As simple as it sounds, I agree. Zelda1 offered a lot of stuff that got lost over the course of the game, such as a large seamless terrain (all the 3D Zeldas have huge 'holes' in the terrain that you can't reach), items that actually mattered and labyrinths that could be beaten out of order in many cases. Zelda1 was simply a far less linear experience then what you get with current day Zeldas and I would like the series to go back to that.
### Every game in the Zelda series are almost completely linear,
Just like basically all japanese RPGs, just because western RPGs tend to offer a lot of freedom doesn't mean every RPG has to. Beside from that its a simple matter of gameplay, if you play something like Secret of Mana or even Jade Empire (or any other RPG with an real-time fight system) it simply plays basically the same as Zelda, sure there are differences in the details, how you level up, how you get your weapon and such, but in many RPGs you can almost completly ignore both of that and just play it the same as a Zelda game, run around fight monsters, beat dungeons, do a little talk in the cities, some sidequests, etc.
Now if you define RPG as a game with a XP-bar, then yes, Zelda isn't one, but aside from that it plays very much the same as a lot of RPGs.
The article says that lifting your finger from the screen selects the item (even more counter-intuitive in my opinion).
Thats not counter-intuitive, thats exactly how basically *every* GUI today works. When you press a button the action takes place not on mouse-button-down event, but on mouse-button-up. Shift uses the time in between down and up to present the user with a little zoomed view of what is under his finger so that he can fine tune his selection. Looks pretty intuitive and easy to understand for me. See the video.
My only problem with this is that it seems to be designed to fix issues that you might not have in the first place when the GUI would be properly designed to fit the device.
Shift doesn't offset the cursor, you click where you click, it however allows you to fine tune the cursor position under your finger by showing the content under yoru finger in a small windows above your finger. The video linked in the article makes this rather clear.
Where exactly should that better user generated content be coming from? Even the most dedicated user can't match the creative power of a team of 20 or more artists working full time for a year or two as you get with commercial games. User generated content is a nice addition, but it will basically never be able to compete with commercial content. Just look at CounterStrike, its well done, extremely popular and everything, but even it did not replace HalfLife, it didn't even try, instead it did its own little multiplayer thing, because that is a thing that can be done by a few dedicated people, while a full blown single player experience is next to impossible, especially when it should compete with commercial content.
### The primary failing of Sony is in not providing any new innovation in the latest generation of consoles.
Except things like Ico or Shadow of the Colossus, eToy, Singstar and a heap load of other games.
### I think the relative failure of the Gamecube served as a wakeup call to Nintendo, they realized that they weren't able to compete on graphics
The Gamecube was quite a bit better then the PS2 and very close to the XBox, while being cheaper then both of them. What the Gamecube lacked where games, not graphic power.
### and if they were going to survive they needed to embrace the creative aspects of their game and console design more fully
I think the realized two things: a) there is a market for casual gamer games b) you can make a hell of a lot more money with old hardware then with bleeding edge stuff
### It will be interesting to see if Nintendo can pull off the online portion of the gaming puzzle
Giving how they still don't have any online games on the Wii, very few on the DS and how they try to make life extra hard with friend codes, I don't think so. When they continue their current strategy online play will never be much interesting on Nintendo consoles.
### sufficiently to keep Wii ahead of X-Box 360 and Playstation 3, of if they will fumble it and have to settle for second place.
### All his games have been unique, genre-creating blockbusters.
Some for sure, but definitively not all, especially not in the last years. Zelda has been basically the same game for far to long, StarFox just got worse and worse with every release, MarioSunshine was pretty awful and a bunch of other haven't really been very interesting either. Overall I would say that Pikmin was the only game he was involved in the last years that actually did something new and interesting, it was however terrible executed with the 8h time limit, a far to small world and such. Pikmin2 sadly failed to fix most of the issues, but instead added some new ones (horrible underground levels).
I do admire Miyamoto for what he has done in the past, but today I don't really care so much about his games any more, they simply don't offer much innovation any more and even lack things considered standard by many others such as online play, voice acting and such.
That said, with Wii Sports and Nintendogs he certainly still has some influence left, but that just isn't the type of game I would want to play.
