"Right, because Mario Kart for the SNES ran on a handheld and supported 8 player network play."
Neither of these two improvements could be classified as innovative - they're just obvious evolution. Upping the player count? WOW! Running on a handheld, just like Mario Kart Super Circuit for GBA did? I DON'T BELIEVE IT!
Again, no one's saying Mario Kart DS is not fun - hell, I was just playing it last night, and I had a great time. But Nintendo has been relying more and more on rehashes rather than new IPs, and it's starting to wear thin. Thus, I attacked the premise of "oh, Nintendo always innovates, unlike the other guys", because I don't perceive it to be true, and I think this perception is reasonably backed-up by their recent releases.
Is this some kind of joke? I played Mario Kart DS, and it was practically the same frigging game I played on my SNES! Ditto for New Super Mario Brothers - it's a fun game, but has practically no innovation (it's a pale shadow of SMB3) sans "big huge Mario mode", which isn't all that much. Not to mention that they've been re-releasing old games under new titles for how long now? While I haven't played it, one of the major criticisms of Twilight Princess was that it felt like every other modern Zelda game.
Nintendo makes fun games, but they're nowhere near being a pure font of innovation, and, if anything, they've gotten worse in recent years. A new controller with the old game does not mean it's a new game!
My guess is that they're getting pummelled by spam, and weren't keeping up fast enough with new hardware. From anecdotal evidence, it appears that the recent increase in spam has been hell on many ISPs, which is why you're seeing ever more pervasive measures to bounce or absorb the stuff before it starts hitting their actual mail servers. "Buy more mail servers" isn't always a great solution, and it's sure as hell a more expensive one than trying to just decrease that spam before it hits your mail servers by filtering.
(All my remarks are personal opinion, and are not representative of my employer in any way, shape, or form.)
That's one theory. The other is that game reviewers have similar tastes, and are playing the same game, so it follows that their reviews would be similar.
These images look _remarkably_ like the screenshots that have been floating around for months - screenshots that look _far_ nicer than the in-game screenshots taken by other reviews.
How about snapping your own, Zonk? Or at least making note that Nintendo basically handed these out?
I do kind of like the idea of having an RSS reader with "new item" updates being presented like the "your friend has logged in/out" messages. I could even see doing it in-game for some stuff, although I could see that being annoying to most people.
Much as it would pain Microsoft, some kind of YouTube integration would be a killer app for the 360, too.
A big factor in this, I would assume, is that Walmart was selling them for $160 each on Black Friday, with no apparent limit. One of my co-workers bought three - one for him, two for his kids. Combine that with some new, non-sucky games and the prospect of PS3 integration, and it could be the PSP will see a revival of sorts.
Well, let me get equally philisophical on you: a game that has excellent gameplay but no graphics at all isn't going to succeed, either. Witness the practical death of IF as games (and the subsequent rebirth as literature).
It's not an FPS. It's a third-person shooter. This game would not work nearly as well as an FPS - the behind-the-back view gives a much better view of the action than a first-person perspective.
I have no idea what Zonk's problem is. I own the game. I'm not a fanboy - I had always thought GoW was going to suck. I was _immensely_ surprised when the excellent reviews came in.
The friendly AI isn't that bad. It's not great, mind you, but calling it "some of the worst ever seen" is just _not true_. Your team mates get killed a little too often, but they do a reasonably good job of killing the enemy, too.
The humor isn't stale. There are many funny lines in the game. The story isn't as bad as Zonk makes it out to be - apparently he's easily-distracted and illiterate. I mean, it's not an RPG, but it keeps you going.
The reloading mechanism (calling it a mini-game sounds wrong) adds _tremendously_ to the title. It creates a tense, spur-of-the-moment decision on whether the risk of blowing the reload is worth the reward. And, trust me, you'll blow it sometimes. The fact that it's "not realistic" is totally irrelevant - I mean, is that any worse than the friggin' Locust Horde emerging from underground?
This game is fantastic. Best ever? Maybe not. But it'll stand pretty nicely in the top 20 console games of all time right now. If you own a 360 and like third-person shooters at all, it's a must-buy.
When I was in college, I had a part time job as a classroom tech. You see, we had fancy, computerized classrooms that the profs really weren't trained to use. When they ran into issues, I had to help them.
One of the classes I did this for was a sophmore or junior level public relations class. The technique of handing the news something that looks like a news video, but is really just a corporate press release, was explicitly covered in this class. Not only was it covered, but it was encouraged as a legitimate and smart method of getting the word out.
