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The 27 Known Wii Launch Titles
Via Joystiq comes a long list of the launch-day titles for the Nintendo Wii, posted at Nwizard. I was aware that they had quite a few coming out around launch, but 27 is pretty impressive. Selections include highly anticipated titles like Red Steel and Twilight Princess, as well as several titles that I personally am looking forward too, such as Metroid Corruption, Trauma Center: Second Opinion, and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers.
One of the titles on that list is Trauma Center: Second Opinion. Now, initially I thought this was a joke but appearantly you use the Wii remote to operate on patients.
I guess I never thought of the special remote to be a cutting edge. What next? Prison Break: Shank or Be Shanked?
Though as usual, launch titles mean nothing. It's all about the first price drop.
Cynical Idealist
Is this the first Nintendo console to release with no Mario game ready at launch date?
VOTE!
Although release games do not mean much in the long run, this list is not the tradition batch of driving, shooting, and shooting while driving games that other consoles seem to love.
Information wants a fueled airplane waiting at the hangar and no one gets hurt.
They got 27 Wein^H^H^H Wii titles to be released on the day the console will be released.
I've been coding too long. I misread that as "The Crystal Beavers."
The article is right, if this doesn't get you excited nothing will.
It also takes the 360 launch and the PS3 launch and makes them both decently laughable.
But I don't know if it'll be a great launch, time will tell. Though with Metroid Prime, and Zelda it's going to be great for nintendo fans, a Hawk game, and Madden (perhaps working with the new controller and not the VC controlleR) that's going to be exciting.
Excite Trucks and Dragon quest Swords is interesting.
The only flaw is that there's a LOT of racing games. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing but it will be interesting in the least if the controller is good for that I'm hopeful for a good GT style sim. I'm also hopeful for interesting online multiplayer in Crystal Chronicles.
The only thing I wonder about is COD3, NFS carbon, and Madden are all made by huge companies, Madden should be ready in time, but the other two... I am not sure if they'll make their dates.
This is a very promising start, IMO, for the Wii. Good variety of games and enough "full" games that they don't come off as gimmicky. Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2, Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors, Far Cry, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers (for some reason, I read Crystal Beers), The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, Metal Slug Anthology, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz, Trauma Center: Second Opinion.
All of these resonate as being good, solid starters on the Wii and giving us a reason to buy launch titles. The promise of more games to come seems just vunderbar.
I am curious as to what online features these games are going to introduce on launch, and if we are going to be waiting for the online features like we did for the DS.
hmmm....ubisoft seems to really be into this with all the titles they are releasing at start
I mean, I've heard people speculating for months about the launch line-up for the Wii. If those are indeed confirmed launch titles, then I must have been following Wii related news at the wrong places because I have never seen such a list anywhere. Tentative launch line-up, sure, but definitive??
Aren't these launch window titles (first 3 months)? The only launch-day games confirmed by Nintendo are LoZ:TP and Wii Sports. Hopefully about 15 will make launch-day, with another 20 or so coming in the following three months.
Amazon is showing October 2nd release date for a Wii game, Walmart is showing the same for Avatar: The Last Airbender Wii, Best Buy shows November 3rd for a few games... has Nintendo given a solid date yet?
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I'd like to know how many are exclusives? I know I recognize a few that will likely be released on the other consoles but even some of those could potentially be more fun on the wii. Madden NFL? It could either be the lame version that no one opts for or it could be the most fun version. I have doubts that Marvel: Ultimate Alliance will be best on the wii but Tony Hawk has potential in my opinion. I think it could be jarring at first to play a game franchise that you're used to playing with an ordinary controller but some games in particular could be more fun once you got used to it.
It has enough horsepower. The gamecube for how "underpowered" the xbox fanboys claimed it was has great graphics.
then again, they must be doing something right with that lack of horsepower you claim, because a number of games looked far better than the xbox/ps2 counterpart.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
However I take exception to the PS3 comparison. That launch looks pretty damn good as well. (There are 30 titles confirmed.)
What sticks out for me (personally) in the Wii launch: Far Cry, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, Red Steel, Super Monkey Ball, Metroid Prime 3. Thats a great list, and makes the Wii probably worth buying day one.
