Nintendo Power Players Guides...

[joshnickerson]

...no more? I noticed at the store the other day that the Nintendo Power branded Players Guides seem to be dwindling down... and I have yet to see a NP guide for Metroid Prime 3, only Prima's official guide.

Have we seen the last of the NP Guides? Has Nintendo tapped Prima to be the "official" publisher of Ninty games, now that Nintendo Power is off to a new publisher? Who is Eric Cartman's father?

[lendelin]

I noticed also that Metroid Prime 3 didn't get a guide from Nintendo and resorted to the Prima guide.

This is certainly remarkable; if a huge Nintendo-published game like Metroid doesn't get a guide it is indeed an indicator of the end of NP guides after 18 years of high quality guides. Sad. It is also the first Metroid game since 1994 that didn't get a NP guide.

I didn't renew my NP subscription in March this year after 19 years. Lets face it, NP wasn't really interesting anymore after its heyday in the 80s and 90s, and with the direction N goes with the Wii I really don't see a purpose in reading NP.

The Wii control sheme (motion sensing) is technologically not yet up to par to deliver more than gimmicky shallow gameplay. The games so far are proof of that. N marketed it way too early to tap into another demographic in order to avoid competition with MS and Sony for the same demographic of gamers.

Shallow party games based on motion sensing don't require in depth reviews nor strategy guides. This Metriod and also Zelda TP will be the last of its kind as we know it. (For Zelda stated by Miyamoto himself a couple of months before the Wii was released.)

That the crisis of NP and the abandonment of guides fall together with the economically successful (but quality-wise very disappointing) Wii is coincidental but reenforces the new trend to appeal to non-gamers and extreme casual gamers.