In other words, the underlying problem might not just be corporate greed, or the laziness of news organizations - it could be that this kind of public relations is still being taught as appropriate in schools. Time to beef up the ethics training in the college of communications?
All the last-gen consoles rendered at 480p. In fact, the Xbox often did 720p/1080i, and even the PS2 has a 1080i game (GT4). So, no, based on resolution alone, the Wii's not going to look better - it'll actually look worse in some cases.
Last time I checked, Microsoft engaged in monopolistic behavior. China is engaged in wholesale, widespread human rights abuses that make Gitmo look downright tame. Equating the two as basically the same level of evil is not only wrong, but it's insulting.
Donate 10% of my time? Most of these non-profit organizations want _money_ far more than volunteer time. That's not to denigrate volunteers, of course - they're important, too. But you're really fooling yourself if you think that the Red Cross, for example, would appreciate it if all of their donaters suddenly stopped giving, and just showed up to sort clothes and supplies.
For what it's worth, I do give time in the evenings as well, but not 10% of it. Then again, I didn't make my rant about volunteer time, either.
As for comparable standards of richness, we're getting into off-topic territory. Clearly, this is a regional sort of classification. For the region I live in, I'm not rich, and for most US citizens, and even Western Europeans, $200 is well within their means for charitable giving for an entire friggin year. I'm sorry that I didn't frame it in that context to begin with, but I am referring to US citizens for this sum of $200. If you can't afford the $200, don't give it, but I somehow wonder if there aren't many people who can that _aren't_.
"Making people feel bad about themselves will only make the world a worse place. "
There are plenty of people who should deservedly feel bad about their actions, or lack thereof. I'm not a subscriber to the feel-good, hedonistic philosophy that "feeling bad is a problem". If people need a little guilt to prod them into doing the right thing, so be it. I guess you and I will just have to disagree on this one.
"So because these people are assholes (yes, including the women's rights groups that are demonizing you for not dedicating your life to their cause) it's okay for you to be an asshole? Great logic. By the way, is their tactic working, or does it just make you want to do those things more? (Besides rape.)"
What's funny is that I actually have become a little more environmentally aware. I have started replacing some of my bulbs with flourescents, and been a touch more careful about power consumption. I have started going to rallies about the problems happening in Darfur. I don't believe in _forcing_ people to do anything, which is my problem with socialism, but I am perfectly prepared to try to convince them to do so.
I'm not Christian, so I could care less what "Jesus says" about anything.
My point was that we're not rich, yet we manage to do it, which directly contradicts the original poster's assertion that $200 was out of reach for the non-rich. Besides, you would just accuse me of not living up to my own standards if I hadn't mentioned this up front, seeing as you seem so interested in making up criticisms of me. In some commmunities, giving 10% wouldn't be bragging - it would just be the expected standard. Don't judge me on your own, and possibly flawed, expectations of charitable giving.
The sentiment I was attacking was _not_ "$200 for a donation seems like too much for the OLPC project". That's a perfectly fine sentiment in my eyes - everyone needs to decide what their charitable donations will be, and to where. I was attacking the idea that non-rich people couldn't afford to donate $200 to charity, as the original poster implied. Please try to read what I wrote, rather than insinuate a bunch of things I didn't into it, and take what I said out of context.
And, you know what? I'm perfectly fine making other people feel bad for not contributing to charity. I mean, the entire environmental movement is built on making me feel bad I don't do more for the environment. PETA is built on making me feel bad I eat animals. Women's rights groups in college constantly gave me guilt trips about not doing all I could to stop rape. I don't care that people aren't "naturally philanthropic". We aren't animals, and we can rise above our base instincts and nature.
For the most part, I agree with your criticisms of how the OLPC project is handling things. But my original post was not about OLPC - it was about what I perceive to be the sad state of charitable giving in the West.
That's sad. Whatever happened to that ideal of donating 10% of your after-tax income to charity? I know my wife and I do, and we're hardly rich. Does our lifestyle suffer a bit? Sure - but what happened to helping fellow people out of the goodness of your heart, rather than the taxman's pointed gun? Is $200 really so unaffordable?
Maybe the world would be a better place if we stopped demanding governments force us to give charity, and if we just started giving it ourselves without coercion. The former method teaches greed - the focus is on taking from others; the latter teaches charity - because the focus is on giving.
