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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.
Nope. Technically, the Gamecube didn't, either, unless you count Luigi's Mansion, which most people probably don't.
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.)
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There's already a Trauma Center game for the DS. Although I guess it's fairly hard to find copies of now. I loved the game until level 2.2, which despite 20 or so tries, I couldn't get past. I haven't played the damned thing since.
* 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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Does this surprise you?
What some industry insiders must have figured out is that it simply makes sense to support the Wii; and I don't mean this in a "Nintendo Rules!" fanboy sort of way.
The reality of Next-Generation game development is clear, if you make a moderately graphically impressive XBox 360 or PS3 game you will be spending (at least) twice as much as your most expensive XBox or PS2 game; at the same time you will not suddenly start to sell twice as many copies of your game for switching to the new platform. Even if you charge more for your games you will not (necessarily) increase your revinues because people will be far more reluctant to purchase a $70 game as compared to a $50 game. What this means is your costs will increase, your revinues will remain about the same, so your margins will get tighter; or you may even start losing money.
Now consider the Wii, the system is designed to be much more powerful than previous generation systems while still maintaining the general (technical) graphical style of the previous generation; essentially, it's goal is to eliminate the problems with the previous generation rather than to start a new generation. The result of Nintendo's design is that the cost of development has not increased at nearly the scale of either the XBox 360 or PS3. The Wii may also (through its unique input device) bring in new gamers which (potentially) could increase sales. If the Wii delivers on it's potential, development costs stay the same while revinues increase meaning your margins are fatter and you become more profitable.
The buisness case for supporting the Wii is sound.
I (personally) suspect why certain developers are not supporting the Wii more heavily now is that the company makes it's decisions from a marketing standpoint. Marketing people are more likely to say "our game is mature so it should be on the most mature system", buisness analysts will choose the system with the largest userbase or best margins, and designers will choose the system with the greatest technical advantage or the system with the unique features that enable them to create their vision.
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).
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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)
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.
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I just checked.. and yes the nunchuck does contain the same 3-axis motion and accel sensors as the wiimote: http://wii.nintendo.com/controller.html
Collector's Edition
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.
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