Slashdot Mirror
Are Third-Party Wii Games Finally Coming Into Their Own?
Gravy Monkey writes "It's not too difficult to criticize the quality of many third-party Wii games — whether they're unique titles, bad licenses or lazy ports to the new system. However, will this change as more quality third-party games appear on the Wii? Recently, Wiiware title 'Lost Winds' picked up some great reviews, as did the Blastworks game. The recent review of a new game called Order Up on IGN caught my attention because they praised it as the way all casual games should be made. Is this the beginning of a new era for Wii games where quality casual games from third parties manage to grab the attention of both mainstream and hardcore gamers alike, instead of being a console where only first-party titles sell?"
Remember, the Wii is substantially more powerful than any last generation console (PS2, Gamecube, X-Box),
Completely wrong, I guess that myth will never die. Its pretty much equally powerful then the stuff from the last generation, its hardware can't even run some effects that the Xbox1 could do, due to the lack of shader, so you won't see a game like Riddick on the Wii ever.
Keep in mind that the normal generation jump in computing power is around 10 times or more, the Wii is stuck somewhere between 1.5x-2.0x times more powerful then the Gamecube and quite a bit of that additional power is already eaten up by 16:9/480p output vs 4:3/480i output that the Gamecube did.
it's certainly less powerful than the PS3 and 360, but the difference is mainly in HD graphic detail
The difference is *FAR* bigger then just HD. For one very important thing there is anti-aliasing, which the Wii doesn't do and causes all Wii games look pretty sucky on a big screen. But more importantly there is texture and object count. One of the fundamental difference between this gen and last gen is that in a PS3 or a Xbox360 game you have the screen full of stuff, crisp textures and a ton of objects, while on a PS2/Wii/Xbox1 game you always have plenty of empty space that is only filled with a blurry texture. Stuff like that gets *very* clear when you compare a MarioGalaxy vs a Ratched&Clank side by side in 480p, those games are really a generation apart.
Now one could of course argue that most of that is just fluff, unimportant to gameplay, and I even agree with that, I certainly had much more fun with Galaxy then Ratched, but claiming that there isn't a *huge* technological leap between Wii and a Xbox360/PS3 is ridiculous. There certainly is one, but well, I have to admin, that the brain is pretty damn good at filling those empty spots with stuff from imagination, so a last-gen game never feels as empty as it really is.
Think of it this way: The Wii is theoretically powerful enough to do a better game than anything ever made for the PS2.
Seriously, that is *eight* years after the Playstation2 was released, really not exactly much. But even still I have some doubt of even that, while the Wii is powerful in some areas, I am not sure if it could do a Shadow of the Colossus type of game. The PS2 isn't the most powerful console around, but at the end of its lifecycle some extremely impressive stuff has been done of it, thanks to its vector processor I guess, that I haven't seen anywhere else.
Also, the Wii does offer something else besides the motion controls... a market substantially larger than either of the other two consoles.
Yeah, but also a market smaller then both of those consoles combined, i.e. a cross platform game for Xbox360 and PS3 still has a larger market then a Wii-only title.