### Each area of the game was different from one another,
Each involves shooting stupid bad guys or throwing stuff at them with the gravity gun. That the wall textures are different doesn't really change much of the core gameplay at all.
### but HL2 was a fun game to the end. I don't know how you could find it boring, unless all you could think of was "Dammit, this isn't Halo!!!!"
I am not much of a Halo fan, read my Blog as mentioned in the previous post. Halo however does a lot of things gameplay things right, which HalfLife2 just didn't do half as good (energie/shield, weapons, vehicles, squad-AI, etc.). In terms of pure gameplay I simply consider Halo vastly superior over HalfLife2 and the only thing I really enjoyed in Half Life 2 where the first 20min, the rest was just totally standard FPS stuff, technically well done, but totally uninteresting. The story also left a lot to be desired, while nicely presented, it just was filled with so many holes and unexplained things that it just wasn't fun anymore, it also lacked purpose and logic.
I did play it and yeah, it has a lot of polish to it in terms of graphics, the core gameplay however was terrible uninteresting, a tiny puzzle here and there doesn't change that and the gravity gun was *heavily* overused, felt more like a physic engine tech-demo then anything else. You can find my in-depth look at the game in my Blog, a little not-so-positve review of Halo1 is in there as well, liked Halo2 much more, but haven't written anything about that yet.
### Are you kidding me? Lets take a look at the facts:
The fact is that HalfLife1 was a big jump, while HalfLife2 was the same thing with prettier graphics and a stupid physic engine powered toy gun. Beside you completly ignore that Halos way of handling shields, grenades and weapons (can only carry two) changed the actual fighting quite a bit, while HalfLife2 was the same stupid run and gun that already got boring in Quake1.
Halo added the automatic recharging shild to the FPS genre, so no more collecting health packs, it also added a realistic limit on how many weapons you can carry, vehicles and separate buttons for melee attacks and grenades, thus making them actually usable instead of rotting in your inventory as in so many games before. It also was also a very important title for console network gaming and had a nice original setting (no WWII, no hell with monster). You might not like Halo and I am not a big fan of it either, but it did add plenty to the FPS genre, some of which are considered standard elements today, which they however weren't back then when Halo was released.
Compared to HalfLife2 I found Halo pretty original and innovative, compared to the likes of DeusEx, OperationFlashpoint, Riddick or HalfLife1 not so much, but its still far from the shovelware WWII shooter.
When system administration is hard, moving it all to a single server and turning the clients into dumbed down thin clients of course can make life easier, but it doesn't fix the problem, its moving it around, system administration still is as hard as ever, only with less machines to worry about. How about instead making system administration easy? Not just a little bit easier, but so easy that installing software is as easy as clicking a link on a webpage. And I don't mean just auto starting 'dpkg -i' once the browser sees a.deb, but ensuring that said.deb runs in a proper sandbox and can't conflict with other programs around. At the moment almost all Linux package distributions fail already at something as simple as installing multiple versions of the same package, while there are historic reasons for this, it really shouldn't be something acceptable.
Instead of wasting time and resources via WebOS people should focus on fixing the problems that exist in the current way software is handled.
For eBook reading the 19.1cm of the OLPC laptop should be perfect, most books aren't much larger either and with its 200dpi in monocrome mode it gets close enough to print resolution. Beside, I'm currently abusing a PSP for reading and that has a 11cm display and less dpi and its already doing the job quite nicely.
Any news on when the rest of the world can finally buy the XO Laptops? Since, well, a 200dpi display for less then $200 sounds like a damn cool device for ebook reading and I really want one.
How about sticking within our own solar system and never invoking aliens?
If you don't mind anime, have a look at Planetes, very realistic non-bullshit display of future space travel (the small kind of travel, since most happens in earth orbit or moon).
Still, I don't think that game design, even last generation, took advantage of all the horsepower available.
