### All three consoles have the ability to do the same style of game.
Wrong, the Wii is not in the same league as PS3 and XBox360, it will not be able to do a things that use huge crowds like AssassinsCreed or DeadRising, things that make use of physics engine will be impossible as well. Sure, sometimes you might be able to scale stuff down, but often times you simply won't be able to do that. Processing power can be very relevant to gameplay and the Wii just hasn't enough to keep up.
### There is no underlying reason why the Wii, inherently, is limited to B titles,
True, you could do all kinds of interesting games on the Wii, the question is: Is there a market for it? And I don't think thats the case, people are buying the Wii for Wii Sports not to play the next GTA on it. Large sales don't really matter if the people who buy the Wii aren't interested in that kind of games.
### companies are now scrambling to get their big AAA teams on board, but it will take time.
Name one big AAA third party title that is making it to the Wii, just one. The biggest thing I know is No More Heroes, but even that doesn't come near the AAA potential that a AssassinsCreed, GTA4 or RE5 has. The big titles are all PS3/XBox360 right now and there is no announcement around to show that this is going to change.
People are always assuming that the Wii will magically get developers because it is selling lots of units right now, but forgetting that the XBox360 still has a solid lead and will continue to stay close to the Wii for a long long while, even if the Wii outsells it. This means that the market for those games simply will be larger on XBox360 for a long while to come and the Wii hardware isn't getting fresher over time, the more month pass, the more outdated it will look. People are not going to play GTA5 on the Wii after they already have played a superior GTA4 on the XBox360/PS3 a year earlier.
Yep, in the end only time will tell, however I just doubt that the Wii will be interesting enough to those people that want Halo, GTA and Co. when those games are not going for the Wii for a long long time, if ever. The Wii simply seems to cater to a different audience and this Miyamato interview seems to confirm that:
Why do you think Zelda isn't doing well in Japan?
Well, I think a lot of people who bought the Wii are not necessarily the types of people who are interested in playing that kind of game.
### But many of these games will eventually end up on the Wii, no question about it.
As crappy ports maybe. As develop-from-scratch from the Wii, I don't think so, there is currently no indication for that and I doubt that there is even a large enough market on the Wii. Just because a bunch of casual gamers buy the Wii, doesn't mean that they want to play Assassins Creed.
### Finally, I think you don't quite understand how friend codes work.
I understand very well how they work. The sole reason they where invented was to stop random players from interacting with each other via chat or voice, which in turn limits online gaming to random match making and makes it rather useless for anything team based. Now there is of course nothing stopping Nintendo from allowing chat in online games for everybody, but so far that was exactly what they wanted to avoid.
### And why would you need position sensing? I guess you mean integrating acceleration twice to get position, which tends to become inexact, but what would you need that for?
To get proper 1:1 mapping from the players action to the game characters action. Currently that mapping is limited to rather simplistic swing motions and doesn't work at all for slow ones (i.e. say putting a key in a keyhole in an adventure game, controlling a hand like in Black&White). Sometimes there are workarounds, but a lot of stuff just doesn't work very well without real 1:1 mapping. The realistic sword fighting game might be a fluffy dream that never turns true.
### The Wii is the most successfull console this generation,
The XBox360 still has a solid lead on the Wii and even the PS3 isn't that far behind. Fast sales in the first few month don't mean all that much for the years to come.
### the Wii dead by 2008?
I don't mean dead as in discontinued, but dead as in 'no good games'. What the developers are doing is trying to quickly cash in on the Wii, they are not doing the big games, those are happening on other consoles and I seriously doubt that everybody will just through away all their next-gen work and develop again for hardware that is a generation behind. And heck, even if they would, that would mean we will see good games somewhen in 2009, after all those developers have to finish their games which they are developing right now for XBox360 and PS3 first, before they could start again for a new game on the Wii.
### However, the thing I was actually taking exception with in your statement was that you claimed that "the titles aren't exclusive because the Wii is dominating, but simply because nobody would care for them on the other platforms." That is a really weird statement.
If the Wii would be dominating Ubisoft would move AssassinCreed over to the Wii, Rockstar would port their GTA and Konami would bring you MetalGear4, while Square gives you FF:XIII and Capcom RE5. Fact however is: They don't, not a single of those next-gen games was announced for the Wii. Instead Ubisoft gives us a bad port of Prince of Persia, Konami brings us Dewy's Adventure, Capcom a RE4 remake and a RE rail shooter. The big titles happen elsewhere, the Wii only gets the small ones that are cheap to produce. Nobody is right now investing large amounts of money in Wii development, like they do with XBox360 and PS3.
### You should keep in mind that most large developers have only just started to move teams away from the PS3 to the Wii.
Do you have any source for that? And what does 'move away' mean in this case? Take five people out of a 100+ staff for a PS3 game or doing a 50/50 split? So far none of the third party Wii games was big enough to actually need a large stuff of people.
### As for the issues you raise with the Wii: How good the Wiimote's accuracy really is remains to be seen.
Not really, Bluetooth drivers are available for PC, so all the data that you can get out of a Wiimote is well known and that data just has its limits. You simply can't get decent position sensing out of a accelerometer.
### Obviously, Nintendo decided to go with the lower price instead of with faster hardware.
The thing is, they could have gone lower price *and* faster hardware. For $250 you can get a lot more today then what the Wii is capable of, you might not reach the XBox360, but you should get somewhat close, especially when leaving out HDTV. It of course would have made them less profit, but it would make the Wii look a lot less outdated, then it does now and in a few years.
