Nintendo loosing their touch?

I must say that I really respect Nintendo for what they have done in the past few years. With their Blue Ocean Strategy they successfully subverted the technology rat race and got out of the dead-end the games industry was going towards. The fact that their games were considered as “childish” or “technologically inferior” by many industry hardliners and “core players” is actually a symptom of that deep going revolution.
However, their recent lineup of games for the Wii gives me some reasons to be concerned. It’s almost Christmas so every console ought te have a major no-brainer present candidate released by now. PS3 has Little Big Planet. X-Box has… i don’t know… Gears of War 2.. whatever. What does Wii have? Wii Music and Animal Crossing. Even I find both titles pretty disappointing. I’m wondering in Nintendo is loosing their touch.
To be fair, I haven’t played neither of the two. I probably won’t anyway. Wii Music has some very fancy packaging and obviously, Nintendo had some extremely high hopes that this would be a follow-up to titles like Wii Sports and Wii Fit. Well, it turns out that it didn’t work so well. The reviews are really bad. The sales don’t seem to be going well either (except maybe for Australia). But that doesn’t matter. You don’t need to be an Expert to see how lame the product is. It is a music game but the “songs” you play in it are tunes like “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”. When was the last thing you were listening to that on the radio? The Blue Ocean Strategy works for Nintendo by using a lowest common denominator approach to get other people into games. I think this time, they went actually TOO LOW. I wouldn’t even call it “Music”. In fact, games like Guitar Hero already hit a sweet spot there. Nintendo seems to have falsely applied the same strategy as in other genres, mistaking games like Guitar Hero or even Singstar for “Hardcore”.

The other Christmas title is Animal Crossing. Now, don’t get me wrong. I do like Animal Crossing. I have the DS Version and I think it is an extremely well done game with some astonishingly simple and effective ideas. The only problem I see here is that it is the same fucking game all over again! The FOURTH time now (N64, Game Cube, DS and now Wii). The Wii is even backwards compatible so it should play the Game Cube version just fine. There are some new features but they are nowhere near enough to justify a new release. The Wii Speak is a cool thing but I would like to see that with Mario Kart Wii instead of Animal Crossing.

So with no really interesting titles on the horizon I’m afraid Nintendo might be getting into trouble.