Neither do I, the problem however is that hardware is still what is driving this industry. After 3D graphics came around, 2D was dead, almost instantly, not because it was bad, but just because it no longer was the trendy thing to do. Today you have the physics engines, crowed AI, HDR lighting, shader and all that stuff, they are less of a change then 2D -> 3D, but they are still new things to explore and the industry will do so and if they do that means XBox360/PS3 versions of a game only. That doesn't mean that you couldn't do nice new innovative games on a Wii, it however means that many companies will be busy doing non-Wii related games. UnrealEngine3 is for PS3 and XBox360 only, CryEngine2 has a good chance of a PS3/XBox360 port, but no chance for a Wii port, id Software doesn't seem to have big plans for the Wii and so it goes on and on. If anything, the Wiimote is the very confirmation for this fact, its also new hardware that should force the developers to build their games around it, it just happens to be input, not CPU/GPU power.
The crux on all this however is that I just don't see where all the Wii games should be coming from, many companies are busy with XBox360/PS3, those that do have Wii development going on are wasting their time with porting and tackling on motion control, not with creating new games. The one group that is known for innovative games that don't just follow the trends of the industry, namely the independent game developers, might actually be interested in the Wii, but so far Nintendo hasn't shown any sign of opening up for them. Back before the Wii was released there was talk about Sam'n Max on the Wii, now half a year later, its still not there, not even an announcement, or even an announcement on when we will see non recycled games on the Virtual Console. Ironically the XBox360 and the PS3 are open for independent developers and Sony and Microsoft are actively pushing them and there are plenty of new original small-scale games on both consoles.
It comes even worse, back around Christmas Nintendo Europe had a cool little Flash jump'n run on their side, Mission Snowdriftland, it was a pretty awesome little game, especially for being free. In terms of length it might not keep up with a NewSuperMarioBros, but in terms of gameplay it was just as fun. Now what happened? After Christmas was over the game was taken offline and never to be seen again. It would have been easy to change the resolution and controls to have the game properly running on the Wii, it however never happened. Nintendo isn't even using those resources that they have for the Wii and that is really disappointing.
### Because I can't think of any "style" of graphics that the PS3 can do that the Wii can't
Anything that involves shaders is impossible on the Wii, it simply lacks the hardware support for that. Sometimes you might be able to get similar effects done, but when you have build a whole engine around certain assumption of what a GPU can do you can't just port it to a hardware that doesn't have those features. Its not just a matter of more pretty or less pretty, but a different way of doing the engine, doing the graphics and doing the game design.
It doesn't stop with graphics, it continues with physics engines, AI and all that stuff. If you do something like Dead Rising with dozens or even hundreds of enemy characters moving around, which is a core gameplay element, you can't just port the game to the Wii by reducing the enemy count a lot without losing the main point of the game. Same with Cell Factor and many other games.
The reason why many current PS3/XBox360 games still work on the Wii is because those aren't real next-gen games, but basically last gen games with a few shiny effects added. That is however slowly changing and in a year or two games will have the additional power of the system used for something that is very gameplay relevant.
The Wii has the problem of being from a different console generation, its like trying to port SNES and Genesis titles to the NES, N64 to the SNES or Gamecube titles to the N64, sometimes it might work, but more often then not you simply can't do it because to many things have changed.
No, but one things that makes the classic thumbstick controls more "realistic" (or ought I just say different?) then classic mouse controls is that with a thumbstick you have a maximum turn speed, while with a mouse you can turn around as fast as you can throw the mouse around. This difference makes the mouse kind of a cheating device, since in normal games your character is limited buy the build in rules, you can't run faster just because you press the button harder, with a mouse however your turn speed is only limited by hardware, not the game rules.
For me its the other way around, Halo1 sucked a lot in terms of story, while Halo2 was very enjoyable. The reason for this is that the story of Halo1 went in circles forever without ever letting the player accomplish anything, its like "to this", next mission is "undo this" because it was the wrong thing to do, then you have those "rescue that person", only to find that he is already dead/dieing, it comes down to the point where you are exactly where you started in the end and have to blow up your own ship, having accomplished basically nothing, with everybody of your comrades dead. Not exactly what I call a satisfying story.
Halo2 on the other side actually moved forward, let the player accomplish some things, let him switch to the alien side and play there a while (thus giving them much more depth) and do things that actually mattered. It wasn't perfect since it lacked proper closure, but even with that fault I liked it much more then Halo1. After Halo1 I felt cheated, after Halo2 entertained.
