“Boom Blox a bust at retail” read a headline at Joystiq yesterday. “BOOM BLOX only sells 60K units in first month, ouch!” shouted thatvideogameblog.

Based on the latest numbers from the NPD Group, much of the Internet has declared “Boom Blox”’s first-month sales a disappointment.

Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitello, however, told an audience at the William Blair Investor Conference today that sales were on target. “It has met our expectations internally,” he said. “It’s continued to sell well. It did break into the top 10 for the Wii, and the advertising is doing exactly what [our] team expected to: drive sales.”

Analysts, however, haven’t been as upbeat.

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You can skip boring parts of movies. Why can’t you skip boring parts of games?

Eden Games, the developers of “Alone in the Dark,” think you should be able to skip ahead.

You won’t be able to see the game’s “true ending” unless you complete a certain amount of the game, but you can skip large parts of the storyline (and gameplay) all you want.

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Electronic Arts has consistently proven to be a surprising innovator on Wii. “Madden NFL 08″ stumbled a bit, but the developers’ Family Play initiative, designed to revamp “Madden” for a more casual crowd, was a step in a promising new direction.

A few weeks ago, EA announced an all-new sub-brand for EA Sports, entitled Freestyle, alongside an evolution of their Family Play interface philosophies designed for Wii: All-Play.

“The Freestyle brand is aimed at those gamers who are looking to enjoy the ‘lighter side of sports,’ regardless of what platform they play on,” said EA Sports senior director of brand marketing Reg Hamlett in an e-mail interview with MTV Multiplayer. “The brand houses games hinged on the suspension of the traditional rules of sports.”

Arcade-styled boxing game “Facebreaker” arrives under the Freestyle moniker this fall. And while Freestlye isn’t just for Wii, it certainly seems most apt for Wii, especially since both initiatives were announced the same day.

But what makes All-Play so different?

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Rockstar’s Dan Houser said f— it.

Nintendo said it doesn’t exist.

And whatever it is, EA said that “The Sims” isn’t it.

So what is “casual gaming”?

According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the definition of “casual” is something “occurring without regularity,” “occasional,” “employed for irregular periods, “met with on occasion and known only superficially” and “lacking a high degree of interest or devotion” or “done without serious intent or commitment.”

However, in gaming, the term “casual” is used to refer to a genre of games. But what really defines a “casual game”? Is it the core audience that plays it? Is it the kind of gameplay a title offers? Or a game’s wide-spread appeal?

When Nancy Smith, Global President of “The Sims” at EA, was asked about the label “casual,” she said, “I don’t think of ["The Sims"] as casual. We were one of the first games that started to attract a broad audience. We were one of the first games that bought in women.”

Meanwhile, Nintendo Europe’s senior marketing director Laurent Fischer told CVG he thinks the idea of the casual gamer is a myth entirely: “For me, you are a gamer or non-gamer… I think most of you know that you can spend ten or twenty hours on an internet flash game and have not realised. The guy who plays these games regularly - he’s a core gamer.”

As for the word “casual,” he said, “I don’t like this word casual so much. Because people consider that casual needs to be something easy. If you’re good at any game you can play at a high difficulty level. There is no casual gaming. There is just a different way to play.”

Clearly, casual games are booming. Why are publishers suddenly uncomfortable with the “c” word? What do you think defines a “casual gamer” or a “casual game”? Should the term “casual” be embraced or tossed out?

Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and co-creator of “Pong,” thinks games have lost their way, and violent games and long, complicated gameplay is to blame.

But he finds hope in the rise of Wii and casual games, he told Multiplayer in a phone interview yesterday morning.

I proposed that games started as a hardcore medium, but he disagreed. “The way that games started, they were virtually all casual. If you really think about ‘Breakout,’ ‘Tank‘ and some of those things, games were very, very simple,” he said.

He can even pinpoint when things went astray.

“I like to talk about [how] 1983 was sort of the break point where games went from casual to hardcore,” said Bushnell. “They got violent. They went long form. The violence lost the women and the long form lost the casual gamer. I actually sort of stuck to my roots, and the console game market moved away.”

He doesn’t believe the current gaming experiences are going to disappear. “Grand Theft Auto” is here to stay, even if he doesn’t approve of it. But new gamers are up for grabs, and they might like the kind of games Bushnell championed 25 years ago.

“I actually think the future of gaming is going to be much more emphasis on games that are casual,” he said. “The Wii was as much about a return to fun games — what I call universally accessible games — as much as it was about the controller. There’s clearly been a demand for games for everybody else, and that’s why I think this is getting so much attention.”

What do you think of his argument, readers? Are “Grand Theft Auto” and “Final Fantasy” responsible for turning off a whole market of would-be gamers?

