All aboard the hype train for the new football season

    Ladies and Gentlemen, take your seats and open a packet of minstrels. In just over one week’s time, the 2013-14 Premier League season will be underway. No more watching Bargain Hunt to while away a Sunday afternoon. No more pretending to give two figs about athletics and golf. No more incessant transfer related drivel. The English top tier will be back in full force, so I hope you have your TV’s tuned, your schedules cleared and your fantasy teams picked. I have a gut feeling this one will be a cracker.

    Rarely have we gone into a season following such a period of intense change. The league is almost unrecognisable, with new managers, new players and even new TV channels. Many teams have spent big; others have spent very little. Some teams have been going about their business in the public eye; others have been quietly improving under the radar. There is the potential for this to be the most unpredictable season in many a year.

     None of this typifies these upheavals more than the managerial changes at the summit of the Premier League. Of the top six teams last time around, four now are under new management. Issue number one is how Manchester United adapts to life without Ferguson? It could be a huge culture shock for the team and their fans, regardless of how fast David Moyes makes his mark. And with their two closest rivals spending big with new managers of their own, the title fight could twist more often than a gin soaked grandma playing blackjack.

     Throw into the mix another intriguing fight for fourth between the two North London clubs, and the scrap underneath between the two Liverpool clubs, and you’re left with a potent mix. With the squads these top seven teams have now developed/bought it’s easy to see them all taking points off each other left right and centre. And with the saga of the Three Musketeers (Bale, Rooney and Suarez) yet to be completed at the time of writing, who knows how any of these teams will ultimately line up come September 1^st?

    Yet it’s not all about the top of the table. Swansea have again spent promisingly and will be looking to cement their place in the top half of the table (and whisper it, maybe even nip at the heels of Liverpool and Everton). They’ll want a good season now their local rivals have finally made it to the Premier League. A top flight Welsh derby between Swansea and Cardiff is going to be tasty. Also watch Norwich win Match of the Day’s ‘wow-how-have-they-started-playing-so-well’ award, even though anyone who has been paying any attention will have noticed Norwich make some canny signings.

    Stoke will have to adapt to life without Tony Pulis, and history suggests this might prove a tough call for them. Fulham will have to adapt not only to their new super-rich owner and his moustache, but also to how they are slowly becoming the Spurs side of the late noughties (with Darren Bent potentially joining Jol and Berbatov if you believe the transfer gossip). Up north the Newcastle circus of crazy continues, the bizarre appointment of Joe Kinnear bound to cause some friction with Alan Pardew. On the subject of crazy will Sunderland improve with Paulo Di Canio at the helm from the offset? Will Aston Villa bounce back from their Annus Horribilis, and can Southampton build on their good work last season? We haven’t mentioned Crystal Palace and Hull, and how their spending sprees will see them fair as they return to the top flight?

     Really, when you list the travails and fortunes of all these teams, you realise the only two currently in similar positions to last year are West Ham and West Brom. The occurrences of last season and this summer mean very few Premier League footballers will be having a sense of Déjà vu when they walk out the tunnel. The eyes of the footballing world maybe on a select few superstars, but you cannot ignore the good work done by many of the Premier League teams. So many things we took for granted last season; the magic chewing gum which seemed to grant Alex Ferguson immortality, for example. But with plenty of intrigue yet to come, and with this particularly tedious transfer window about to come to boil, who knows what will happen when we come to actually kicking a football?

    But if you want my predictions, so you can laugh and point at me in twelve months, I would tip Manchester City for the title with Chelsea second, Manchester United third and (unless Arsenal actually buy someone of note) Spurs hitting fourth. Liverpool I can see getting sixth, with Swansea, Everton, West Brom and Norwich making up the remaining top ten. As for relegation, ultimately I think the bottom three will be Hull, Crystal Palace and Stoke.  As for eleventh to seventeenth, God knows.  

How do you solve a problem like the Wii U?

OK, articles with a title similar to that of a Graham Norton reality TV show aside, this is quite a pickle Nintendo have on their hands here. In future generations marketing graduates will be writing dissertations on just how Nintendo went from getting everything perfectly right with the Wii, to getting it so catastrophically wrong with the Wii U in the space of half a decade. Even Nintendo seem muddled and confused as to what their central message for their product is. Hard to generate hype for a console when even their creators seem unsure of what they need to do.

