Only on his new job for about two and a half weeks, Mike Hayes is the man who now oversees Sega West, the combined domain of Sega of America and Sega of Europe and the man who I asked yesterday to define, if such a term is possible, "Sega-ness."

Hayes, who formerly had been running just Sega of Europe and years before that was at Nintendo, was taking meetings in New York on the penthouse floor of a midtown Manhattan hotel. Based in London, he was paying the territory added to his portfolio a visit. Around him, in adjacent rooms, a line-up with a diversity that make even Sega's innovative line-ups of its old Genesis and Dreamcast eras look homogeneous was illuminating TV screens. A few doors in one direction were Aliens Vs. Predator and espionage role-playing game Alpha Protocol. In the other, beyond more than half a dozen other distinct games, were Daisy Fuentes Pilates and a Sonic kart-racing game.

Is there an essence of Sega that unifies the company's games? Something that a gamer unaware of the company logos on game boxes might still sense as a unifying aspect of Sega's games?

"In some cases, but not all," Hayes said, answering this early question with the thoughtfulness and lack of diplomatic self-censorship with which he'd field all of my questions. "When we are trying to do core games like Aliens Vs. Predator from Rebellion, I don't think you'll find any Seganess in that. However, there are a lot of games that we do do — whether it be particularly with our old intellectual property, like Monkey Ball, like with Mario and Sonic and … things like Let's Tap — it's that kind of slight risk-taking that Sega was renowned for as innovators that we still do and we still intend to do."

Such a publisher winds up having to field from an outlet like this one questions as wide-ranging as the fate of its Aliens license, its Sonic line and its heritage as a hardware maker. More on some of that later this week, but here's our first batch of updates.

Aliens is one of the murkier Sega topics. The company announced in 2006 that it would publish three games based on the famous chest-bursting movie monsters. Sega showed Aliens Vs. Predator at this event, demonstrating how games can play as a human marines or a Predator. Still under wraps is what playing like an Alien will be like. But this game wasn't expected to be the first Aliens game from Sega. That was going to be the Gearbox-developed Aliens: Colonial Marines shooter or the now-canceled Obsidian-developed Aliens RPG.

"The Gearbox project was moving along," Hayes said, recalling when the decision was made to take Colonial Marines out of the lead position. The game wasn't as far along as Aliens Vs. Predator, which originally wasn't backed by Sega. It was being made by Rebellion for publisher Vivendi, until that support ceased following Vivendi's 2008 merger with Activision. "There was an opportunity for us to take that." Its development progress put Gearbox's game into the second slot, to be released "a good period after" AvP, according to Hayes. The RPG won't be third because "it just wasn't coming along to the plan that we thought."

Might the newly announced, Ridley Scott Alien prequel project be a source of Aliens inspiration for Sega? "We're quite excited about that and buzzing from the news of that," Hayes said. But of the third game, Hayes would only say, " We'd like to think we'll be doing a third project but at the moment we haven't confirmed what the third project will be."

Another hyped grouping of Sega games has been its trio of Wii games targeted to the demographic of gamers that prefers a good headshot or chainsaw kill to an interactive sit-up routine: House of the Dead Overkill, MadWorld and The Conduit. Hayes views their fortunes as mixed. Sales reports don't show blockbuster numbers for any of the games, but, Hays said, "I just don't think, categorically, that you can therefore concludes that mature games won't work on Wii."

Hayes deemed profane Grindhouse-style in-rails shooter House of the Dead: Overkill a "big success in Europe," even though it performed less spectacularly in America. Hayes said the game's budget-priced Wii predecessor, which compiled two earlier games in the series, continues to do well, suggesting there's a future to this line. "We're still very keen on the House of the Dead franchise."

Conduit can also be deemed a success, Hayes said, qualifying its performance as a solid one in a summer that has seen a pre-Holiday Wii hardware and software "dip." The company has shipped 300,000 copies of the game worldwide and sold through more than half of them to gamers, about 100,000 in the U.S., according to figures from Segaof America v.p. of marketing, Sean Ratcliffe who attended our interview.

