If you actually look at the raw hardware, you'll see that the PS2 is substantially faster. The PS2 had a GPU with 16 pixel pipelines running at 150 Mhz, resulting in a fill rate of 2.4 gigapixels/sec. The GC had a GPU with 4 pixel pipelines running at 165 Mhz, giving it a fill rate of 660 megapixels/second. The GC did T&L in hardware, but the PS2 had a seperate vector coprocessor running at 300 MHz to do T&L.
If you were displaying a flat-shaded CAD model, the PS2 would indeed be tremendously faster. The problem with the PS2 was that every extra feature you enabled resulted in a huge hit in fill rate. The GC did all these effects in hardware. So by the time you'd gotten roughly comparable features enabled (lighting, filtering, etc), you'd also lost your polygon count advantage. The PS2 was really designed to run games like FF X and The Boucer, with very high-poly models and relatively simple shading and lighting.
The current market is what you'd consider the "hardcore" gaming market. The current market is the 100m people that own PS2s and GCs and XBoxes.
The market Nintendo is targetting with the Wii is the hypothetical casual gamer market. There are some indications that there is such a market, as evidenced by sales of games like the Sims, but saying "most of the potential market" is non-hardcore (by your definition) is misleading. There are no indications that the casual gaming market is anywhere close to the size, let alone bigger, than the "hardcore" gaming market.
Over the lifetime of the system, it won't be 3x the cost. If you buy 20 games over the life of the system, and Wii games and up being $10 cheaper on average than PS3 games*, then you're talking $1000 versus $1500*. That's $500 over 5-6 years, or about $10 a month. Is $10 a month going to make me buy one console over the other? I pay $40 a month for broadband, and $50 for cell phone service. $10 a month isn't going to make a difference --- I'm going to go with the system that has the games I want.
*) People will say, "but Wii content will be cheaper", and I agree, but it won't be *that* much cheaper. Remember, a texture costs about the same to create whether you render it at 1024x1024 or 256x256, and a model costs about the same wether it has 1m or 5m polygons. Indeed, most artwork is created at very high detail, and scaled down for the game using tools, so the cost savings from targetting a less powerful system isn't huge.
*) Why compare the $600 PS3 with the $200 Wii when the $500 PS3 exists? Just to be dishonest?
Look at this month's screenshots of Zelda: TP in EGM and tell me that.
I looked it them and had a very mixed reaction. On one hand, it looks pretty good. On the other hand, in a day-and age where I watch Boston Legal in HD, the pixelated trees in the distance really killed the scene for me.
Graphical immersion in the game matters. If the graphics on a system are noticibly inferior to what a person is used to elsewhere, that'll kill the immersion, even if it wouldn't have if the person hadn't been exposed to better.
Wii's graphics will likely be okay for its target market, but only if its target market is different from the 360/PS3 crowd (which is a good bet). As I said, Zelda TP looks great, artistic and all, but this is 2006, and 480p is still 480p, and Link's hat had far too few polygons.
1) Each generation of console is 10-20x more powerful than the previous one. It's not Sony and MS exaggerating their claims, but rather the fact that increasing preceived graphical quality by a little bit takes a large increase in the system's power. Consider something like anisotropic filtering. It can easily double the performance requirement from the hardware, without delivering what you might consider to be a doubling in graphical quality. However, it's worth it, because it makes touches like text on billboards so much sharper and easier to read (ie: more realistic). In reality, the PS2 is easily 20x faster than the PS1. That's why it can deliver graphics that you might consider to look 2-3x better overall.
2) When ATI speaks about hardware performance, they're talking about actual performance, not perceived visual quality. So that 2-2.5x number likely means a few more pixel pipelines, a 50% higher clockspeed, and that's it. If game developers don't actually use any next-gen feature (ie: stuff like anisotropic filtering, shaders, etc), games could look substantially better, but they won't look anywhere near "twice as good" in the sense that you think PS2 looks twice as good as PS1.
3) Your scaling about the relative delta in graphics performance is completely off. The PS3 GPU and the Gamecube's GPU are in completely different leagues. The PS3's GPU can theoretically draw 12 gigapixels per second (24 pixel pipes, 500 MHz clockspeed). Moreover, it's got special hardware for reducing the impact of stuff like anisotropic filtering, and its got pixel shaders and whatnot for special effects. The Gamecube's GPU can draw 660 megapixels per second. If the 2.5x figure is accurate, then the Revolution's GPU can hit probably 1.3-1.4 gigapixels per second, with far fewer special effects and no pixel shaders, putting its theoretical performance about 1/8 the theoretical performance of the PS3's GPU. Even given the difference in resolution, the Wii just won't be able to compete, graphically.
