Wii Look To 2008 (NintendoLife)

[R.O.B.]

Lets be honest, 2007 was a fantastic year for Nintendo, Wii and DS have had an amazing holiday season and things haven't looked this good in years.

As another New Year rolls around we feel its time to reflect, it's still hard to believe just how good a year 2007 was for Nintendo, DS and Wii sales have rocketed and production has constantly been increased.

It was only 2 years ago that Gamecube was coming to its last days, Sony was on-top of the pile and Microsoft had just released the 360 hoping to take the lead in the next generation. Nintendo was limping over the finish line in the third place slot, still hungry the Japanese giant released a new dual screen handheld which paved the way for a revolution in console gaming.

2007 was the year Nintendo took back their console throne, in September Wii had sold over 13 million units, overtaking Microsoft's Xbox 360 in the sales war. 2008 will hopefully bring even more growth for Wii and the gaming industry as a whole, but that all comes down to one thing.. the games.

Games

It's always a special year for Nintendo fans when a new Mario game is released, 2007 was no exception seeing the release of Super Mario Galaxy. Most critics had written off the little plumber as a piece of gaming history, unable to survive in the modern video games climate. Sunshine was warm, pretty and nice.. but no masterpiece. Thankfully for us, Super Mario Galaxy blew away everyones expectations and become one of the highest rated games of all time.

We've also had a number of other excellent titles from Nintendo, the third and final Metroid Prime, Corruption, was a roaring success leaving critics impressed with the innovation of controls. Super Paper Mario also re-wrote the rule book on 2D games, proving they can be just as inventive as their 3D cousins.

Since then we've also seen Fire Emblem, Mario Strikers Charged, Pokemon Battle Revolution, Mario Party 8 and Big Brain Academy. The DS console has also seen some amazing titles, including the first Zelda DS title, Phantom Hourglass.

What should we look forward to in 2008? We've already had major titles from Mario, Zelda and Metroid so Nintendo have their work cut out for them. We'll see the launch of the huge Smash Bros Brawl next month and Mario Kart Wii later in the year. We're predicting that Wii Fit will also take the western world by storm during 2008.

Our Nintendo Life...

2007 was also a hugely successful year for NintendoLife.com, we're only a small team and generally only run the site in our spare time because quite simply, we love Nintendo games. Traffic to the site has increased amazingly, from around 20,000 visits in January to over 160,000 visits in December. We've had continued support from games publishers and have started to investigate revenue streams to help pay for the server

We're really excited about 2008 as we'll continue to develop the site, grow our readership even more and play more games! We've got a few exciting announcements to make regarding the website, but you'll have to wait alittle longer before we tell you!

With Thanks

I think it's important that I take a little time to give thanks to all the people that make the site possible. First of all you, the reader, without people like you visiting us the website would mean nothing. Secondly is the staff whom put in the hours playing the games and taking the time to write about them, my huge thanks goes out to Damien, Thomas, Sammy, Ryan, James, Paul and Mike. Thirdly is those guys behind the scenes, Jude, Sean and Phill on the technical side and Dan for helping test things out.

I'd finally like to thank our favourite contacts in the gaming industry, including Jodie & Shaun at EA, Kev at SEGA Europe, Derek at Ignition, Chris at Ubisoft, Rebecca at THQ and Roxana at Atari, you guys rock and we're looking forward to working with you in 2008!

Thank You!

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