But... the PS3 list is also quite good: Metal Gear Solid 4, Final Fantasy PS3, Possession, Killzone PS3, Tekken PS3, Warhawk, Gran Turismo Vision. Those are all launch titles as well.
This is good news across the board. From what we know currently, both of these launches look to wipe the floor with the Xbox360 launch. (Which is really too bad. I say, the more the merrier.)
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Underpowered compared to them? Yes, but Nintendo isn't doing HD. The Wii will be over twice what the XBOX is, output-wise (visuals, physics, etc). That's plenty next-gen for me... after all, I'm spending half the cash and getting a new gaming experience.
* Avatar: The Last Airbender
* Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII
* Blitz: The League
* Call of Duty 3
* Cars
* Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2
* Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors
* Elebits
* Excite Truck
* Far Cry
* GT Pro Series
* Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers
* The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
* Madden NFL 07
* Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
* Metal Slug Anthology
* Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
* Monster 4x4 World Circuit
* Need for Speed: Carbon
* Open Season
* Rayman Raving Rabbids
* Red Steel
* SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab
* Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz
* Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam
* Trauma Center: Second Opinion
* Wii Sports
Mmm, CoD 3, Red Steel, Zelda, Metroid Prime 3, Metal Slug. No, that's not a Wiimote in my pocket, I'm just really excited to see this lineup.
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but I'm looking forward to Mario and Spore the most!
I'm an Avatar and I'm ok
I work in Space and I play all day
I wear Square Pants and dress up nice
My Spore's on straight but my Truck's Excite!
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Sounds like a solid start, but I am not really impressive, Zelda is a port af a Gamecube game, MetroidPrime is the successor of Gamecube game with some new controls, so are Need for Speed, Metal Slug, Madden, MonkeyBall, FF:Chronicals and plenty of others. That list reads like a "been there, done that". What I still miss for the Wii is something as awesome as Mario64 was for the N64. This all feels like Nintendo has designed this cool new controller and then couldn't figure out what to do with it, so we get ports, successors and stuff. So far WiiSports and Trauma Center seem to be only game that actually require the new controller, while the rest could have been done with a regular controller with only little changes. So while I hope for the best, I also fear for the worst. Wii so far is interesting, but not exciting.
is the number of non-nintendo launch titles. It seems Nintendo has finally embraced 3rd party developers, and the developers seem quite excited to work on such a unique platform.
;)
I know I'll be standing in line on the launch date
Only 5 games are of any interest to me, and of those 5 I predict at least 3 of them to end up being "fun for a while, but boring after you get over the new play mechanics".
I think I've got mild dyslexia. I thought that said "Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Beavers." That's going to get an AO rating for sure!
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Wow, that server went down hard.
Here, you can see the list of titles at Wikipedia.
While we can be sure who will win the console wars for at least a year, it looks like Nintendo may win the Launch Wars. Not only having a massive number of titles available, but having a lot of "Most wanted" Titles (Madden, Twilight Princess, Metroid Prime 3) will really boost sales. I doubt we'll see a shortchange in console availability (I'm looking at you, Microsoft), but it may sell out in any case.
Now all we need is to wait for the end of this month when all will finally be revealed.
Seriously - this is a hugely underpowered console compared with the PS3 and XBox 360.
But it has more power than any other console in history apart from those two. I think it'll do just fine. Sure, there will be some game experiences available on the PS360 that just won't be possible on the Wii due to its comparatively lesser computing muscle, but because of the controller possibilities the inverse is also true.
Please tell me I can control the monkey ball with the wiimote. That would be so sweet. I wouldn't even have to change my playing habits as I already unintentionally lean while rolling him around. Now I'd actually be accomplishing something.
Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam is the only confirmed launch title that will feature online play. A page on Nintendo's website actually specificly talked about the online functions, but was taken down shortly after (it wasn't done- there was still placeholder text on the page).
e ID=18
However, Square Enix officials talked about Crystal Chronicles being online way back when we were still calling it the Revolution. They haven't mentioned it since, so they may have dropped it, but it was *supposed* to be online.
I'd guess Madden, Need For Speed Carbon, and Call of Duty 3 would be online too, as those games are online on other platforms. That's just a guess though, don't quote me on that.