It is the mostly black-and-white, hyper-violent MadWorld that Hayes dubbed a "disappointment" for reasons he can't yet nail down. "It could be the consumers didn't like the art style," he said. "It could be the consumers had enough Mature-rated games to play on 360 and PS3 and didn't need a new experience on Wii."

Hayes sums up the mixed success of those titles with a sanguine recognition that any grouping of games will have its hit, its flop and some in-between performers. "That's video games," he said. And it's not the end of this Wii gamer narrative from Sega. " You will see more — I wouldn't say Mature as in M — but you will see more definitely more hardcore games from us on the Wii platform."

MadWorld was part of a second grouping of Sega titles, those developed by Platinum Games, the company led mainly by former design stars at Capcom. Bayonetta, now releasing in early 2010 in the U.S. will be the second, along with DS game Infinite Space. Hayes said there will be at least two more Platinum Games titles published by Sega beyond that, but wouldn't provide details nor confirm if either of those is the previously-announced game being developed by heralded Japanese game maker Shinji Mikami.

One of the biggest hits for Sega in Japan has been its Yakuza series, a line of story-driven brawlers set, mostly, in modern Tokyo and crafted with the help of a Japanese crime novelist and Toshihiro Nagoshi, the classically eclectic Sega developer who also dreamed up the kid-friendly Super Monkey Ball. Yakuza may be the Japanese series that most closely matches the urban antisocial vibe of the Grand Theft Auto series, but its two PlayStation 2 releases in America have sold poorly. A third PS2 Yakuza was not brought to America. A current-gen game, Yakuza 3, made its mark in Japan in February. The third is absent from Sega's announced U.S. release schedule. "We're looking into it," Hayes said, remarking that it would require "massive localization" work and that, yes, he's aware of the dedicated fans here clamoring for its release.

Hayes answered that Yakuza question outside of our interview, truth be told. We'd wrapped up. I was at the other end of the penthouse, preparing to play Mario and Sonic at the Winter Olympics after commandeering Luigi on bobsled I saw Hayes and had to ask. Imagine the ability to transition from playing character-mascot Olympics to a discussion of a crime-filled city adventure, all without leaving the same publisher's demo hotel suite: Maybe that is the definition of "Sega-ness"

With The Conduit out of the way and a couple more Wii projects being polished off, High Voltage Software is now ready to make the leap into the "next-generation." They've signed an agreement with developer Terminal Reality that grants them a lifetime license for the Infernal Engine, which was the driving force behind the extremely well-received Ghostbusters: The Videogame on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Joe Kreiner, VP Sales and Marketing at Terminal Reality, neatly dismisses the Wii as a current generation platform.

"With more than 75 titles shipped, High Voltage Software has a proven track record of developing quality products on all of the current platforms. Through the use of the Infernal Engine technologies, they are now able to extend that remarkable track record into the next-generation platforms."

Poor Wii. Still, considering how painful it was to read reviews for The Conduit, perhaps moving to a new platform is in order.

Sega Sammy pulled in $639.4 million during the quarter, including video game sales, arcade and pachinko revenues. The company noted that growth in the home video game business had "leveled off in Japan and North America, due to the popularization of the current generation of game platform," but called demand in Europe "relatively firm."

Comments about its arcade business were less rosy, saying "conditions remained difficult due to sluggish personal consumption."

Sega says it sold 2.65 million video games during the quarter, with 1.12 million of those in Europe, 990,000 in the U.S. and 530,000 in Japan. The company's best performing platform was the Wii, with more than 550,000 games sold on that platform during the quarter. Nintendo's console beat out the PS3 with 310,000 Sega games sold and the Xbox 360 with sales of 200,000. Sega's consumer business—which also includes toys, mobile phones, animated films and PC content—dropped more than 40%, incurring a loss of about $47.59 million USD.

The company also shared sales info on The Conduit, which shipped 150,000 units on the Wii during the quarter to American and European gamers. Virtua Tennis 2009 did a bit better across its multiple platforms, moving 790,000 copies during the quarter.

While not a positive quarter for the company, at least it didn't suffer as badly as if it had released Shenmue III.