4) The proof is in the pudding. Look at the screenshots of Zelda: Twilight Princess in this weeks EGM. When I saw them, two things popped into my mind. One: they are so artistically drawn, and really do look great. Two: the Revolution really can't do the artwork justice. Nintendo, faced with limited hardware power, did the rational thing: the made a game with beautiful colors and textures, but with limited quality in the details. Most Revolution games will likely look the same way. They'll look good, because of good and somewhat stylized artwork, but they won't have the detail, smoothness, sharpness, and special effects that PS3 and Xbox 360 games will. That fits right in with Nintendo's policy of creating "fun, easy to develop" games, but don't think for a second the same games wouldn't look a ton better done on the PS3 in 720p.
5) The PS2 is actually faster than the GC by a substantial margin. However, it's designed more to push a huge number of polygons with relatively few special effects. If you look carefully at PS2 games versus Gamecube games, you'll notice that PS2 models are substantially higher in polygon count, while Gamecube models tend to mask lower-polygon counts with rich textures and special effects.
At least the competition is expensive because they're giving you a lot of hardware. How do you justify Nintendo selling die-shrunk 5yr-old tech for the same price as they did originally, despite the fact that the cost to manufacture the hardware has shrunken to a fraction of its original price?
Of course, they were competing at a time when their competitor, which was vastly more popular and had a vastly larger game library, was selling its console for $200. Now, with the nearest competitor at $400, and Sony with a fully-competitive offering at $500, and Sony being the one with the huge marketshare and gaming library, the playing field looks vastly different.
The console market isn't hugely into PC-style RPGs. The only console they really took off on is the XBox, whose library heavily overlaps the PC one anyway. When a console gamer talks about RPGs, they mean something like Star Ocean or Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. These sorts of RPGs are a very big genre, especially in Japan. To put it into perspective, three of the last four Final Fantasy games (VII, VIII, and X) are on the top-20 most-sold games list, each with at least 7.5m sales. Only the top-4 PC games (Myst, Starcraft, The Sims, and Half Life) have more sales. Morrowind isn't even close (at 4.5m for Elder Scrolls III and 1.7m for IV), and even the Halos, as popular as they are, didn't make the top-20.
Your comments about "dwindling market" and whatnot are entirely besides the point. The console gaming market is still hugely lucrative (to the tune of $6bn in software sales alone last year), much more so than the PC gaming market (which is less than one-quarter the size).
Now, you might very well be right that there is a market out there for the Wii, but you have no evidence of how large it is or how lucrative it is outside perhaps your own feelings. Meanwhile, there is a very large and very real market out there for Sony and Microsoft to target.
Also, your comments about the demographics of the gaming market are off. The average gamer is now quite a bit older than 18, and if you think a $500 console is going to put-off even the teenage market, think again. These are the same people that spend $100 for a pair of jeans and walk around school with $300 iPods that often get stolen and quickly replaced. The XBox 360 flew off the shelves at $400, $100 more isn't going to hurt the PS3 substantially.
We're not fighting a bunch of camel jockeys here. We're fighting a sophisticated criminal organization with millions in funding.
Seriously, if an organization managed to hijack several airplanes on the same day and fly them into two key targets in the United States, don't you think it's sophisticated enough to think about how the NSA might try and monitor them?
The fact that there hasn't been another attack doesn't really prove anything more than the fact that there was no attack for three years prior to 9/11, or five years prior to that. If you could show that the number of terrorist attacks per unit time under the current security policy are lower than the number per unit time under our old policies, then you'd have a case. But just saying "there hasn't been any attacks for five years" doesn't mean anything --- it could simply mean that terrorist attacks are rare regardless of your policy.
Of course, there is also the "we're at war" aspect. Why should terrorists go to the trouble of trying to kill Americans in the US when there are a whole bunch of Americans in Iraq that are much easier to target. You could just as easily argue that the lack of attacks over the last several years is due not to better security policies at home, but the fact that terrorists are occupied killing Americans abroad.
On the other hand, you have some fairly strong evidence to suggest that our current security policy really isn't any more secure than it used to be. Just last month, auditors tried to sneak weapons onboard airplanes, and succeeded in the vast majority of attempts, despite consciously making the weapons easy to discover. At the same time, you had the Israeli guys audit our airplane security, and conclude that it was "not so much a system for protecting Americans as it was a system for annoying them."