     But now it seems Nintendo have decided on a strategy, and it’s pretty much identical to the one they used to re-invigorate the 3DS. They brought their latest handheld to life with a 3D Mario, a Mario Kart and a Zelda remake. They’re looking to bring the Wii U to life with a 3D Mario, a Mario Kart and a Zelda remake. OK that’s perhaps doing them a disservice, because we’ve got Donkey Kong and Wii Fit U coming too, not to mention the recently released Pikmin 3, intriguing exclusives like The Wonderful 101 and Bayonetta 2, and the irresistible allure of a new Smash Bros and Zelda on the horizon. Combined with third party titles coming from Ubisoft, Sega and Warner Bros; suddenly the Wii U’s library from here on to early/mid 2014 looks pretty solid.

    But is it a line-up that will tear everyone’s eyes away from the impending touchdown of the PS4 and XboxOne? Is it a line-up that will distract from the launch of GTAV on systems of comparative power, larger install base and at a cheaper price? Rather it is a line-up that preaches to the choir. To the millions who buy a Nintendo console for their Mario, Zelda and Smash Bros fix. They seem to believe that they need to tempt those fans onto their console first, before making a push for new blood. Their policy of regular Nintendo Directs reflects this attitude.

     There is a huge flaw with this policy, and it is a problem Nintendo have had since the GameCube. They simply cannot get the ravenous hordes of enthusiast gamers, who wrench Call of Duty from the shelves like piranha’s stripping a cow down to its skeleton, interested in their products. Worse, they struggle to attract the kids who still go nuts over their handhelds into buying their home console over a PlayStation and/or Xbox.

    The reason is that Nintendo have continued to assert, with stern belief almost bordering on zealousness, that they make games hugely different from what can be found on their rival’s consoles, and that this is what their fans want. They have a point, but they cannot ignore how well other franchises and genres are selling. However noble their intentions in not copying the success of Call of Duty and other FPS’s, that’s a huge chunk of the market they have automatically conceded.

     Moreover, the real problem with the Wii U’s current and upcoming library is a lack of diversity. Consider the huge number of platformers which will be out for the system come 2014. New Super Mario Bros U, New Super Luigi Bros U, Mario 3D World, Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze, Yoshi’s Epic Yarn, Sonic Lost World and Rayman Legends will all have been released by then. Now as a fan of platformers, I’m clicking my heels in delight Gene Kelly style. If you’re a fan of racers or action adventures, there ain’t a lot the Wii U can provide.

    The fact is that Nintendo are a company unsure of where they should be targeting the Wii U. At the moment their focus seems to be their utterly loyal fans. Such a strategy is not without merits; Microsoft and Sony are targeting their next consoles by and large at their loyal fans as well. But the Nintendo’s is a shrinking demographic. Any hope Nintendo had that the hordes of people who bought the Wii would stick around were dashed the moment the Ipad came along. And Nintendo can’t win over those who primarily game on Xbox and PlayStation with their existing franchises. Zelda, Mario and their like failed to wow those gamers in the past; they won’t be wowing them now. Yet Nintendo’s reaction to the flailing Wii U is to buckle down and make more of what sold well in the past, and to take no risks at all on new IP’s. It might generate some short term sales, but it won’t solve their long term image problems.

    Nintendo’s problem is really that they retain a primarily Japanese focus in an increasingly Western market. That is reflected by the mixed fortunes of the Japanese gaming giants last generation compared to the vast fortunes acquired by Western gaming giants. Not to mention that their famous conservatism with regards to online features remains a real albatross around their neck. In this day and age a comprehensive online is expected in most titles, not the occasional toe dipping Nintendo are famous for.

     So what can be done? In the short term not a lot more than cut the price, get the games out, market the living hell out of the thing and pray. Yet Nintendo needs a rethink of their long term strategy. They need significant investments in Western development studios, green light a bunch of new IP’s (or at the very least re-invent dormant franchises like F-Zero) and begin a campaign to court back the Western gamer. Many like to portray gamers as tribal brigands battling the cause of one single console, but in reality gamers are actually quite fickle. You bring them games which excite and intrigue them; they will buy your console. That is perhaps the Wii U’s biggest problem at the moment. It’s not exciting enough.

      Alternatively Nintendo could just bring out a Pokémon MMO, at which point they’ll once again start swimming in a vault of gold coins, Scrooge McDuck style.