Believe it or not, I have played some other games recently.
One of the things I've often whined about in the past is the limited ways the Wii and DS can interact; I always felt there should be a good deal of connectivity between handheld and console games. To clarify, I'm not one of those people who wants to play the same game on six different platforms, it's just that I'd like, when appropriate, for the two kinds of systems to complement each other better.
I've gotten something close to my wish with My Pokemon Ranch, which is a title that seems at first blush either too bizarre or too childish to draw any significant attention. I posted my first impressions at Kotaku, at which point I concluded it was cute, but not much to write home about.
You can drop Pokemon from your Diamond or Pearl DS cart into the ranch, though, so that you can watch them prance around, play and interact as little 3D versions, and except for some cute behaviors and interactions with your Miis, which you can also plop in, I pretty much thought that was all there is to it.
Turns out, though, the game's quite capable of wholly reviving your compulsion to catch-'em-all. The Mii who runs the ranch, Haley, will assign you Pokemon not already in your dex to go and catch in your DS game. If you bring them back to her, she'll offer to trade you one of hers (Haley brings several of her own to the ranch regularly) if you don't already have it.
This simple functionality breeds compulsion - how funny that the simple act of having an objective designed for you would make you want to go back in your game and fulfill it in the hopes of a reward?
One of my friends, Gamasutra news editor Brandon Boyer, has been hooked on the ranch since it launched, and has kept me posted on all the things you're able to do and get there that I haven't had time to discover yet (even though I beat MGS 4, I'm still messing with it). The ranch continues to expand as you add more Pokemon, and every day a new toy for them to interact with arrives on the ranch.
If you enable the feature, your friends' Miis will sometimes come to visit you on the ranch, and your Mii can visit theirs. The pic in the header is my Mii decidedly not enjoying itself at Brandon's ranch. There are also NPCs that will periodically invite you to visit, like a buck-toothed weirdo who invited Brandon to see his ranch populated by 300 Bidoofs.
One more thing about the ranch, and here's the kicker - bring 250 Pokemon to the ranch and Haley will trade you a Phione. Bring 1000 and you can trade for a Mew. Wow. It's just tantalizing enough to revive my irrational dream of a complete Pokedex.
I'm hard on the Wii occasionally, but it's times like this that it occurs to me what a smart little machine it is. While we're busy skeptically eyeing it while Nintendo seems to have turned its back on us in favor of slightly overweight middle-aged women who like fitness equipment, it's quietly doing the kind of things that we've wanted from our game technology for a long time.
I'm in the camp that often suspects that the absence of a user-aggregate ranking system will be the achilles heel of digital distribution platforms like Xbox Live, and I often wonder why nobody actively discusses the importance of implementing such a quality system, in this age of the almighty UGC and Raph Koster's beloved "democratization of content."
Yet on the new (month-old) Nintendo Channel, which I'd pegged as just a surreptitious source of useless marketing video, something of the sort is quietly happening already. Did you know you can rank, sort and view aggregate feedback from other Wii users on just about every game there is? I checked out that feature here and explicated it at Kotaku, again thanks to a tip from Brandon - if he hadn't taken note of it, I wouldn't have even been aware. Odd subtlety, right?
