At his GDC keynote today, Nintendo president Satoru Iwata walked through designer Shigeru Miyamoto's design process. Miyamoto doesn't write design documents. He shares his ideas with a small group of developers who then make a prototype. Iwata said the developers may spend as many as two years making prototypes. He showed this example: the prototype for "Wii Sports" boxing. Good prototypes get greenlit for production. Iwata siad he tries to avoid asking Miyamoto how things are going, so as to keep the development team from cutting corners.

There seems to be a problem when the latest "Madden" sells more than two million copies on PS3, Xbox 360 and PS2 combined in the U.S. in August this year -- and just a little over 100,000 on the Wii according to sales-tracker NPD.

A few years ago, that kind of sales misery on a Nintendo console would be okay. For a long time, sports games on Nintendo consoles just didn't sell.

But given that "Wii Sports" sparked Nintendo's GameCube-to-Wii console resurrection, it seems like sports games can sell on the Wii.

So why isn't EA Sports having an easier go of it on the Wii? I recently asked EA Sports chief Peter Moore to tell me what EA was doing right and wrong with sports games on Nintendo's console.

As always, he was blunt: Read more...

You'd think it was the year 2006 around here. Why else would I post the results of an exercise study for Wii launch game "Wii Sports"?

Good reason: While it seems like the folks at the American Council on Exercise are a little behind in releasing results of a "Wii Sports" fitness study in 2008, they've taken the time to present research that contains some useful data.

At long last we can now know how, in terms of calories burned, "Wii Sports" boxing compares to real boxing, "Wii Sports" tennis compares to real tennis, and so on.

The study reveals the following: Read more...