Work crawled to a screeching halt this morning, thanks to the web game “TypeRacer.”

Click the link to see out what I mean, but the concept’s simple. Remember the typing teacher program “Mavis Beacon”? Many of the exercises involved copying lines of text.

That’s all you do here, except you’re re-typing bits from Pulp Fiction or lyrics from Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb.” And here’s the kicker: you’re always competing against people, too. The risk of making a typo becomes a serious problem.

During the dozen or so races I typed through, I capped out at 121 words per minute. I don’t think I can beat that, and cheaters have ruined the leaderboards.

I was always disappointed Sega never followed up “Typing of the Dead” (and no one copied it), but “TypeRacer’”s a fun spin on the idea. You can even add the application to your MySpace profile. No support for Facebook yet, though.

Can you imagine how addicting this would be on a cell phone, and competing against folks via nearby Wi-Fi spots? I think I just blew my own mind.

EA has figured out how to make Monopoly fun again. And as a video game, no less.

Shocking, I know, but I swear it’s true.

Later this year, “Monopoly” the video game will be released for the Wii, Xbox 360, and PlayStation 2, and it won’t be the game you grew up playing.

Sitting down and playing the upcoming version of Monopoly is like sitting down to play a game loosely based on the board game of the same name.

For example, the board you have come to know and love is receiving a complete overhaul, replacing the Avenues with cities from around the world - picked by fans for the Monopoly Here and Now: World Edition that will be released later this year.

A facelift is nothing new, but for the video game one particular game mode that made this version of Monopoly stand out over every edition of Monopoly that you’ve ever played - even the Pirates of the Caribbean Trilogy Edition. [NOTE FROM STEPHEN: I have a set of John Deere: Monopoly next to my desk.]

The big breakthrough in EA Casual’s upcoming video game is an optional play-style called “Riches Mode.” There’s no money involved in this mode. It’s based entirely on property ownership, and you get to play with multiple pieces each turn. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to play this new version of “Monopoly.” Read more…

“Wii Sports” was the first video game my mom played after obsessing, years earlier, over “Tetris” on the original, green-tinted Game Boy. It was the first time we’d shared a game experience together since then.

According to Nintendo, the upcoming “Mario Kart Wii” should allow us to have another. In a press release late yesterday touting sales of “Super Smash Bros. Brawl,” Nintendo classified “Wii Sports” and the next “Mario Kart” as a new type of kind of experience: “bridge games.”

“Bridge games,” reads the release, “let video game novices and veterans play and have fun together.”

A few weeks ago, “BioShock”’s Ken Levine called “Wii Bowling” “the ultimate gateway drug.”

But is it? Bridging casual and hardcore gamers implies each is approaching a game from opposite directions — but having fun on a common ground. That doesn’t mean the “novice” will ever end up crossing to the other side. “Gateway games” and “bridge games” may not be one and the same.

Nintendo’s announced definition of a “bridge” game isn’t necessarily Wii specific, either. Does a “bridge” game mean another player has to be a part of the action? I had several friends watch me play through “Resident Evil,“ simply because the game was so immersive, even to a viewer. They never played it, but they experienced it.

So far, the gameplay of “bridge games” falls on the simpler side. Could Nintendo make a “bridge game” out of “Pikmin”? And how would you make a more accessible version of “The Legend of Zelda?” without scaring off the hardcore?

Do they need to?

I’ll admit it: I was a little girl once.

A little girl who not only played “Super Mario Bros” and watched “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” but also one who played with Barbies and loved sappy romance flicks… like “Dirty Dancing.”

My sisters and I would try to re-enact that final, epic scene in the movie, where “Baby” Houseman would run into Patrick Swayze, er… Johnny Castle, and he’d lift her up into the air like a soaring bird (it’s a good thing we had pillows). It was a classic coming-of-age story. We watched it so much, the VHS tape broke.

So when a build of the “Dirty Dancing the Game” for the PC came to my mailbox last week for me to preview, my first thought was that it would be great for my nieces, who are now around the age I was when I first fell in love with that movie. But I hadn’t seen the film in years, and I tried to remember what it was actually about… a timid girl going to summer camp and coming out a full-fledged woman, de-virginized by her dance instructor and harnessing the uncanny ability to undulate sexually, shamelessly in front of her family and friends. And wasn’t there an illegal abortion in there somewhere? (My 7 year-old mind must’ve blocked that out entirely.)

With that, I figured I should give the game a whirl. For nostalgia’s sake. And for the sake of my nieces, who would potentially play this game. Twenty years after the film’s release, would the game take me back in time? How would it incorporate the more mature themes in the movie? What I found was quite different than what I expected…

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