Wario Land: Shake It! -- Initial Impression.

Well this is it. My one Nintendo Wii game for the holiday season 2008. You would have thought Nintendo would have seen this coming. I mean they essentially shot their active intellectual property load in launching the Wii. You would think someone would have looked ahead at the schedule and realized that there would be nothing to offer core gamers in the all important holiday season. Maybe they did. Maybe they thought third party console support would fill the holes. Given the fact that they haven't had decent third party console support since the 16-bit era I doubt that's it. Maybe they just don't care about the software they're selling while they're still moving hardware like they are. Maybe they expect the Nintendo DS to pick up the slack. Maybe they're just caught with they're pants down. Yeah, that's the one in my opinion. Wario Land: Shake It! is the next proper entry in the Wario Land series which started out on the original Game Boy. Wario himself started in the Mario Land games as the villain before rising to become the lead and morphing the series into Wario Land in the third entry. Wario Land: Shake It! is the first effort of Good-Feel which is headed up by Shigeharu Umezaki, an ex Konami employee. Umezaki had his hands in various Konami titles like Castlevania, Life Force, Legend of the Mystical Ninja, and Contra. So what we have here is an old school 2D platforming game in the hands of someone with considerable industry experience in said genre. I'm expecting an old fashioned fun platforming romp. A game straight out of yesteryear, with added Wii Remote gimmickry. Hopefully it's of the far more functional variety and not just tacked on because it's the Wii. As always, time will tell.