According to Nintendo's Denise Kaigler, "You know, I don't know. It's hard to say. It could be titles have the same type of sales curve that a lot of Nintendo titles have. A lot of Nintendo titles don't follow that traditional sales curve where they launch big and then that's it. Our titles have a long tail. They build in popularity, and this could be the case with MadWorld and The Conduit. I've played both. I'm not a core gamer, and I found that they were challenging and fun."

In its first month on sale, action title MadWorld sold around 66,000 copies. Meanwhile, first-person-shooter The Conduit sold 72,000 copies from its June 23 launch to the end of the June sales period.

Thoughts?

Q&A: Nintendo's Kaigler on Slowing Wii Sales, Hardcore Games [GameLife via CVG via VG247]

The Conduit has everything going for it. It's an exclusive first-person shooter for a console that generally only sees second-rate ports. It features a compelling story of conspiracy, betrayal, and alien invasion on the streets of Washington D.C. And it also delivers a robust multiplayer experience on a platform that isn't exactly known for its only capabilities. What could possibly go wrong?

Let us channel the assembled game critics through The Conduit and see what comes out the other end.

Giant Bomb The game's story is your typical alien-filled and shadowy government conspiracy that doesn't really go anywhere. All you really need to know is that the bug-like alien troops come out of glowing portals called conduits. So a lot of the gameplay tasks you with fighting your way up to a conduit, and then shutting it with a grenade. You'll also have to pull out the all-seeing eye, a glowing orb that acts as your primary way to interact with computers and as a beam that reveals hidden objects in the world. Sometimes you'll use this to unlock doors that block your forward progress. Other times, you'll use it to open up secret pathways to additional weaponry, disarm normally invisible mines, and so on.

GameSpot The real draw in The Conduit is the outstanding control scheme. Conceptually, it's nothing special. You aim your gun with the remote, walk around with the analog stick, and perform various moves by hitting buttons or performing specific motions. However, the execution is nearly flawless. You can aim with pinpoint precision, easily lining up headshots from across the screen or spinning around to cut down a critter creeping up behind you. With more than 10 different actions to keep track of, it can be difficult to find the ideal controller setup, but you can customize the controls to suit your play style.

Game Informer Online play works better than I expected on the Wii, which is to say that it's slightly better than what PC gamers had circa 1998. Matchmaking works well enough, and latency issues are present but not catastrophic. An interesting take on free-for-all deathmatching, dubbed Bounty Hunter mode, subtly changes the game by only scoring points for players who have wronged you in the past, giving you an onscreen objective arrow to the current location of your most bitter foe. Beyond that, the old standbys like capture-the-flag and team deathmatch round out a capable online experience.

Gamervision High Voltage has done a fantastic job showing what is possible with the Wii when a developer actually commits itself to the console. Sadly, the answer isn't as much as you'd hope. Claims that the graphics would reach that of early Xbox 360 titles was a bit of an overstatement, and the game is likely outperformed in some areas by a number of last-generation titles. Some enemy character models look fantastic, and nearly reach Xbox 360 levels, but others look downright muddy. It has that same "next-gen shine" that Perfect Dark: Zero took advantage of, but environments can often look rough. For a Wii game, it's likely one of the best looking, but saying much more is really stretching the truth.

Nintendo World Report This is the paradox of The Conduit. Its disappointing single-player component seems hastily-designed with its cookie-cutter plot, limited range of enemies, and myriad elements copied wholesale from popular recent first-person shooters. On the other hand, its multiplayer component is great, matching online shooters on other platforms feature-for-feature and providing a no-hassle experience that's among the best on Wii. Hopefully High Voltage will learn from The Conduit's shortcomings for their next game, but for now, Wii owners will have to settle for something very good instead of truly great.

Nice to see everyone agrees.

But the Wii-exclusive first-person shooter hopes to win gamers over not with its plot and known voice talent, but its nuanced controls and solid multiplayer gaming. With the ability to tweak every control in the game, from HUD layout to motion controls, High Voltage Software seems to be going out of its way to try and appease an audience sometimes hard to please on the Nintendo console.

But can even the voice talent, sci-fi plot and solid controls help turn a core game into a mainstream success on the Wii?