Depends on how they are improved, decent facial animation can enhance the experience quite a lot (Half Life 2), while bad ones can ruin things quite a bit (Zelda:TP). Good voice acting is also extremely important, actually the most important part, static images and good voice acting are still far superior to the newest animation tech with bad actors. When it however comes to pure 'fluff', like more explosions, more slow motion effects, motion blur, bloom and such I pass, they can be sometimes fun to watch, but don't exactly make a game more believable (MetalGear:Twin Snakes), especially not when all those cool effects and actions violate the rules of the gameplay.
Overall I prefer when things stay simple, give me good voice actors, make decent use of the in-game engine (Operation Flashpoint, Dreamfall) and stay away from all the fancy over the top CG stuff, that just distracts and doesn't enhance. A well done cutscene can enhance the storytelling quite a bit, a bad one or an annoying one just makes me press the skip button really fast.
### Nintendo has been saying this over and over again,
They can say it as long as they want, that doesn't make it any more true. Just look at the lack of online offering and serious lack of third party support (Assassins Creed, Bioshock, AlanWake, etc.). I have been a loyal Nintendo customer for 15+ years, the Wii has right now however nothing in terms of games that I would be interested in. Why that? Because I have played all its games last year when they where available on other Nintendo platforms. A game like SuperPaperMario just isn't different enough to get me interested, I have been through four MarioRPGs in the last few years, I don't need another one, same with WarioWare and Trauma Center and a bunch of others. Nintendo is claiming to be innovative, but so far I just don't see it, tackled on motion control just isn't enough.
### The Wii is getting MORE games than any other system, and quite a few aimed at the hardcore crowd.
'quite a few' is still a lot less then PS3 and Xbox360 are getting.
### Twilight Princess was EXACTLY what I was looking for,
I bought that game for the Gamecube, I don't need a Wii for it. Beside I consider it a rather boring rehash of old concepts, innovation is nowhere to be found, even WindWaker was much more interesting.
### Square seems to have one of the FF13 games up its sleeve, among other things.
Thats exactly the point, the Wii gets one of the FF13 spinoffs, while the PS3 gets the FF13 main game.
### The PS3 and 360 are totally different animals, and what's more is only their tallied horsepower stats are comparible, but in individual areas, their graphical handling is completely different.
Even with all their differences they are still a lot more similar to each other then compared to the Wii. A PS3 simply can do XBox360 style graphics and a XBox360 can do PS3 style graphics, a Wii can't do either of that. Sure the engine programmers will have quite a bit of work to do to get the different architectures of PS3 and XBox360 under the same roof, but the thing is, its a solvable problem. While doing the same for Wii would basically an impossible task.
Well, as a gamer I care if a console will get good games and little else. When it makes money for Nintendo, fine for them, but that won't guarantee me good games. As said, for a third party developer it is important where the potential customers are and so far you have 13mil on the XBox360/PS3 side, since porting between those two consoles is relatively easy, and 6mil on the Wii side, since porting between XBox360/PS3 is never going to lead to satisfying results.
The Wii might very well overtake both XBox360 and PS3, but there is very little chance that it will overtake both combined and unless that happen, the chance for ever getting decent third party support is rather slim. If the PS3 comes out last or not really isn't the issue as long as it sells enough to make porting viable and so far it looks like its doing fine in that aspect, selling half as much as a Wii is quite good considering that the console cost more then twice as much.
And if the Wii can keep up it sales is doubtful to begin with, since lack of decent third party support never was a good sign for a console.
### The money comes from the number of consoles on the market.
The money comes from players interested in buying your games, not from the consoles sold. You have to keep in mind that the Wii isn't up to the XBox360 or the PS3, but against the XBox360 *and* the PS3. Many of the next-gen games are for XBox360 and the PS3, but not for the Wii, since it just is to slow to run them, which means that you have 6mio Wii customers vs 13mio PS3/XBox360 customers. Now guess where the money flows. The Wii might continue to sell like hotcakes, but XBox360 and PS3 sales are not going to suddenly stop, so they will continue to lead for long long while. And this isn't even taking into account that the PS3/XBox360 audience is much more interested in the GTAs, AssassinsCreeds, Oblivions and such, while the Wii audience is more interested in the quick fun, easy to learn fun like Wii Sports.
