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The State of WiiWare, Xbox Alternatives
CVG is running a piece discussing the current state of WiiWare, and where they expect it to go in the future. They point to the success of Mega Man 9 on WiiWare and other platforms, but worry that the perception will arise that certain games are "too good" to be featured on WiiWare. GameSetWatch has a related interview with independent developer Ninjabee discussing their recent games and comparing WiiWare with Xbox Live Arcade. Meanwhile, Microsoft has announced that the new Xbox Experience coming in November will included their Community Games initiative, which will allow amateur game developers to create and share games using the XNA development tools.
You mean like Pain, Calling All Cars, Flow, Warhawk, Echochrome, Everyday Shooter, the Pixeljunk games, Super Stardust HD, etc. etc. etc.?
You don't even need to set up the my nintendo account. Anything you purchase you can delete off your system as much as you want and just go back and download it right away.
And if your system dies? When you get a new one call Nintendo's customer support, give them your old serial number and then give them your new serial number and Nintendo transfers everything you've purchased to your new console. Then everything you've purchased is available to download.
Nintendo doesn't have any DRM issue that can't also be said of the 360 or PS3.
SD cards aren't very expensive. I only have a 2GB card in my Wii and there's still plenty of room for me to download games. Mind you, I tend toward NES and SNES games more often for download, but it's still a lot of space.
When encryption is outlawed, ?o'AZ-,++o+i++##4AoA+-/-C++bI+/.+~
You're forgetting the PS3 has the ability to run Linux, so there's your hobbyist dev station right there, at least for 2D games.
You mean like Sony? Who lets you re-download any purchased game content from their store on up to five PS3's on which you have an account?
Yes, The same Sony that killed the Downloadable version of Warhawk by not allowing local multiplayer if both people didn't buy the game?
If you buy the retail disc, you can take 4 people online from 1 system, on the downloadable copy each user needs to have bought the game.
It's worth mentioning at this point that Sony is losing exclusives at what must be an alarming rate to their execs.
Final Fantasy XIII has already jumped ship, and the only exclusive they have this holiday season is the delayed LittleBigPlanet. And "October" isn't quite "holiday season" but hey, if they keep on delaying it, they might actually hit Christmas.
How bad is it?
Konami is talking about porting Metal Gear Solid 4 to the Xbox 360. Nothing final yet, but apparently even with it being the game to get for the PS3, they weren't able to recover development costs.
A savegame is one of the paths to breaking the data / code barrier and running untrusted code. This has two implications: piracy and viruses. We've already seen how easy it was to run untrusted code via a simple savegame. Transfer the save from the Wii to the SD card, load up the save in a hex editor and start looking for meaning. Name strings, for example. If you rewrite the save to use an overly long name, maybe it notices and nothing happens. But maybe they forgot to check the horse's name. All you need is one weak path, and now you can run homebrew emulators that compete with Virtual Console games (you can also run Linux, but there's little point without wifi). You might also be able to
There's another problem however, that affects more than Nintendo's bottom line. Malicious virii. If there was a problem with game names, it could potentially wreck a chain of players. I imagine a game like Brawl does peer to peer multiplayer to reduce latency and bottlenecks, so you can't filter out bad packets. And you can't shut down online play without fiasco. So encrypting the save at least obscures where data that might be transferred over the net is stored.
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