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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.
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.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Somehow wiii isn't the sound I'd expect someone to make as they are falling out of airplanes. I would it expect it to be this:
Omg. Ahhhahghgahhghaghaghgahhg *#*##* @*@*@*@ Im going to die.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
The video game industry has always relied heavily on addicts having more money than brains, but I think $500-$600 hits that magical "critical density" where even the fanboys will be hesitating to buy it. Even fanboys have to pay $3 a gallon, and it's been pointed out that you can get a tricked-out Xbox 360 and a Wii for the same price as the fully-fledged PS3.
Did Sony forget how they beat out the Sega Saturn that they're now making some of the same mistakes Sega did?
Seriously
All we need now is an unannounced early release of the hardware.
"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."
First off, comparing the PS3 controller to the Wiimote is like night and day. Aside from the shell not being designed for motion detection (possible motion detection was never taken into account in the design of the PS1 controller), the Wiimote has several other functions that Sony can't or won't implement in the PS3 controller.
Secondly, the Xbox 360 controller (at least the wireless one) has ports on it. If they're capable of doing more than just connecting a headset and recharge cable, Microsoft could conceivably release a Wii-esque dongle and imitate Nintendo's control scheme even better than Sony. The only problem will be that it will have to be a separate accessory.
(My God, after years of defending the GameCube against Xbox fanboys, I'm siding with them against Sony. Screw politics, video games makes strange bedfellows.)
"The hand stress is definately a potential problem some games. The real question is do I have to hold it out in front of me, or can I rest the controller on my lap and use less dramatic movements?"
t ml)
Not if the developer knows what they're doing. Take a look at this excerpt from IGN's preview of 'WiiSports Tennis':
One interesting thing we learned while playing is that you can choose to either do wide, arching movements that genuinely simulate the real game of tennis, or, alternatively, you can choose simple flicks of the wrist to do the same thing. So, if you want to go out (like the actors in Nintendo's initial controller teaser video), you have that option. But if not, you can go small, too. The game recognizes and translates either movement to the court on the fly.
(Full article http://revolution.ign.com/articles/706/706071p1.h
So I'd think if the proper optimizations are made, usage of the Wii-mote really doesn't have to be any more tiring than using a dual-shock or xbox controller.