The only point I have to add is that if Nintendo does actually accrue a large library of games with a lot of variety and depth, it'll do very well. However, it has to overcome the legacy of the N64 and Gamecube, both of which were actually good consoles, but were hampered by their narrow libraries.
Only 25% of American households have a PS2. What do you want to bet there is a tremendous overlap between the households that have a PS2 and the households that have HD?
What Sony realized was that 1/3 of its target market already had HD. Moreover, well over half would have HD by the time the console reached "middle age" (eg: 2010). Proper support for HD was a no-brainer.
The PSP is only $50 more than the DS! If you like the gaming library better, sure, that's fine, but saving $50 is a stupid reason to choose one console over another.
You people bitch that you don't want HD and you don't want Blu-Ray, but you choose to focus on the console with HDMI?
The simple fact is that the low-end PS3 is not worthless as a gaming console like the low end 360 is. It is just as capable in gaming terms as the high-end PS3. That means the legitimate comparison is between the $400 360 and the $500 PS3. The $100 price difference isn't even the cost of two games. The differences in the libraries of the two systems will basically wipe out that price differential.
The XBox 360 still has the problem that its library is uncertain. It's still missing entire genres (eg: RPGs), and still suffers from playing second-fiddle to PC ports. If Microsoft doesn't fix that problem, the PS3 is going to win anyway, $100 price difference or not.
1) Cell's performance is mediocre on typical single-threaded applications (eg: AI). Not because it has inherently bad single-threaded performance, but because most single-threaded code happens to be integer code, and the SPE's integer and branching performance sucks.
2) Most simulations are highly parallel. There are lots of cases where you can simulate many parts of the system simultaniously, and only synchronize state at certain points.
Actually, the GC's worldwide sales is about 20m. XBox's, however, is about 22m, around 10% more.
While Nintendo surely made a profit last time around, the loss of marketshare is alarming. Microsoft's stole Nintendo's second-place spot despite terrible sales in Japan and a very mediocre software library. A company needs to look out for its future, and going from first place to third in two generations is something that should worry management, regardless of current profitability.
Of course, beyond that, the article is absolutely right. Both the N64 and Gamecube suffered from the same problem. The libraries had no depth and little variety. That's why Nintendo went from being first, to second, and now to third.
Uh, no. The SNES was a far superior system to the GC (relatively). Back in the day, the SNES was a beast of a console. It had twice the main memory and video memory of the Genesis, and an audio DSP with more hardware channels and 8x the amount of audio memory. The video chip supported 50% more sprites, and did several tricks in hardware, such as hardware rotation, scaling, and transparency for the sprites as well as hardware transformation of the background layer. The Nintendo 64 also put its competitors to shame technically, with a CPU three times as fast, a far more powerful rasterizer, and hardware support for texture filtering and anti-aliasing. Basically, the N64 was the only console of its generation that could do 3D properly.
The Gamecube and the Wii are nowhere near the quality of the SNES and N64, as pieces of hardware. Nintendo has focus-shifted from making hardware that enables great games, to being a software company that just happens to make hardware.
Are you insane? Nintendo only sold 20m Gamecubes worldwide, over the life of the system. You think they're going to sell that many Wii's just at launch?
I think you drastically overestimate the interest in the Wii. Outside Slashdot, its not on the radars of most gamers.
Fun for whom? I never liked a Mario game (ever) good enough to finish it. I never understood the point of just trying to get from one end of the map to the other, or why he has to go through every section instead of just bee-lining to the end. After the first few levels, it just all seems the same to me.
Countries don't deserve credit for cultivating great people, cultures do. A country has a culture, but the history of a nation is not necessarily an expression of that culture. What you originally referred to was being "proud of America's history", but what you're talking about here is being "proud of America's culture". The American culture is indeed an admirable one, of which Americans should rightfully be proud*. The history of the United States, on the other hand, like that of most powreful countries, is mixed at best.
*) Though I wish more would stop taking credit for European ideas that were adopted into American culture...
Slashdot Mirror
TP was delayed when it was announced for the Wii. The graphics have improved *a lot* since then.
The Wii version isn't identical graphically to the GC version. As one of the premier launch games for the Wii, Nintendo would be stupid to make it so.