Loved
Tight Controls: Even without messing around with the settings, The Conduit has responsive, tight controls for a point-and-aim shooter. Players use the nunchuk to move around the game while aiming and firing off shots with the Wii Remote. The buttons on the two controllers let you jump, duck, spin around, swap weapons and grenade types on the fly and reload. Stabbing toward the screen with the remote lets you pull off a melee attack and swinging the nunchuk lets you toss a grenade.

Control Customization: While the presets for The Conduits controls are fairly good, the ability to change just about everything in the game's controls means you can make the game play like you want to. After beating the campaign, for instance, I went in and shrunk the Wii Remote's dead zone down to the size of a largish postage stamp. Moving outside of the dead zone moves the camera. Making the dead zone that small meant that the game felt and played like I was using a mouse to aim and shoot and gave me a sizable advantage over gamers who hadn't tweaked in multiplayer matches. You can also change sensitivity, the location of everything on the HUD, what the game does when the remote stops pointing off the screen and the button mapping.

Weapons: The Conduit has more than a dozen weapons and three types of grenades. The weapons are broken down into three categories: conventional human guns, high-tech Trust guns and alien guns. The weapons all act differently enough to give the game, and better still the multiplayer matches, a lot of variety. Some guns even detect when you twist the remote, allowing you to tweak the spread of multishot weapons.

The ASE: One of the only interesting twists that The Conduit brings to the first-person shooter genre is the inclusion of the alien All Seeing Eye. The floating ball can detect items in a hidden phase state and pull them into the physical world. Unfortunately, that means putting your gun away for a few minutes as you sweep an area and then use the ASE to pull it into the world. It's a nice twist that breaks the monotony of running and gunning.

Interesting Level Design: While much of The Conduit's single player campaign is a bit monotonous, the levels you have to fight your way through offer up a pretty broad spectrum of settings and maps. The game has you working your way through the White House, the Pentagon, down city streets and inside bunkers. It's a nice reminder that not all shooters have to take place on a battlefield.

Multiplayer Matches: The Conduit's multiplayer matches are surprisingly fun to play. While the game only includes three modes of play, each mode can be tweaked with a variety of rule sets that change the maps, the weapons and basic rules of the game. Add to that the inclusion of voice chat support through the Wii Speak peripheral and the variety of weapons and you've got yourself a fairly robust Wii shooter.

Hated
Background Graphics: While The Conduit's front-and-center graphics are fairly impressive, the little stuff, the backdrops, the decals, have some major issues and go a long way to undermine the game's overall visuals. Looking through windows in buildings net you flat backdrops that look like cardboard cut-outs. Blaster burns from weapons sometimes float in midair. The horizon for some settings is often blurry, and uninspired.

Blundering Enemies: The enemy artificial intelligence, the heart of any single-player experience in a shooter, is tragically flawed. Enemy aliens and humans occasionally get stuck behind things, continue to fire despite having no clear line of fire, and respond to obvious triggers in the game, allowing you to systematically clear a room with careful footwork.

Voice Acting: With the likes of Kevin Sorbo (Hercules, Andromeda), William Morgan Sheppard and Mark Sheppard doing voice work for the game, you'd think it would be, at least, a fun listen. You'd be wrong. The trite dialog is made worse, not better, when this trio get their voices on it.

Plot: Conspiracy theories are often not the best fodder for video games. Generic conspiracy theories are even worse. While the plot is pretty straightforward, it would be easy to get confused searching for some substance in the dialog.

Despite its shortcomings, I was pleasantly surprised to find The Conduit to be a solid shooter that offers just enough in its single-player campaign to keep me playing to the end and enough multiplayer support to make me want to stick around after I'm done.

The key moment for me was when I went in and played around with the control settings. Once fine-tuned to my tastes, The Conduit felt nearly as intuitive and precise as a shooter played on a PC.

The Conduit was developed by High Voltage Software and published by Sega for the Wii on June 23. The Teen-rated game retails for $49.99. Played through the entire single-player campaign and a dozen or so matches of online multiplayer matches.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

The company that's been riding high on its own Wii and DS successes has recently had some trouble convincing people that marquee games from publishers other than Nintendo can do well on Nintendo's machines.