However, there is very little first-party online support from Nintendo. We've got an article on that over at NintendoPlayers...
http://www.nintendoplayers.com/feature.php?featur
(written before Tony Hawk was confirmed to be online, but still just as relevant about first party games)
I really think they're right in that assumption, and I'll even take it farther: The average consumer isn't even going to be able to tell the difference. Hell, I myself can't really see any improvement in 360 or PS3 stuff over the best-looking Gamecube games (RE4).
While it is nice to have a lot of titles at launch, how many of these are going to be Gamecube ports with minor Wiimote functionality tacked on? We saw that too much on the DS Launch where they were GBA games with some cheesy mini-games tacked on. With the Wii being a slightly souped-up GC internally with a new controller, it is going to be awfully tempting for publishers to dust-off GC ports they have lying around and push them out for Christmas. I mean, Ubisoft and EA came up with that roster AWFULLY fast for "new" console...
Slashdot can always use more leved-headed discussions.
While this statement could be construed as a troll, I think he makes a valid point: The Wii is only marginally more powerful than a 6th generation system. Now I realize that Nintendo is working off the assumption that "Graphics aren't everything," but that statement is not the same as saying "Graphics are nothing." Personally, I wish that Nintendo had at least tried to make the graphics noticeably better, instead of simply increasing clock speeds. For example, the XBox 360 is capable of providing full scene antialiasing with virtually no performance hit. Would it really have been so difficult for Nintendo to integrate a similar graphics capability into the Wii?
I only recently got a gamecube and also got FIFA 2006. I was pretty underwhelmed with the graphics. The players look washed out and blurry, which isn't at all the case on the Xbox and PS2 versions of Fifa 2006 I saw in stores. I imagine that the game was made with the Xbox and PS2 in mind with the Gamecube being an afterthought, and as such nobody gave much effort in making the game look good on the Gamecube.
What lack of horsepower? The final specs haven't even been revealed yet, except that it will have PowerPC processors. If you're going to be trolling, at least don't be so obvious about it; back up your crap.
Be careful not to drop your controller while in the shower level. Otherwise, you might get a rude introduction to your opponent's Wii!
What im wondering is if the capability of downloading will be available at release. Thats the biggest pull for me, all the old school games. And if I have to keep waiting to download/replay Mario 64 or Super Smash Brothers and Goldeneye, im gonna be sorely disappointed.
Launch titles are misleading, the only Release title that "saved" a system is Halo and the XBox, others had great careers even without their launch titles.
sounds like you like good games, you might want to check out Blast Corps too. Great 64 game.
Really, the horsepower will only be a hindrence for the biggest budget titles (Final Fantasy, etc.), as it costs so much to produce those great graphics. Also, remember that HD takes a good magnitude of additional horsepower, so the probability is that the poly-count will be about equal on SD/ED between Wii and 360/PS3 games. Basically, the only really noticable difference in graphics between the Wii and the 360/PS3 will be the lack of HD. A few may point to this as an achillies heal, but HD is still a luxury item, and a bit of a novelty at this point. It may be a little less so in 4 years, but Nintendo can come out with an HD-powered Wii, I think this is a much better business model then trying to be 4 years ahead of the curve (ie: Sony).
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
While MS and Sony were trying to steal the show with overpowered machines, Nintendo managed to undercut the competition by a few hundred dollars, came out with an innovative new technology that has caught everyone's attention, and managed to come up with one of the best release line-ups in years. Yep, they'll be hurting. Food for thought as I walk home with a brand new Wii and 5 or 6 games that are sure to be smash-hits. All for cheaper than buying a game-less PS3.
This really is an amazing launch list. Almost the most amazing thing about it isn't even the number of titles, but just the sheer range of the titles that are there. Basically every single console genre except fighting games, from RPGs to FPSes to platformers to sports to "unclassifiable", has one really standout title and one potentially promising title on that list. That's practically unheard of for a launch. I would personally go so far as to say this is the first good console launch since the Super Nintendo.
(It does make me sad of course that Wario Ware won't be making it for launch, but apparently it's coming before Christmas...)
There's one thing about all this that's so odd though it makes me wonder whether or not this list is for real. Is Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles really a launch title? That seems almost impossible to believe. How could this game be coming out in just two or three months when we know almost nothing about it?