### Nintendo can't just attract third-parties.
If Microsoft wants a third party, they buy them. Now Nintendo might not be able to go that far, but they could at least try to care and secure a few decent exclusives, which they however failed to do.
### That will improve dramatically within the next few months.
What makes you think so? Online will never be able to compete with PS3 or XBox360 as long as Nintendo is using friends codes to lock out any kind of communication between players. And speaking about games, as said, I haven't seen any big third parties, not in the stores, not on the release lists, they are nowhere to be found. If the developers are now all jumping on the Wii train I would expect to see some announcement, tech demos, screenshots, videos or anything interesting, but that just isn't the case.
If there would be some hope that the Wii wouldn't be totally dead in 2008, just as it right now, I would already bought one, but I just don't see any indication for that.
Given the state of gaming and how most of them don't even have properly animated eyes, let alone properly player controlled ones, I really doubt that eye contact matters at all currently, especially not in third person camera. I think the reasons why many of the rules still work is simply because we role play a little bit. There is no point in placing your avatars a pixel away from another one when you have plenty of open room, so people end up spacing their characters around more evenly, it simply is the logical thing to do to make the game not look totally stupid. The reason why it still might get uncomfortable to have a avatar close by in an open space is because that avatar didn't end up there by random, the person behind that avatar did that most likely on purpose, so you react to what you guess was the intend of that other person, not the avatar itself. On a crowded place on the other side nobody cares if avatars look at each other, run through each other or do other weird things, since all those things happen at random.
I think the rules that still apply are not because we identify with the avatar so much, but simply because we know that behind that other avatar is a real person, so we don't want to step on those toes or get annoying when he does on ours. If the avatars ran into each other or not however isn't an issue, we just don't care, because those things just happen in todays games.
### I don't see how that relates to the point I was making, namely, that a console usually can't make a comeback after failing for a year.
It means that the PS3 is losing against the XBox360, not against the Wii. Which in turns means that Xbox360 lack of support in Japan is a huge issue. As you said, you can't win without Japan and the XBox360 is as far away as being a success in Japan as always, which means the PS3 is alone in its market segment there. This of course doesn't make the PS3 a winner, but you can't really lose when you are the sole contester in that market either. At the moment I would guess we end up with a 50/50 (or 60/40) split between PS3 and Xbox360 and a whole lot of multiplatform titles.
### Not only is that claim utterly absurd,
Please name the big third party titles for the Wii that aren't spin-offs or gaiden on the Wii and I mean big as in potential AAA top title, not small stuff like Elebits and vaporware like Sadness doesn't count either. I looked quite a bit, but I couldn't name you a single one. The only companies from which I see solid Wii support right now are Ubisoft and EA, and both of them currently use the Wii for making money, not for marking new games.
### I also have no idea where it is coming from. What made you hate the Wii so much?
Back when the Revolution was announced at E3 I, as a loyal Nintendo customer for 15 years, couldn't wait to buy one, Nintendo was always good at innovations, so what could go wrong? Well, as it turned out, lots of.
First there was the controller, which just didn't have enough sensory to make true 1:1 mapping happening, meaning all the great innovative games I thought of simply were not possible or would need to be scaled down to the point where they simply weren't interesting any more.
Secondly there are the graphics and CPU, I don't mind the lack of HD, but just shipping a slightly improved Gamecube in a new box doesn't cut it either. The Gamecube was in term of power for the money the best console hardware ever released, I expected the Wii to be of similar quality by *todays* technical standards, it however doesn't get close, no shader support, no anti-aliasing, etc. The Wii would have been outdated if it was released three years ago.
Third there was the price, I wouldn't even have minded if the Wii is being technically last-gen, if the price would have reflected that, but it just didn't. $250 for the Wii is ridiculous considering the Gamecube was $200 back in 2001.
Last not least, the most important aspect, the games. As before Nintendo completly failed to attract third party, after the N64 and Gamecube they should have known better, thats just inexcusable. Also Nintendo talked about "big idea being more important then big money" back at E3, today however the Wii is as close a platform as ever, neither is it open to indie developers nor does Nintendo actually support small games, PS3 and Xbox360 online shops are full with small games, both improved classics as well as completly original ones. The Wii on the other side only offers non improved classic, nothing original, no additions like network play and all that at a high price. And if that all wouldn't be enough Nintendo did their best to piss of Gamecube owners, not only was there support in the last years pretty substandard, they also delay Zelda:TP a year just so that they could hit the Wii launch, they also turned SuperPaperMario from being a Gamecube into a Wii game and who knows what other games suffered similar fate. If Nintendo would have wanted it should have been trivial to pack Wii and Gamecube binaries on the same disk to get a smooth transition, turning all those titles that don't make much use of the Wiimote into multiplatform titles, but they simply didn't, Wii titles only run on the Wii, even if they don't make any use of the Wiimote or that little bit of extra processing power. And if that would be enough, Nintendo also failed to have any real Wii titles ready at launch, those titles that made use of the Wii ended up look
I don't own any of the next-gen consoles. Given however that the Wii doesn't offer anything I would be interested in and that the XBox360 has the most buggy hardware in console history as well as expensive online play, the PS3 sounds like a solid offering, not one that I would buy now, but a year or two down the road when the price is down and some more games are out, why not?