Sega's hardcore-hyped MadWorld launched on the Wii with 66,000 copies sold in the U.S. in March, according to the NPD group.

Take Two's Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars — the best-reviewed game on the DS — launched that same month with fewer than 90,000 copies sold in the U.S.

"There is no magic number that says x = profitability," Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime told Kotaku during our E3 interview last week, further clarifying earlier comments on the matter.

Two non-Nintendo games he expects to perform well are Sega's The Conduit and EA's Dead Space Extraction, both first-person games with a darker tone that Nintendo's standard. "I am really optimistic about The Conduit," he said. "I think it looks great, plays great. I think Dead Space Extraction is going to be fabulous given the early builds that I've seen. So, I do think that we will continue to see not only great titles, but great sales, on higher-rated M and T type of titles on our platforms."

Fils-Aime addressed the seeming struggles of some of those M-rated games on Wii and DS from earlier this year.

As other Nintendo reps have said before him, Fils-Aime thinks Chinatown Wars may have been counted out too soon by people focusing on its launch numbers. "In the handheld space, with Nintendo platforms specifically — whether it's Game Boy Advance or Nintendo DS — the fact is that first month sales really don't matter," he said. "You have a title like Mario Kart, in its first month, a holiday month that did just over 200,000 copies. New Super Mario Brothers, which launched in the summer, did over 150,000 in its first month. Those are not huge numbers, yet both of those have gone on to sell more than four million units apiece and to be in the top 10 total industry titles for the last two years running. So, first month doesn't matter in the handheld space as long as it's a high-quality game, which Chinatown Wars is, has some continuous level of marketing support — whether its retail marketing, consumer marketing, online — as long as you keep the buzz going it will continue to sell millions and millions. And that's my expectation for Chinatown Wars. As long as the team at Take Two and Rockstar give it a long life, it will do very well."

Reggie said he would have liked to have seen higher sales for MadWorld but doesn't think its launch counts out other M-rated Wii games. "The challenge with home console is that for a 'gamer game' you need to have the buzz and the expectation early and you need to support the title for a number of months to drive the sales. On both of those fronts, I'm not sure MadWorld was able to do that."
It's not an M-rated Wii game, but EA Sports Active just had a blockbuster debut of supposedly more than 600,000 copies sold in its first two weeks, according to EA.

Those are the arguments. Don't count Wii and DS third-party games out for 2009 yet, Nintendo says. There will plenty of high profile games to test that.

The Conduit is out this month. Dead Space Extraction ships in September.

Sega's official E3 line-up announcement doesn't hint at any big surprises, but it does mention a fair number of titles we're definitely keeping an eye on. It's all about alphabetical convenience this year, with Aliens Vs. Predator, Alpha Protocol, Bayonetta, and The Conduit making up the core titles in Sega's line-up this year. Three completely original IP to one licensed title is a very welcome ratio indeed.

The rest of the games Sega will be showing aren't quite as exciting. Planet 51 is tie-in with the animated movie of the same name, and the company continues to milk their Olympic license with Vancouver 2010 and Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games for the Wii and DS.

The list reflects the line up Sega mentioned via Twitter earlier this month, with the addition of Aliens VS. Predator, as foreseen by McWhertor.

I'm just hoping that Bayonetta will be playable this time around. I've seen quite enough; now it's time for some wholly appropriate touching.

Both MadWorld and The House of the Dead received praise from game reviewers, but the sales for both titles we rather abysmal, especially when considering the Wii's massive install base. Speaking to VideoGamer.com, Nofsinger explains why High Voltage isn't concerned about suffering the same fate with The Conduit.

"This is something that gets brought up quite a lot," he said, "but we're not concerned at all. Those games, and you can point to a few others as well… I think they're great games, but they're mature games. I think there's a nomenclature that you need to be certain on. Those games are gory and they are aesthetically niche. They're boutique games. They're great games and I love them, however I know that they're not accessible and they're not the kind of titles that are going to tap into both core and mainstream [audiences].

But what does Nofsinger mean by core and accessible?

