The Nintendo Wii truly is an innovative product, but it would take an idealistic soul to chalk all of its phenomenal success in the past half-year to this alone. The Wii is a well-marketed product, and has had a lot of gloss painted onto it in the past year which may mask some salient facts: Between now and Christmas there will only be around ten major releases for the Wii (more in real terms, but who wants to count cheap film tie-ins, quality titles that they tend to be?)

The classic Nintendo problem of software support for the excellent console seems to be rearing its head once again. The Wii has had a good run of it, but the question on everyone's lips now is...

Honestly... where have the games gone?

Most readers will by now be well aware of the usual complaints levelled against the most popular games on the Wii; Twilight Princess is fundamentally a GameCube game, and Wii sports is a fun pack-in, but hardly qualifies in the long-term entertainment stakes.

The biggest issue facing the Wii at the moment is simply making quality games available to those who already own the hardware. The release list seems fairly well packed and evenly spread, but it doesn't really tell the full story.

We need only look to our friends across the water so see one glaring omission; Trauma Centre: Second Opinion has yet to make an appearance in Europe, despite being a launch title in the US. While we're no strangers to the delays caused by localisation, it's hard to imagine that a 7 month gap is reasonable. We've only just received word that Second Opinion will launch on August 10th. Things only get worse when looking at the slow slide of other first party release dates.

If we were real doctors, this man would be long dead.

We've been informed that Mario Party 8 has been bumped back from its June 22nd release to July 13th. There was a time when Metroid Prime 3: Corruption was seen as a "soon after launch" release though it's slowly slid to its current expected release of August 7th, enough time having lapsed for expectant Metroid players to conceive a child. Super Mario Galaxy may look astounding, but it still sports a vague 2007 (US) release date. Battalion Wars 2 has been given a US release date of September 24th, though there's still no word on a European release and at this stage it seems almost silly to imagine we might see it soon afterwards. Super Smash Bros. Brawl has been given a December '07 launch date for Japan, which means we'll likely not see it until 2008. Given that the only major first party release since launch was Mario Strikers Charged, the wait has been interminable.

One hopes for online multiplayer.

Things are no better for third party publishers; the downside to developing for Nintendo hardware is undoubtedly that high quality first party titles tend to eclipse much of the third party content. This is exemplified by the close relationship of the Gameboy and Pokemon brands; it's become a powerful mental association, which of course can damage sales of other software. Of course, for the game consuming public this only worsens the situation when the first party content is so thinly spread.