I didn't donate to this project, but the sentiment that $200 a year is too much to give really bothers me. You could have saved over time to do this, if you really felt it was important.
I'm also running FC6 on my home print/storage server. I wish I had something to cry joyously about in this area, but it's more of the same - which I think is a good thing. My firewire RAID transferred flawlessly over, and once I figured out that, yet again, SELinux and Samba don't play nicely together, sharing was a breeze. I keep wishing I had one of those fancy VT/Pacifica chips so that I could experiment with the virtualization tools, which look particularly nice. I never really understood the hate some people have towards Fedora - other than a little bit of oddness with the graphical installer, it configured perfectly.
I'm sure I'll have something much more interesting to say once I've had a chance to put it on my laptop, which is primary "user machine".
But is it really Microsoft's responsibility to tell publishers what they can or cannot sell? Should they be strong-arming folks even MORE than they already do now? The cure, I think, is worse than the disease.
I also disagree with your contention that Microsoft is the publisher for Lumines Live. They only control the distribution medium. If a publisher has an exclusive deal with GameStop for some game, does that make GameStop the publisher? I think not. Microsoft isn't going to take as much heat as you'd think.
"Trouble is, that your belief in Next-Gen is entirely predicated on one aspect of gaming : high fidelity cinematics. That this cinematic quality truly represents the next level in your interactive entertainment. Your enthusiastic missive could be correctly expressed as, "[Dead Rising] constitutes [an] example to [the] thesis [that next-gen == lots of good graphics]". Yet, there is nothing in the gameplay mechanics of Dead Rising that emerge if you replaced all of those high-poly Zombie models with symbolic ASCII squares or circles. There are just lots and lots of them, translating your gameplay experience into one of an endurance race."
You misread what I was trying to say. I didn't say that Dead Rising's graphics were its great advance, although they are indeed pretty. I'm saying that controlling hundreds of zombies simultaneously in a "realistic" fashion was something that couldn't be done before the advent of multi-core processors - even in ASCII. Trying to make comparisons to, say, Geometry Wars is silly, because Geometry Wars doesn't have any real amount of AI, only very, very simplistic control algorithms, which are indeed trivial to run through.
However, I realized you were full of it when I got down to your "highly destructible environments, finely grained control or intelligent opponents" rant. None of these require any hardware that's not already included with the Xbox 360 or PS3, or even the Wii. They are _all_ functions of existing hardware capabilities and algorithms. I'm amazed at the amount of things you crammed into my mouth that I didn't say, and didn't even imply - indeed, I even made a point of noting that you didn't need anything new but ideas and good engineering to make significant jumps in usability and fun.
I suspect you're a flaming Wii fanboy, to be honest, and that you were just looking for an excuse to rip on anyone who _dared_ contradict the idea that some new controller is the best thing since sliced bread. Sorry.
You seem to assume that CPU and GPU upgrades can't enable new gameplay ideas. Here's a counter-example to that thesis: Dead Rising. Dead Rising would not seem to be possible with the previous CPUs and GPUs present on "last-gen" consoles (or "next-gen" Wii's, for that matter). The gameplay is completely influenced by the several hundred zombies milling around you constantly, and ends up creating a totally new experience.
You don't even need more power to create this kind of paradigm shift, either. Xbox Live, especially the better version for the 360, totally changed the way console gamers thought about online services, with integrated chat, matchmaking, and content downloads. There's a lot of room to improve without a fancy new GPU, CPU, or controller. (It's worth noting here that the Wii takes a giant leap backwards on this front with the generally maligned Friends Code system. Does that make it "not next-gen"? I think not, but it's worth thinking about.)
Further, a controller is just an input. It doesn't magically make things more fun or "take gaming to the next level". Good developers do that, and a good developer can work with whatever inputs they have access to. A wiimote is not more fun than a steering wheel, a gamepad is not more fun than a DDR mat, a joystick is not more fun than a mouse and keyboard. They're just inputs. That's it. Ascribing mystical properties of "fun-ness" to them is silly.
So, I disagree with your idea that a new controller is somehow more next-gen than anything else. It's a self-serving rationalization by Nintendo fanbots, in my experience. What makes something "this generation" is relative release date, nothing else.
Slashdot Mirror
"Right, because Mario Kart for the SNES ran on a handheld and supported 8 player network play."
Neither of these two improvements could be classified as innovative - they're just obvious evolution. Upping the player count? WOW! Running on a handheld, just like Mario Kart Super Circuit for GBA did? I DON'T BELIEVE IT!