"When I say that we're core, I mean that we have a level of detail and depth and customisation and variety that core gamers demand. When I say that we're accessible and that we're also aiming for the mainstream, that is why we specifically chose the art style we did, and the setting. The theme is very much in the mindset of going for that Hollywood blockbuster feel.

If you ask me, the main difference lies in the ratings, at least in North America. There's a world of difference between a T-rating and an M-rating, especially on the Wii.

High Voltage: Conduit won't suffer MadWorld sales fate [VideoGamer.com]

No matter how you feel about announcement announcements, there's no way we're going to get the game companies from stopping during this time of the year. E3 is only two weeks away, but High Voltage Software cannot contain themselves any longer, announcing that they will reveal a new original intellectual property at the show.

"I won't say much about our new property until we unveil it at E3," said Eric Nofsinger, Chief Creative Officer of High Voltage Software. "But I can guarantee that we are continuing to push our technology to the absolute limit in order to deliver experiences that are beyond jaw-dropping."

Beyond jaw-dropping? That might be a bit too exciting for my blood. Let's hope they pull that back a bit before the show. I enjoy my jaw. It keeps me from having to eat by smashing my head down onto my plate over and over.

The new trailer explores the story behind The Conduit in timeline form, giving us a quick synopsis as to what happened over the course of six months that ended with our protagonist running through Washington D.C. shooting aliens. Note the inclusion of September 11th in the timeline, which isn't a date you include in a North America video game advertisement lightly.

I was surprised at how deftly the game seemed to handle... with one exception.

The Conduit is meant to be a solid first-person shooter built from the ground up for the Wii. I was impressed with just how customizable the controls are, allowing you to tweak just about everything in the game to try and create, or recreate, your favorite shooter controls.

Taking the Wii remote in hand, I was able to adjust to the controls within a few seconds and was pulling off head shots in minutes.

I found the controls exceptionally tight and more than able to deliver a solid shooter experience. I did run into one significant problem though.

To look around, you need to aim the remote to the edge of the screen. This worked fine normally, but when I pointed too far off the screen the game would sort of flip out, sending me spinning in circles until i was able to recenter my controller and stop the movement.

Of course, the problem is that when playing a fast-paced shooter, one that may expect you to spin around quickly, the possibilities of over turning are pretty high.

Hopefully this is something High Voltage can fix with software, because without the one flaw it seems like the best controls for a Wii shooter that I can remember.

On top of tracking headshots and nailing precision aiming, every gun you use also has a zoom option and many, I'm told, will have secondary fire.

While the controls seemed mostly flawless, when I saw the game is still lacked a bit of polish. In particular, the graphics seemed to need a little work, but nothing that is insurmountable.

"We know it's a letdown to you," High Voltage Chief Creative Officer Eric Nofsinger told crestfallen journalists. "It's definitely a letdown to us."

So, with little else to do with 10 completely playable builds of The Conduit, journalists were turned loose on the single player mode that we've only gotten mere tastes of over the last nine months. Here's what we came away with.

What Is It?
The Conduit is a sci-fi first person shooter, developed exclusively for the Wii. Players take the role of ex-Secret Service Agent generic name Michael Ford to fight their way through an alien-attacked Washington D.C. Originally, the game was going to have Wii MotionPlus, but that got scrapped because it was deemed unnecessary . It sounds like they're going to keep Wii Speak in for multiplayer, though.

What We Saw
Robbed of multiplayer and with about three times as many journalists as there were builds, I settled for a sharing playthrough with GamesRadar's Brett Elston. Originally, we were going to pass the controller back and forth every time one of us died – but since Brett rarely ever died and I died all the time, we settled for taking turns by level. In about half an hour, we'd made it all the way to level five or so before Brett started dying regularly.

How Far Along Is It?
The game is due out in June, but it still looks like it's in bad need of a polish. I'd like to think two months is enough time, but according to Creative Director Matt Corso, the art team is still changing things like lighting and textures. Here's hoping it'll all come together.

