If there were even the slightest bit of new buzz or media for Sin & Punishment 2 today, I would have it posted faster than you can blink. There’s not by the way, but I’m going to write a bit more just for the hell of it.

Maybe because of my excitement for the title, I have a hard time understanding why so many people still don’t know what the hell I’m talking about when I mention it. I’ve had a game reviewer ask me if I meant “Crime and Punishment.”

I found that rather curious, given that I’m telling you that we need this game to slap us upside the head and remind us what playing a videogame is all about at a deeper level, giving us some slight pause from titles that have become experiences we curl up on the couch with like a novel. Not that there’s anything wrong with that approach, I just have twitchy needs that only a studio like Treasure can satisfy.

So here we are, and I’m mentioning Sin & Punishment 2 for the sake of mentioning it some more. We’re still waiting for the North American release that we hope sticks to early January, while we lament the lackluster sales the game has experienced so far in Japan.

If the game succeeds here, it will owe a lot to people that hit you over the head until you play it. To that end, if enough of you decide that I’m lying and it’s not one of the most important game releases of late, I’ll stop writing here altogether and make room for posts about gaming themed pastries or some such nonsense as penance for leading you astray .

Ideally, I hope that the game does well here because it is in fact, a damn good game. One that isn’t just a flag for veteran gamers that mourn the fundamentals, but because this Wii release makes a Treasure game more accessible via controls that don’t sacrifice the essence of what makes it important to those flag waving gamers - which I always thought was the point of the Wii before everything got confusing and murky.

At this point I’m willing to also say that if it succeeds, which is a long shot, it won’t owe anything to Nintendo, who has the curious position of being the publisher for the title without entirely knowing it. Of course they do know the game exists, it’s just a matter of whether they are going to share that knowledge with the rest of the world.

I was so delighted to see the game on the floor of E3, that I largely ignored the fact that it was at the back corner of Nintendo’s booth, as if purposefully facing the perceived weirdness of Atlus across from it. At a post-E3 Nintendo event later during the summer, I found it harder to ignore the fact that the game was entirely absent while the rest of the E3 lineup was on display.

But when external PR sources that handle all of Nintendo’s titles tell you they aren’t handling that one, and moreover there are a few that don’t even seem familiar with the name, that puts a heavy strain on my bleeding gamer heart. And then when one can’t even find a listing for the title via Nintendo’s press site, well that just has to be the last straw.

Don’t get me wrong, you can check out this morsel of information at Nintendo.com, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anything more substantial - any images or videos we’ve posted since E3 have piggybacked off of Japanese or European outlets. Japan even got those nifty Iwata asks segments.

The cynical part of me almost thinks Nintendo wants it to fail in North America, so they can claim they tried to give us what we wanted only to have us ignore it. That would help settle the hardcore on Wii debate with some more faulty reasoning that again fails to factor in marketing.

Though I am partly willing to believe that they don’t know how to handle the title as well, so they just aren’t going to handle it all. I can’t reconcile the logic in making this game more accessible via the controls, achieving a brilliant merger of classic game design with new technology, and yet still acting as if only the most hardcore among us need apply. Perhaps this is why I’m not in marketing.

But every fiber of me believes this is a vitally important release for the Wii, and you’re being done a disservice by not hearing about it more. So I guess we’ll just have to keep finding ways to talk about it, because the greatest sin in this case would be one of ignorance.