If you’re not familiar with Club Nintendo, it’s Nintendo’s rewards system where registering games and consoles and taking surveys grants you coins you can later spend on tangible prizes. This system was slow to come to North America, though, and when it did, it pretty much sucked. For years, we’ve been whining about how Club Nintendo in Japan got all the good stuff. SNES-style Classic Controllers. Soundtracks. DS games that were actually fun (like Tingle’s Balloon Fight). The coolest thing in our “store” was a deck of Animal Crossing playing cards. Don’t get me wrong, I like my cards, but the catalog’s emphasis on posters, notebooks, and folders was disappointing.

What I really wanted from this was to be able to trade my coins for actual games, and not the lame Game & Watch Collections that I could never save up for, anyway, because they cost a whopping 800 coins. Then in 2010, Nintendo released a downloadable WiiWare game for Club Nintendo members called Grill-Off with Ultra Hand, and I “bought” it without hesitation. It was kind of a silly game, but it also only cost 80 coins, so you definitely got your “money’s worth.” Again with the quote marks… But what a concept! How brilliant to reward dedicated gamers with even more games! So why has it taken so long for Nintendo to implement this in a greater capacity?

I’m talking about the fact that, on a monthly basis now, different WiiWare, DSiWare, and eShop games will be available in Club Nintendo ranging from 100 to 150 coins each. This is the smartest thing Nintendo has done in a very, very long time. No longer do I have to redeem expiring coins for Mario memorabilia I don’t really want. Now I can buy games I’ve always been interested in but never pursued before, because I hated dealing with Wii point cards. I just got Dr. Mario Online with the coins I earned from registering Metroid and Kirby, and I’m tickled pink. Like Kirby.

This is what I was hoping achievements on the Xbox would become. In an ideal world, you could cash in your gamerscore for Microsoft points. Even if the exchange rate was a pathetic 1,000 gamer points for 10 Microsoft points, it would be a good enough incentive for me to take it seriously. Hell, I have a new found interest in actively registering Nintendo products now (and I never thought I’d say that), because I have something to look forward to: free games! At the end of the day, what gets gamers most excited is the prospect of more games, and I’m glad Nintendo is finally getting on board with this idea.

No, you shouldn’t. Not for gaming, anyway. It won’t even completely replace a laptop, and they cost about the same. They are fun, and there is some cool functionality you can get out of the apps, but the web still works better using a standard browser on a PC or Mac. And don’t forget Apple’s hater-aid for Adobe Flash.  I’ve even found some Youtube videos that won’t play on the iOS You Tube app. But the real question is gaming. There are some good games, but none are worth the minimum $500 entry fee for the device. Scribblenauts, Fruit Ninja, and Infinity Blade are all really cool on the iPad, but I doubt the remastering of GTA3 is as cool as everyone says it is right now. I hate to make that call for anyone, but I don’t feel that the price is worth it for solely a gaming device.

If the plan is to use it for other things, though, like easy access to remote desktop, mobile browsing (still better than most smart phones, yet worse than computers), drawing, and… well… any non-gaming reason to justify that kind of purchase, then yes it is worth it. That is, if you don’t own an iTouch or an iPhone. Most of the functionality with a smart phone is going to overlap and cause a redundancy in technology. This will force you to pick one or the other, limiting the value you’ll get out of your device.

The iTouch/iPhone versions of most iOS games can be less functional or missing features from the iPad counterparts of the same app, but the price difference usually reflects that. Not always, of course. For example, in Ticket to Ride, you can only get one map on the iPhone/iTouch, whereas there are multiple maps for the iPad. You have to pay for the extra maps, but they aren’t even available on the smaller devices. When you buy an app with the little “+” sign next to it, that means it is compatible with both iPad and iPhone/iTouch. Some apps are only one or the other.

I somewhat tried to sound discouraging, but I will say that iPads really are cool to have around. I use them most when I am doing trophy-grinding on the PS3, like collecting the last few treasures in Uncharted or the difficult Riddler trophies in Arkham City (which is to say not that often). It’s not a whole lot more functional than a laptop, but I don’t have to worry about the cords and viewing angle while holding a controller.

The iPad novelty has worn off without me ever having to fork out the cash for one. They are awesome devices, and my kids (both 1 and 6 years old) love the games and interactive books. I decided for the few things I actually use the iPad for, I’d get more bang for my buck out of a Kindle Fire. It’s only $200, and I love it. Understand, I have an iPhone with me almost all of the time. I got the Fire for reading books and a chance peak at the Android market. As I said earlier, there is a lot of redundancy between an iPhone/iPad, though not complete overlap. If I had a different phone, I’m sure Apple’s siren song would lure me to dropping the cash for an iPad. Even then, I wouldn’t be able to justify it as a gaming device. It’s just not solely worth it for that… yet.

