OK, the Wii has been a phenomenal success story. It has outsold the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 by huge margins. It has brought gaming into houses that never knew gaming. But...

There are troubling signs. The Wii is not this generation's Playstation 2 and it probably won't have a long shelf life. We're four years into the Wii's life cycle and Nintendo's focus appears to be on handheld gaming, not console gaming. The Wii's software sales are declining and the attach rate is poor. Every time you hear Nintendo talk about "evergreen" titles, what they're really saying is, "We can't get decent third party games for our console, so we're making first party games that we can sell and sell and sell without coming up with anything new because we're doing this all ourselves." Their E3 press conference for 2010 only highlighted this problem as they spent most of the time hyping 3DS and the rest of the time was devoted to a handful of SNES and N64 remakes headed for the Wii in the coming months.

Yikes...

In drumming up a new market--new gamers--Nintendo both assured their success by opening up gaming to a vast, new audience. At the same time, they victimized themselves because this audience just does not buy games! In the process they abandoned the "core" gamers--the ones who actually buy new games on a regular basis--by pushing out a console that is technically a Gamecube with a fancy controller. In 2006, that was an OK thing. In 2010...well, it's not looking so hot.

There are no casual games, or casual gamers. There, that's all you really need to know. You can skip the rest of this post.

Or not.

Hardcore gamers (or "core" gamers as Reggie Fils-Aime likes to call everyone who still obsesses over the 124th game to star Mario) often deride "casual" games. Games like Wii Sports, Wii Fit, Farmville, et. al. are constantly derided as being fit only for casual gamers. Casual gamers being those people who don't actually care what games are being released this month or what Roger Ebert thinks about video game or who provides the voice of Miranda in ME2. (Not that a casual gamer knows what ME2 stands for. He would think it's a typo of Einstein's Theory of Relativity. If he even cares.)

But, games in and of themselves are not hardcore or casual, rather, it is one's approach to the game. I spent a couple months playing Farmville earlier this year and I can personally attest there are hardcore Farmville players. You don't need to try this yourself, just visit one of the many Farmville help sites or wikis and see how they've broken down every resource by the amount of coins you earn per hour per square of land and it becomes obvious there are some very hardcore players harvesting ghost chili and collect eggs. If you do play Farmville, you can tell the hardcore players right away. They are the ones with their avatar penned in and every square inch of their farm occupied by golden chickens and multiple crops planted in various states of ripeness. They probably also have two or more Facebook accounts so they can run multiple farms and share stuff with themselves.

I've said a lot of bad things about the Playstation 3. I questioned its abilities. I bemoaned its excessively high price. I postulated it wasn't worth getting when a Wii + an Xbox 360 (the so-called Wii60) was a better deal with better games.

I'm sorry, Sony.

I own a PS3 now (giving me the PSWii combo) and it's freaking awesome. This Fall was to be the "build a new gaming PC". This new rig would play Fallout 3, Dragon Age: Origins and lots of other great games. But...something funny happened on the way to Newegg.com. Instead of a new PC, I ended up with a new HDTV and a PS3. I think I came out on top on this deal. Especially now Bioware has confirmed Dragon Age: Origins will come to consoles. The last coffin nail in my PC gaming days has been driven in. I'm officially a console fan-boy.

Let the hate-mail begin...