Slashdot Mirror
As simple as it sounds, I agree. Zelda1 offered a lot of stuff that got lost over the course of the game, such as a large seamless terrain (all the 3D Zeldas have huge 'holes' in the terrain that you can't reach), items that actually mattered and labyrinths that could be beaten out of order in many cases. Zelda1 was simply a far less linear experience then what you get with current day Zeldas and I would like the series to go back to that.
### Every game in the Zelda series are almost completely linear,
Just like basically all japanese RPGs, just because western RPGs tend to offer a lot of freedom doesn't mean every RPG has to. Beside from that its a simple matter of gameplay, if you play something like Secret of Mana or even Jade Empire (or any other RPG with an real-time fight system) it simply plays basically the same as Zelda, sure there are differences in the details, how you level up, how you get your weapon and such, but in many RPGs you can almost completly ignore both of that and just play it the same as a Zelda game, run around fight monsters, beat dungeons, do a little talk in the cities, some sidequests, etc.
Now if you define RPG as a game with a XP-bar, then yes, Zelda isn't one, but aside from that it plays very much the same as a lot of RPGs.
Thats not counter-intuitive, thats exactly how basically *every* GUI today works. When you press a button the action takes place not on mouse-button-down event, but on mouse-button-up. Shift uses the time in between down and up to present the user with a little zoomed view of what is under his finger so that he can fine tune his selection. Looks pretty intuitive and easy to understand for me. See the video.
My only problem with this is that it seems to be designed to fix issues that you might not have in the first place when the GUI would be properly designed to fit the device.
Shift doesn't offset the cursor, you click where you click, it however allows you to fine tune the cursor position under your finger by showing the content under yoru finger in a small windows above your finger. The video linked in the article makes this rather clear.
You can do exactly that with Shift, watching the video (linked in the article) helps to understand how it actually works.
Where exactly should that better user generated content be coming from? Even the most dedicated user can't match the creative power of a team of 20 or more artists working full time for a year or two as you get with commercial games. User generated content is a nice addition, but it will basically never be able to compete with commercial content. Just look at CounterStrike, its well done, extremely popular and everything, but even it did not replace HalfLife, it didn't even try, instead it did its own little multiplayer thing, because that is a thing that can be done by a few dedicated people, while a full blown single player experience is next to impossible, especially when it should compete with commercial content.
### The primary failing of Sony is in not providing any new innovation in the latest generation of consoles.
Except things like Ico or Shadow of the Colossus, eToy, Singstar and a heap load of other games.
### I think the relative failure of the Gamecube served as a wakeup call to Nintendo, they realized that they weren't able to compete on graphics
The Gamecube was quite a bit better then the PS2 and very close to the XBox, while being cheaper then both of them. What the Gamecube lacked where games, not graphic power.
### and if they were going to survive they needed to embrace the creative aspects of their game and console design more fully
I think the realized two things: a) there is a market for casual gamer games b) you can make a hell of a lot more money with old hardware then with bleeding edge stuff
### It will be interesting to see if Nintendo can pull off the online portion of the gaming puzzle
Giving how they still don't have any online games on the Wii, very few on the DS and how they try to make life extra hard with friend codes, I don't think so. When they continue their current strategy online play will never be much interesting on Nintendo consoles.
### sufficiently to keep Wii ahead of X-Box 360 and Playstation 3, of if they will fumble it and have to settle for second place.
XBox360 is still #1.
### All his games have been unique, genre-creating blockbusters.
Some for sure, but definitively not all, especially not in the last years. Zelda has been basically the same game for far to long, StarFox just got worse and worse with every release, MarioSunshine was pretty awful and a bunch of other haven't really been very interesting either. Overall I would say that Pikmin was the only game he was involved in the last years that actually did something new and interesting, it was however terrible executed with the 8h time limit, a far to small world and such. Pikmin2 sadly failed to fix most of the issues, but instead added some new ones (horrible underground levels).
I do admire Miyamoto for what he has done in the past, but today I don't really care so much about his games any more, they simply don't offer much innovation any more and even lack things considered standard by many others such as online play, voice acting and such.
That said, with Wii Sports and Nintendogs he certainly still has some influence left, but that just isn't the type of game I would want to play.