If you actually look at the raw hardware, you'll see that the PS2 is substantially faster. The PS2 had a GPU with 16 pixel pipelines running at 150 Mhz, resulting in a fill rate of 2.4 gigapixels/sec. The GC had a GPU with 4 pixel pipelines running at 165 Mhz, giving it a fill rate of 660 megapixels/second. The GC did T&L in hardware, but the PS2 had a seperate vector coprocessor running at 300 MHz to do T&L.
If you were displaying a flat-shaded CAD model, the PS2 would indeed be tremendously faster. The problem with the PS2 was that every extra feature you enabled resulted in a huge hit in fill rate. The GC did all these effects in hardware. So by the time you'd gotten roughly comparable features enabled (lighting, filtering, etc), you'd also lost your polygon count advantage. The PS2 was really designed to run games like FF X and The Boucer, with very high-poly models and relatively simple shading and lighting.
The current market is what you'd consider the "hardcore" gaming market. The current market is the 100m people that own PS2s and GCs and XBoxes.
The market Nintendo is targetting with the Wii is the hypothetical casual gamer market. There are some indications that there is such a market, as evidenced by sales of games like the Sims, but saying "most of the potential market" is non-hardcore (by your definition) is misleading. There are no indications that the casual gaming market is anywhere close to the size, let alone bigger, than the "hardcore" gaming market.
Over the lifetime of the system, it won't be 3x the cost. If you buy 20 games over the life of the system, and Wii games and up being $10 cheaper on average than PS3 games*, then you're talking $1000 versus $1500*. That's $500 over 5-6 years, or about $10 a month. Is $10 a month going to make me buy one console over the other? I pay $40 a month for broadband, and $50 for cell phone service. $10 a month isn't going to make a difference --- I'm going to go with the system that has the games I want.
*) People will say, "but Wii content will be cheaper", and I agree, but it won't be *that* much cheaper. Remember, a texture costs about the same to create whether you render it at 1024x1024 or 256x256, and a model costs about the same wether it has 1m or 5m polygons. Indeed, most artwork is created at very high detail, and scaled down for the game using tools, so the cost savings from targetting a less powerful system isn't huge.
*) Why compare the $600 PS3 with the $200 Wii when the $500 PS3 exists? Just to be dishonest?
Look at this month's screenshots of Zelda: TP in EGM and tell me that.
I looked it them and had a very mixed reaction. On one hand, it looks pretty good. On the other hand, in a day-and age where I watch Boston Legal in HD, the pixelated trees in the distance really killed the scene for me.
Graphical immersion in the game matters. If the graphics on a system are noticibly inferior to what a person is used to elsewhere, that'll kill the immersion, even if it wouldn't have if the person hadn't been exposed to better.
Wii's graphics will likely be okay for its target market, but only if its target market is different from the 360/PS3 crowd (which is a good bet). As I said, Zelda TP looks great, artistic and all, but this is 2006, and 480p is still 480p, and Link's hat had far too few polygons.
To put it into perspective: the GC's GPU is about 10x-15x more powerful than the N64's GPU.
Now, considering the graphical delta between the GC and the N64, does a 2.5x difference still sound impressive to you?
1) Each generation of console is 10-20x more powerful than the previous one. It's not Sony and MS exaggerating their claims, but rather the fact that increasing preceived graphical quality by a little bit takes a large increase in the system's power. Consider something like anisotropic filtering. It can easily double the performance requirement from the hardware, without delivering what you might consider to be a doubling in graphical quality. However, it's worth it, because it makes touches like text on billboards so much sharper and easier to read (ie: more realistic). In reality, the PS2 is easily 20x faster than the PS1. That's why it can deliver graphics that you might consider to look 2-3x better overall.
2) When ATI speaks about hardware performance, they're talking about actual performance, not perceived visual quality. So that 2-2.5x number likely means a few more pixel pipelines, a 50% higher clockspeed, and that's it. If game developers don't actually use any next-gen feature (ie: stuff like anisotropic filtering, shaders, etc), games could look substantially better, but they won't look anywhere near "twice as good" in the sense that you think PS2 looks twice as good as PS1.
3) Your scaling about the relative delta in graphics performance is completely off. The PS3 GPU and the Gamecube's GPU are in completely different leagues. The PS3's GPU can theoretically draw 12 gigapixels per second (24 pixel pipes, 500 MHz clockspeed). Moreover, it's got special hardware for reducing the impact of stuff like anisotropic filtering, and its got pixel shaders and whatnot for special effects. The Gamecube's GPU can draw 660 megapixels per second. If the 2.5x figure is accurate, then the Revolution's GPU can hit probably 1.3-1.4 gigapixels per second, with far fewer special effects and no pixel shaders, putting its theoretical performance about 1/8 the theoretical performance of the PS3's GPU. Even given the difference in resolution, the Wii just won't be able to compete, graphically.