If the Xbox360 wouldn't be so damn buggy I would have already bought one, but with news about disk scratching and red rings of death every few weeks it just isn't something I want to spend money on right now.
They sure could, but who would buy that thing? The current hype is focused mostly around Wii Sports and the controller, in two years it will be old stuff by then and I doubt that the same crowed that bought into the current hype will go to buy a Wii HD, since the normal Wii already does everything they expect from a game console. To keep up with the XBox360/PS3 the Wii HD would need to have substantial more power then just a Wii with HD capabilities added on, it would need to be a completly new machine build from scratch, which in turn would mean that WiiHD games wouldn't run on a Wii, which in turn would mean that the Wii won't ever get a decent amount of good games since it was to short lived. So the 'hardcore' gamer crowed might not exactly be happy with that either and buy into the WiiHD.
### In two years the PS/3 GPU will not be state of the art.
The PS3 won't be state of the art in two years, but in two years it might cost only $200. Nintendo could of course do a state of the art console, but they will have trouble doing that in a similar price range as the PS3, which means they will have to do a console that either isn't significantly better then a PS3 or one that costs a lot more, neither would be very attractive.
XBox360 getting more Japanese developers is of course a huge risk for Sony, but it hasn't happened with the Xbox1 and hasn't happened in the 1.5 years that the XBox360 is already out, I don't think there is all that much chance it will ever happen this generation.
Halo is a universe with a complete story, each game shows you a piece of that story. Its interesting because you want to know how the story goes, its interesting because it fits together. With Mario or Zelda games on the other side you don't have that, each game is a reset and starts from scratch, you have a few common elements here and there, but it doesn't connect, the story of Mario1 isn't continued in Mario2. You don't play a Mario because you want to know how the thing continues, but because its a good game on its own. The problem is when you don't end up having one Mario game every few years, but Mario in almost each and every game, it gets boring, you want to see a new face every know and then. And yes, even Halo with its universe and story might get boring in its tenth iteration, but its not even close to that.
### Well I suppose that take Halo 3...
You very well can, that however still leaves AssassinsCreed, HeavenlySword, BioShock, MassEffect, DeadRising, BlueDragon, Lair, HeavyRain, Crysis and a whole bunch of other titles. There is a lot of recycling going on on Xbox360 and PS3, but there are also plenty of new titles either in the making or already released. On the Wii on the other side I haven't seen a *single* one that looks great and is original.
### While more and more exclusive 3rd-party games are announced for the Wii, PS3 exclusives are going multi-platform one by one.
Multi-platform here means Xbox360, PS3 and sometimes PC, but not Wii. What the Wii gets aren't the big titles, but the spin-offs and gaidens, the FF:Crystal Chronicals, the RE:UC rail shooter and stuff like that. Those titles aren't exclusive because the Wii is dominating, but simply because nobody would care for them on the other platforms. So far I couldn't name a single potential tripple-AAA third party title for the Wii, while there are plenty for XBox360 and PS3 announced.
The PS3 might very well lose against the XBox360 in Europe and USA, but one thing to keep in mind is that the XBox360 is still basically dead in japan and as long as that is the case the PS3 shouldn't have all that much trouble. As long as the PS3 offers games that the Wii can't handle it shouldn't have much trouble to find a large enough market to keep going. In a year or two when the technical gap between Wii and PS3 got larger and the PS3 had a solid price cut things might look very different.
And lets not forget, the PS2 is still keeping up with the Wii, so the Playstation brand as a whole is still doing quite well, even when the PS3 might look a little weak right now.
### Watch a video of Super Paper Mario and tell me it's the same as Super Mario Galaxy.
SuperPaperMario is not the same as MarioGalaxy, but MarioGalaxy is the same as Mario64/Sunshine and SuperPaperMario is the same as PaperMario. Beside, even if the gameplay is completly different, having the same characters in each and every game does get extremely boring, especially when you already had those characters around for 20+ years.
### The Wii has some awesome-looking titles coming that aren't Nintendo's main series'
Have you actually looked at those titles? Project HAMMER looks like a totally generic hack&slash title, like you can find dozens already on every other console, Disaster seems, from the little we have seen, like a generic third person action title and Sadness is still more vaporware then a real game. Now FireEmblem isn't bad, but its not a title that needs the Wii, it already played fine the last three times on GBA and Gamecube
Mario Sunshine, Mario Strikers, Metroid Prime, Super Smash Brothers Melee and Paper Mario 2. The Gamecube is looking better and better...
Whenever I look at the Wii I kind of get a déjà vu, I already played all those games or their prequels on the Cube, adding a bit motion control here and there is all nice and good, but where are the new games? I mean the completly new ones, not the franchise recycling that is going on here. So far I see only Disaster Day of Crisis and Project HAMMER, but they look like generic shovelware that you wouldn't even waste to look at when they would be announced for a PS2, not like the potential tripple AAA titles that I would expect from Nintendo.
I don't think the risk was all that big, if any at all. The Wii is making money basically from day one, thanks to being based on Gamecube hardware, so even if the Wii would have completly flopped, there is a good chance that they still would have made money from it, since the development costs for the thing could be keep quite low. And even that would have failed they still had the DS being there as backup.