What Needs Improvement?
Polish, polish, polish: Everything from the graphics to the difficulty balancing could use a couple more passes by the developer. There's nothing glaringly wrong with the game, but a series of minor flaws combined with high expectations for The Conduit could cost High Voltage. Example: the textures are dull – no biggie. But combine that with a level that's difficulty needs balancing (even Brett died like four times on the train in level four), a checkpoint that feels like it's in the wrong place and some wigging-out of the motion controls when trying to turn with the Wii Remote. That's a recipe for harsh or mixed reviews right there.

Holding Down To Crouch: Most of the button-controls in the game were easy to pick up. You tap B to shoot, hold B to charge up the weapon and press A to jump, etc. But crouching involves holding down on the C button – which doesn't really feel intuitive. Especially considering that to toggle a weapon's scope view, all you have to do is press down on the D-pad and it just stays that way ‘til you press it again. That, to me, seems like a better, more intuitive way to crouch.

All Seeing Eye Puzzles Don't Make Much Sense: To be fair, I didn't spend too much time with the All Seeing Eye – but what few puzzles I did encounter with it weren't very puzzle-y because they didn't really have anything to do with logic. For example, you get to a door with a bright yellow alien lock on it. To unlock it, you have to use the Eye to look for two yellow nodes somewhere in the room, focus the Eye on it and press B to charge up the lock. You'd think the challenge of finding the nodes would make for some kind of puzzle – but nope. They're just randomly tossed around the room, making you question whether the lock wasn't just some developer device to slow you down while the engine renders the graphics in the next room.

Gets Old Fast Early On: I'm really hoping the story makes up for the lack of variety to gameplay. Sure, the All Seeing Eye puzzles shake things up a bit; but for the first four levels when you don't have it, combat gets really old really fast. Especially when you die more than four times at a single checkpoint.

What Should Stay The Same?
Control Scheme: When the controller wasn't wigging out from whatever external pressures exerted on it (10 other controllers going at the same time, bright lights, cell phone signals, etc.), the Wii controls worked pretty well. I think High Voltage has done a good job of a) finding a natural-feeling default that will work for everyone and b) providing all kinds of customization options just in case it doesn't feel natural enough for some.

Options Galore: You can change a lot about The Conduit on the fly in any level from the Start menu screen. Wii Remote sensitivity, level difficulty and basic audio/visual options are there. But there's also a layer of tweaks that can turn an easy level into a hardcore experience: for example, there's an option to set the Wii Remote so that when you point it off screen, Agent Ford keeps turning in place (the default is that he stops moving when the reticule leaves the screen). It's a very small, very subtle difference, but it can make a level feel like a completely different experience.

Varied Weapons: I didn't get to see more than four guns in five levels, but there's something like 15 weapons in the game (all available in multiplayer). A lot of them are your basic shooter weapons: pistol, machine gun, alien shocking ray gun, etc. But hidden weapons caches will yield higher-level weapons with additional motion control features, such as an alien rocket launcher that lets you control the rocket with the Wii Remote after you fire.

There Will Be Cheats: Think back to Goldeneye, Turok and Perfect Dark on Nintendo 64 – they all had weird cheats and unlockables that gave the games tons of replayability and spiced up multiplayer like you wouldn't believe. The Conduit plans to offer cheats along the same line – as well as some pre-order bonus codes for unlockable stuff.

It's On The Wii: I don't care if other developers have abandoned the Wii to the casual games scene – there needs to be a middle ground game like The Conduit that straddles hardcore challenge and Little Johnny's First FPS.

Final Thoughts
The biggest problem I foresee for The Conduit comes from shooter fans that are too used to games on PS3 and 360. It takes a lot of work to unlearn the dual analog stick system of moving and shooting; I could see gamers getting frustrated and mistaking The Conduit's controls as the source of their learning curve woes.

That concern aside, Wii gamers will be pleased; because is nothing else, The Conduit is a step in the right direction. It might fall short of expectations on some fronts (especially if they don't get that difficulty balancing sorted out), but the game goes a long way towards exploring what the Wii can really do for the first person experience – as well as for multiplayer (if they get the servers working, that is).

