Console Monster writes :"The Nintendo Wii has received it's fair share of budget games. Some of these have been reasonably playable, even if they are dull and repetitive. The latest offender to hit the Wii console comes in the form of Pool Party - and it is a huge offender.
The first thing that you will notice about the game when you boot it up is the horrendously poor looking menus. Everything looks about as basic and dull as you could possibly get. The menus aren't even intuitive to use, requiring you to use the Wii remote IR to scroll down menus that are just begging to be controlled via the D-Pad or thumbstick on the Nunchuk attachment.
There are however plenty of different options to select from, a total of 13 different game modes can be selected, all of which are about as bad as each other. Once you have selected the game type you then get to choose what location you would like to play. Location options range from a basic pool bar, to a ship or even a manky corridor. Why on earth you would enjoy playing pool in a dull grey corridor with lights that keep flickering, I don't know, but hey, maybe they were trying to appeal to the janitor in us all. Oh, wait, you don't have some janitor spirit inside you? Nope, me either..."
Games keep aiming for endless cash flow instead of responding to creative ideas or the desires of their audience.
I always find it weird to see opinion pieces reminiscing about a time when the article's author wasn't even alive to see it. This "switch" to profit over creativity in the industry started way back in the NES era when Nintendo controlled the number of games each publisher could release in a given time. This, in turn, made publishers carefully choose what was going to be released.
Things only really got better with the 3DO and later PlayStation, which changed how licensed games were handled. That improvement more or less lasted a generation and a half. By the time of the Xbox 360, we had another enormous cash cow trend in the form of the "casual audience." Since then, there has always been this chase for the next biggest thing to maximize profit.
It's not new; it's been going on for more than ten years now. And it's not going to stop when we have the production costs of the industry going higher and higher.
Summer is the perfect time for multiplayer party games, and Pool Party seems to bring just enough chaos and silliness to the billiards formula to keep it entertaining.
"The Novato-based (CA, the US) indie games publisher Mindscape and Geneva-based (Switzerland) indie games developer Lakeview Games, are today very happy and excited to announce that their chaotic physics-based party game collection "Pool Party", is coming to PC (via Steam) and consoles (PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, and the Nintendo Switch) in 2024." - Jonas Ek, TGG.
