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Will Wright Opines That Wii Is the Only Next-Gen Console
PhoenixOne writes "In an article that will probably tick off a lot of PS3 owners, Will Wright calls the PS3 and 360 'incremental improvement(s)'. 'The Wii feels like a major jump - not that the graphics are more powerful, but that it hits a completely different demographic. In some sense I see the Wii as the most significant thing that's happened, at least on the console side, in quite a while ... I still, for the most part, prefer playing games on the computer - to me the mouse is the best input device ever. Every generation it's like 'the PC's dead! The PC's dead!'. But it carries on growing when consoles are flat for five years. At the moment I can get better graphics on my PC than I can on the PS3.'"
The attach rate is appaling because the majority of non gamers buying the console are,... shock horror not that into games!
They aren't buying games for the system, it's that toy they will pull out of the closet every xmas because last year grandma had fun with Wii bowling.
The majority of games are diluted versions / ports from other systems or kiddie games.
The few Nintendo games on the system that are good are well... such a small amount of the library.
The wii remote is not as accurate and 'fun to use' as it's marketed as, it'll never be a proper gun pointer, it's not accurate for sword / light saber swinging - it's just a clever motion detector not an accurate one.
I am normally the first man to say graphics aren't everything but there is still a baseline and that thing is seriously dated, it'll soon be at the point where people look at it as the atari.
My family had an atari when I was a kid and it was the same thing, the cool toy we pulled out twice a year, we NEVER got other games for the system, attach rate like 3 initial games, nothing else.
The Wii may sell lots of hardware but hopefully it diminishes back to gamecube levels, so Sony and MS can pick up the slack, I want to see those 2 competing better so we, the gamers get more choice and lower prices.
Oh while I'm at it, I can not tell you how many friends, friends of friends, people I speak to on forums have told me they own a Wii and it's sitting under their TV doing nothing, I don't think I actually know one person who actually IS happy with the thing.
It's a very popular fad right now andhopefully it will soon die away.
Hah, this is rich, coming from Will Wright of all people, the man behind Spore. Seriously, have you guys taken a look at the underlying technology behind Spore? We're talking about real-time animation and gait construction, procedural generation for EVERYTHING, from geometry to textures to AI behaviour, all the way down to your animations.
If anything, Spore is a prime example of all that "next-gen" power being harnessed to do great things for gameplay, instead of putting on just more shiny.
This also makes Spore the prime justification for having beefier CPUs, RAM, video cards, and a whole lot more bus bandwidth than we had before. I highly doubt Spore will run on a Wii, but it will for sure run on PS3 and 360. All that processing power is being put to good use, and he's complaining about MS/Sony making consoles that will actually be able to execute his idea, and pledging his allegiance to a piece of hardware that WON'T?
We are a LONG way from the day where our computers are so fast that nothing more can be done on the gameplay side with more performance. The fact that few developers are pushing their games in this direction is no reason to stop making our machines faster.
Or perhaps it actually went and did something new instead of rehashing the same crap all over again this time slightly shinier. I'm just saying...
New like the power glove? Not new, but old idea done fairly well in a few titles (wii sports, zelda, metroid, mario party 8) and very poorly in others (almost every other title). The idea itself is an old one. and the 360 and ps3 brings things that aren't just "shiny".
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I own a 360 and it's awesome when it's not flashing the red ring of death like now. Mine is being repaired so I though I'd try PC Games. Opps.
So with my Xbox in-transit back to me I was having withdrawls not being able to play any games. I stopped by Gamestop and picked up Shadowrun for the PC.
Then I get home and try to install it and fine that it requires VISTA! Here is the kicker though. It is a Native DirectX 9 game that was written for XP! Bill Gates and his cronies decided to force their game studio to do Vista only releases. The install won't even run on XP. Luckily I found a crack. Then I had to update my Video Card Drivers to get it to run. Next I found that the game REQUIRES you to sign into Windows Live! What the... So I have a Gold account so I sign in. Then it asks for an update so I click yes. No-GO. It just gets stuck and then says I'm not connected to the Internet.
At this point I shake my fist at the sky and scream "I'll get you BILL!". Ok not really but something like that but with more obscenities. So then I read that the update will not work if you have more then one network interface installed. I had three. A Wireless which I used, a Wired NIC and a VPN Client. So I remove the other two and still no dice. Finally I read that the Cisco VPN client is buggy so I uninstall that. That knocks out my Internet Connection. I followed the damn guidlines right on ciscoDOTcom. I hate Cisco. So I reinstall the damn Internet Connection and run the game. Now it acts like it is updating. I am almost esstatic but a little too soon. The game updates, restarts and then asks me to upsate again, and again, and again. It's stuck in a loop.
At this time it was 10PM and I needed to work the next day so I packed it in and went to bed. So 3 hours of troubleshooting later and I still can't play the game that I paid for with my hard earned dollars.
I think I'll stick to console games from now on.
"Motion control, in the sense that the Wii has it, is new, as in never been done before in a console." Where am I? 1989? A little history lesson for you son, the Wii controller is just an incremental improvement over the joystick, the gamepad, the light gun I used to play Duck Hunt and Hogan's Alley, and the current incarnation of this ugly thing (http://youtube.com/watch?v=93iDhnBcMGo) that no one would be caught dead with wearing. The only thing Nintendo managed that was revolutionary with the Wii is that they got all of you suckers to pay a $150 for a remote control with a repackaged last-generation $99 GameCube. That had truly never been done in the history of the console.
You're right, I must be doing it wrong. I've only been in the industry my entire adult life and have been building my PCs and servers for a couple of decades.
Yes, you can build and run a midrange gaming machine for far cheaper, but where is the fun in that? And now that you have 65" widescreens running in 1080p and you only need a $400 console to do it, why would I want to spend my time hunched over my keyboard in front of a 30" or smaller screen? Even though the resolution may be higher.
I never suggested that every gamer requires a $2000+ annual investment, but even with a much smaller investment, they're looking at spending far more than the console investment. I am speaking of my particular experience. What makes you happy and what you are willing to settle for may not be the same as I am willing to settle for. My grandmother is happy playing on my old 700mhz Duron with a 17" LCD and a copy of Solitaire on a gnome desktop. *shrug*