### Each area of the game was different from one another,
Each involves shooting stupid bad guys or throwing stuff at them with the gravity gun. That the wall textures are different doesn't really change much of the core gameplay at all.
### but HL2 was a fun game to the end. I don't know how you could find it boring, unless all you could think of was "Dammit, this isn't Halo!!!!"
I am not much of a Halo fan, read my Blog as mentioned in the previous post. Halo however does a lot of things gameplay things right, which HalfLife2 just didn't do half as good (energie/shield, weapons, vehicles, squad-AI, etc.). In terms of pure gameplay I simply consider Halo vastly superior over HalfLife2 and the only thing I really enjoyed in Half Life 2 where the first 20min, the rest was just totally standard FPS stuff, technically well done, but totally uninteresting. The story also left a lot to be desired, while nicely presented, it just was filled with so many holes and unexplained things that it just wasn't fun anymore, it also lacked purpose and logic.
I did play it and yeah, it has a lot of polish to it in terms of graphics, the core gameplay however was terrible uninteresting, a tiny puzzle here and there doesn't change that and the gravity gun was *heavily* overused, felt more like a physic engine tech-demo then anything else. You can find my in-depth look at the game in my Blog, a little not-so-positve review of Halo1 is in there as well, liked Halo2 much more, but haven't written anything about that yet.
### Are you kidding me? Lets take a look at the facts:
The fact is that HalfLife1 was a big jump, while HalfLife2 was the same thing with prettier graphics and a stupid physic engine powered toy gun. Beside you completly ignore that Halos way of handling shields, grenades and weapons (can only carry two) changed the actual fighting quite a bit, while HalfLife2 was the same stupid run and gun that already got boring in Quake1.
Halo added the automatic recharging shild to the FPS genre, so no more collecting health packs, it also added a realistic limit on how many weapons you can carry, vehicles and separate buttons for melee attacks and grenades, thus making them actually usable instead of rotting in your inventory as in so many games before. It also was also a very important title for console network gaming and had a nice original setting (no WWII, no hell with monster). You might not like Halo and I am not a big fan of it either, but it did add plenty to the FPS genre, some of which are considered standard elements today, which they however weren't back then when Halo was released.
Compared to HalfLife2 I found Halo pretty original and innovative, compared to the likes of DeusEx, OperationFlashpoint, Riddick or HalfLife1 not so much, but its still far from the shovelware WWII shooter.
When system administration is hard, moving it all to a single server and turning the clients into dumbed down thin clients of course can make life easier, but it doesn't fix the problem, its moving it around, system administration still is as hard as ever, only with less machines to worry about. How about instead making system administration easy? Not just a little bit easier, but so easy that installing software is as easy as clicking a link on a webpage. And I don't mean just auto starting 'dpkg -i' once the browser sees a .deb, but ensuring that said .deb runs in a proper sandbox and can't conflict with other programs around. At the moment almost all Linux package distributions fail already at something as simple as installing multiple versions of the same package, while there are historic reasons for this, it really shouldn't be something acceptable.
Instead of wasting time and resources via WebOS people should focus on fixing the problems that exist in the current way software is handled.
For eBook reading the 19.1cm of the OLPC laptop should be perfect, most books aren't much larger either and with its 200dpi in monocrome mode it gets close enough to print resolution. Beside, I'm currently abusing a PSP for reading and that has a 11cm display and less dpi and its already doing the job quite nicely.
Any news on when the rest of the world can finally buy the XO Laptops? Since, well, a 200dpi display for less then $200 sounds like a damn cool device for ebook reading and I really want one.
If you don't mind anime, have a look at Planetes, very realistic non-bullshit display of future space travel (the small kind of travel, since most happens in earth orbit or moon).
Neither do I, the problem however is that hardware is still what is driving this industry. After 3D graphics came around, 2D was dead, almost instantly, not because it was bad, but just because it no longer was the trendy thing to do. Today you have the physics engines, crowed AI, HDR lighting, shader and all that stuff, they are less of a change then 2D -> 3D, but they are still new things to explore and the industry will do so and if they do that means XBox360/PS3 versions of a game only. That doesn't mean that you couldn't do nice new innovative games on a Wii, it however means that many companies will be busy doing non-Wii related games. UnrealEngine3 is for PS3 and XBox360 only, CryEngine2 has a good chance of a PS3/XBox360 port, but no chance for a Wii port, id Software doesn't seem to have big plans for the Wii and so it goes on and on. If anything, the Wiimote is the very confirmation for this fact, its also new hardware that should force the developers to build their games around it, it just happens to be input, not CPU/GPU power.
