Darth Chaltab said:I counter with Mario Galaxy. It looks incredible on my widescreen HDTV. Also, Call of Duty 4 did not come out on the Wii. And no crap the X-Box and PS3 titles surpass it. Nobody is arguing that the Wii looks as good as them. What I'm saying is that good art design and intelligent use of hardware can still make a damn fine-looking game with out the power of the other two consoles.
Sorry, I misspoke. I meant COD:WAW, which looks like ass on the Wii compared to the PS3 and 360 versions.
Mario Galaxy does look great...at 480p. It doesn't look incredible by any stretch on any display where scaling is required. lordjedi mentioned that his DVDs still look great as proof that 480p is adequate. Yes, DVDs do look great, because scaling live action photography is much different than scaling game content. All the little details in live action scale much better because the resulting artifacts are much harder to spot in all the chaos, whereas scaling Wii games results in obvious stairstepping and other problems.
If the 'real piece of hardware' that Nintendo releases in the future still supports the mass-market casual gamers for an affordable price, they'll still eat it up.
No, they won't. I'll see you in 2011 or whenever they release their next console and we'll talk about it then. They'll sell it to Nintendo fanboys and hardcore gamers who buy every system. These newfound casual gamers won't be returning en masse for the next round because they won't pay to play tennis and pop balloons in 1080p. The increase in power won't be of any interest to them because they don't care about specs or graphics quality (obviously).
The the GameBoy, PS2, and Nintendo DS should be proof enough that the most powerful system isn't always the one that wins the highest market share.
The difference is that software sales for those systems kept/keep pace with the hardware sales. GameBoy development was cheap because there was only so much you could do with a 2 inch black and white (well, dark green and light green) screen, and it had no competition when it launched. The PS2 had such a huge installed base, you couldn't go wrong as a developer. Same thing with the DS, which also lets devs recycle their SNES and N64 titles with minimal effort.
Nintendo is doing very well financially with the Wii because they built a system that allows them to make a profit on the hardware. They also sell the most popular games for that system--the games casual gamers are most likely to buy because they're system branded (Wii Music, Wii Fit, etc.) and even casual gamers recognize Mario and Zelda.
Where does that leave third party developers? They can't port their PS3 and 360 games without major effort because the Wii's hardware is too weak and taking advantage of the Wiimote requires extra work if it's going to be anything other than a gimmick (take lordjedi's Hulk vs. Iron Man example). And the simple truth is that traditional games for traditional gamers wouldn't do well with these newfound casual gamers.
lordjedi said:
As far as tennis and bowling are concerned, that's exactly what I was referring to before. Someone who figures out that they can just flick their wrist isn't going to have fun playing with a Wii. Moving around and swinging your arms is half the fun. If you're just going to sit there flicking your wrist, then don't even bother.
If you can just flick your wrist to play the game, that's a problem with the game, not the gamer. That's why button mashing games get shit on so much by hardcore gamers. If the player can just keep hitting buttons to move forward or win with no skill or strategy involved, then the game was poorly made, end of story.
Or maybe the Wiimote isn't capable of tracking the difference, which makes it a hardware shortcoming (gimmick).
I know I come off as a Wii hater, but I honestly don't hate it. It's weak hardware, but it's quality hardware, which is nice, and it is lots of fun when friends come over. I even enjoyed being a nerd and swinging my sword in Twilight Princess until I got bored with what is ultimately a pretty average game.
At the end of the day, I'll take Oblivion with a DualShock over Zelda with a Wiimote. I'll take Fallout 3 and Uncharted over Mario Kart and Wii Music. Different strokes, that's all.