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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?
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.
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.
The Wii doens't need a price drop, as it will be priced well below the XBox 360 and the PS3.
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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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* 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.
but I'm looking forward to Mario and Spore the most!
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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!
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Sorry, but if there is no press release, then it doesn't exist. Everybody says it's confirmed, but nobody points to a press release or any article that would confirm this.
"The Wii doens't need a price drop, as it will be priced well below the XBox 360 and the PS3."
But the games are still priced at the same price as new current-gen games, $50. Launch titles tend to drop in price rapidly. Today even the best Cube launch titles (Metroid Prime!) are $9.99 new, $4.99 used at GameStop.
I'll buy the big titles I want at launch (Zelda, Metroid, maybe Wii Sports so I can force my non-gamer family to play it) and grab everything else when the price dives.
google wii
Only on slashdot is that a) a sentence and b) a sentence that won't get you labeled as a pervert. Though Google's lawyers might take you out back and rough you up a bit...
Monstar L
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)
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).
now that's a game I'd like to play with the wiimote!
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
Since when was Metroid Prime a launch game?
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?
In general, Nintendo titles do NOT quickly drop in price after release. At least not first party titles. This has pretty much been the case with the Gamecube, and will remain to be the case on the Wii. How long did it take for the launch titles you mention to get to the budget price they're at now? It took years, not months! The only thing that tends to make a nintendo title quikly drop in price is when a sequel comes out. Unlike the other consoles, becoming a "players choice" title does not grant an immediate $20 price tag either. It just means that they'll keep making more copies of the game, with small price decreases every now and then.
Nintendo's president Satoru Iwata has said before that he feels the game market is much healthier if games are given an appropriate initial priced based on various development criteria and costs, and then not discounted at all for several years.
While the downside to this philosophy is that you do fork over a lot of money for the AAA titles, the benefit is that you also don't have to risk much on low-budget gems. We've also seen this philosophy being played out in the DS market. There, the AAA titles generally run $30-35, while "cheaply produced" titles such as Brain Age and Big Brain Academy hit the shelves at only $20.
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...
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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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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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