The crux on all this however is that I just don't see where all the Wii games should be coming from, many companies are busy with XBox360/PS3, those that do have Wii development going on are wasting their time with porting and tackling on motion control, not with creating new games. The one group that is known for innovative games that don't just follow the trends of the industry, namely the independent game developers, might actually be interested in the Wii, but so far Nintendo hasn't shown any sign of opening up for them. Back before the Wii was released there was talk about Sam'n Max on the Wii, now half a year later, its still not there, not even an announcement, or even an announcement on when we will see non recycled games on the Virtual Console. Ironically the XBox360 and the PS3 are open for independent developers and Sony and Microsoft are actively pushing them and there are plenty of new original small-scale games on both consoles.
It comes even worse, back around Christmas Nintendo Europe had a cool little Flash jump'n run on their side, Mission Snowdriftland, it was a pretty awesome little game, especially for being free. In terms of length it might not keep up with a NewSuperMarioBros, but in terms of gameplay it was just as fun. Now what happened? After Christmas was over the game was taken offline and never to be seen again. It would have been easy to change the resolution and controls to have the game properly running on the Wii, it however never happened. Nintendo isn't even using those resources that they have for the Wii and that is really disappointing.
### Because I can't think of any "style" of graphics that the PS3 can do that the Wii can't
Anything that involves shaders is impossible on the Wii, it simply lacks the hardware support for that. Sometimes you might be able to get similar effects done, but when you have build a whole engine around certain assumption of what a GPU can do you can't just port it to a hardware that doesn't have those features. Its not just a matter of more pretty or less pretty, but a different way of doing the engine, doing the graphics and doing the game design.
It doesn't stop with graphics, it continues with physics engines, AI and all that stuff. If you do something like Dead Rising with dozens or even hundreds of enemy characters moving around, which is a core gameplay element, you can't just port the game to the Wii by reducing the enemy count a lot without losing the main point of the game. Same with Cell Factor and many other games.
The reason why many current PS3/XBox360 games still work on the Wii is because those aren't real next-gen games, but basically last gen games with a few shiny effects added. That is however slowly changing and in a year or two games will have the additional power of the system used for something that is very gameplay relevant.
The Wii has the problem of being from a different console generation, its like trying to port SNES and Genesis titles to the NES, N64 to the SNES or Gamecube titles to the N64, sometimes it might work, but more often then not you simply can't do it because to many things have changed.
### Please, and the thumbstick does?
No, but one things that makes the classic thumbstick controls more "realistic" (or ought I just say different?) then classic mouse controls is that with a thumbstick you have a maximum turn speed, while with a mouse you can turn around as fast as you can throw the mouse around. This difference makes the mouse kind of a cheating device, since in normal games your character is limited buy the build in rules, you can't run faster just because you press the button harder, with a mouse however your turn speed is only limited by hardware, not the game rules.
For me its the other way around, Halo1 sucked a lot in terms of story, while Halo2 was very enjoyable. The reason for this is that the story of Halo1 went in circles forever without ever letting the player accomplish anything, its like "to this", next mission is "undo this" because it was the wrong thing to do, then you have those "rescue that person", only to find that he is already dead/dieing, it comes down to the point where you are exactly where you started in the end and have to blow up your own ship, having accomplished basically nothing, with everybody of your comrades dead. Not exactly what I call a satisfying story.
Halo2 on the other side actually moved forward, let the player accomplish some things, let him switch to the alien side and play there a while (thus giving them much more depth) and do things that actually mattered. It wasn't perfect since it lacked proper closure, but even with that fault I liked it much more then Halo1. After Halo1 I felt cheated, after Halo2 entertained.
