Tomorrow’s the 17-month birthday of the Wii and, in turn, Wii Sports!  Should we bake a cake?

At this point, over 18 million people have plugged in their new little white box and taken their little brightly-colored no-armed sphere-handed people for a test drive in the five arenas offered by Wii Sports, and by most accounts, its popularity remains rampant.  To date, no collection of minigames has been received nearly as well by both the critical community and the general public, and though its presence is quieter now than it was a year ago (we haven’t seen it on any late-night talk shows recently), its impact looms large over the release of any collection of minigames, particularly sports-related ones, that dare to stake a claim to its legion of fans.

This is motocross, which is fun, but…

The latest group of developers to attempt to stake a claim to the Wii Sports constituency is over at Hudson, where they’re putting something together called Deca Sports.

Hudson was nice enough to send a preview of Deca Sports with four of the ten games playable.  Regrettably, they did not include the curling (because, hey, who doesn’t love curling?), but we did get to try out beach volleyball, figure skating, motocross, and badminton.

For the most part, Hudson is sticking to the formula that made Wii Sports so popular, in that playing the games is generally a piece of cake.  Of the four games included in the demo, three are played using only the Wiimote, with the only exception being figure skating.  Figure skating is probably the most difficult of the games for the non-gamer to master, simply because it requires agile manipulation of the thumbstick on the nunchuck, combined with flicks of the Wiimote to perform jumps, which isn’t hard in theory, but comes off a bit like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time.  Badminton and volleyball follow the Wii Tennis formula of not actually moving your players to the ball/birdie; you just hit it the way you want when you have a clear shot at it.  Finally, there’s motocross, which was actually really fun, mostly because it’s like playing Excitebike in rudimentary 3D.  Think Wii Play‘s cow racing with more hills and less cows and you’re most of the way to Deca Sports’ motocross.

...this is what I\‘m waiting for.

Playing these games with family and friends around is fun, but a couple of things are off when the inevitable comparisons start happening.  For one, the mechanics of the “hit the thing over the net” games seem a little off, because now you can wave the remote in the direction that you want things to go, which makes the games an awful lot less twitchy than they could be.  This is actually to their disadvantage, as the primary audience for these games is simply going to want to pick them up and play them the way they could when they first unpacked their Wii.  Depth of gameplay should not come from more advanced game mechanics, it should be found in difficulty scaling based on some very, very simple mechanics.  The lack of Mii integration is also unfortunate, as is the lack of online multiplayer, though limitations on these things have come to be expected of Nintendo, which seems to dole out its technology on a case-by-case basis.

What we also didn’t get a sense of was the way in which these games were going to be packaged and supplemented.  What are the single-player modes like?  Are they going to give out medals or implement some sort of achievement system for high scores?  Are there going to be fun little training games?  All of these things were an important part of Wii Sports’ success, and without some incentive to play beyond picking up a couple of controllers and competing with buddies, these kinds of games can get old, and fast.

What do you think?  Can any minigame compilation ever truly live up to Wii Sports?  I don’t think so, as it’s a perfect case of right-place-right-time combined with some of the most well-implemented waggle yet seen on the Wii, even a year and a half after its release.  Maybe you think differently—give us the what-for in the comments.  We like that sort of thing.

One of the nice byproducts of having a gaming-centric blog here at PopMatters is that we are now able to preview games, rather than just review them.  As such, there’s actually some incentive for PR to send us stuff before it actually comes out.

Today, I got some stuff.

Granted, when you get a giant box at your doorstep from Rockstar three weeks before Grand Theft Auto IV comes out, you hope there’s going to be a little, DVD-size box inside, but hey, beggars can’t be choosers.  Instead, we get:

This is the stuff.  Please ignore the berber.

- A giant, black and white foam hand, emblazoned with the GTAIV logo, doing the “shocker”
- A crayola yellow Burgershot T-shirt
- A GTAIV sticker

You can tell a lot about a game by the swag that gets sent with it.  Hudson sent a bright green and yellow headband to promote the upcoming Deca Sports, Sony sent a funky little black necklace with an Omega charm with God of War: Chains of Olympus (which also came with some copies of the Chains of Olympus demo disc back when that was a big deal).  Both of those were subtle little touches, trinkets whose primary purpose is to evoke a mindset rather than to serve any actual tangible purpose.

There’s nothing subtle about the GTAIV promotional items, yet another sign that Rockstar is looking to hit like an 18-wheeler come April 29th.

The funny thing is, I’m a father of three.  I own a minivan.  What am I going to do with a giant foam shocker?  Give it to my kid to bring to school?

