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EA Confirms Major Wii Support
Electronic Arts has confirmed they are 100% committed to the Nintendo Wii, reports Gamasutra. The largest game publisher in the U.S. has revealed six games currently in production for the console, which is scheduled to launch sometime in the Fall. From the article: "The EA statement on the matter comments: 'Each title will remain true to the hallmarks of its franchise but is being designed to maximize the power of the Wii hardware and take full advantage of the uniqueness and innovation of its one-of-a-kind controller.'"
EA innovating and not just re-releasing the same game with the trades made... I jsut got shivers running down my spine...
--Valthan
EA's sports titles on the Wii-mote sounds excellent to me. If they implement the analog control well, it might become the preferred platform for sports games. Seeing these titles excel on the Wii should boost Nintendo's street cred.
I hereby dub this The Jockstrap Announcement.
It seems FTA that none of the six titles are original though. They are all new versions of old franchises and multiplatform titles (like The Godfather.) It's a little bit disappointing that we're not seeing more original works.
Even if I don't like EA as a company, everything I hear makes me feel that a Wii (and neither a 360 or PS3) is the way for us to go for this next generation, in terms of games options, fun, innovation, and of course cost. And this comes from a family that now has just a PS2 + PC games.
Other than the "poorer" graphics (intentional quotation marks), what bad stuff *has* come out about the Wii? Anything?
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Translation - they're all going to be sequels. No original content from us. We're EA, what did you expect?
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
I don't know how the Wii controller will make video game sports any cooler. I'd rather just go play sports outside... in the sunlight.
Wow! Talk about your inovative controler. More than a two hundred piece skeletal structure and fully thought controlled through a high speed interface with zero lag. Perfect force feadback as well as heat/cold sensations and actual pain when you screw up.
The visual interface features perfect High Dynamic Range (HDR) lighting and infinate polygonal surfaces with fully translucent light scattering substructures.
The environment is not only fully destructable, but fully interactive. Every single object down to individual grains of dirt can be manipulated at will and that awesome controller lets you manipulate it through a 100% 3D range of motion including rotation, push and pull along every axis.
For sports games, why would anyone use anything else?
Oh yeah, you have to F***ing excersize. Screw that, I'm gonna try out that Wii thingy.
TW
Yea, but you can't apply feature upgrades or patches easily, the dev tree is closed on release, and besides, it's completely closed source anyway.
Who knows what backdoors and exploits are left in a system like that...
A lot of people are talking about EA "dropping the ball" by just introducing the same old crud on the Wii that they've introduced on every other platform, and that people won't want to buy the same games all over again. They're mostly correct, but they're not taking one thing into account: the wiimote.
Yes, the games are the same old thing they've had on many platforms before, but this would be its first time on the Wii. The control scheme is an important part of the game no matter what platform it's on, and if the control scheme is sufficiently different on the Wii (that is, if they use the fancy new control to its fullest), then people will buy it that all important one more time. And if it does really well, the Wii will become a choice platform for certain types of games over the PS3 and X360.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
But hey, it's the only system in the world where the trojans prevent the viruses.
People get used to things after a while. Film at 11.
Personally the touchscreen on my DS doesn't seem like a big deal to me anymore, but that doesn't mean I like Trauma Center or Meteos any less, and neither game would be much fun without the touchscreen. Of course, your game developer friend isn't playing all the new games in the works for the Wii, as they haven't been released yet. I'm sure that swinging the controller around on the devkit demo does get old after a while.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
EA is trying anyway. You're right, they could've just released new rosters and said the old controller was enough. They didn't just phone it in. If they actually get rebounding sorta right-ish in NBALive after so many years of painfully bad results, Heck will at least be a little cooler. Maybe not Hell...
EA was among the earliest 3rd-party developers to show major projects on the Wii, and from the start they were talking about Madden and how the controller would work. It's clear they've spent some thought on what a new controller might mean for their franchises.
And yeah, they are franchise games. Go figger, EA is known for sports titles, and they will continue to make titles for the major US sports (except baseball now) and some for the rest of the world. Yes, I would personally be very interested in a Rugby title similar to their existing games, but apparently that doesn't have enough market behind it.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
EA is reknown for treating employees less than fairly. And I don't really like many of their games. But strong 3rd-party support is something that Nintendo has been lacking, and this helps to dig them out of the hole just a little bit.
If Nintendo could get similar statements from other big companies, it would do so much for their prospects. I would really like to see Blizzard, Bioware, and Obsidian doing Wii games. I respect their PC games, and I think they could help to up the ante.
Also, I'm starting to get excited about Nintendo's new console for a different reason. People have struggled with RTS console games, due to the controllers. But couldn't the Wiimote work similar to a laser pointer? If so, wouldn't that open up some better control mechanisms for RTS console games?
-Tony
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
It's just not a console article without you!
Let's see, the article's about the EA's support for the Wii so you mention right off how awesome the PS3 is and finish with a superfluous dig at the 360.
You know, I should probably be annoyed at the low level of the astoturfing on display here, but somehow running across your posts always brightens my day!
Thank you Sony-Shill!
(Hey! Here's an idea! How about you register for an account and then I can find your comments more easily! You could even use the name "Sony Shill"! Unless you already registered for an account and were moderated into oblivion [not the 360 game though, because we all know that really super-duper sucks, right?! LOL!] and so had to resort to anonymity to fulfill your contractual astroturfing duties...)
am screaming in horror at this.
He says the controller now is about as exciting as analog joypad input - can't really imagine going without it but nothing you really are thinking about when you use it everyday.
Sounds perfect. I wouldn't want it any other way. Any other way would imply that the controller was difficult to get used to. Just like the first use of an analog controller in Mario 64 seemed weird and exciting just on its own, pretty soon I got used to it and was more interested in how I could make mario run around than specifically thinking about the analog controller.
If the result of the Wii is that in the subsequent generation people consider motion-sensitive 3D-positioned controls to be both as fundamental and mundane as analog joysticks are today, then I don't think you could call it anything but a smashing success.
The enemies of Democracy are
I'm not going to buy a Wii or any other console in this next generation, but I want the Wii to do very well since I think the technology and fun-aspect of it are very exciting. The "Wiimote" is pretty darn cool, and they seem to be interested in user-experience more than anybody else.
So why won't you be buying a Wii?
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
EA didn't actually port any game to the DreamCast... so no.
Not that this was a bad thing for the DC though.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
But why would the Wii controller need more buttons, even for an EA game? That's the whole *point* of the Wiimote -- rather than having a zillion buttons to map to the various actions in the game, you use gestures of the controller itself. If it works out, playing games should be more like playing sports: easy to pick up, but with practice of the gestures comes mastery.
Nice title "EA Confirms Major Wii Support". I, for one, did not know EA was getting into the underwear business. Not at all suprised they are the kind of tightasses that would only make briefs.
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high speed interface with zero lag
Actually IIRC there is significant lag of ca. 0.3-0.5 secs between input reaching your sensory organs and cerebrum reaction. Your brains just pretends to itself that it has zero lag. Reference IIRC somewhere in here,
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Who is this Major Wii and why is EA supporting him?
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.