The OLPC laptop costs currently a little less then $200, doesn't have any moving parts and should be more then enough for school usage. If you give students real laptops you will of course have a ton of issues, but there really is no reason why you should give them a full blown expensive and fragile laptop, when better alternatives are possible.
Holy shit, MS rigged their Xboxes and 360s to self-destruct if they ever got out of the console business?
Actually, yes, they have. Or what do you expect to happen with XBoxLive when Microsoft leaves the console business. It lost sure won't stop your console from booting, but a large part of the experience will be lost.
Back when I was in school we had to build a map of our school in the computer science class, now ok, it wasn't for Doom, but that might be because we did it back then when CommandKeen was still popular and Doom not yet released. I mean, duh, building things you already know from reallife is among the most normal things you can do and well, since walking around it is a much more fun thing to do then just watching blueprints from it in a CAD program, using a FPS is the natural choice these days.
This is really starting to get totally ridiculous.
One problem with the Wii is that while it opens a new market, it makes little to attract to the old customers. When I have the choice between rolling a marble and some nice sci-fi setting. I'll pick the sci-fi setting, not because of the violence, but simply because I like video games that allow me to explore different worlds and well, rolling a marble just isn't enough. Today there simply are almost no big titles that have some good story and lack violence, which is kind of sad, since a lot of good story telling works a lot better when you don't have to kill hundreds of bad guys in between. All that said, the DS got TraceMemory and HotelDusk, which give some hope that we sooner or later might see similar things on the Wii.
Those that don't want violence in video games should just start producing non-violent ones. With all the violent games out there, you would guess there is quite a bit of a market left for non-violent onces, but except a little sports game here or a mini-game there, the market is mostly ignored by the developers/publishers. Where are the non-violent triple-AAA titles?
Lets also not forget that Nintendo keep the Wii secret for quite a long time. So developers simply couldn't prepare any titles for it, since they couldn't guess what Nintendo was doing. Back when the Wiimote was announced a lot of developers told something along the line of "Nice idea, but it would have been even nicer if Nintendo had told us a bit earlier". Nintendo is simply developing their stuff in isolation, they are the ones who now what they are doing a lot sooner then any third party, so they always have quite a head start. The 'problem' Nintendo has is that they are developing stuff for their own good and not for the demands of the third parties.
How many games are out there that actually change dramatically during play? I have a hard time to name even a single one. The weapons get bigger as get the bad guys, but you basically just move from killing people/monster to killing bigger monsters. The experince a game provides in the first hour, isn't really different from that ten hours down the road.
One thing to keep in mind is that the Xbox360 is not just a game console, but basically the PC for the living room. You already can buy movies via XBoxLive and things might expand quite a bit in that area in the future. So the thing goes beyond games and that might be why Microsoft is willing to take some loss on the thing, since the "living room PC" is still a mostly unconquered market waiting for somebody to take it.
### There's a point at the end of [Shadow of the Colossus] where everything you think is going to happen has happened, but it hasn't, and the horse is killed in a rock fall. It's just devastating...
One huge problem that video games have when it comes to such emotional scenes is that video games are not 'final', if stuff goes wrong I can just retry, load and older savegame and things like that. Often it is simply not clear if an event went the way it did because I did a mistake or because it is the only way to progress in the game.
In WingCommanderIII for example when the Behemoth gets destroyed, the first thing I did was to try again, then again and then give up and let the story continue, the emotional scene didn't really work because as a player I was expecting to succeed, but couldn't. Similar issue in The Longest Journey when Emma gets shoot, I did load a old savegame to try if there was a way around it, well, there wasn't.
Now in SotC it was more clear, there was just one bridge, so it couldn't be avoided, but still I my first thought wasn't "Oh no, my horse...", but "Could I avoid this when I retry?", the answer was of course "no", but the very fact that that thought crossed my mind removed a lot of impact from that scene, it brought back the idea that it was just a game. Same issue later on when one turns into a Colossus, the player is in control and so there is always the question "Is there a different solution to this 'level'?", the scene can't be enjoyed by itself on the first try.
So far I really haven't seen much good solutions to this issue. Some games make it clear by making it a complete cutscene without any interaction (Aeris in FF7), some other can get away with it because things happen outside the influence of the player (Beyond Good & Evil when Pey'j dies). The most interesting solution is probably in Façade, where you simply don't have those clear cut events that change how the game continues, but instead each of your actions influences the progression a little bit. However Façade is a very small game, so that solution might not be practical for a random 10-20h game.
The PS3 is still slaughtering the Xbox360 in japan, which means it is without any real competition in terms of 'hardcore' games there. The PS3 might look rather dead now, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it still makes number #1 this time around, it just needs a few more games. And when it comes to games the PS3 has already plenty of high quality on its release lists, on the Wii side I however have yet to see anything that isn't a rehash or minigame, which makes its long term success kind of doubtful.
### I don't know.. i'll grant my first post wasn't the best example but i feel accomplished when a pass a level, beat an online opponent, level up my mmorpg character..
True, but those are very simple emotions, when you have success you enjoy it, when you don't frustration follows. I think the point is that games have a hard time moving beyond those simple emotions. You don't need any connection to the game world at all to feel success or failure, you don't need to know the characters, like them, feel with them or anything along the line, you don't even need characters in the first place, a Tetris brick will do. With movies however you often do feel with the characters, you like them, hate them and whatever, you don't do the same with that random always respawning character in CounterStrike, you might have feelings for the player behind it, but not for the game character itself. Now there are more emotional games like CounterStrike on the market, but even the best ones have a very hard time to even get close to just an average movie.