What Rockstar seems to be saying here is that GTAIV is not for people like me.  It’s not for grandmas.  It’s not for girls.  It’s for a certain audience that will appreciate the GTA brand of humor: macho, college-age boys, preferably ones that pound beers and incessantly quote raunchy comedies.

The problem, then, is that the appeal of Grand Theft Auto goes beyond that crowd, important as it may be to Rockstar’s numbers.  Grand Theft Auto III first appeared nearly seven years ago, meaning that even if everyone who played that game is in Rockstar’s apparent target demographic, those are the folks who have now moved on to SUVs and jobs and changing diapers.  Granted, that’s an awfully broad generality, but there are plenty of people with fond memories of GTAIII who could well be turned off by a giant foam shocker.  This isn’t by any means a complaint, but I hope for their sake that Rockstar’s marketing scheme stretches beyond the demographic indicated by this particular round of stuff.

Have you heard of the Happy Tree Friends?  I hadn’t until I saw the trailer below.  Apparently I should watch more G4 so that I can be educated on these things.

Or, maybe I’ve been better off.  I haven’t decided yet.

Once I saw the trailer, for Sega’s soon-coming Xbox Live and PC download Happy Tree Friends: False Alarm, I couldn’t help but click around and find a few other animated shorts featuring the titular “friends” on YouTube.  The unrelenting violence of these cartoons is slightly hypnotic, enough to leave your mouth agape and a slightly sick feeling in your stomach as you watch, somehow unable to turn away.

Think of the Care Bears mixed with Rocky and Bullwinkle, Ren and Stimpy, and Itchy and Scratchy.  Except more violent.  It’s like watching your childhood thrown into a wood chipper.

What do you think?  Is there merit to the Happy Tree Friends formula, or is it simply shock humor for the sake of itself?  Most important of all, did watching it just ruin your weekend?

Shh…did you feel that?  That little tremor, underneath your feet, did you feel it?

That was the hype train, embarking on its latest journey through mass media city, blog village, and all points in between.  Its passenger for the next month will be Grand Theft Auto IV, set to claim the title of most hotly hyped release of 2008 now that the buildup to Super Smash Bros. Brawl has passed us by.  GTA4‘s seat is likely saved until at least mid-May, when it will likely have to step aside for the adventures of Geriatric Snake in Metal Gear Solid 4.

The sparkplug that’s starting the train’s journey to April 29th, then, is the announcement of this:

That’s right, folks, the Rockstar Social Club will be opening on the same day as GTAIV‘s release, complete with all of the seedy connotations and orange neon you can handle. 

Before you start thinking that Rockstar’s games are going to turn into a dark, irreverent version of Second Life, one thing should be clear: There is nothing, at least according to the press release that showed up in my e-mailbox yesterday, “social” about the Rockstar Social Club.  It is an online leaderboard with a fancy name, which requires only a PlayStation Network ID or an Xbox Live Gamertag as admission to enter.  Offer up one or both of those things, and you get to measure yourself against the legion of other Grand Theft Auto junkies out there in a number of different ways.

That said, as far as leaderboards go, the Rockstar Social Club sounds pretty snazzy.  It’ll be keeping track of the race to get to 100%, and the first 10 insomniacs to do so will get an extra-special trinket of some sort that they will undoubtedly be able to Ebay for big bucks.  It’ll have a map keeping track of every recorded crime committed in Liberty City.  The bit that sticks out most, however, is the following:

The Liberty City Marathon—A ranking of special physical milestones achieved in the game - from the amount of miles walked, driven, or swam - to the number of bullets fired and stunt-jumps jumped.  There will be additional special marathon-based competitions in the future from this area as well.

I’m a huge fan of the achievement system, given that achievements can serve as suggestions, prompting ways to play games that one might never have tried had Gamerscore points not been attached, thus extending the life of a game beyond its immediate goals.  Still, there’s something more than a little humorous about the idea of keeping track of, say, who swam the most in a game called Grand Theft Auto.  You just know that there are going to be a few poor souls whose ultimate goal is to top the distance-swam leaderboard, and watching that race as it happens is going to be a little bit hilarious in a sad sort of way.  Still, kudos to Rockstar for finding ways, more than a month before the game is even released, to extend the play experience of a game destined to eat hundreds of hours of our time anyway. 

The full press release is after the jump, and the latest trailer is sitting below.  Looking forward to GTAIV?  Couldn’t care less?  Let us know in the comments, and enjoy your weekend.