Homefront: It grew on me. Seriously.

So I finally got around to finishing Homefront. And yes, it didn't take very long at all. General word is that the SP campaign is around 4 to 5 hours or so for most players, making on average a bit shorter than Modern Warfare 2 or Black Ops. There has been a lot of talk about this and I won't wade too much into that suffice to say that I agreed it felt kind of short.  But I thought the last two Call of Duty games were kind of short.

But the more important point is that the game did grow on me.  Yes, I was a bit harsh on it in my previous post, and I still think those points are valid, but I have to admit I enjoyed the SP campaign.  It got much better at the end, even though I still thought the voice acting and writing was generally not as good as it could or should have been, but even with that there were moments that I really liked.  For example, near the end, the Hopper character says something like (and I am paraphrasing): "I can't believe you're not dead. That's like the 5th thing you've fallen off of and lived!"  In context I found that very amusing and some much needed comic relief.  So +1 to the writer.  But anyway, I got used to the slightly dated but still very acceptable graphics and in a way grew to like it.  I still felt the run speed was too slow.  I got an interesting opinion from someone saying I didn't know what I was talking about on that one, but I stand by my point.

The last mission was actually pretty good, but it ended so abruptly and it actually left me wanting more.  Perhaps even a sequel.  See, there is so much possibility with the setting.  A few years ago I was in San Francisco for a very sunny and beautiful Memorial Day weekend. My wife and I walked all over and had a great time.  Like any game designer at heart I kept thinking, "How cool would it be to set an urban war game in a hilly city like this?"  It made me think back to my Day of Defeat days designing my map dod_switch just because of the hills.

But anyway, I think the premise and setting have a lot of room for sequels.  With some improvements to the gameplay and writing/acting, I think Homefront could become a real franchise with a loyal following.

Also, Homefront wasn't exactly a launch failure.  According to today's directional data from NPD, Homefront was the top selling game in the US in March after Nintendo's Pokemon Black/White games.  That ain't bad.

Wii 2 announcement speculation

Recently much-a-do-about-stuffing has surfaced around Wii 2. Many posts on IndustryGamers of late have taken up the discussion.  Even my colleague David Cole of DFC Intelligence got in on the comments.  In the discussion Arvind Bhatia at Sterne Agee was very clear he thinks Nintendo should launch its next console for this holiday to protect market share.  True, Nintendo could certainly use a big shot in the arm.  Obviously I am biased in that I share in David Cole's opinion but I do think Jesse Divnich at EEDAR does also make the very logical point that the Wii was announced 18 months before its Nov 2006 launch at E3 2005.  We could likely see a parallel announcement here or some time after E3, and maybe E3 will be that big price cut some are calling for.  In any event, I don't think Wii unit sales will fall off a completely off a cliff this year even if they are down from last year.  There is a lot of focus on year-over-year comparisons and unfortunately NPD no longer releases hardware unit sales data to the general public. But aside from the general wind in the air we can infer where March Wii numbers ended up.  Thankfully we have a record of NPD's Wii number for March 2010 of 558k units.  Today Microsoft was kind enough to announce Xbox 360 US sales for March at 433k units.  So the Wii's March 2011 number must have been south of 433k which is a considerable decline year-over-year.  In that sense you could say the sky continues to fall on the Wii.  On the other hand, the Wii is still selling and given it's "less core" or "more casual" or however-you-want-to-say-it focus makes me think it will indeed still sell fairly well come holiday 2011, especially if there is that rumored price cut coming.

But here's the interesting question about a Wii 2 launch for 2011: what about 3rd party?  The first reaction to that question might be "what about it?  Third party support on Nintendo consoles have generally been poor anyway."  While true that the Wii has not been the gold mine for typical 3rd parties (excluding brands like Activision's Guitar Hero in its big years or Ubisoft's Just Dance) that one would hope the massive install base would foster like it had for 3rd party on the PS2 (like Electronic Arts in the first half of the last decade), a Wii 2 release for holiday 2011 would signal that Nintendo is punting on 3rd party support even more than it did on Wii.  That is unless 3rd parties have known about it for a while now and have been super secret in not letting news of it leak.  Normally you would think a 1st party would give some heads up to its 3rd party "partners" they have a new system coming 3rd party can support the lineup at launch.  The 3DS had decent 3rd party support for launch with the best stuff coming from outside Nintendo.  As of today Amazon's rank order of the 5 most popular 3DS launch titles is listed below:
1. Super Street Fighter IV 3D - Capcom
2. Pilotwings Resort - Nintendo
3. Ghost Recon Shadow Wars - Ubisoft
4. LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars - LucasArts
5. Ridge Racer 3D - Namco

The #1 game was 3rd party, as were 4 of the top 5.  So I just don't see Nintendo completely punting on 3rd party for the Wii 2.  And given we haven't heard any leaks about a Wii 2 until now, I tend to think 3rd parties don't know much of anything about Wii 2 specs and couldn't have much of anything ready for the it come this fall.  So that leaves a few possible conclusions:

1. Nintendo is launching the Wii 2 this fall and is punting on 3rd party because they won't be able to get anything of substance ready for it in time.

2. Nintendo is launching the Wii 2 this fall but it will really be a Wii HD and the game development won't be much different than it is for the current Wii except maybe it supports some kind of hard drive or larger flash memory and possibly has higher resolution output.  That's more of a Wii 1.5 or addon and wouldn't that be like Sega 32x?  Wait, how did that go?

3. Nintendo will launch the Wii 2 after this fall, likely for holiday 2012.

The safe bet is on 3, but maybe Nintendo knows something we don't. After all, despite the complaints they receive about 3rd party performance on their systems, you can't argue with the success of the Wii and DS over the years.