Mr eel
The Nintendo Channel - Under-cooked
Nerd that I am, I spent a few minutes of my Saturday morning playing around with the recently released Nintendo Channel for the Wii. It’s pretty dull.
Ads for games. Wow. Watching these is like watching any other ad on television — pointless.
DS Demos… of old or frankly boring-sounding games — Sight Training? *Yawn*
The game catalogue is potentially interesting, since it could prove to be a good way to track upcoming stuff or otherwise find interesting games you might have missed previously.
It’s got no hope of doing that in it’s current form. For starters the catalogue is anemic. It only holds a small proportion of recent releases. Additionally, the actual information on each game is limited and very dry. Marketing copy, bullet list for number of players etc. No screenshots, no videos.
So much more could have been done with this. For example I would like to be able to flag an upcoming release and have new information about it sent to me periodically and a message when it’s finally been released. I forget game release dates sometimes, so that would be useful.
But typical Nintendo, anything outside of making games — which they do very well — tends to be under-cooked. The interface is lovely and it has a lot of potential, but as of now it’s a waste of time.