@Styl3s: Businesses also have the freedom to reject people on the basis of their demeanor. Just because you're comfortable with mature language doesn't mean the business is required to accommodate it.
Different countries have different pricing structures. What happens in Russia (and Korea, and other countries with different structures) will not affect those of us in North American and Europe.
While I do agree that overall Nintendo won't lose a lot of momentum due to Kinect and Move launching later this year, I think you're a little too harsh in your assessment.
The Kinect has serious potential to appeal to the casual market, thanks to Dance Central and Your Shape / EA Sports Active 2. E3 has shown these games work with the device and may generate enough buzz to sell units the same way Wii Sports single-handedly sold the Wii. The problem is the Kinect has not shown any potential to appeal beyond this small group of games which utilize total body movements and no controller. If the Kinect is priced sub-$100 and a Xbox Acrade bundle is released, it may just work out for Microsoft long enough to figure out a strategic plan for the thing.
Sony needs to convince the traditional gaming market that the Move is something they need, which is a far more arduous task. We'll find out how many people truly want a Wii HD, but without the benefit of all of the Nintendo characters.
Story has always been an optional part of a game. Critics take umbrage when a game with a story has a bad story and has nothing else to make up for it (e.g. Nintendo). Most negative reviews of M&B heavily criticized the game because it was ugly and unwieldy (e.g. Eurogamer, PC Games, GamingXP), not because it didn't have a story. I really think Gamespot is an outlier here and not reflective of a consensus among critics.
I agree with Jeff and other folks regarding the lack of NPC voices in Zelda. What's the point of having Midna mimic speech but not actually speak? Was she speaking another language? Nintendo still shies away from voice overs in many of their major franchises, but is it really still a stylistic carry over from the cartridge era when a lot of voice overs weren't possible, or are they afraid that they might recruit a bad team of voice actors that ruins the overall experience? For a company renowned for technological innovation, the inability to successfully implement a now common feature of games is mind boggling to me.
Games are open to interpretation, but there's not a lot of room to interpret a Zelda story: hero goes out to save the world. Sure, you may get a couple dialog choices at certain points, but it is inevitable that you have to choose the correct dialog choice or else you cannot progress the story, so what's the point of even putting them in there? I can say "no way!" and sit on my hands for an hour?
The second point I agree with more, but going off your example I don't think lack of story is so much a criticism as it is a piece of information. People play games for different reasons, and if someone takes a peek at M&B hoping for an epic story crafted by the developer, it is good to know that they won't find one here. They'll find other characteristics to enjoy (as other review sites clearly point out), but not a great game-driven story like you would find in Legend of Zelda.
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