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Resident Evil, Game On With Wii
oneils writes "Chris Morris of CNN.com outlines some interesting gameplay impressions of Nintendo's Wii. He explains that the new controller works well with first person shooter games like Metroid Prime, but, currently, falls short in the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. Morris' impression is that this setback can be rectified by 'optimization.'" From the article: "Imagine holding your TV remote control by its ends and pretending it's a steering wheel. Substitute the Wii controller and you've got an idea of how to control 'Excite Truck'. Driving's pretty easy. The real fun comes when you hit a hill and go sailing into the air. The object is to land with all four wheels on the ground. To do that you'll have to tilt the controller back and forth away from you to stabilize the truck. It's frenetic and fast-paced - and seemed to be everyone's favorite game. I agreed." Several readers also wrote in to mention that Resident Evil will be coming to the Wii. No word on if it's RE5, or a spin-off/remake. Lots of related links below, please Read More. Update: 05/10 20:41 GMT by Z : Joystiq has pictures of a Zapper attachment for the Wiimote.
This takes huge balls.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
It isn't noticed as often, but Opera is like Nintendo and Apple too: they come up with all the cool new stuff which everyone else then copies.
:-).
It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling when two of my favorite companies join forces like this
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
Your numbers are a little off. My understanding is that a XBox/PS2/Gamecube title costs $8 - $12 million to produce (with some AAA titles going into the 20s), and last I heard HD games were expected to at least double the costs. (Is it any wonder publishers are afraid to take risks with money like that involved?)
When the XBox 360 was announced you could hear industry insiders talking about the end of life as we know it - without rapid market growth we were looking at financing only 1/2 the total number of games. And market growth was an elusive target, as people started to realize that the number of actual gamers wasn't really growing in the US - they were just spending more money (and how long could we expect that?); and the Japanese market pre-DS was on the verge of collapse from genre exhaustion... well, listening to the Japanese game developers anyway - they always sounded so fatalistic.
Microsoft (for some reason) said that the XNA toolset would bring costs under control for HD games(which doesn't make sense when the art department/sweatshop eats up most of the funds) --- Sony has made no attempt that I know of to address the skyrocketing costs. Nintendo simply isn't taking their next system there.
Yes, sure, it might take more people to program a game for such a complex controller, but you aren't going to need 200 people churning out high res textures that will only be appreciated by people with HDTVs. Nintendo knows what it's doing.
I plan to buy the PS3, and the Wii. I always planned to buy both of them as I knew Nintendo could produce.
I would think about 360, but I know the PS3 is going to have a wider range of types of games. Beyond that with the Blu-Ray discs it's going to have games with a lot wider range of graphics since it can hold a lot more textures or other media, the lack of space is really going to hamstring the 360.
I saw another comment the other day in a news story that was kind of interesting, it stated that because both the Wii and PS3 included motion detection that there were going to be a lot of games ported only to those two platforms, leaving the 360 out in the cold. I could see that happening...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It was IGN (I think) that put together that mock-up photo, and said it was such, so there was no intential deception.
But as some of the people in the comments on the Eurogamer article mention, it's 100% possible that this controller plugs into the Wii remote, and NOT into the console... which would make sense IMO: why have a long cable to the machine, when you can just have a small one to the remote, which can be on the armrest of the chair, or wherever. Makes perfect sense to me. Not REQUIRED of course (could just be a cable to the machine), but fully possible.
As for the controller itself... I'm a little wary of the placement of the analog sticks. I was never a huge fan of the dual-shock-type controller stick setup, so I wonder how well it'll really work for N64 games "reaching" over to use the sticks (and it has nothing to do with hand size, as mine are massive). I think I'd still try and use my GCN controller if possible (that was confirmed a while ago that you can just plug those straight in), small as it is.
"If I want a cheap console with lots of third-party support and no HD support, I can buy an old PS2."
Except it won't be long before you stop seeing first party PS2 games published, unless the PS3 bombs so badly that SCEA hangs on to the PS2 to stay afloat.
"What's so wonderful about a new-generation console with previous-generation performance?"
Well, considering it's been described as "better than the GameCube," and the GameCube is better than the PS2 as far as performace is concerned, why are you holding on to your PS2 again?
"Why buy a new console that doesn't offer any new performance boost?"
Because the only other option is to buy a new console that offers nothing but a performance boost?
"but those who don't have the need for ultra-smooth HD graphics already have three perfectly good consoles to choose from, each with a 5-year library of fun games already developed for them and being sold for about $20 a pop in many cases."
