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The Pressures on the Next Nintendo Console
With the launch of Nintendo's next-gen offering a little more than two months away, the importance that Nintendo is placing on this console is finally becoming apparent. Dyed-in-the-wool Nintendo loyalists and haters alike have both come to the same conclusion: if Nintendo is to stay a force in the non-portable console market, this system has to succeed. Along those lines, WhatEntertainment offers an editorial entitled Failure is not an Option. It explores the reality that Nintendo's failure would have repercussions on the industry as a whole. "Most of all I'm worried what this might do to the industry if it's a failure. In a landscape already filled with the carcasses of those that dared to try something new, and publishers more afraid than ever to try something a little different, the high-profile failure of a system that tried to put innovation and fun before graphics could be the final nail in the coffin of creativity." Meanwhile, GameInformer has a piece entitled Will Wii be Dissapointed Again? Billy Berghammer says what he doesn't want to say: the Wii could be another flop for Nintendo. From that article: "The launch price is low enough (outside of the $60 for controller costs) to avoid damaging my wallet the same way the purchase of a Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 will, and the possibilities and promises from Nintendo somehow still keep me hoping for a bright future. But for now, the future is made up of many of the same promises and hopes I had when the N64 and GameCube were announced. I just hope I don't end up being disappointed once again."
Mod Parent Up!
I also believe that DS sales are going to really help the adoption rate of the Wii. People didn't take the DS seriously at first, and now, they're flying off the shelves. I think that people are seeing that Nintendo is not just being innovative to be wierd (okay, not ALL the time, at least), but really trying to push what we consider regular gameplay to be.
Nintendo was actually 3rd place worldwide on the last generation... in unit sales (Microsoft shipped 24 million xbox)
Of course, Nintendo trounced MS in Japan and got a damn huge lot of profits out of the gamecube era (hint: you're nearly the only game publisher for a 20million user base. Ohhh look, every single release gets a million sales!) while Microsoft lost $2billion in the process. But on shipped units count, they lost.
"The way we can tell it's C# instead of Haskell is because it's nine lines instead of two." -- wadler
As I understand it the processor on the Wii is made by IBM and is 800Mhz or less
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Actually, all we know about the Wii's GPU (code name Hollywood) and CPU (code name broadway) is that they're custom built processors manufactured using a 90nm SOI CMOS process; the process is the same process which was used on the PowePC 970 processors (the G5) which came in single and dual core configurations and ran between 1.5GHz and 2.5GHz. We have heard from ATI that the graphics demonstrated at E3 were just "The tip of the iceburg".
Recently, in an interview with UBIsoft about RedSteel, it was reported that UBIsoft did not recieve Wii hardware until 2 months before E3 and they did not have time to complete the artistic upgrades before the demo had to be ready for testing (most developers require 4-6 weeks of testing a demo prior to E3); this meant that the E3 demo was more representative of what was running on Gamecube hardware than what the Wii can do. Now, I'm not arguing that the Wii is a technological marvel but it is not incapable of adequate graphics ( http://media.wii.ign.com/media/821/821973/img_391
The one thing I will say about your "under 800MHz remark" is that I know for a fact that EBgames was publishing the fake IGN specs and received a nice visit from Nintendo's laywer; now they publish the same specs Nintendo does. Matt from IGN was either lying or believed a lie.