Of course robust online multiplayer is all relative when we're talking the Nintendo Wii, but High Voltage is packing as much as they possible can into The Conduit. The originally promised 16-players online had to be trimmed down to 12 to keep everything running smoothly, but with a nice selection of maps, weapon load outs, and multiplayer modes we might just overlook those other four people. They were probably campers anyway.

The All Seeing Eye, or ASE, is a device that reveals hidden objects and enemies in the upcoming first-person shooter for the Nintendo Wii, kind of like Rowdy Roddy Piper's magical sunglasses in the 1988 classic science fiction thriller They Live. Any game that allows me to make a reference to a film starring Rowdy Roddy Piper is okay in my book.

Matt Corso, art and creative director at High Voltage, walked me through the options, which not only rival, but may surpass the level of customization found in most PC shooters.

By default, the game's controls are pretty straight forward for a Wii shooter. You move around with the thumbstick and aim and shoot with the remote. A button lets you lock onto a target for strafing, and a swing of the remote triggers a melee attack.

But you can go into customization and switch to any of three presets, or you can just create your own. Every button and action is mappable. Yes, including the motion control. While you can't completely ditch the single motion control in the game, Corso said you could always map it to something you will almost never use if it bugs you.

That's not all though, not by a long shot.

By hopping into the Remote Sensitivity settings you can manually adjust everything, everything. That means turning speed, cursor sensitivity, horizontal and vertical views, thrust sensitivity, nunchuk shake sensitivity.

You can also adjust the size of the deadzone window. The deadzone window is the invisible box that determines when the game sees your remote pointing as aiming and when it sees it as looking. If you want the game to play like a PC mouse and keyboard title just shrink that box to its smallest size. If you want it to be more like Metroid, stretch out the horizontal but keep the vertical thin. The customization is endless.

The game also lets you switch between the five difficulty settings for gameplay on the fly, so you can pause at any time and make it easier or harder.

Finally, the game's HUD is adjustable. When you drop into the settings you can click and drag the bits and pieces of the HUD to wherever you'd like to. You can also tweak the HUD's transparency.

"None of this was really hard to do," said Corso. "I felt there were these old arguments about that's not the way it's
done in console games so we shouldn't do it.

"But we decided to just giving you all of these options and settings," he said. "You can even adjust default run speeds."

And don't worry, you can't use them to make the game unplayable.

"All of the settings work well in the game, so we don't feel you can actually break it."

I wish I could say there were a whole bunch of amazing first-person experiences to compare it to on Nintendo's console, but sadly that isn't the case. There are plenty of ports, and Red Steel, but nothing that really stands out as a contender for the definitive experience. If The Conduit shapes up as well as I hope it will, I'd gladly let it wear that crown once it sees release this June.

For better or worse, Wii MotionPlus support has since been dropped from The Conduit, a seemingly curious decision for a first-person shooter. 1UP decided to find out, straight from High Voltage Software, why the Wii game has shunned the Wii Remote add-on.

"When we actually implemented it for the Conduit, it didn't really add anything for our primarily ranged combat," explains High Voltage VP Eric Nofsinger. "We had hoped that it would allow for better off screen IR tracking, but the device seems to lend itself more naturally for hand to hand combat where the player can calibrate in-between bouts."

That's a little bit distressing to potential Wii MotionPlus owners looking forward to more, not less support for the one-to-one motion tracking peripheral. We know that Nintendo's own Wii Sports Resort relies on it, as does the EA Sports Wii lineup and expect more games to support it once, you know, the thing actually comes out.

With Sega planning to ship The Conduit this June, perhaps those rumors of a delay for the MotionPlus accessory started to give the publisher pause.

Why The Conduit Dropped Wii MotionPlus Support [1UP]

Among the new details, The Conduit won't include MotionPlus, but will use Wii Speak support.

To celebrate we posted impressions, mostly hands-on, with The Conduit, Bayonetta and Madworld. Also a very red video for one of those. Check it out:

MadWorld Paints the Wii Red: Hands-On Impressions
The Conduit Channels Hardcore Gaming To the Wii: Hands-On
Bayonetta Brings Devil May Cry Aesthetic To a New Level
New Madworld Trailer Adds Cheese To The Bloodbath

*Don't. They like fingers.