Games get old. You can only play one game for so long before you want to try something new, otherwise we'd all still be playing Pong.
"Unless you're filthy rich, there's no way you already own and have played every single available PS2 game."
No, but I own all the PS2 games that I might actually want.
"In other words, the Wii doesn't seem to fill any niche that isn't already served."
If the other niches are "being served," why are video game purchases still dominated by 20-something guys?
And I think that the PS3 motion detection will be seen by everyone as completely useless and will be abandoned by developers within a year, just like the lame analog buttons on the Dual Shock 2.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
As several people have pointed out, Nintendo's strategy to reach out to non-gamers has been a massive success on the DS.
People aren't intimidated by technology. Everyone has a computer and keyboard and wires and mice. And that's the problem -- the gamepad is less intuitive than a mouse-based interface.
No one calls a mouse an "optical camera-based motion control device". And they're not going to think of a Wii controller in those terms either, it's either going to be intuitive when they try it out, or it's not.
HD has nothing to do with. PC have been gaming at this kind of resolution for a good two or three years. It's all down to GPU, CPU and memory grunt. This is why a top end video card for a PC is as much as a console.
...
Well, sort of
You have always had the option to play a game at a higher resolution than is available from a TV on the PC but that doesn't mean that the games have been optimized for a HD display; you could have played Quake 3, Half-Life or Unreal Tournament at 1600x1200 if you wanted to but that doesn't mean that the games are really HD.
Now the problem with the "HD-Generation" is not necessarily the higher resolution (you could just run Halo at a higher resolution after all) but more the expectations surrounding the generation. The focus on the "HD-Generation" systems is the graphics and developers, publishers and consumers know it. A developer knows that if their game is not "photorealistic" they will get destroyed in a review, sell less units, and ultimately their game is unsuccessful; this means that all models must have higher geometric detail, have higher resolution textures, and posess state of the art shader effects. In other words developers know that costs must escalate inorder to become successful on these HD-Machines.
Contrast this with the Wii's approach where the focus is entirely on how the game plays; a game will be successful or unsuccessful whether it controls well and is fun. Personally, it wouldn't surprise me if the Wii was more powerful than people suspected; that most of the developers just got to a level of graphics that they thought was appropriate. I'm not saying that it is as powerful as either of the other systems, just that Nintendo convinced publishers to approach it from a different angle where the graphics just needed to be "good enough"
Uh... Microsoft's got, like, a handful of PC ports and one exclusive fighting game. On the horizon the best they have to offer is more PC ports and some sequels to XBox games. They are really not in a good position. Sony doesn't have anything now-- because they haven't released a console yet. Meanwhile in the pipeline Sony has two Final Fantasy games, Virtua Fighter, the same GTA game the XBox 360 is getting, Metal Gear Solid 4, Heavenly Sword... do I really need to go on? Because that's just off the top of my head, and that spans five genres and every one of those except Heavenly Sword is a proven franchise.
I don't see much of anything to be excited about about the PS3 games that we'll be seeing this fall, but I can't imagine anyone with any sense buying a Sony console at launch anyway (especially not at these prices). Meanwhile this fall the PS2 is getting God of War 2 and Final Fantasy 12, while the XBox 360 is getting... I don't know, I think it's an Unreal 3 spinoff or something? The PS2 is absolutely going to be a hotter console this Christmas than either the PS3 or the XBox 360. I don't know if that's good for Sony or not. But it definitely doesn't make this a good year for Microsoft.
Microsoft basically has two things going for them right now:
Advantage #1 will evaporate with simple time, and take with it everything along the lines of "The XBox has games, Sony doesn't".
Advantage #2 will not effect the wider market; it will help Nintendo more than it helps Microsoft (because Nintendo, you see, has games in genres in addition to first person shooters); and even that may (or may not) go away once people start trying to rationalize their desire for Final Fantasy 13.
This remains true in spite of Nintendo targeting everybody else for several years now. It could very well be that adult men are actually more intersted in console gaming than other people.
Look at the Japanese Sales charts. They are here. Now you tell me how successful they have been. Animal Crossing: Wild World has sold more than Final Fantasy 12 in Japan on a system with less than half the userbase, and it is still in the top ten. Brain training 1 and 2 have a decent shot at beating FF 12 too. It is crazy. I thought the DS would be successful in Japan, but it is kicking the ever-loving shit out of every other console combined.
Wake up and smell the coffee. The revolution has already begun, and in a mere 6 months, it will finally be televised.