Again, no one's saying Mario Kart DS is not fun - hell, I was just playing it last night, and I had a great time. But Nintendo has been relying more and more on rehashes rather than new IPs, and it's starting to wear thin. Thus, I attacked the premise of "oh, Nintendo always innovates, unlike the other guys", because I don't perceive it to be true, and I think this perception is reasonably backed-up by their recent releases.
Is this some kind of joke? I played Mario Kart DS, and it was practically the same frigging game I played on my SNES! Ditto for New Super Mario Brothers - it's a fun game, but has practically no innovation (it's a pale shadow of SMB3) sans "big huge Mario mode", which isn't all that much. Not to mention that they've been re-releasing old games under new titles for how long now? While I haven't played it, one of the major criticisms of Twilight Princess was that it felt like every other modern Zelda game.
Nintendo makes fun games, but they're nowhere near being a pure font of innovation, and, if anything, they've gotten worse in recent years. A new controller with the old game does not mean it's a new game!
My guess is that they're getting pummelled by spam, and weren't keeping up fast enough with new hardware. From anecdotal evidence, it appears that the recent increase in spam has been hell on many ISPs, which is why you're seeing ever more pervasive measures to bounce or absorb the stuff before it starts hitting their actual mail servers. "Buy more mail servers" isn't always a great solution, and it's sure as hell a more expensive one than trying to just decrease that spam before it hits your mail servers by filtering.
(All my remarks are personal opinion, and are not representative of my employer in any way, shape, or form.)
Writing under your real name is also a criteria, in my opinion, and is what sets traditional newsmedia apart from the vast majority of bloggers.
That's one theory. The other is that game reviewers have similar tastes, and are playing the same game, so it follows that their reviews would be similar.
These images look _remarkably_ like the screenshots that have been floating around for months - screenshots that look _far_ nicer than the in-game screenshots taken by other reviews.
How about snapping your own, Zonk? Or at least making note that Nintendo basically handed these out?
I do kind of like the idea of having an RSS reader with "new item" updates being presented like the "your friend has logged in/out" messages. I could even see doing it in-game for some stuff, although I could see that being annoying to most people.
Much as it would pain Microsoft, some kind of YouTube integration would be a killer app for the 360, too.
A big factor in this, I would assume, is that Walmart was selling them for $160 each on Black Friday, with no apparent limit. One of my co-workers bought three - one for him, two for his kids. Combine that with some new, non-sucky games and the prospect of PS3 integration, and it could be the PSP will see a revival of sorts.
Well, let me get equally philisophical on you: a game that has excellent gameplay but no graphics at all isn't going to succeed, either. Witness the practical death of IF as games (and the subsequent rebirth as literature).
It's not either-or choice. I'd prefer both.
It's not an FPS. It's a third-person shooter. This game would not work nearly as well as an FPS - the behind-the-back view gives a much better view of the action than a first-person perspective.
I have no idea what Zonk's problem is. I own the game. I'm not a fanboy - I had always thought GoW was going to suck. I was _immensely_ surprised when the excellent reviews came in.
The friendly AI isn't that bad. It's not great, mind you, but calling it "some of the worst ever seen" is just _not true_. Your team mates get killed a little too often, but they do a reasonably good job of killing the enemy, too.
The humor isn't stale. There are many funny lines in the game. The story isn't as bad as Zonk makes it out to be - apparently he's easily-distracted and illiterate. I mean, it's not an RPG, but it keeps you going.
The reloading mechanism (calling it a mini-game sounds wrong) adds _tremendously_ to the title. It creates a tense, spur-of-the-moment decision on whether the risk of blowing the reload is worth the reward. And, trust me, you'll blow it sometimes. The fact that it's "not realistic" is totally irrelevant - I mean, is that any worse than the friggin' Locust Horde emerging from underground?
This game is fantastic. Best ever? Maybe not. But it'll stand pretty nicely in the top 20 console games of all time right now. If you own a 360 and like third-person shooters at all, it's a must-buy.
When I was in college, I had a part time job as a classroom tech. You see, we had fancy, computerized classrooms that the profs really weren't trained to use. When they ran into issues, I had to help them.
One of the classes I did this for was a sophmore or junior level public relations class. The technique of handing the news something that looks like a news video, but is really just a corporate press release, was explicitly covered in this class. Not only was it covered, but it was encouraged as a legitimate and smart method of getting the word out.
