Ignoring the shovelware problem, I'm still befuddled by Nintendo's lack of first-party development. They have many different internal dev teams and second party studios. Are they just sticking to some new policy of not announcing games a long time before release? It's easy to say, "lolol they're all working on casual games," but the three internally-developed games known about (Animal Crossing, Wii Music, and Wii Sports Resort) are all handled by the same team!
I can understand that some teams just finished a project and don't have anything yet (like the Mario Kart team), or that the ones involved in big projects like Mario (EAD Tokyo), Zelda (Aonuma's EAD team), and Metroid (was Retro but Prime is over), take a lot of time... but there's still several groups and second parties left. Some are working on DS games or just finished said DS games, but considering Nintendo's size and that the teams have the capacity to work on several console and handheld projects at once, I can't imagine that all that manpower would be exhausted by stuff like Rhythm Tengoku or Fire Emblem DS.
It's baffling. What the hell are they doing?