Slashdot Mirror
### All three consoles have the ability to do the same style of game.
Wrong, the Wii is not in the same league as PS3 and XBox360, it will not be able to do a things that use huge crowds like AssassinsCreed or DeadRising, things that make use of physics engine will be impossible as well. Sure, sometimes you might be able to scale stuff down, but often times you simply won't be able to do that. Processing power can be very relevant to gameplay and the Wii just hasn't enough to keep up.
### There is no underlying reason why the Wii, inherently, is limited to B titles,
True, you could do all kinds of interesting games on the Wii, the question is: Is there a market for it? And I don't think thats the case, people are buying the Wii for Wii Sports not to play the next GTA on it. Large sales don't really matter if the people who buy the Wii aren't interested in that kind of games.
### companies are now scrambling to get their big AAA teams on board, but it will take time.
Name one big AAA third party title that is making it to the Wii, just one. The biggest thing I know is No More Heroes, but even that doesn't come near the AAA potential that a AssassinsCreed, GTA4 or RE5 has. The big titles are all PS3/XBox360 right now and there is no announcement around to show that this is going to change.
People are always assuming that the Wii will magically get developers because it is selling lots of units right now, but forgetting that the XBox360 still has a solid lead and will continue to stay close to the Wii for a long long while, even if the Wii outsells it. This means that the market for those games simply will be larger on XBox360 for a long while to come and the Wii hardware isn't getting fresher over time, the more month pass, the more outdated it will look. People are not going to play GTA5 on the Wii after they already have played a superior GTA4 on the XBox360/PS3 a year earlier.
### But many of these games will eventually end up on the Wii, no question about it.
As crappy ports maybe. As develop-from-scratch from the Wii, I don't think so, there is currently no indication for that and I doubt that there is even a large enough market on the Wii. Just because a bunch of casual gamers buy the Wii, doesn't mean that they want to play Assassins Creed.
### Finally, I think you don't quite understand how friend codes work.
I understand very well how they work. The sole reason they where invented was to stop random players from interacting with each other via chat or voice, which in turn limits online gaming to random match making and makes it rather useless for anything team based. Now there is of course nothing stopping Nintendo from allowing chat in online games for everybody, but so far that was exactly what they wanted to avoid.
### And why would you need position sensing? I guess you mean integrating acceleration twice to get position, which tends to become inexact, but what would you need that for?
To get proper 1:1 mapping from the players action to the game characters action. Currently that mapping is limited to rather simplistic swing motions and doesn't work at all for slow ones (i.e. say putting a key in a keyhole in an adventure game, controlling a hand like in Black&White). Sometimes there are workarounds, but a lot of stuff just doesn't work very well without real 1:1 mapping. The realistic sword fighting game might be a fluffy dream that never turns true.
### The Wii is the most successfull console this generation,
The XBox360 still has a solid lead on the Wii and even the PS3 isn't that far behind. Fast sales in the first few month don't mean all that much for the years to come.
### the Wii dead by 2008?
I don't mean dead as in discontinued, but dead as in 'no good games'. What the developers are doing is trying to quickly cash in on the Wii, they are not doing the big games, those are happening on other consoles and I seriously doubt that everybody will just through away all their next-gen work and develop again for hardware that is a generation behind. And heck, even if they would, that would mean we will see good games somewhen in 2009, after all those developers have to finish their games which they are developing right now for XBox360 and PS3 first, before they could start again for a new game on the Wii.
### However, the thing I was actually taking exception with in your statement was that you claimed that "the titles aren't exclusive because the Wii is dominating, but simply because nobody would care for them on the other platforms." That is a really weird statement.
If the Wii would be dominating Ubisoft would move AssassinCreed over to the Wii, Rockstar would port their GTA and Konami would bring you MetalGear4, while Square gives you FF:XIII and Capcom RE5. Fact however is: They don't, not a single of those next-gen games was announced for the Wii. Instead Ubisoft gives us a bad port of Prince of Persia, Konami brings us Dewy's Adventure, Capcom a RE4 remake and a RE rail shooter. The big titles happen elsewhere, the Wii only gets the small ones that are cheap to produce. Nobody is right now investing large amounts of money in Wii development, like they do with XBox360 and PS3.
### You should keep in mind that most large developers have only just started to move teams away from the PS3 to the Wii.
Do you have any source for that? And what does 'move away' mean in this case? Take five people out of a 100+ staff for a PS3 game or doing a 50/50 split? So far none of the third party Wii games was big enough to actually need a large stuff of people.
### As for the issues you raise with the Wii: How good the Wiimote's accuracy really is remains to be seen.
Not really, Bluetooth drivers are available for PC, so all the data that you can get out of a Wiimote is well known and that data just has its limits. You simply can't get decent position sensing out of a accelerometer.
### Obviously, Nintendo decided to go with the lower price instead of with faster hardware.
The thing is, they could have gone lower price *and* faster hardware. For $250 you can get a lot more today then what the Wii is capable of, you might not reach the XBox360, but you should get somewhat close, especially when leaving out HDTV. It of course would have made them less profit, but it would make the Wii look a lot less outdated, then it does now and in a few years.