In other words, the underlying problem might not just be corporate greed, or the laziness of news organizations - it could be that this kind of public relations is still being taught as appropriate in schools. Time to beef up the ethics training in the college of communications?
All the last-gen consoles rendered at 480p. In fact, the Xbox often did 720p/1080i, and even the PS2 has a 1080i game (GT4). So, no, based on resolution alone, the Wii's not going to look better - it'll actually look worse in some cases.
Last time I checked, Microsoft engaged in monopolistic behavior. China is engaged in wholesale, widespread human rights abuses that make Gitmo look downright tame. Equating the two as basically the same level of evil is not only wrong, but it's insulting.
Donate 10% of my time? Most of these non-profit organizations want _money_ far more than volunteer time. That's not to denigrate volunteers, of course - they're important, too. But you're really fooling yourself if you think that the Red Cross, for example, would appreciate it if all of their donaters suddenly stopped giving, and just showed up to sort clothes and supplies.
For what it's worth, I do give time in the evenings as well, but not 10% of it. Then again, I didn't make my rant about volunteer time, either.
As for comparable standards of richness, we're getting into off-topic territory. Clearly, this is a regional sort of classification. For the region I live in, I'm not rich, and for most US citizens, and even Western Europeans, $200 is well within their means for charitable giving for an entire friggin year. I'm sorry that I didn't frame it in that context to begin with, but I am referring to US citizens for this sum of $200. If you can't afford the $200, don't give it, but I somehow wonder if there aren't many people who can that _aren't_.
"Making people feel bad about themselves will only make the world a worse place. "
There are plenty of people who should deservedly feel bad about their actions, or lack thereof. I'm not a subscriber to the feel-good, hedonistic philosophy that "feeling bad is a problem". If people need a little guilt to prod them into doing the right thing, so be it. I guess you and I will just have to disagree on this one.
"So because these people are assholes (yes, including the women's rights groups that are demonizing you for not dedicating your life to their cause) it's okay for you to be an asshole? Great logic. By the way, is their tactic working, or does it just make you want to do those things more? (Besides rape.)"
What's funny is that I actually have become a little more environmentally aware. I have started replacing some of my bulbs with flourescents, and been a touch more careful about power consumption. I have started going to rallies about the problems happening in Darfur. I don't believe in _forcing_ people to do anything, which is my problem with socialism, but I am perfectly prepared to try to convince them to do so.
I'm not Christian, so I could care less what "Jesus says" about anything.
My point was that we're not rich, yet we manage to do it, which directly contradicts the original poster's assertion that $200 was out of reach for the non-rich. Besides, you would just accuse me of not living up to my own standards if I hadn't mentioned this up front, seeing as you seem so interested in making up criticisms of me. In some commmunities, giving 10% wouldn't be bragging - it would just be the expected standard. Don't judge me on your own, and possibly flawed, expectations of charitable giving.
The sentiment I was attacking was _not_ "$200 for a donation seems like too much for the OLPC project". That's a perfectly fine sentiment in my eyes - everyone needs to decide what their charitable donations will be, and to where. I was attacking the idea that non-rich people couldn't afford to donate $200 to charity, as the original poster implied. Please try to read what I wrote, rather than insinuate a bunch of things I didn't into it, and take what I said out of context.
And, you know what? I'm perfectly fine making other people feel bad for not contributing to charity. I mean, the entire environmental movement is built on making me feel bad I don't do more for the environment. PETA is built on making me feel bad I eat animals. Women's rights groups in college constantly gave me guilt trips about not doing all I could to stop rape. I don't care that people aren't "naturally philanthropic". We aren't animals, and we can rise above our base instincts and nature.
For the most part, I agree with your criticisms of how the OLPC project is handling things. But my original post was not about OLPC - it was about what I perceive to be the sad state of charitable giving in the West.
That's sad. Whatever happened to that ideal of donating 10% of your after-tax income to charity? I know my wife and I do, and we're hardly rich. Does our lifestyle suffer a bit? Sure - but what happened to helping fellow people out of the goodness of your heart, rather than the taxman's pointed gun? Is $200 really so unaffordable?
Maybe the world would be a better place if we stopped demanding governments force us to give charity, and if we just started giving it ourselves without coercion. The former method teaches greed - the focus is on taking from others; the latter teaches charity - because the focus is on giving.
I didn't donate to this project, but the sentiment that $200 a year is too much to give really bothers me. You could have saved over time to do this, if you really felt it was important.
