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.

Comments

Retro Controller

[AKAImBatman]

What the retro controller article seems to be missing, is that the controller pictured probably isn't for Wii games. Nintendo has already stated that the Wii will play all the old Nintendo titles, including GameCube.

I'd like to see how people plan to play these games with a motion sensor controller. (Hint: It's very doubtful they can.) Ergo, the "retro" controller. Designed to allow classic gameplay on the Wii.

Of course, classic, classic (NES) is fully supported by the Wii-little design. :-P

Nice looking list

[Dark Paladin]

I was looking over the list last night of the upcoming Wii games - "Trauma Center" should be interesting on the Wii (the DS version was pretty good, even if it had some annoyances).

Either way, it would appear that Nintendo has a lot of 3rd party support time time around, which made me think of why, and then something that Ubisoft president commented on made me figure it out.

Long story short, he made some less then flattering remarks about the PS3 - how it just ups the power. The same could be said for the 360. But that's no the issue for a publisher; for a publisher, all of that extra power and HD requirements goes into cost. Now, a development team needs even bigger hardware, a bigger graphics and sound team to get the same game out, which now increases the cost of the game by a large margin - say from $1 million to $7-$10 million. For a publisher, that means increased risk, reduced margins, and relying ever more on "certain" hits (which can vanish if something goes wrong - look at the Tomb Raider franches, and what they've had to do to get it back).

Nintendo is offering publishers something more than just a gimmick: they're offering them reduced price. Look at "Brain Age" - developed, tested, and ready for market in 90 days, and it hardly needed a graphics team. Since the Wii uses really Gamecube development systems with more power, that's an easy transfer of knowledge, which is why I predict that for the first year, Wii games will look pretty much like Gamecube games, maybe a little smoother.

But for the publisher, once you get past the controller issue, it's reduced cost, reduced time, reduced risk over time. If the Wii takes off at all, it may be that publishers wind up favoring it if for no other reason than it makes them more money over time.

Of course, this is all just my opinion, and I could be wrong. But my family is pretty much committed to the Wii - the only thing I need to know is how to get DVD functionality out of it and it'll be the only console in the play room for family computer gaming for quite some time.

Re:Nice looking list

[Golias]

Everybody who's cheering for Nintendo (and I'd just like to say: I get it... They are the only non-evil company making consoles, so they are easy to r00t for, if you'll pardon the pun) keeps trying to make the point that it was some stroke of genius for them to keep the console "Low-Def" for the sake of cheaper game development and to keep the cost of the console itself down.

But here's the thing that doesn't fit about that:

If I want a cheap console with lots of third-party support and no HD support, I can buy an old PS2.

What's so wonderful about a new-generation console with previous-generation performance? Why buy a new console that doesn't offer any new performance boost?

Wouldn't it have been even cheaper for Nintendo to just sell a motion sensor that you can plug in to an X-Box, PS2, or GameCube, and develop games for that???

Sure, not everybody has an HDTV and not everybody needs cutting-edge graphics... 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. Unless you're filthy rich, there's no way you already own and have played every single available PS2 game. (And if you are that filthy rich, you are probably one of those HDTV owners currently playing Call of Duty 2 on the X-Box 360.)

In other words, the Wii doesn't seem to fill any niche that isn't already served.

And speaking of that controller:

Imagine holding your TV remote control by its ends and pretending it's a steering wheel.

That's exactly what every non-fanboy was imagining the moment photos of the Wii controller came out. No surprise there at all.

Re:Gotta admire Nintendo's balls

[VendingMenace]

the whole company -- except for the part of the company that deals with the handheld market.

Still. this DOES take balls. Balls and genius. Seriously, i predict that Wii will be the most loved of the consols this generation.

Speaking of balls, Sony can lick mine. Geeze, i mean they really are not shaping up that well this time around, and this comes from a guy that has NEVER owned a nintendo system. Just the genesis and playstation (greatest consol to date) and xbox. This time around I will be getting some nintendo hardware, i guess.

Seems like Sony is about to get dethroned

[eebra82]

A year ago I wouldn't believe anyone if they told me Sony was going to get dethroned from the lead position in the console market. Now, all of a sudden, Microsoft has dropped the bomb on Sony by releasing the 360 a full year ahead, and by the looks of it, 360 is - in terms of visuals - fully comparable to PS3.

I personally thought that Nintendo was going down the hill before they announced the Revolution. Now it seems like it gets more attention than the 360 and the PS3, mostly due to its controller. The best part is that it does not seem to be all that mumbo jumbo some people expected the controller to be, so with a few more tweaks before the release, this might make Nintendo sell more consoles than Sony and Microsoft, mostly because the price is so competitive.

I have obviously not decided what to go for, but I am quite sure it won't be a PS3. It's too expensive and doesn't seem to offer much beyond the cheaper 360, except other games. So with features compared, it's going to be PS3 vs 360, a war which MS will probably win due to its one year advantage. Additionally, MS is likely to refine the build process costs and probably push Sony out of the game by offering a cheaper console. And no, Sony won't be able to compete because every sold console is probably a loss for Sony until we buy a game.

Things can be turned around a bit and I might be very wrong, but I really think that Sony is in deep trouble here.

Thoughts on the controller

[zerocool^]

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the Wii controller. And I've come up with some conclusions.

Head over to wwi.nintendo.com and watch the movies on how the controller is used. See if you can spot the one thing that just doesn't feel right.

... Did you see it?
I stared at these movies, watched them several times. It finally hit me.

When you're using the Wii controller, for some games it will be awesome. For example, the tennis game will be really cool. The baseball game will probably be sweet. The Ping-Pong game will be cool. The driving game will be cool. The games with the multi-player abilities will really be awesome, and will be huge hits at parties, I suspect.
See the catch?

All these games have you get up out of your seat and move around. That's cool.

But, see how the people hold the Wii controller in the movies that don't deal with Sports themes. They hold it out in front of them, at arms' length. You just aren't going to be able to do that for hours on end. If you sit down to play a marathon Zelda run, or a speed run at metroid, and you have to jiggle, wiggle, bounce, aim, and otherwise move the controller, you're going to wear your arms out (don't believe me? Grab a stapler in one hand and a mouse in the other, and hold them at arms' length. Come back in 45 minutes after taking some advil for the muscle pain).

Now, take your hands and put them in your lap, as if you were holding a SNES or a playstation controller, and playing Sonic the Hedgehog or Link to the Past, or whatever. Think how your hands and fingers sit. Now, imagine a TV remote in each hand, instead of a playstation controller. Which hand is pointing at the screen? Neither - in order to do that, you have to bend your wrists, which will also hurt after a while (for those of us who type for a living, a short while).

My conclusion is that the controller will be great for games that encourage physical movement, i.e. tennis, golf (especially golf, that will be cool), etc. But, trying to bootstrap the "interactive controller" nonsense onto platform games like Zelda and Metroid is only going to make them impossible to play for any length of time.

I pointed this out to a friend, and he said, "dude, not every game is going to use all the motion sensing crap, some are just going to turn the right hand controller over 90 degrees and use that". But, wait. Then, we've got a square controller, with a 4-way D-pad on the left side, and two buttons on the right side. Here's an artist's rendering.

They're going to have trouble trying to shoehorn the technology into games that serious gamers want to sit and play for 6 hours.

~Will