I was originally going to get a Wii and a PS3, but now, it's just a Wii for me. You see, I had some friends over. We were all doing stuff...By ourselves. One was playing PS2, another Gamecube, another on my computer, and me on my PSP. What was the point? Party machines for the win!
If by marginally you mean 2x then you would be correct.
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Once you've downloaded the games from the Virtual Console you should be able to save them on an SD card. I believe the Wii has at least one, possibly two slots available.
I'm really hoping the games are not locked down to the machine and that it will be possibly to take my SD card to a friends house and play games there.
Chewie does not get a medal. Come on, George. Can a Wookie get a medal?
I hope Nintendo are right in their apparent assumption that these days consoles have enough power, and the typical consumer doesn't care about running at ultra high resolutions.
Similarly, one might ask the question: have MS and Sony been right in their assumption, made years in advance, that the HDTV market would be mature by now? The market for their products is considerably narrower, limited as it is to those who already own or would own HD sets -- and their products themselves are perceived as much more expensive partly because they went the HD route.
Perceptions of "horsepower" aside, for me the HD feature is actually a potential drawback of those other systems. If I can't see games in all their splendor, why would I pay $500 or whatever for a console whose main claim to glory is the HD images? A whopping $2000 ($600 + an HD set) just to get in the door is a LOT to ask. Too much for me, personally.
So I see what you're saying, but it cuts both ways.
Note also that while MS and Sony are pitching to the dedicated gamer willing to shell out a big lump of bills, Nintendo's rhetoric has been all about broadening the market. With the DS, at least, it seems to work -- if my kids' 82-year-old grandma avidly playing "Brain Age" this last week was any indication...
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Try upgrading that 10 year old TV. I'm on the fence when it comes to next gen consoles, but my friend brought his 360 over and hooked it up to my HDTV and it was amazing. It makes the Gamecube look like a NES.
//TODO: Insert catchy phrase
Totally not true. Yes, it is an upscaled GC in essence, but the GC was very good (see Resident Evil 4) and lacked in a few specific departments: it had not enough RAM and the CPU wasn't fast enough to fully feed the GPU. This has been been corrected.
The GC has 24 MB RAM. Nothing is known about the amount in the Wii, but given current RAM prices it is safe to assume a lot more. Heck, even the very low "specs" that were allegedly leaked recently (ars thinks they are fake) have it at 64 MB.
The "leaked specs" give a 729 MHz CPU for the Wii, which seems far too low given current technology, but even that would be a significant improvement over GC.
With that info, let's revisit the GC specs. Notice the Image Processing Functions:
- Fog
- Subpixel anti-aliasing
- 8 hardware lights
- 4 pixel pipelines (4 x 162 MHz = 648 MPixels)
- hardware nurbs
- Alpha blending
- Virtual texture design
- Multi-texturing, bump mapping
- Environment mapping
- MIP mapping
- Bilinear filtering
- Trilinear filtering
- Anisotropic filtering
- Real-time hardware texture decompression (S3TC)
- Real-time decompression of display list
- Hardware 3-line flicker filter
Some of these haven't been used much on the GC due to aforementioned problems. On the Wii they will be and likely some more.Now, that surely doesn't make the Wii a PS3, but it's misleading to say the Wii is only "marginally more powerful" than the GC. Also, have you watched the E3 video of, say, Mario Galaxy? It's way better than the GC.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
I was more or less referring to the appearance of the screenshots, which don't seem particularly different than the screenshots of games of 6th gen systems. (Generally, I've noticed some fancier lighting effects, such as the bloom and specularity effects visible in Red Steel.)
While the system may very well be more powerful that its screenshots would serve to indicate, I would have liked to see a more profound difference between the graphical power of the Wii and that of systems preceeding it.
Forgot the ars link
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
Well at least you get the full picture, the above ars guy took the specs on face value, this is the one I had in mind.
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
This video is a great PS3 vs. Wii spoof using the Mac vs. PC ad campaign (18+, may not be appropriate for a work environment)
"To be is to do." --Socrates
"To do is to be." -- Aristotle
"Do-Be-Do-Be-Do..." --Sinatra
Have they said whether or not the SD cards usable with the Wii will be ordinary SD cards or specially modified Nintendo-branded ones? I've got other reasons to invest in high-capacity SD cards, so if I can pop in any standard SD card, I'd be thrilled.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers.
