Thing is, I understand Nintendo's whole point of view on the casual market. I really like it too. I love playing stuff like Crosswords DS and Wii Fit. The problem is they're falling into this trap which I think is more just a matter of laziness. They could add in basic things that normally make sense, but they don't have to, so long as they just say it's simple and easy that way.
Let's go back to Wii Baseball again for a moment. The idea of the whole Wii Sports package is that you get to play all these sports using your Wii, right? Well, when you remove an entire aspect of a sport (running/fielding) then it kind of defeats the purpose of having it at all.
Nintendo seems to be confusing the idea of a 'casual gamer' with another demographic, 'person who never plays video games'. I like to think of myself as a casual gamer sometimes, since I'd be more content playing Bomberman than Smash Bros. or something intense in that line. But just to play devil's advocate, I'll think of a casual gamer as someone who in fact, never plays video games.
So when you take this person who supposedly never plays video games, and tell them they can play this baseball video game just like a real game of baseball, then yes, they'll probably be interesed. However, most, if not all, of these people who know what baseball is, but don't really play it or video games, are going to be wondering where the fielding went. They know it's a part of baseball, and they were expecting to play baseball on the Wii, so now they're left short. So in this case, does this idea of 'simple is better' work in the casual gamer's favor? Frankly, no. There's a difference between simple (Mario Party) and flat out non-existant (Wii Tennis).
Ok, I think that's enough ranting about Wii Sports for now... I gotta get out of this thread.
