Two days back, Nintendo dropped its price to $200 bringing it on par with competitors Xbox 360 and PS3. Now they’ve announced that they’ll be giving two motion pluses free with Wii Sports Resort. Motion Plus adds extra-fidility to Wii-controller and tracks motion a little more accurately than it did earlier.

However, the offer is only applicable to a limited offer bundle which will sell for $59.99 starting October 12. There’s no information yet, if the limited edition pack will come to India or not. But considering the way companies launch games and consoles in India (Halo 3 ODST was an exception. Kudos to MS for pulling it off) I doubt it will come at all.

“Shoppers are looking for value as we head into the holiday season, and this Wii Sports Resort bundle is a gift that players of all ages and experience levels can enjoy,” said Cammie Dunaway, Nintendo of America’s executive vice president of Sales & Marketing. “Best of all, it instantly gets multiple members of the household engaged in playing as soon as the package is opened.”

The new bundle will be available while supplies last at most major retailers.

Through the end of August, Wii Sports Resort has already sold more than 1.25 million units in the United States alone, according to the NPD Group. Nearly 2.9 million Wii MotionPlus accessories are in the hands of the public. That includes all those sold with Wii Sports Resort, standalone sales of 1.36 million and an additional 257,000 bundled with Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10.

It looks like Electronic Arts has a plan when it comes to developing games for the Wii. When Console and PC gamers will be getting Shift, Wii gamers will be getting Need for Speed Nitro which will have the kind of gaming we have grown familiar to in games like Carbon and hot pursuit. Sweet!  Need for Speed NITRO is expected to deliver the fun and exhilaration of high-speed racing, combining the franchise’s trademark attitude and car culture with deep and thrilling gameplay over the two Nintendo platforms (It is available for Nintendo DS too).

Whether it’s with the Wii remote, nunchuck, racing wheel, the classic controller or the Gamecube controller, Need for Speed NITRO will let gamers race it their way. Showcased at the EA Showcase India 2009, NFS NITRO has a different look and feel in comparison to other games in the NFS series under development.

The Wii version is with 5 different zones starting in Rio, Brazil, where racers will move their way up the ranks to dominate every race from street to street, city to city ( a lot like NFS Carbon and others). With techniques such as drafting off rivals to gain speed and drifting sharp corners to gain nitro boost, players will also have to manage their heat level as cops add to the mayhem on the road with their increased intensity and aggression. As I said earlier, not too different from previous NFS games in terms of gameplay.

The Nintendo DS version will feature around 10 game modes in a variety of fresh and exciting race modes including, Elimination (last place driver is eliminated at the end of every lap), Circuit (complete 3 laps, first one wins), Smack’m’all (smash objects in a limited time), Tag the World (achieve 100% tagging score in shortest amount of time) etc etc. Now this sounds exciting to me.

All this combined with some fresh modes, tracks and exotic real world locations, doesn’t really make Need for Speed NITRO so much exciting to us here.. Still we can hope for the best.

[| Trying out free writing with this post… Wrote it in 15 min+10 mins to create image above..
so don’t mind the vague points |]

I was reading this story on tech2 on the launch of Hanuman the Boy Warrior, but what grabbed my attention was the last line of the story.

A action game based on the Mumbai gang wars will also hit the PS2 platform.

Now hold on… no one mentioned that before. I haven’t got any info on the game other than that tiny line I saw there. I am wondering why they did not try to get more details on the game. So what would it be comparable to? I don’t want to say Grand Theft Auto, after seeing the quality of Hanuman game.. They are trying to get people who have never played game before to pick up a controller.

The strategy just might work considering as PS2 costs just 7k, (the prices might fall to below-6k soon) while Wii costs around Rs20k. And that is a huge difference in price-sensitive Indian market.

So what made the Wii so popular?

1> Simplicity of games

Simplicity of Wii gaming came with the Wii-remote, no more button bashing just wave of the remote and you can score an ace. It is not that simple with a DualShock

2> Clean content

By clean I am referring to games which appeal to all age groups. Not 18+ or 16+ games which most parents would object to buy and rightfully so. The games which Sony is developing in India along with Indian developers come in this category. I mean look at them, one is a possibly preachy Hanuman game, then an educational game, there is also a game involving village sports like kabaddi. Their strategy seems to to encourage people who don’t know anything about gaming. (People like my parents =P ) to buy a game or a console for their kids or grand-children. And this just might work!

3> Low pricing

Sony beats Wii black and blue here. A difference of approximately 15k is definitely not a small one

Last month I read an article at Gamasutra on disappointment of Nintendo president, Satoru Iwata, at the lackluster sales of Wii in home country – Japan.

"If the U.S. sold two or three times as much as Japan, it would be tolerable," Iwata added. "Yet, I feel that something is wrong when the U.S. is selling ten times as much as Japan on a weekly basis."

That’s what he said.

I read yet another feature in Gamasutra which addressed the issue of “Can You Create A Must-Have Wii Game?” Fabulous, must-read article I say… It mentions how some good games never sell as much as some sad ones on the console. As an example, they put forward the case of THQ’s de Blob which according to them, is a really great Wii game. However, Ubisoft’s “inferior” game – The Price Is Right, outsold it 3-to-1.

“So did THQ’s Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader: Make The Grade. That’s sad. But it tells you who the audience is."

Tells you who the casual gaming audience is? Well of course it does. It is mostly a bunch of parents who don’t know sh*t about gaming, but want their children to get the right type of gaming; read – “no harmful content.” I am sure most of them go by the cover of the game and do not even bother to check the review of a game on Metacritic or IGN. The result, game developers reap in money despite producing an inferior product.

Talking about inferior products making money, I recall the case of Ghajini, (an Indian PC game based on a movie by the same name) which sold approximately 500% more than any other PC game sold in India. But the quality was simply poor. Of course they did raise the level for “fully developed in India, for the Indian gamer” type of games by quite a margin. So how come they managed to sell so many games?

Well it was simple, the game was based on a Bollywood movie which had set box office records, was marketed really well and was priced really really low (Rs 200). Oooh did I mention that Bollywood film actor Amir Khan was the protagonist in the game.. well. That my dear friend, is the recipe for success to making a successful games.

Create publicity, price them cheap, catch the unaware. The n00bs and those who buy it because his n00b friends have it! So much for the high-def!

Sony has been beating up Microsoft black and blue in 2008. First it was the Blu Ray blues now it’s PS3 outselling Xbox 360! So what does Microsoft do to put on a happy face? Come out with ‘impressive’ stats of course!

According to Microsoft, the Xbox Live community currently boasts over 10 million people compared to the PlayStation Network’s which has 2.9 million and Nintendo Wii’s with 4 million. These numbers include North America and Japan and are according to Microsoft’s internal estimates.

Big deal, but how many of those 10 million are active users? I have a Live id but I don’t remember the last time I used it! And figures of Nintendo Wii are pretty impressive considering it doesn’t have many multiplayer friendly games (ehm Mario bros is an exception)

But hey Wii has not launched in India… Don’t worry… the rumour is still alive and kicking they might soon step in and take gaming to the masses.. or may be they will import it from China, where the console in being launched this year