At the time, A Link to the Past was awesome. There was nothing out then that was so polished and epic.

Move forward to 2006…and twilight princess just isn’t that good. I played it well over 10 hours before I threw in the towel. And no, you don’t have to play the entire game to have an opinion on it. Or if you’d like, we can relegate my opinion solely to the first ten hours of the game, which I found super boring, rehashed, wide open environments with nothing in them, no voice acting, and really just not much to do. But that’s fine, you can like it.

You didn’t address my bigger point though. At the time when Nintendo is doing twilight princess, naughty dog is doing uncharted, and it’s really hard to call Nintendo innovative lately. What has Nintendo done that’s awesome on the Wii? They’ve released Mario kart, animal crossing, and smash bros updates, and Wii sports and Wii play demos. Galaxy, new super Mario, and Wii fit are the only things that stand out to me.

As for buy back prices, 360 controllers go for $19 used on the amazon market. You can’t compare the trade-in prices to new prices. I got $33 for mag, and its going used for $43. MGS4 is going for $16, I got $11. Like I said, paying for convenience, but I’ll check out gamestop.

And Heavy Rain is getting some pretty disappointing reviews from the players, the critics loved it. It seems like a cool idea, but could have been carried out better. Maybe Heavy Rain 2 will get it.

I just checked out the buy back on Amazon and I am not impressed at all. $6 back for a controller(retails at $50)? $18 back for a wireless adapter(retails for $100)? I can understand the decrease buy back for games, they go out of style really fast(eg: MAG). I’ve been trading games to Gamestop since Jr High and I’ve found a pretty good system that lets me get a good amount of cash back:

Buy your games, and decide which ones you’d like to trade back after play(usually non multiplayer games and ones that are collecting dust like you discovered). Then I wait for Gamestop to have a trade in deal(the more games you have at tradein time the better). They have specials such like an “Extra 50% bonus” or “Extra 10% per game you trade back in”. Sometimes they are even partial to specific games coming out, “Extra 50% when you trade in a game towards Uncharted 2″. And if you are a member you get 10% more credit. I usually trade in 3 or 4 games in at a time and get around $70 to $80 back.

Right now I have two games that I’m waiting to trade in towards Call of Juarez, Starcraft II, or Halo Reach.

http://www.vgchartz.com/yearly.php?year=2009&boxartz=1#

There are only two third party Wii games in the top 50. And even though Nintendo has some huge games, a bunch of them came out a year or two ago. It’s like people are buying wiis, and then buying the same 5-10 games.

Can they coexist? Yeah, but I don’t know how long Nintendo can ride Wii sports, Wii play, Wii fit, and Mario kart. No third party is doing anything remarkable on the platform, and other than new super Mario bros, even Nintendo isn’t doing much.

And on top of all that, the numbers are even more remarkable considering how many more wiis have been sold.

Sorry, all nostalgia aside, Zelda sucks now. And I think this is actually indicative of a much bigger problem Nintendo has. The whole casual gamer market was great for the Wii to start with, but I think there is a big shift back towards “hardcore” gamers, and Nintendo looks like a chicken with their head cut off. When you have games like Heavy Rain becoming interactive movies, and Uncharted with it’s amazing story and voice acting, it makes everything Nintendo is doing look amateur.