2K Games and Rokkan launched the Mafia II website today. Very heavy experience with lots of HD video. Pretty cool stuff. Keep an eye out for new chapters to be rolled out in the near future. Shouts to Charles, Faisal, Errol, Bryan, Andy, Kat, Jessica and Mat for doing a great job.

I've been looking around at the whole premise of designing games in Flash specifically for the Wii. This seems to be a hot topic since there are already some posts on the subject, as well as people talking about it at upcoming Flash conventions. By "people," I'm apparently only talking about one person when it comes to conferences... never the less... I think it's awesome that a Nintendo product is finally natively supporting independent game developers (even if it's unintentional), and people are jumping on this.

Kinda.

So when we say "Nintendo Wii Supports Flash 7" we're really talking about Opera supporting Flash 7. The beta trial version of Opera is available on the Nintendo shopping channel. It looks like this. What's interesting about Opera running Flash 7 is that I'd think the Flash Player would be able to run on the Nintendo Wii's core OS without help from Opera, but apparently it cant... At least not the current Flash Player 9. Because of this, Opera probably had to license Flash Player from Adobe. Flash Player 7 was more than likely the only version, at the time, that they Adobe would license-out. Of course this is all speculation.

The big problem with Flash on the Wii is that the version of Flash 7 that is running in Opera is apparently pretty stripped down and doesn't work with the Wii-Remote's directional pad. People like Aral Balkan and Mario Klingemann have been messing around with a few work-arounds.

At this point, is a work-around worth it? Will being able to use the directional pad or other buttons be worth the time if you have to create a hack (most have latency issues as well)? With sites like WiiCade and WiiPlayable, people are already trying to create portals for Wii/Flash games. Therefore, there must be a need for better Flash support.

All in all, I'm unimpressed with Flash on the Nintendo Wii, though I believe it is a good place to start for independent developers. Designing a Flash game to run in Opera with a couple hacks to try to get some more button support seems like a horrible solution to something that could potentially extend the life of the Nintendo Wii. An ideal solution, in my opinion, is for Nintendo to create a "shared-gaming" channel where people can play independent Flash games full screen with full controller support. Of course this would mean that you'd have to go through Nintendo with any and all uploads/changes/configurations of your Wii Flash game, but I think it'd be a small price to pay for exposure while offering free/independent gaming to Wii customers.