### Nintendo can't just attract third-parties.
If Microsoft wants a third party, they buy them. Now Nintendo might not be able to go that far, but they could at least try to care and secure a few decent exclusives, which they however failed to do.
### That will improve dramatically within the next few months.
What makes you think so? Online will never be able to compete with PS3 or XBox360 as long as Nintendo is using friends codes to lock out any kind of communication between players. And speaking about games, as said, I haven't seen any big third parties, not in the stores, not on the release lists, they are nowhere to be found. If the developers are now all jumping on the Wii train I would expect to see some announcement, tech demos, screenshots, videos or anything interesting, but that just isn't the case.
If there would be some hope that the Wii wouldn't be totally dead in 2008, just as it right now, I would already bought one, but I just don't see any indication for that.
Given the state of gaming and how most of them don't even have properly animated eyes, let alone properly player controlled ones, I really doubt that eye contact matters at all currently, especially not in third person camera. I think the reasons why many of the rules still work is simply because we role play a little bit. There is no point in placing your avatars a pixel away from another one when you have plenty of open room, so people end up spacing their characters around more evenly, it simply is the logical thing to do to make the game not look totally stupid. The reason why it still might get uncomfortable to have a avatar close by in an open space is because that avatar didn't end up there by random, the person behind that avatar did that most likely on purpose, so you react to what you guess was the intend of that other person, not the avatar itself. On a crowded place on the other side nobody cares if avatars look at each other, run through each other or do other weird things, since all those things happen at random.
I think the rules that still apply are not because we identify with the avatar so much, but simply because we know that behind that other avatar is a real person, so we don't want to step on those toes or get annoying when he does on ours. If the avatars ran into each other or not however isn't an issue, we just don't care, because those things just happen in todays games.
### I don't see how that relates to the point I was making, namely, that a console usually can't make a comeback after failing for a year.
It means that the PS3 is losing against the XBox360, not against the Wii. Which in turns means that Xbox360 lack of support in Japan is a huge issue. As you said, you can't win without Japan and the XBox360 is as far away as being a success in Japan as always, which means the PS3 is alone in its market segment there. This of course doesn't make the PS3 a winner, but you can't really lose when you are the sole contester in that market either. At the moment I would guess we end up with a 50/50 (or 60/40) split between PS3 and Xbox360 and a whole lot of multiplatform titles.
### Not only is that claim utterly absurd,
Please name the big third party titles for the Wii that aren't spin-offs or gaiden on the Wii and I mean big as in potential AAA top title, not small stuff like Elebits and vaporware like Sadness doesn't count either. I looked quite a bit, but I couldn't name you a single one. The only companies from which I see solid Wii support right now are Ubisoft and EA, and both of them currently use the Wii for making money, not for marking new games.
### I also have no idea where it is coming from. What made you hate the Wii so much?
Back when the Revolution was announced at E3 I, as a loyal Nintendo customer for 15 years, couldn't wait to buy one, Nintendo was always good at innovations, so what could go wrong? Well, as it turned out, lots of.
First there was the controller, which just didn't have enough sensory to make true 1:1 mapping happening, meaning all the great innovative games I thought of simply were not possible or would need to be scaled down to the point where they simply weren't interesting any more.
Secondly there are the graphics and CPU, I don't mind the lack of HD, but just shipping a slightly improved Gamecube in a new box doesn't cut it either. The Gamecube was in term of power for the money the best console hardware ever released, I expected the Wii to be of similar quality by *todays* technical standards, it however doesn't get close, no shader support, no anti-aliasing, etc. The Wii would have been outdated if it was released three years ago.
Third there was the price, I wouldn't even have minded if the Wii is being technically last-gen, if the price would have reflected that, but it just didn't. $250 for the Wii is ridiculous considering the Gamecube was $200 back in 2001.
Last not least, the most important aspect, the games. As before Nintendo completly failed to attract third party, after the N64 and Gamecube they should have known better, thats just inexcusable. Also Nintendo talked about "big idea being more important then big money" back at E3, today however the Wii is as close a platform as ever, neither is it open to indie developers nor does Nintendo actually support small games, PS3 and Xbox360 online shops are full with small games, both improved classics as well as completly original ones. The Wii on the other side only offers non improved classic, nothing original, no additions like network play and all that at a high price. And if that all wouldn't be enough Nintendo did their best to piss of Gamecube owners, not only was there support in the last years pretty substandard, they also delay Zelda:TP a year just so that they could hit the Wii launch, they also turned SuperPaperMario from being a Gamecube into a Wii game and who knows what other games suffered similar fate. If Nintendo would have wanted it should have been trivial to pack Wii and Gamecube binaries on the same disk to get a smooth transition, turning all those titles that don't make much use of the Wiimote into multiplatform titles, but they simply didn't, Wii titles only run on the Wii, even if they don't make any use of the Wiimote or that little bit of extra processing power. And if that would be enough, Nintendo also failed to have any real Wii titles ready at launch, those titles that made use of the Wii ended up look
I don't own any of the next-gen consoles. Given however that the Wii doesn't offer anything I would be interested in and that the XBox360 has the most buggy hardware in console history as well as expensive online play, the PS3 sounds like a solid offering, not one that I would buy now, but a year or two down the road when the price is down and some more games are out, why not?
If the Xbox360 wouldn't be so damn buggy I would have already bought one, but with news about disk scratching and red rings of death every few weeks it just isn't something I want to spend money on right now.
