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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."
Well, while the Wii certainly doesn't look like system providing next-gen graphics, I guess the article makes an interesting point though... with development costs of modern games going through the roof, it might make perfect sense to design a simple system (from a hardware perspective) like their new console.
Also, does next-gen necessarily have to mean next-gen graphics? Or does good-enough-graphics with a fresh look on gameplay suffice?
I always wondered... If this thing is going to be plugged in always, and running always, doesn't it consume enormous amounts of power? I've often hear people say that it's better to unplug your tv, stereo, ... when not in use for 'longer periods' (say, the night) because even the smallest of control lights still uses power for no gain. Anyone who has ever done some tests with those power consumption meters? Anyone planning to do it for the Wii?
One CS student VS 893 DOS games: Let's play oldies
I lot of entertainment centers I've seen have quite a bit of space left over on the side with various players. More than enough for a vertical Wii - probably designed for things with side vents, which none of my VCR/Stereo/DVD players have.
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for Nintendo. They opted away from the childish design of the gamecube, for something more sleek. I can't see this as a bad thing.
Always on, could be good too, but could backfire in our green world.
But a weak CPU, I am pretty sure that developers will always push for a better CPU. One of the ways of measuring a console is to compare those games that run on all three - and this could make the Nintendo look bad, very bad. Risky.
The interview itself has been posted in pieces over the past few weeks, starting with this segment. It's been ongoing, and it's pretty interesting stuff, if you're into that sort of thing. There was a story posted on Slashdot a week or two ago that mentioned it, even, but it hardly had any replies, so I don't know if that's a sign that no one read it, or what.
Anyway, as I posted on that story back then, among other things, the interview mentions some things that I've seen people here talking about, like the possibility of distributing independent games via the Virtual Console system. They seem to be considering it and possibly in favor of it as high up as Iwata. It goes into a whole lot more detail than the Ars Technica summary does, and the more recent segments talk about some of the software design elements, not just the hardware side of things. Interesting reading.
Nintendo is extremely careful about load times. I mean, hell, they went with cartridges instead of CDs for the N64 because of load tims. Gamecube devkits have deliberately-limited transfer rates from the dev hard drive so that the devs need to deal with load times. I'm sure it won't be a big deal here.
Plus, it does have an internal Flash drive, although I think that's mostly for downloaded stuff.
I've upped my standards, so up yours.
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.
Developers do try to find the cheapest ways to make the latest and greatest games they can, and quite often this means that they produce their game on the Gameboy rather than on a PS2. The reality is that most developers have a limited total budget to produce games that they have to divide between all projects, and in many cases this entire budget is now smaller than the expected cost of one PS3/XBox 360 game; if you have $25 Million you could (probably) produce 3 reasonably high budget Wii games on one low to moderate budget PS3/XBox 360 game. The fact is that the reason you see so few "big-budget" PC games these days is the same reason you'll see very few PS3 and XBox 360 games, the number of developers who can afford to make a $20 Million game is very limited; outside of internal developers of the top 10 publishers in the world I think that producing a game at that budget is a good way to go bankrupt.
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.
Well the Wii comes with a game (Wii sports) and doesn't require a memory card so claiming that there is only a $50 difference to the consumer is misleading; anyway you look at it, it would be at least a $100 difference in cost. The Wii is also designed to break even on hardware (and be profitable from the start) which doesn't (directly) effect consumers, but personally if Nintendo wants to invest $100 in me I'd rather see that money go into game developement. The Wii is also much more complicated than the PS2/XBox 360 are in that it is the basic hardware, sensor bar, wireless Wiimote (which is far more expensive to produce than a standard wireless controller) and Nunchucku.