Depends on how they are improved, decent facial animation can enhance the experience quite a lot (Half Life 2), while bad ones can ruin things quite a bit (Zelda:TP). Good voice acting is also extremely important, actually the most important part, static images and good voice acting are still far superior to the newest animation tech with bad actors. When it however comes to pure 'fluff', like more explosions, more slow motion effects, motion blur, bloom and such I pass, they can be sometimes fun to watch, but don't exactly make a game more believable (MetalGear:Twin Snakes), especially not when all those cool effects and actions violate the rules of the gameplay.
Overall I prefer when things stay simple, give me good voice actors, make decent use of the in-game engine (Operation Flashpoint, Dreamfall) and stay away from all the fancy over the top CG stuff, that just distracts and doesn't enhance. A well done cutscene can enhance the storytelling quite a bit, a bad one or an annoying one just makes me press the skip button really fast.
### Nintendo has been saying this over and over again,
They can say it as long as they want, that doesn't make it any more true. Just look at the lack of online offering and serious lack of third party support (Assassins Creed, Bioshock, AlanWake, etc.). I have been a loyal Nintendo customer for 15+ years, the Wii has right now however nothing in terms of games that I would be interested in. Why that? Because I have played all its games last year when they where available on other Nintendo platforms. A game like SuperPaperMario just isn't different enough to get me interested, I have been through four MarioRPGs in the last few years, I don't need another one, same with WarioWare and Trauma Center and a bunch of others. Nintendo is claiming to be innovative, but so far I just don't see it, tackled on motion control just isn't enough.
### The Wii is getting MORE games than any other system, and quite a few aimed at the hardcore crowd.
'quite a few' is still a lot less then PS3 and Xbox360 are getting.
### Twilight Princess was EXACTLY what I was looking for,
I bought that game for the Gamecube, I don't need a Wii for it. Beside I consider it a rather boring rehash of old concepts, innovation is nowhere to be found, even WindWaker was much more interesting.
### Square seems to have one of the FF13 games up its sleeve, among other things.
Thats exactly the point, the Wii gets one of the FF13 spinoffs, while the PS3 gets the FF13 main game.
### The PS3 and 360 are totally different animals, and what's more is only their tallied horsepower stats are comparible, but in individual areas, their graphical handling is completely different.
Even with all their differences they are still a lot more similar to each other then compared to the Wii. A PS3 simply can do XBox360 style graphics and a XBox360 can do PS3 style graphics, a Wii can't do either of that. Sure the engine programmers will have quite a bit of work to do to get the different architectures of PS3 and XBox360 under the same roof, but the thing is, its a solvable problem. While doing the same for Wii would basically an impossible task.
### It just has to make Nintendo a lot of money.
Well, as a gamer I care if a console will get good games and little else. When it makes money for Nintendo, fine for them, but that won't guarantee me good games. As said, for a third party developer it is important where the potential customers are and so far you have 13mil on the XBox360/PS3 side, since porting between those two consoles is relatively easy, and 6mil on the Wii side, since porting between XBox360/PS3 is never going to lead to satisfying results.
The Wii might very well overtake both XBox360 and PS3, but there is very little chance that it will overtake both combined and unless that happen, the chance for ever getting decent third party support is rather slim. If the PS3 comes out last or not really isn't the issue as long as it sells enough to make porting viable and so far it looks like its doing fine in that aspect, selling half as much as a Wii is quite good considering that the console cost more then twice as much.
And if the Wii can keep up it sales is doubtful to begin with, since lack of decent third party support never was a good sign for a console.
### The money comes from the number of consoles on the market.
The money comes from players interested in buying your games, not from the consoles sold. You have to keep in mind that the Wii isn't up to the XBox360 or the PS3, but against the XBox360 *and* the PS3. Many of the next-gen games are for XBox360 and the PS3, but not for the Wii, since it just is to slow to run them, which means that you have 6mio Wii customers vs 13mio PS3/XBox360 customers. Now guess where the money flows. The Wii might continue to sell like hotcakes, but XBox360 and PS3 sales are not going to suddenly stop, so they will continue to lead for long long while. And this isn't even taking into account that the PS3/XBox360 audience is much more interested in the GTAs, AssassinsCreeds, Oblivions and such, while the Wii audience is more interested in the quick fun, easy to learn fun like Wii Sports.