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Miyamoto on Wiimakes, Dead-End Design
GameDaily is reporting on an interview that Nintendo Dream scored with legendary designer Shigeru Miyamoto. Mr. Miyamoto spoke about the future of design and Wii gaming during the interview, touching on several interesting topics. Older Gamecube titles, for example, may be remade for the Wii at some point in the future to take advantage of the console's unique control scheme. There are no announcements of which titles might see this treatment, but he seemed confident that if it does happen the pricepoint would be rather low. In some more high-level comments, Mr. Miyamoto stated that game designers have come to a dead-end as regards gaming today. Not sparing his own company, the designer thinks that future titles will have to come at gaming from a very different perspective if they are to succeed.
I think the idea is intended to appeal to the people who never owned a Gamecube and missed out on some good games.
You have planned to launch a system with a fundamentally different interface from what people are used to. How to optimally exploit this for fun games is not obvious, because it's very out-of-the-box. The more minds you can have working on this, the better. This is even more important than on rival consoles because of the immensely-greater possibilities. If you really want to discover the most innovative uses of the Wiimote, you're going to need to let hobbyists buy the (fortunately affordable) SDK. Even if their version is bad, if they hit on a good use no one though of, that can become an instant console-seller. Why keep your restrictive policies about the size of developers you'll sell to?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
The Wii controller just isn't 'innovative'
I'm curious to what dictionary you got your definition of 'innovative' out of...
(innovative = characterized by, tending to, or introducing innovations, yeay for recursive definitions)
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/innovations
Main Entry: innovation
Pronunciation: "i-n&-'vA-sh&n
Function: noun
1 : the introduction of something new
2 : a new idea, method, or device : NOVELTY
Seems to me this controller fits that definition to a T. What I don't find innovative is simply increasing resolution or texture depth or triangles per second. It's not *new* it's just an improvement, like going from a 20" TV to a 32" TV.
It might not be an innovation that works, or appeals to the entire crowd, but you can't have a success without some failures. (Virtual Boy...ugg) Personally, I'm excited by it. I don't need a new console to play games with a control pad; I've got emulators and a Gravis. I don't need spiffy shiny console games, I can get a new system with an X1950 for that.
However, this is a bonifide innovation, and it might actually be fun.
If you look at the strategy employed on the DS (another non-innovative system by your reckoning) you will see that while there are many games that take advantage of the touch screen/microphone there are also many successful games that don't make use of it al all.
Nintendo will encourage developers to make use of the unique capabilities of the Wii but they will not force feed it to the public. If Nintendo feels that a game is better experienced with a standard gamepad they'll run with it.