Like many videogame fans, I was extremely excited to hear all the juicy Wii news and Nindto conferences that slowly trickled over the Internet. Everything was looking great; cheap price, innovative controls, decent graphics, sexy design, I was very excited. So I waited in line outside of Wal-Mart on launch day for 5 hours, and at midnight I recieved the console that I have been literally dreaming about for over two months. My friends and I purchased 4 Wii consoles and eagerly stopped by a gas station, got beer and went to my house, where we eagerly, but carefully, opened the ivory treasure. We played 5 or 6 games throughout the night on 3 seperate TVs. It was a blast. Something was missing; Something wasn't right; Something was very wrong.

Skip to present, and the once beloved ivory-treasure is sitting next to me collecting dust. What went wrong? Is it true, that graphics matter? Was the control not innovative enough? Did I just caught up in Wii-mania? Did Reggie lie to millions of game fans? The answer, I think, is no.

It was its popularity.

It seems since the day I saw Al Roker swinging a Wiimote around like a mad man on the NBC.... it was put into motion (pun intended). It was huge. My 3 year-old nephew loved it, my grandparents loved it, Matt Lawer loved it, and developers that once shunned the console for being nothing more than a cool "gimmick" ,at best, now put that in the back of their heads and started to love it too........................

Developer's of DS games, psp games, Ps2 game soon decided to tack on a little waggle controls then plastered a Wii logo on the coming soon advertisment, and they no longer saw a gimmick; they saw money signs. Pretty soon, every kid's movie was not only getting the usual mediocre game title, priced at 30 bucks and below, but they were also getting the Wii treatment of: tacked on one or two motion controls, also perhaps, maybe a couple of sub-par motion mini-games, and of course, an extra 20 dollar price tag. They sold. It worked. The games raked in the dough. Now all the uninformed old people and little kids who used to buy games twice a year, on X-mas and birthdays, are now the base and the most hungry for any Wii game. And we all know how well most of these people are at picking out quality games, but this time they were buying them all the time, and have deep pockets to pay for it.

From a business standpoint, this is a good move, but how much energy, brains, and money are being spent on making quality games? I'm willing to bet most of it is spent on: kiddie licenses, advertising, and including causal easy play mechanics. Quality does not fit into this business plan, and why be innovative and take a risk when you could have a bestseller by playing it safe? There will also be the Miyamotos, and the Hideos, but I worried that's not enough to get the full innovative-creative Wii experience we were all promised