It's actually MPEG1, MPEG2, and WMV. I can confirm that Windows Media Connect is all that's needed, too.
Note that WMC does _not_ work with Transcode360, though.
I'm also running FC6 on my home print/storage server. I wish I had something to cry joyously about in this area, but it's more of the same - which I think is a good thing. My firewire RAID transferred flawlessly over, and once I figured out that, yet again, SELinux and Samba don't play nicely together, sharing was a breeze. I keep wishing I had one of those fancy VT/Pacifica chips so that I could experiment with the virtualization tools, which look particularly nice. I never really understood the hate some people have towards Fedora - other than a little bit of oddness with the graphical installer, it configured perfectly.
I'm sure I'll have something much more interesting to say once I've had a chance to put it on my laptop, which is primary "user machine".
It _should_. Fedora Core 5 did, but I never got it working, due to the weirdness of the Broadcom drivers.
But is it really Microsoft's responsibility to tell publishers what they can or cannot sell? Should they be strong-arming folks even MORE than they already do now? The cure, I think, is worse than the disease.
I also disagree with your contention that Microsoft is the publisher for Lumines Live. They only control the distribution medium. If a publisher has an exclusive deal with GameStop for some game, does that make GameStop the publisher? I think not. Microsoft isn't going to take as much heat as you'd think.
Is this included in Fedora Core 6, either in the core packages or the extras? It'd be nice to get a new browser with my new OS.
"Trouble is, that your belief in Next-Gen is entirely predicated on one aspect of gaming : high fidelity cinematics. That this cinematic quality truly represents the next level in your interactive entertainment. Your enthusiastic missive could be correctly expressed as, "[Dead Rising] constitutes [an] example to [the] thesis [that next-gen == lots of good graphics]". Yet, there is nothing in the gameplay mechanics of Dead Rising that emerge if you replaced all of those high-poly Zombie models with symbolic ASCII squares or circles. There are just lots and lots of them, translating your gameplay experience into one of an endurance race."
You misread what I was trying to say. I didn't say that Dead Rising's graphics were its great advance, although they are indeed pretty. I'm saying that controlling hundreds of zombies simultaneously in a "realistic" fashion was something that couldn't be done before the advent of multi-core processors - even in ASCII. Trying to make comparisons to, say, Geometry Wars is silly, because Geometry Wars doesn't have any real amount of AI, only very, very simplistic control algorithms, which are indeed trivial to run through.
However, I realized you were full of it when I got down to your "highly destructible environments, finely grained control or intelligent opponents" rant. None of these require any hardware that's not already included with the Xbox 360 or PS3, or even the Wii. They are _all_ functions of existing hardware capabilities and algorithms. I'm amazed at the amount of things you crammed into my mouth that I didn't say, and didn't even imply - indeed, I even made a point of noting that you didn't need anything new but ideas and good engineering to make significant jumps in usability and fun.
I suspect you're a flaming Wii fanboy, to be honest, and that you were just looking for an excuse to rip on anyone who _dared_ contradict the idea that some new controller is the best thing since sliced bread. Sorry.
You seem to assume that CPU and GPU upgrades can't enable new gameplay ideas. Here's a counter-example to that thesis: Dead Rising. Dead Rising would not seem to be possible with the previous CPUs and GPUs present on "last-gen" consoles (or "next-gen" Wii's, for that matter). The gameplay is completely influenced by the several hundred zombies milling around you constantly, and ends up creating a totally new experience.
You don't even need more power to create this kind of paradigm shift, either. Xbox Live, especially the better version for the 360, totally changed the way console gamers thought about online services, with integrated chat, matchmaking, and content downloads. There's a lot of room to improve without a fancy new GPU, CPU, or controller. (It's worth noting here that the Wii takes a giant leap backwards on this front with the generally maligned Friends Code system. Does that make it "not next-gen"? I think not, but it's worth thinking about.)
Further, a controller is just an input. It doesn't magically make things more fun or "take gaming to the next level". Good developers do that, and a good developer can work with whatever inputs they have access to. A wiimote is not more fun than a steering wheel, a gamepad is not more fun than a DDR mat, a joystick is not more fun than a mouse and keyboard. They're just inputs. That's it. Ascribing mystical properties of "fun-ness" to them is silly.
So, I disagree with your idea that a new controller is somehow more next-gen than anything else. It's a self-serving rationalization by Nintendo fanbots, in my experience. What makes something "this generation" is relative release date, nothing else.