Warning: may be hazardous to life outside of your room

Most well-used Wii games for February, 2009:

1. Super Smash Bros. Brawl …
2. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock …
3. The Legend OF Zelda: Twilight Princess …
4. Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn …
5. Animal Crossing: City Folk …
6. Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga …
7. Wii Sports …
8. Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World …
9. Rock Band …
10. Mario Kart Wii.

Rankings based on average hours played per month, per console; stats pulled from The Nintendo Channel; participating players only; sample size roughly 2 million.

Analysis

SSBB and GH III and Zelda are in a word, awesome.  Numbers don’t lie; each has been on market for over a year (two for Zelda), yet still hold gamers’ interest better than anything else out there.

Fire Emblem is not awesome.  Yet the hardcore role playing game takes a crapload of time to play through.  It’s only 1/20th as popular overall as Super Smash Bros. Brawl… but apparently those who do play it, devote their lives to it.  Look for the houses with the newspapers piling up. Ditto for Symphonia, relatively few people have played it, but the weird RPG die-hards who have, logged long hours.

As far as I’m concerned the jury is still out on Animal Crossing… top 5 is elite title territory… yet critics who reviewed the game have indicated that it’s merely ‘pretty good’, not great.  However one of the chief criticisms of the game is that it’s too similar to previous Animal Crossing titles, for DS and Gamecube.  So, if you’ve never played Animal Crossing, this wouldn’t bother you, would it?  In any case the game made a record-breaking jump in ‘average hours played’ last month—the average Animal Crossing player used their disc 7 hours longer in February than they did in January.  So I guess pulling virtual weeds grows on you.

Funny that Guitar Hero: World Tour has not usurped GH III.  Prediction: it will. I have both, and GH III is gathering dust. With the addition of drums and a mic, Guitar Hero has made the leap from nerdy teenage rockstar wannabe/hipster fare to ‘a game for everybody.’ It’s the bona fide party game, along with Rock Band.  It’s great in groups, with kids, with girls, you name it.  It’s immensely popular, and it isn’t showing signs of slowing down. Rhythm games are a way of life; I know a couple in their thirties who have a “Rock Band room” in their house. Also important to note: GH III led all games in number of sessions per player (more than 1 per day) indicating that GH players player more, shorter sessions, instead of longer, fewer sessions.

Wii Sports and Mario Kart Wii need no intro.  No-honk guarantee. Both are Nintendo staples that everyone plays and everyone enjoys. Both appeal to young and old, are good as a ten-minute fix or a weekend-long binge, are fun whether or not you care if you win (for the record, I do) and neither require a 90 dollar balance board…

And finally, what is the deal with this Lego Star Wars business, which I know nothing about?  I admit to having never played any Lego video game, in part because the mere idea of doing so annoyed me.  I’m normally not like this but I dismissed the entire franchise as kiddy fare, and gimmicky; the sort of thing that would probably make my friends and family go, “oh, that’s cute” but then fail to hold anyone’s interest. But just yesterday a man of 31 told me that this game is terrific. He’s not brain damaged as near as I can tell. So now I want to give it a try. I think I was thrown by mediocre review scores, which I’ve learned were chiefly due to the fact that the content in this game is recycled from previous games.  Having never played those, I don’t hold it against it.  And it is number 6 in the world…

Note: Call of Duty: World at War is up three spots to #13 on the list this month, with a 5 hours+ average increase in time spent playing, over the previous month.  Similarly to Animal Crossing, those who play Call of Duty are REALLY playing it.  The game is relatively young and I suspect that gradual development of a strong online multiplayer community is to thank (or to blame) for the across-the-board increase in average time devoted to this addictive WWII first-person shooter.