### Nintendo could then role out an HD Wii
They sure could, but who would buy that thing? The current hype is focused mostly around Wii Sports and the controller, in two years it will be old stuff by then and I doubt that the same crowed that bought into the current hype will go to buy a Wii HD, since the normal Wii already does everything they expect from a game console. To keep up with the XBox360/PS3 the Wii HD would need to have substantial more power then just a Wii with HD capabilities added on, it would need to be a completly new machine build from scratch, which in turn would mean that WiiHD games wouldn't run on a Wii, which in turn would mean that the Wii won't ever get a decent amount of good games since it was to short lived. So the 'hardcore' gamer crowed might not exactly be happy with that either and buy into the WiiHD.
### In two years the PS/3 GPU will not be state of the art.
The PS3 won't be state of the art in two years, but in two years it might cost only $200. Nintendo could of course do a state of the art console, but they will have trouble doing that in a similar price range as the PS3, which means they will have to do a console that either isn't significantly better then a PS3 or one that costs a lot more, neither would be very attractive.
XBox360 getting more Japanese developers is of course a huge risk for Sony, but it hasn't happened with the Xbox1 and hasn't happened in the 1.5 years that the XBox360 is already out, I don't think there is all that much chance it will ever happen this generation.
### Halo Wars
Halo is a universe with a complete story, each game shows you a piece of that story. Its interesting because you want to know how the story goes, its interesting because it fits together. With Mario or Zelda games on the other side you don't have that, each game is a reset and starts from scratch, you have a few common elements here and there, but it doesn't connect, the story of Mario1 isn't continued in Mario2. You don't play a Mario because you want to know how the thing continues, but because its a good game on its own. The problem is when you don't end up having one Mario game every few years, but Mario in almost each and every game, it gets boring, you want to see a new face every know and then. And yes, even Halo with its universe and story might get boring in its tenth iteration, but its not even close to that.
### Well I suppose that take Halo 3...
You very well can, that however still leaves AssassinsCreed, HeavenlySword, BioShock, MassEffect, DeadRising, BlueDragon, Lair, HeavyRain, Crysis and a whole bunch of other titles. There is a lot of recycling going on on Xbox360 and PS3, but there are also plenty of new titles either in the making or already released. On the Wii on the other side I haven't seen a *single* one that looks great and is original.
### While more and more exclusive 3rd-party games are announced for the Wii, PS3 exclusives are going multi-platform one by one.
Multi-platform here means Xbox360, PS3 and sometimes PC, but not Wii. What the Wii gets aren't the big titles, but the spin-offs and gaidens, the FF:Crystal Chronicals, the RE:UC rail shooter and stuff like that. Those titles aren't exclusive because the Wii is dominating, but simply because nobody would care for them on the other platforms. So far I couldn't name a single potential tripple-AAA third party title for the Wii, while there are plenty for XBox360 and PS3 announced.
The PS3 might very well lose against the XBox360 in Europe and USA, but one thing to keep in mind is that the XBox360 is still basically dead in japan and as long as that is the case the PS3 shouldn't have all that much trouble. As long as the PS3 offers games that the Wii can't handle it shouldn't have much trouble to find a large enough market to keep going. In a year or two when the technical gap between Wii and PS3 got larger and the PS3 had a solid price cut things might look very different.
And lets not forget, the PS2 is still keeping up with the Wii, so the Playstation brand as a whole is still doing quite well, even when the PS3 might look a little weak right now.
### Watch a video of Super Paper Mario and tell me it's the same as Super Mario Galaxy.
SuperPaperMario is not the same as MarioGalaxy, but MarioGalaxy is the same as Mario64/Sunshine and SuperPaperMario is the same as PaperMario. Beside, even if the gameplay is completly different, having the same characters in each and every game does get extremely boring, especially when you already had those characters around for 20+ years.
### The Wii has some awesome-looking titles coming that aren't Nintendo's main series'
Have you actually looked at those titles? Project HAMMER looks like a totally generic hack&slash title, like you can find dozens already on every other console, Disaster seems, from the little we have seen, like a generic third person action title and Sadness is still more vaporware then a real game. Now FireEmblem isn't bad, but its not a title that needs the Wii, it already played fine the last three times on GBA and Gamecube
Mario Sunshine, Mario Strikers, Metroid Prime, Super Smash Brothers Melee and Paper Mario 2. The Gamecube is looking better and better...
Whenever I look at the Wii I kind of get a déjà vu, I already played all those games or their prequels on the Cube, adding a bit motion control here and there is all nice and good, but where are the new games? I mean the completly new ones, not the franchise recycling that is going on here. So far I see only Disaster Day of Crisis and Project HAMMER, but they look like generic shovelware that you wouldn't even waste to look at when they would be announced for a PS2, not like the potential tripple AAA titles that I would expect from Nintendo.
I don't think the risk was all that big, if any at all. The Wii is making money basically from day one, thanks to being based on Gamecube hardware, so even if the Wii would have completly flopped, there is a good chance that they still would have made money from it, since the development costs for the thing could be keep quite low. And even that would have failed they still had the DS being there as backup.
The OLPC laptop costs currently a little less then $200, doesn't have any moving parts and should be more then enough for school usage. If you give students real laptops you will of course have a ton of issues, but there really is no reason why you should give them a full blown expensive and fragile laptop, when better alternatives are possible.
