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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."
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!
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.
Spoken like the truly uninformed. I guess this is
Watch this, and watch how Matt takes the Wii out of the vertical stand, and lays it flat. Hmmm
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
"Then again, developers may be happy that they don't have to spend upwards of $50 million just to get a game out the door because Nintendo is forcing them to make sure it works in SD, 480p, 720p, 1080i, and maybe 1080p."
But they're spending that money anyways to get the game to also run on the 360 and PS3. Honestly, the best thing I can see about the Wii is that the new controller will force 3rd party developers to actually think about the port to Wii instead of it just being an afterthought. For example, EA is already talking about what features they can put into the Wii Madden 07. They're not just dumping what they have to console X like they do for every other console. They're actually thinking about how to make the game better using the Wiimote.
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.
But when the entire world is leaving devices plugged in, it ends up being a huge amount of power devoted to doing nothing.
Not true! How else will I know that it's eternally twelve o'clock in my apartment?
This guy's the limit!