I remember a year before the Wii was released, and I saw a screenshot of the controller. I was mad. It looked like Nintendo was going to change things for the worse. When the reports came in about the motion features, I was blown away and super excited. I loved the Wii for about 2 years and defended its innovations and looked at its weaknesses as the cost of better and more exciting features. I soon realized that the motion controls were gimmicks and, despite myself, my initial impression was right. The level of interactivity that was preached was lackluster, and the glory of my experiences never reached half of what I expected. Soon, my adoration of Nintendo turned to bitterness.

A year ago, everyone was anxiously awaiting the new, groundbreaking motion controls “done right.” The Wii Motion Sensor Plus, Xbox 360 Kinect, and the Playstation Move. I looked at them with the wisdom I had gained from my Wii experience. I refuse to spend any money on peripherals Nintendo adds to their consoles as afterthoughts (remember the N64 expansion pack?). The Kinect held zero interest for me. Not just because I don’t have an Xbox but because you can’t sit down to use it. The Move looked cool but was merely a better version of what the Wii could do, and you had to pay for it.

What’s the verdict now? Am I still in love with those new motion controls? Were they worth the money? Was it everything I hoped and dreamed? No. They’re still gimmicks that are used to sell “innovative” games and more accessories. When the peripherals are added to a game as an option instead of a requirement, I prefer the regular controls 99.95% percent of the time.

I don’t want to lecture the industry and claim it was all a mistake, but the best I can say for motion controls is that at least it seems the trend is to make them optional. I can’t pick up the Wii for fear of rage-throwing my Wii-motes through the screen. I don’t use the Move, because I hate the camera, and I prefer the Six-Axis. The Kinect was fun for the 5 minutes I tried it, but I know the novelty will wear off fast.

The problem is, I feel hesitant to say I think motion controls should go away forever, yet I don’t know where I’d want them to go. Maybe they will get better. 3D seems to be catching on, from what I read, but I’ve yet to try it gaming. Maybe combining 3D with motion controls and the new amazing surround sound headsets will finally give me the experiences I’ve imagined… but I doubt it.

How do you separate hype from a strong recommendation? I think of hype as how much a product is oversold over how much I enjoy it. Or in other words, how highly a product is recommended minus how much I actually liked it. While the game industry is far from unique in suffering from this problem, that is what I’m talking about. I’ve been told, “If you didn’t like the game, then you bought into the hype too much!” That annoys me.

My first big run-in with this phenomenon was with Braid. Braid is a good game with some cool visuals and interesting game mechanics, but when I bought it a year after its original release, it was touted as “the best game on the PSN” and a “must-play.” What self-respecting gamer could turn that down? At the time, I felt that everything good that could have been said about Braid had been said twice, and I couldn’t lose. I felt justified and excited to drop $15 to blow my mind and provide the most unique gaming experience ever. To me, it was a platforming puzzle game that was fun but never great and definitely not even close to what I was expecting. I wish I would have used that time to replay Super Metroid.

I think it is my fault that my expectations were so high, but  the dozen or so reviews I read that oversold the game to me were hardly blameless. I have an expectation of a sort with every game I play based on the platform. I expect PS Minis and most iOS games to be mildly entertaining but generally suck, so when one grabs me, I may be more excited about it than it really deserves. When I pay $60 for a new release, I damn well better be impressed. Receiving recommendations or reading reviews will have to compete with your already pre-conceptualized views of the platform. If I said the greatest game ever made is coming out on the Wii this fall, you wouldn’t believe me.  When I played Braid, I was freshly jaded from Nintendo and completely enamored with the many options of  the PS3.

Recently, I played through Limbo , and it had very similar reviews as Braid. Having played through both, I think they have more similarities than differences (I’m not even going to start on how much ambiguous endings irritate me). I heard everything again from “it is better than most $60 games” to “being absolutely blown away!” I’m not saying those reviews aren’t valid, but making myself disbelieve them went a long way to saving the game for me. I loved the look, physics, environment, and particularly the overall feel, but that was it. Limbo also kinda lost my attention for the last half of the game. I liked it but felt like I could have gotten a better experience from watching a video.

The point is that while all game reviews are subjective, ideally it is best to play the game as objectively as possible to form the truest opinion of the game’s merits. When you come in with expectations of something terrible, a few things done well may seem better than they should, and the inverse is true when you put expectations of a game on a pedestal. Maybe I’m way off base here, but with every game I play, I find that the opinion I had going in hardly counts for naught in my verdict.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” That seems to be the general attitude of gamers and developers alike for the last several years. The cost of development has gone up, as well as the number of ignorant buyers. Are you going to get the next Call of Duty game fully aware that the game engine has hardly seen a tweak since Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare? Making a few map variations, weapon adjustments, kill streak additions, and periodically adding zombies seems to be the formula for creating the number one selling franchise worldwide.

