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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.
They should be able to use the original disc, and have the game be locally patched to handle the Wii's control scheme. I wouldn't mind paying $5 for some Metroid Prime goodness.
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.
"The Wii controller just isn't 'innovative'"
I really cannot say I agree with that. I've recently been playing San Andreas. Though I enjoy the game, the controller is a big hinderance. Not only is aiming the gun a pain in the butt, but it isn't hard to hit the wrong button at an inopportune time. A number of times I've gone to hit the targetting button and changed weapons instead. After I build up some muscle memory on it, it won't matter as much, but it's still frustrating. If the Wii were to get a port of this (blah, I don't expect that, but man I'd love it) I'd be able to point the remote at the target and hit the trigger button to fire. If I want to go jack a car, I'd thrust the nunchuck controller ahead in a punching motion instead of hitting the action button. If those were the only upgrades to the game with the remote, I'd not only have a much better time controlling it, I'd also have a more intuitive interface.
This is the sort of scheme Nintendo is pushing ahead with. In light of what Sony and Microsoft have for their 'next-gen' systems, I'd say 'thin-ice' is the last thing I'd use to describe Nintendo's controller. I went to a 360 kiosk and tried to play a demo of a WWII game. Trying to aim the gun was clumsy at best, and who knows what the other buttons did. I wouldn't mind, but 'running around and shooting stuff' is what most of these games are based on.
Respectfully, I disagree with your post. Partly because I've found FPS gaming (even games like Metroid Prime) frustrating with traditional controls and partly because I'm really enjoying my DS. I'm welcoming the Wii with open arms.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
It seems a lot of people on internet fourms don't consider the possibly of the DS keeping the Wii market share low. There is a big difference with casual mobile and casual on the console. Also the recent Xbox Live arcade has more to do with the lack of titles than the appeal of the actual games. What happens if you can get the same title for DS as Wii? Which do you think people would buy? This is one of the ideas leading analysts to think of Wii as a '3rd place' in next gen. Once it gets down to the SNES and 'arcade' titles people will want to play those on DS more than Wii.
Designers can't seem to think of anything else.
I don't think it's that they can't think of anything else, it's that they can't implement anything else.
Take Nethack. Now, make a magnificent modern AAA 3D game out of it that sacrifices absolutely nothing. Every spell effect, every creature, every action, everything. It is probably theoretically possible, but it would be a monstrous undertaking. Nethack casually does very advanced things because the graphics, perhaps ironically, support those advanced things as well as they do anything else.
Angband is simpler in many ways, but it also does some things with terrain and detection spells that a modern 3D graphics engine could hardly dream of.
Graphics have shot well ahead of our ability to actually represent things with them. Combat's all that's left, and honestly, it tends to suck; if my sword was actually going straight through that orc, shouldn't it be in two pieces now? But it's easily fakable. Most other things aren't. So we're left with games consisting of the things that are sorta, kinda fakable in 3D.
Who knows how many wonderful features have been cut because there was no way to render them in breathtaking 3D? We end up with only the games we can represent in 3D, which is a horrific subset of the games we could do in 2D. There's still room for 2D games because we aren't as advanced in 3D as we think we are.
The Wii at least attacks one problem, that of the fundamentally binary input of buttons and a directional pad being your only interface into a complicated world. (I am aware that the directional pads are technically analog, but they aren't really very good at it.) But it doesn't do anything to attack the graphics problem.
Hi, thanks for your message. Unfortunately, Slashdot isn't my personal messaging system, so I didn't read one word of whatever you said. Regardless, I hope you enjoy Twilight Princess!
Love,
Shigeru "Important People Don't Read Slashdot" Miyamoto
OMG! Wau!