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Nintendo Confirms Wii on GC Housing at E3
kukyfrope writes "Nintendo's PR Manager, Matt Atwood, has confirmed accusations that Wii demo stations at E3 were not running inside the Wii case and instead were running inside Gamecube housing using Wii-spec hardware. 'The Wii hardware we exhibited at E3 2006 was made specifically for the E3 show and is not the final mass-production version. Some of this hardware was cased in Nintendo GameCube housing.'" Update: 05/19 21:08 GMT by Z : Changed 'hardware' to 'housing' in title.
I guess I'm not going to buy a Wii now, because they housed the hardware for the demo inside a GameCube.
Come on Sony, you can poison the well better than that.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Do I not get it? Why would anyone care what case they were in?
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
...but not unexpected for a 5-to-6-months-before release demo.
:)
It showcased what they wanted it to do - they could have cased in hardened dog shit for all I personally would have cared
That makes it sound like they were doing something wrong. Who cares what case it was in if the hardware was the real deal?
Had this not been the case, then either the GCN is forward compatible or that there'd be Wii controller kits for the GCN.
I mean, it's not like someone was playing it for a while, then looked down and saw a GCN and said "Eeewww, I've been playing on a previous-gen console."
There seems to be accusations of "faking it" at every E3. I guess the industry has brought it on itself, showing stuff like the supposed Madden for Xbox 360 screen shots that were much better than the actual game when it shipped. This stuff has been going on for years and it's no wonder that audiences are wary of being duped by faked demos.
But 6 months before the console hits the shelves, the only hardware that exists is in prototype versions. It is not suprising that the floor models were put together with duct tape, GameCube cases and whatever else they had on-hand. I would be suprised if the actual Wii games don't look better than what Nintendo had on display at this years E3, as developers have more time to work on games and get them polished.
Don't forget that Friday is Hawaiian shirt day.
I don't care if the hardware was housed inside a shoebox. It came, it saw, it kicked some ass. Whatever case it came in doesn't mean shit.
On a related note, a shoebox Wii would be pretty cool.
That's a really odd choice for nintendo, given the fact that the gamecube is a fairly 'customized' piece of hardware (3 boards, funky controller ports, etc) crammed into a REALLY tight space.
I would have found it much more likely for them to have been put in some generic grey box or something like that for E3........
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Not having the production plastic case ready is not a bad thing.
But, being able to stuff the prototype electronics in the gamecube case is a Good Thing:
The Wii will most likely not be Hot, Loud (fans), or obnoxiously large and obtrusive like other consoles.
But the US SNES was ugly beyond sin. The one we have in the UK is a lovely piece of kit, same shape as the Japanese one I think and the controller buttons are four different colours instead of the purple and lilac you lot in the colonies got.
It's all fun and games until a 200' robot dinosaur shows up and trashes Neo-Tokyo... Again
It looks like everybody is missing the point.
Accusation: Nintendo doesn't have their Wii hardware ready and is just running the demos on GameCube hardware with a new controller plugged in.
Fact: Nintendo doesn't have their Wii hardware ready and is just running the demos on GameCube hardware that has been upgraded to Wii specs with a new controller plugged in.
Difference: Accusation is correct: Nintendo doesn't have final hardware ready yet (no biggie). Accusation is incorrect: Nintendo is just using GameCube hardware for demos and dev kits and hasn't gotten the updated hardware story figured out yet (this would be scary).
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Even after the update, this is an extremely confusing headline. How about not abbreviating Game Cube to GC? And I believe the corrent preposition would be "in" or "inside" not "on". "Housing?" Are we talking about Habitat for Humanity? Just because the article uses it doesn't mean we have to. How about "Case?" "Shell" would be better, too.
Normally I don't care about this stuff, but this one annoyed the hell out of me for some reason.
-If
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
I guess it *should* be "in" instead of "on". However, "housing" is certainly a common technical term and I don't get that part of your rant.
I know more than you drink.
All the games companies show games on unfinished hardware, why is this even news? Remember last year the X360 demos were on dual CPU Macs with Radeon X800s until the hardware was finished. And at this year's E3 Sony demoed Gran Turismo HD on a PC! That's not even vaguely similar architecturally to the PS3!
I saw an auction on eBay a while back for an early GameCube dev kit. The CPU clockspeed was listed as only half that of the final GameCube and the graphics hardware was missing a few pipelines. It was also bigger than the final hardware so it couldn't fit in the GC's case. Was demoing GameCube games on that at E3 also misleading?
And what have we got this year? Wii hardware that's too big to fit in Wii cases, so they stuck it in a GC case. Even if Nintendo were just using GCs and there wasn't any Wii hardware in them, I don't think it's particularly important because a) the Wii isn't about graphical power and b) the GC is essentially a subset of the Wii's final spec. So it's the equivalent of working on a cut down Wii anyway, like the early GC dev kit I mentioned above was a cut down version of the final GC hardware.