Call of Duty is just one example. Rather than updating their engines between games, the majority of companies seem content to fall back on their original engines for each sequel. For a large part, Epic’s Unreal Engines seem to be the gaming standard for this generation. Not that incredible games can’t be made this way, but relentlessly pushing the available hardware to its limits has become a rare aspiration.

Another, albeit small reason, is that developers fear a lack of sales when pushing content past the volume of a single disc, or adding features that could only be available on one competing console. Microsoft’s demands state that “Should content not be shipped simultaneously with competing platforms in all regions where the content is available, or should the content and features available on the Xbox 360 not be in parity with versions on competing platforms, then Microsoft reserves the right to not allow that content to be published for Xbox 360 or released on Xbox Live marketplace.” One of Microsoft’s fairly strict retail policies for independent and some major companies is that if content arrives on a Sony platform first or has more content on a Sony platform, Microsoft won’t publish it. Of course, there are exceptions, but this is just another example of how developers are limited to the confines of one console at the risk of losing well over half of their potential consumers.

This isn’t a bash on Microsoft, it’s just a rant about common sense and dollar signs. It does, however, break my heart a little as each sub-par game is released, proving each time that most developers have no reason to try their hardest to bring us the highest quality entertainment this generation has to offer. As consumers, it’s really our own fault.

Radiangames, the developer behind some of the Xbox’s best indie games like Crossfire and Inferno, recently abandoned XBLIG and moved onto greener pastures. And it’s all your fault! Many developers, in fact, have quit supporting Xbox Live Indie Games, because the money just isn’t there. Zeboyd Games (of Cthulhu Saves the World and Breath of Death VII fame) announced that its one-week sales on Steam surpassed a year and a half on the Xbox. So I can’t blame these indie developers for leaving the Xbox, but I’m sure going to miss them.

I stumbled across the XBLIG channel about the same time Protect me Knight was released, so it was the first indie game I downloaded. You couldn’t ask for a better introduction. I could see how someone whose first trial was a massage app would never want to download another Xbox indie title ever again, but Protect me Knight was amazing. It was every bit as good as a $10 XBLA game and sold me on the entire service. I check the indie channel every day now looking for the next great $1 or $3 experience, which has paid off with shining examples like Score Rush, Tacticolor, Explosionade, and, of course, anything made by radiangames.

The best part about these games is that most of them go for only $1, but sometimes it feels like developers are forced to use this price point. A game that costs 240 points is a harder sell than 80, and 400-point games practically scream, “Please ignore me!” I’ll admit that I’m very stingy with my Microsoft points, but that’s because Xbox marketplace transactions are run through Microsoft’s unforgiving point exchange system rather than being a direct dollar paid by credit card. I’d throw down a dollar for a lot of things, but when I have to pay 80 points from my balance that’s hard to keep even, it’s a different story.

Another thing that has plagued the indie channel from the beginning is underexposure. The latest dashboard update made sure to stick XBLIG games in a dark corner (you have to go to Game Marketplace > Explore New Games > Games & Demos > Indie Games to find it), and Microsoft rarely draws attention to its existence. But I hate to call Microsoft the bad guy here, because the indie channel is overrun by pure crap that cheapens the Xbox experience. Does Microsoft want customers to know its system has fifty massage apps readily available for download? I see that as more of a deterrent than a selling point.

As much as we’d like to see the massage apps disappear (and die a horrible death along the way), you kind of have to embrace them and all the other worthless games, because they’re part of the “free market” that makes XBLIG so great. Anyone with a computer and $100 (for the membership fee) can make a game and sell it on an actual game console. It’s a dream for a lot of people and an easy reality for those who take the time to learn C# and the XNA framework. Hell, I’m even working on my own XBLIG game, and my programming background is strictly web development. That’s how easy Microsoft has made it to be an indie developer.

Now I realize phones have opened up a whole new (and more lucrative) frontier, which is where most disheartened XBLIG developers go when their games fail to do well. But you don’t get the console experience on an iPhone. No 42″ screen to play on. No dual-analog controller to hold. Very limited multiplayer support. These were the things that made every radiangames release so brilliant. Radiangames was perfect for the Xbox. Knowing that the developer is trying to tap the phone market makes me sad, because I just don’t see how he can make the same kind of games and appeal to the Angry Birds and Fruit Ninja crowd at the same time.

Week by week, more talented developers announce they are dropping XBLIG, or at least supporting it in a much smaller capacity. But as they leave, new developers eager to get their first game out swoop in. As long as Microsoft doesn’t can XBLIG altogether, I think we’ll still see the same steady stream of good games and bad, just with new developers periodically taking up the reins. Nobody’s been able to replace radiangames yet, though. Sadly, XBLIG may never see another developer as talented, but the service is still going strong, and I highly encourage anyone who hasn’t already looked into it to do so. You’re missing out on one of the best features of the Xbox and some very cool indie developers.