4) The proof is in the pudding. Look at the screenshots of Zelda: Twilight Princess in this weeks EGM. When I saw them, two things popped into my mind. One: they are so artistically drawn, and really do look great. Two: the Revolution really can't do the artwork justice. Nintendo, faced with limited hardware power, did the rational thing: the made a game with beautiful colors and textures, but with limited quality in the details. Most Revolution games will likely look the same way. They'll look good, because of good and somewhat stylized artwork, but they won't have the detail, smoothness, sharpness, and special effects that PS3 and Xbox 360 games will. That fits right in with Nintendo's policy of creating "fun, easy to develop" games, but don't think for a second the same games wouldn't look a ton better done on the PS3 in 720p.
5) The PS2 is actually faster than the GC by a substantial margin. However, it's designed more to push a huge number of polygons with relatively few special effects. If you look carefully at PS2 games versus Gamecube games, you'll notice that PS2 models are substantially higher in polygon count, while Gamecube models tend to mask lower-polygon counts with rich textures and special effects.
At least the competition is expensive because they're giving you a lot of hardware. How do you justify Nintendo selling die-shrunk 5yr-old tech for the same price as they did originally, despite the fact that the cost to manufacture the hardware has shrunken to a fraction of its original price?
Of course, they were competing at a time when their competitor, which was vastly more popular and had a vastly larger game library, was selling its console for $200. Now, with the nearest competitor at $400, and Sony with a fully-competitive offering at $500, and Sony being the one with the huge marketshare and gaming library, the playing field looks vastly different.
A D&D life simulator?
The console market isn't hugely into PC-style RPGs. The only console they really took off on is the XBox, whose library heavily overlaps the PC one anyway. When a console gamer talks about RPGs, they mean something like Star Ocean or Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest. These sorts of RPGs are a very big genre, especially in Japan. To put it into perspective, three of the last four Final Fantasy games (VII, VIII, and X) are on the top-20 most-sold games list, each with at least 7.5m sales. Only the top-4 PC games (Myst, Starcraft, The Sims, and Half Life) have more sales. Morrowind isn't even close (at 4.5m for Elder Scrolls III and 1.7m for IV), and even the Halos, as popular as they are, didn't make the top-20.
Your comments about "dwindling market" and whatnot are entirely besides the point. The console gaming market is still hugely lucrative (to the tune of $6bn in software sales alone last year), much more so than the PC gaming market (which is less than one-quarter the size).
Now, you might very well be right that there is a market out there for the Wii, but you have no evidence of how large it is or how lucrative it is outside perhaps your own feelings. Meanwhile, there is a very large and very real market out there for Sony and Microsoft to target.
Also, your comments about the demographics of the gaming market are off. The average gamer is now quite a bit older than 18, and if you think a $500 console is going to put-off even the teenage market, think again. These are the same people that spend $100 for a pair of jeans and walk around school with $300 iPods that often get stolen and quickly replaced. The XBox 360 flew off the shelves at $400, $100 more isn't going to hurt the PS3 substantially.
Do you think these people are stupid?
We're not fighting a bunch of camel jockeys here. We're fighting a sophisticated criminal organization with millions in funding.
Seriously, if an organization managed to hijack several airplanes on the same day and fly them into two key targets in the United States, don't you think it's sophisticated enough to think about how the NSA might try and monitor them?
The fact that there hasn't been another attack doesn't really prove anything more than the fact that there was no attack for three years prior to 9/11, or five years prior to that. If you could show that the number of terrorist attacks per unit time under the current security policy are lower than the number per unit time under our old policies, then you'd have a case. But just saying "there hasn't been any attacks for five years" doesn't mean anything --- it could simply mean that terrorist attacks are rare regardless of your policy.
Of course, there is also the "we're at war" aspect. Why should terrorists go to the trouble of trying to kill Americans in the US when there are a whole bunch of Americans in Iraq that are much easier to target. You could just as easily argue that the lack of attacks over the last several years is due not to better security policies at home, but the fact that terrorists are occupied killing Americans abroad.
