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Today, I visited Sailing Empires. It is an empire under RPG Empires specially built for sea battles. It is made up of two sims which are all water except for a few land masses or islands. The main island is where the landing area is and it is also where you’ll find everything that you’ll […]

Filed under: Features

During its first four days on sale in the US, Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure sold approximately 30,000 copies. A week later, it had added 15,000 to that total. Hardly breathtaking figures in a nation with over 3.7 million Wiis in its bedrooms and living rooms, and the game also struggled to leave a mark in its homeland, where it is known as Takarajima Z: Barbaros no Hihou. There's no doubt about it: Capcom's splendid piratey adventure has, as much as it saddens us, flopped.

On the face of it, the game's commercial failure might seem odd. After all, Zack & Wiki earned eye-catching scores from a number of reviewers, while IGN's Matt Casamassina loved it so much, he frothed and raved about it non-stop for four months, before slapping a 90% on it come review time. Its bright, attractive visuals, cute character design, and puzzley action were seemingly the perfect ingredients for massmarket appeal. Ultimately however, it sank faster than a holed galleon.

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With the glorious benefit of hindsight, numerous factors could explain the consumer apathy that faces Zack & Wiki. It might well be the lack of marketing power behind the game. It may be that everybody has been saving their pennies for Super Mario Galaxy. It could even be that it suffers from what has become widely known as "Viva Piñata syndrome": it's too cutesy for adults, and too complex for kids.

Or it could simply be too difficult, period.

Indeed, Zack & Wiki is no pushover. Admirably, producer Hironobu Takeshita has been unrepentant about including challenges that strain the noggin. In fact, it sounded as though he'd had quite enough of the moaning in one recent interview: "There are puzzles where, if you don't look properly at the hints in the start, you're going to be in trouble. You have to look at the screen -- all the answers that you need to solve the puzzles are there on the screen. There are some people who say they don't understand the puzzles, but really, they're not paying enough attention."

Yet as commendable as Takeshita-san's defiance is, there will be plenty of publishers sitting up and taking notice of his game's lumbering commercial performance, and mentally shelving any future plans they might have had to release Wii games that challenge players to think.

It's not just Zack & Wiki that may influence those with the purse strings to adopt a more risk-averse approach. Super Mario Galaxy, another hardcore favorite, was released in Japan last week, and immediately leapt to the top of the sales charts, selling 251,000 copies in its first full week on sale. That makes it far more successful than poor old Zack & Wiki, but let's not forget that the casual gamer-friendly Mario Party 8 had even greater first week sales (265,000). In such a scenario, the message being sent to publishers is loud and clear: more party, less epic.

Reggie and Shiggy, bless them, have previously taken time out to reassure the hardcore that Nintendo won't abandon them, and with Ninty's vast resources to spare, not to mention its history of catering to core gamers, we're happy to take their word for it.

Will third-party developers be as patient? Historically, Capcom has been happy to push epic games and unique content. But if you want our honest-to-God advice, don't go booking time off for Zack & Wiki 2 yet.

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Filed under: Video

Hmm. In the age-old debate regarding pirates v. ninja, it seems Nintendo clearly prefers the latter. What possible other reason could they have for following up International Talk Like a Pirate Day with ninja games? The two must be linked!

Now that we've had our daily conspiracy theory moment, let's get to the subject of what European gamers have a shot at this week, as the Hanabi Festival continues.

• Ninja Gaiden -- NES -- 600 Wii points
• Ninja JaJaMaru-kun -- NES -- 600 Wii points
• World Class Baseball -- Turbografx -- 600 Wii points

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I still have Voyage Century Online installed on my PC so I decided to drop by and say Hi to my Guildmates in ~Poseidon~.

VCO’s launcher did a quick update and judging from how fast it finished I can say that not much was added to the game since I last logged in last April, 2007 which is sad because VCO is large game and I was expecting a huge client update.

I spawned at high seas near London and I had problems controlling the ship. I already forgot how to play the game, hahahaha! While I was trying to re-learn the controls my favorite NPC Pirate appeared and attacked me, Emanuel Wynne. I entered Sea Battle in a panic because I already forgot what to do.

Emanuel Wynne rammed my level 6 ship and caused some damage to it. While I was still feeling my way around the menus and controls, Emanuel Wynne was bombarding my ship with cannon fire. Finally, I was able to find the grapple icon and decided to grapple Emanuel Wynne’s ship because that’s the only way I will win this battle now.

Grappling Emanuel Wynne’s ship was successful and since my character was more stronger than Emanuel Wynne victory was guaranteed. Wynne tried desperately to shoot my character down but at the end my character’s falchion was much better and much stronger than his riffle.

Emanuel Wynne was defeated but unfortunately he did not drop anything. You suck Wynne!!!! LOL!

Back at High Seas, I navigated the ship to London and there I continued to play with the menus and icons until I finally opened up the Guild window. The guild, ~Poseidon~, has 150+ members but the sad part is none of them were online.

Since I can’t say Hi to my guildmates, I did the next best thing and that is to say Hi to everyone using the Public channel. The public channel is only available to those that has a Viscount title and above. It also cost 100MP to send a message using the public channel.

Sofie, whom I think was a former ~Poseidon~ member, told me through the public channel that most of ~Poseidon~’s leaders and active members had transferred to other guilds. This strategy of moving or even creating a new guild because your current guild isn’t active is what I don’t understand. They worked very hard to make ~Poseidon~ DaGama’s number 1 guild only to leave it? Why not just kick out inactive members and then invite active ones? If the current leader suck then why not just change leadership? All of these features are available in VCO.

I stopped playing VCO not because the game suck, VCO is a great game, but because of how IGG handles or handled issues within the game. I feel that they are more concern on selling their “mall items” than improving game experience which I can’t really blame them since VCO is a Free Access game and they need to earn some money out of it but not to the extent of almost ignoring your players concerns and issues.

After my visit, I’ve uninstalled VCO from my PC since it’s just eating a lot of space from my harddrive! Goodbye Voyage Century Online, until next time!