Actually, yes, they have. Or what do you expect to happen with XBoxLive when Microsoft leaves the console business. It lost sure won't stop your console from booting, but a large part of the experience will be lost.
Back when I was in school we had to build a map of our school in the computer science class, now ok, it wasn't for Doom, but that might be because we did it back then when CommandKeen was still popular and Doom not yet released. I mean, duh, building things you already know from reallife is among the most normal things you can do and well, since walking around it is a much more fun thing to do then just watching blueprints from it in a CAD program, using a FPS is the natural choice these days.
This is really starting to get totally ridiculous.
One problem with the Wii is that while it opens a new market, it makes little to attract to the old customers. When I have the choice between rolling a marble and some nice sci-fi setting. I'll pick the sci-fi setting, not because of the violence, but simply because I like video games that allow me to explore different worlds and well, rolling a marble just isn't enough. Today there simply are almost no big titles that have some good story and lack violence, which is kind of sad, since a lot of good story telling works a lot better when you don't have to kill hundreds of bad guys in between. All that said, the DS got TraceMemory and HotelDusk, which give some hope that we sooner or later might see similar things on the Wii.
Those that don't want violence in video games should just start producing non-violent ones. With all the violent games out there, you would guess there is quite a bit of a market left for non-violent onces, but except a little sports game here or a mini-game there, the market is mostly ignored by the developers/publishers. Where are the non-violent triple-AAA titles?
Lets also not forget that Nintendo keep the Wii secret for quite a long time. So developers simply couldn't prepare any titles for it, since they couldn't guess what Nintendo was doing. Back when the Wiimote was announced a lot of developers told something along the line of "Nice idea, but it would have been even nicer if Nintendo had told us a bit earlier". Nintendo is simply developing their stuff in isolation, they are the ones who now what they are doing a lot sooner then any third party, so they always have quite a head start. The 'problem' Nintendo has is that they are developing stuff for their own good and not for the demands of the third parties.
How many games are out there that actually change dramatically during play? I have a hard time to name even a single one. The weapons get bigger as get the bad guys, but you basically just move from killing people/monster to killing bigger monsters. The experince a game provides in the first hour, isn't really different from that ten hours down the road.
One thing to keep in mind is that the Xbox360 is not just a game console, but basically the PC for the living room. You already can buy movies via XBoxLive and things might expand quite a bit in that area in the future. So the thing goes beyond games and that might be why Microsoft is willing to take some loss on the thing, since the "living room PC" is still a mostly unconquered market waiting for somebody to take it.
### There's a point at the end of [Shadow of the Colossus] where everything you think is going to happen has happened, but it hasn't, and the horse is killed in a rock fall. It's just devastating...
One huge problem that video games have when it comes to such emotional scenes is that video games are not 'final', if stuff goes wrong I can just retry, load and older savegame and things like that. Often it is simply not clear if an event went the way it did because I did a mistake or because it is the only way to progress in the game.
In WingCommanderIII for example when the Behemoth gets destroyed, the first thing I did was to try again, then again and then give up and let the story continue, the emotional scene didn't really work because as a player I was expecting to succeed, but couldn't. Similar issue in The Longest Journey when Emma gets shoot, I did load a old savegame to try if there was a way around it, well, there wasn't.
Now in SotC it was more clear, there was just one bridge, so it couldn't be avoided, but still I my first thought wasn't "Oh no, my horse...", but "Could I avoid this when I retry?", the answer was of course "no", but the very fact that that thought crossed my mind removed a lot of impact from that scene, it brought back the idea that it was just a game. Same issue later on when one turns into a Colossus, the player is in control and so there is always the question "Is there a different solution to this 'level'?", the scene can't be enjoyed by itself on the first try.
So far I really haven't seen much good solutions to this issue. Some games make it clear by making it a complete cutscene without any interaction (Aeris in FF7), some other can get away with it because things happen outside the influence of the player (Beyond Good & Evil when Pey'j dies). The most interesting solution is probably in Façade, where you simply don't have those clear cut events that change how the game continues, but instead each of your actions influences the progression a little bit. However Façade is a very small game, so that solution might not be practical for a random 10-20h game.
The PS3 is still slaughtering the Xbox360 in japan, which means it is without any real competition in terms of 'hardcore' games there. The PS3 might look rather dead now, but I wouldn't be surprised at all if it still makes number #1 this time around, it just needs a few more games. And when it comes to games the PS3 has already plenty of high quality on its release lists, on the Wii side I however have yet to see anything that isn't a rehash or minigame, which makes its long term success kind of doubtful.
### I don't know.. i'll grant my first post wasn't the best example but i feel accomplished when a pass a level, beat an online opponent, level up my mmorpg character..
True, but those are very simple emotions, when you have success you enjoy it, when you don't frustration follows. I think the point is that games have a hard time moving beyond those simple emotions. You don't need any connection to the game world at all to feel success or failure, you don't need to know the characters, like them, feel with them or anything along the line, you don't even need characters in the first place, a Tetris brick will do. With movies however you often do feel with the characters, you like them, hate them and whatever, you don't do the same with that random always respawning character in CounterStrike, you might have feelings for the player behind it, but not for the game character itself. Now there are more emotional games like CounterStrike on the market, but even the best ones have a very hard time to even get close to just an average movie.
WoW isn't engrossing, its addicting.