On the other hand, you have some fairly strong evidence to suggest that our current security policy really isn't any more secure than it used to be. Just last month, auditors tried to sneak weapons onboard airplanes, and succeeded in the vast majority of attempts, despite consciously making the weapons easy to discover. At the same time, you had the Israeli guys audit our airplane security, and conclude that it was "not so much a system for protecting Americans as it was a system for annoying them."
Excellent summary!
The only point I have to add is that if Nintendo does actually accrue a large library of games with a lot of variety and depth, it'll do very well. However, it has to overcome the legacy of the N64 and Gamecube, both of which were actually good consoles, but were hampered by their narrow libraries.
Only 25% of American households have a PS2. What do you want to bet there is a tremendous overlap between the households that have a PS2 and the households that have HD?
What Sony realized was that 1/3 of its target market already had HD. Moreover, well over half would have HD by the time the console reached "middle age" (eg: 2010). Proper support for HD was a no-brainer.
The PSP is only $50 more than the DS! If you like the gaming library better, sure, that's fine, but saving $50 is a stupid reason to choose one console over another.
Try $500?
You people bitch that you don't want HD and you don't want Blu-Ray, but you choose to focus on the console with HDMI?
The simple fact is that the low-end PS3 is not worthless as a gaming console like the low end 360 is. It is just as capable in gaming terms as the high-end PS3. That means the legitimate comparison is between the $400 360 and the $500 PS3. The $100 price difference isn't even the cost of two games. The differences in the libraries of the two systems will basically wipe out that price differential.
The XBox 360 still has the problem that its library is uncertain. It's still missing entire genres (eg: RPGs), and still suffers from playing second-fiddle to PC ports. If Microsoft doesn't fix that problem, the PS3 is going to win anyway, $100 price difference or not.
1) Cell's performance is mediocre on typical single-threaded applications (eg: AI). Not because it has inherently bad single-threaded performance, but because most single-threaded code happens to be integer code, and the SPE's integer and branching performance sucks.
2) Most simulations are highly parallel. There are lots of cases where you can simulate many parts of the system simultaniously, and only synchronize state at certain points.
The Opteron/Itanium's SP/DV performance is about the same.
And you misread the statement. It said that Cell was 8 times faster than Opteron in DP.
Such a tower would collapse under its own weight, using any known materials.
Actually, the GC's worldwide sales is about 20m. XBox's, however, is about 22m, around 10% more.
While Nintendo surely made a profit last time around, the loss of marketshare is alarming. Microsoft's stole Nintendo's second-place spot despite terrible sales in Japan and a very mediocre software library. A company needs to look out for its future, and going from first place to third in two generations is something that should worry management, regardless of current profitability.
Of course, beyond that, the article is absolutely right. Both the N64 and Gamecube suffered from the same problem. The libraries had no depth and little variety. That's why Nintendo went from being first, to second, and now to third.
Uh, no. The SNES was a far superior system to the GC (relatively). Back in the day, the SNES was a beast of a console. It had twice the main memory and video memory of the Genesis, and an audio DSP with more hardware channels and 8x the amount of audio memory. The video chip supported 50% more sprites, and did several tricks in hardware, such as hardware rotation, scaling, and transparency for the sprites as well as hardware transformation of the background layer. The Nintendo 64 also put its competitors to shame technically, with a CPU three times as fast, a far more powerful rasterizer, and hardware support for texture filtering and anti-aliasing. Basically, the N64 was the only console of its generation that could do 3D properly.
The Gamecube and the Wii are nowhere near the quality of the SNES and N64, as pieces of hardware. Nintendo has focus-shifted from making hardware that enables great games, to being a software company that just happens to make hardware.
Are you insane? Nintendo only sold 20m Gamecubes worldwide, over the life of the system. You think they're going to sell that many Wii's just at launch?
I think you drastically overestimate the interest in the Wii. Outside Slashdot, its not on the radars of most gamers.
Fun for whom? I never liked a Mario game (ever) good enough to finish it. I never understood the point of just trying to get from one end of the map to the other, or why he has to go through every section instead of just bee-lining to the end. After the first few levels, it just all seems the same to me.
Countries don't deserve credit for cultivating great people, cultures do. A country has a culture, but the history of a nation is not necessarily an expression of that culture. What you originally referred to was being "proud of America's history", but what you're talking about here is being "proud of America's culture". The American culture is indeed an admirable one, of which Americans should rightfully be proud*. The history of the United States, on the other hand, like that of most powreful countries, is mixed at best.
*) Though I wish more would stop taking credit for European ideas that were adopted into American culture...