GTA Chinatown Wars is a very, very curious piece of gaming. It’s pretty much the unrivaled champion of controversy (what with the ’smashing prostitutes’ faces in with a baseball bat’ and that sort of thing) and as such has never found its way onto what you’d call a “family” console; pretty much anything made by Nintendo then.

And this is why Chinatown Wars is so interesting; I’m wondering how well it – and some other mature games – will sell. Read why over the jump…

We’ve all had our presumptions about Nintendo’s most recent family of consoles, and to be fair it’s their own fault: they keep advertising their games with photographs of friends/family types (and celebrities) as if to say “hey, our consoles aren’t really for playing real games on. We don’t do violence, vulgarities; y’know, all that good stuff.”

It’s because of this that the release schedule for this month on the Wii and the DS looks so interesting. Aside from the usual Wii Music and Wii Fit clones that will soon line the shelves, together with pointless plastic attachments that do nothing whatsoever, MADWORLD (as my release schedule of choice dictates it) is bringing a bit of the old ultraviolence to the console for the first time.

Chinatown Wars takes us back to Liberty City with a healthy helping of drug-dealing, carjacking, gunfighting and more swears than your average sailor could muster. It is, without a doubt, the DS’s first “real” mature game (save for the occasional obscure zombie FPS whose name I have forgotten) and I’m worried about how well it will sell.

The DS has, as far as I can see, become the handheld of choice for 8-14 year olds and the occasional middle-aged parent convinced that their brain needs work. I don’t know anybody who owns one and plays it regularly; it’s become the preserve of shovelware, and the same goes for its motion-controlled bigger brother.

Have Chinatown Wars and MADWORLD arrived too late to spark a revival for “mature” games in the Nintendo family? I’m not saying that “real” games have ceased to exist – they all come from Nintendo’s own studios anyway – and I’m not making the correlation that real games = mature games, because they’re not. But some good old grown-up games have been needed for a long time and I’m fearing that it’s too little, too late.

While I have a good feeling that they’ll be great games, they’re hardly going to be system sellers. The Chinatown Wars announcement at Nintendo’s catastrophic E3 conference last year raised a collective “meh” from the gaming community, and all MADWORLD has done lately is annoy the Daily Mail. I’ve not talked about it with people in the way I’d talk about Killzone 2 or Gears of War 2; they just don’t have that system-seller aura about them. I can’t see people buying a Wii or a DS (for the second time, maybe) just to play these games.

It won’t stop me getting my hands on them and giving them a shot, but at the same time it’s dawning on me that these games simply won’t sell. Anyone who was put off of their DS or Wii by the range of games and has sold their console will not be roped back in. Trying to appeal to mature gamers with “mature” games at this stage of each console’s lifecycle isn’t enough, as the PS3, 360 and PC offer more than enough in the way of grown-up games to satisfy anyone’s needs.

Am I wrong here? Are you all going to go out and buy MADWORLD and Chinatown Wars, and the console if you need it? Or will they crash and burn because the entire consumer base is made up of 7 year olds? Then again, that might just help after all…

Tweet This Post