Amazon.com has posted their year-end sales rankings for everything in the video games category (via Gamasutra). Looking at just the top ten, Nintendo positively dominated the year and took home nine of the slots. The video games category includes software, hardware, and optional peripherals.
Interestingly, of those nine slots, seven are straight hardware or are hardware [...]

There’s been a gradual upsurge in oldschool 2D gaming recently, albeit on the sly. The burgeoning casual and portable markets have converged with increasing visibility for indie developers and digital distribution. Set it all against the recession as a backdrop, and suddenly the cheap simple games of yesteryear start looking pretty good. Nintendo can smell these things coming like sharks smell blood in water, and so we have New Super Mario Bros. Wii, the first AAA 2D console platformer in ages.

The rumor mill has been running overtime this week, with patents, trademarks, and offhand developer mutterings flying everywhere. You’d think that with BlizzCon only just passed and PAX coming in hard on its heels there’d be other things to talk about. However, I suspect that the gaming press has a deep-seated need to manufacture [...]

In the launch wake of Tales of Monkey Island, complaints have surfaced about the Wii port’s framerate. A compromised port isn’t normally news, but one of Telltale’s programmers has responded (vi gamezine) to the complaints by drawing some unflattering comparisons to Nintendo’s Wii, and there’s no news like some juicy gossip.
The programmer is registered [...]

Like an infatuated zombie pirate, The Monkey Island series has returned from parts unknown to perform unspeakable acts on your brains. It’s pushing eight years since the last installment, which was less well received than its three predecessors, so you may be wondering if this is a revival or betrayal of the brand.

Punch-Out!! is an excellent franchise retread, if a merely competent game. The attempt to integrate the Wii’s gestural controls will do little to entice casual gamers past the first handful of fights as the steep difficulty curve was clearly designed with a controller in mind. All in all, it’s game that’s low on content, but high on nostalgia.

Don’t look now, but your childhood is trying to pick your pocket again.
The supposedly recession-proof games industry is mining its back catalog for free money, and Nintendo struck a pure vein of Metroid Prime. The rerelease of the surprisingly successful FPS trilogy will be retrofitted with gestural aiming and crammed on [...]

It turns out that it’s cheaper to develop games for hardware that’s little more than two Gamecubes taped together (does anyone even remember that slur for the Wii any more?). Seriously though, according to gamesindustry.biz, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata recently said in a conference call that Nintendo is being courted by third parties as they try to develop affordable games in tough economic times. Said Iwata, “Some are reportedly saying that they bet on the wrong horse or that they need to change course.” Nintendo has always been the primary supporter of its own hardware, especially during the N64 and Gamecube generations when third parties flocked en masse to Sony’s consoles.

Although the console has been criticized for a glut of poor-quality bargain bin games, Iwata was optimistic about future support, saying, “Overall, we recognise that our relationships with the software manufacturers are shaping up better than before. So, in the mid-term, we believe that more attractive titles will be launched by them for our platforms.”

A rising tide may lift all boats, but a falling tide won’t sink Nintendo.

World of Goo is one of those bite-sized games you can consume before it gets stale. The tower-building puzzle gameplay offers a level of accessibility that should appeal to casual gamers and deep innovative puzzles that should appeal to just about everyone. There’s not too much incentive to replay the game, but at $20, you get what you pay for and more.

Console sales have long been a painful exercise where the manufacturer takes a monetary hit on every unit sold. They then cross their fingers and hope to make up the difference on first party software titles and licensing fees–not a bad bet considering the low cost of printing and distributing games and the high cost at the point of sale.

The gaming press has long portrayed Nintendo as the exception to this rule, but only just recently has Forbes placed its money at its media mouth and estimated the Wii’s console profit margin at $6. Given that the Wii has a comparable market penetration to Sony’s Playstation 3 and about half that of Microsoft’s Xbox 360, Nintendo must be sitting pretty on that profit margin.

This news comes at about the same time as a gamesindustry.biz observation that the Wii is the hottest thing on Ebay since the terms of use made it illegal to sell and ship fire. The console is currently asking $100 over its MSRP on the popular auctioneering site. It’s almost as though Nintendo is stepping on its own long tail by starving the American market so close to the holiday sales season.