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How the Wii Was Born
saintory writes "Ars Technica has an article up looking at how the Wii was born. It's a nice overview of how Nintendo's culture came up with the 'new-gen' system." More from the article: "'Diverging from the road map takes a fair amount of courage,' [Engineer Shiota] said, 'especially when we didn't have a clear image of what we were going to do with this hardware.' However, once he saw the power level reduction (from one-third to as little as one-fourth that of current hardware) he was very excited. Instead of competing on 'how many more times the CPU is going to be faster, how much more memory is going to be on the machine, and how many more polygons can be rendered' he saw Nintendo as being able to do something different and unique."
Interesting article - lots of detail on Nintendo's desire to fit it into a small space, driven, it seems by Iwata.
Which makes me wonder, why they still came up with something that's clearly designed to live vertically. Something with the form factor of the typical DVD player or set-top box would fit in amongst many people's setups even easier than the Wii in its standard orientation.
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Accommodate Students
I'm by far no expert, but I believe the reason people say it's better to unplug everything is the miniscule power drain from being plugged in. It won't cost you more than a few dollars a year. But when the entire world is leaving devices plugged in, it ends up being a huge amount of power devoted to doing nothing.
It's like sex, except I'm having it!
IMHO, gameplay always trumps graphics. Case in point, Civ 2 vs. Civ 3. (possibly Civ 4). To be honest, none of the Next-Gen consoles offer anything compelling enough to make me want to buy them, at least not at the current price point. I don't have a HD television, and I don't have tons of money to spend on games. If somebody asked me what they should buy for a game console today, I'd tell them PS2. You're getting a console that plays DVD's and has a huge collection of great games for $20, and free online play. If I had to pick a Next-Gen console though, it would be the Wii based on price point and game selection.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
I don't get how anyone could think going with slower hardware is a GOOD thing, also excusing the Wii's slower hardware using "game development costs" is ridiculous, the cost to develop games will always be changing as game companies look to find cheaper ways to make the latest and greatest games. The fact is if you provide the developers hardware *they will find ways to use it for something* even if that is not graphics!! Exta processing power does not always have to be about graphics... I'm getting a litle tired of the "so the graphicss aren't as good, who cares?" well what about things we don't see "visually" that the game developers use the extra processing power for?
The fact is if the PS2 and Xbox 360 are with $50 of the Wii at Wii's launch you definitely know an extra $50 is not much of a stretch.