I read that as "The Crystal Beavers", and was very confused for a second.
You must be misinformed, the GameCube was nearly as powerfull as the xbox, although not as powerfull, I thnik mainly because of the lack of swap option on the HDD that the xbox supported. it was vastly more powerfull than ps2 though.
Unfortnatly it is made by rare (so no Virtual Console :-()
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Agreed. Although, I will say, RE4 beats anything I saw in the last gen. This is typical of "great" GC games in my experience... Fight Night Round 2 on the GC beats the tar out of Round 3 on PS2. Vice City on Xbox is up to par with RE4/FN2 on GC, imo.
But get Fight Night Rd 3, or Oblivion on 360... wow it's good. I just bought a 50" LCD projection HDTV, and it blows me away. Not every game is as "wow" as those two (e.g. Moto GP), but FN3 totally sold me on the 360. I'm sure it'll be similarly good on PS3, but I'm not willing to buy into the HD/BR battle at this point. I'll be perfectly happy waiting on the PS3 to price drop in 3 or 4 years, and pick up a Wii in the meantime. I did the opposite in this gen (PS2 (launch price, though not at launch) -> Gamecube (first price drop) -> Xbox (refurb at 130)), and I've been able to play all the great games eventually, at a hardware cost under the cost of a launch PS3.
Before the PS2 console gen I used to buy computer parts for gaming... but I'd rather drop 400 bucks on a full system than on a graphics card (which will almost always need a tricked out system to perform at peak). I do most of my work on a laptop nowadays anyway... it's just not worth the time/money to stay on the PC upgrade train for me anymore, when X360 looks like it does... now just to hook a keyboard/mouse into it so I can play FPS games =)
-Greg
Shadow of the Colossus - Note the jagged edges and overall muddy appearance.
God of War - Same.
Resident Evil 4 - Getting better but still muddy, some jaggies.
Halo 2 - Same as RE4, some jaggies.
Oversized(remember, 480p, up to 16:9) Red Steel shot 1 and shot 2 - Crisp, no jaggies, decent lighting, texture detail is good.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
Polycounts are limited by the transformation performance, HD affects the fillrate. You might see fewer per-pixel shaders or lower resolution textures when going to HD but the hardware difference here will make up for that.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Yeah it's 27 titles (supposedly) but have you LOOKED at these titles?
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Call of Duty 3
Cars
Dragon Ball Z: Budokai Tenkaichi 2
Madden NFL 07
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
Need for Speed: Carbon
Open Season
Rayman Raving Rabbids
SpongeBob SquarePants: Creature from the Krusty Krab
Multiplatform. Avatar, Cars, Open Season, and SpongeBob are crappy kiddie games. Most observers are of the opinion that multiplatform games will do better on the PS3 and 360 because those platforms have better graphics, and multiplatform games won't be likely to take advantage of the unique Wii controller.
Blazing Angels: Squadrons of WWII
Blitz: The League
Far Cry
Metal Slug Anthology
Monster 4x4 World Circuit
Old, already out on other platforms. Monster 4x4 is a disaster.
Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors
Elebits
Excite Truck
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers
GT Pro Series
The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess
Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
Red Steel
Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz
Tony Hawk's Downhill Jam
Trauma Center: Second Opinion
Wii Sports
So we're REALLY left with 12 unique launch titles. And Wii Sports and Excite Truck seem to be little more than controller demonstrations. Bigger news is the relatively robust 3rd-party support. Nintendo won't have to support the launch on it's own with significant titles from both Square Enix and Ubisoft (Crystal Bearers and Red Steel). Time will tell if this will last.
Another thing to remember is that some of these titles were likely GameCube titles that were switched during development. I'm told the relatively similar architectures made this possible. IOW, expect many of the launch titles to look like GameCube titles.
I suspect the system will fare well in Japan, with the titles seeming to slightly cater to Japanese audiences (not a lot of sports games I notice), do fairly well in Europe, and struggle in the USA. Much like the Gamecube. In terms of commercial success, Nintendo is still likely to be Microsoft due to the 360's poor showing in Japan.
Nintendo has also hinted at being able to use USB harddrives to extend storage, but they haven't officially confirmed it yet.
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