lordjedi said:
Nintendo has always been about quality over power. Always, always, always. Even back to the NES and Super NES. Nintendo may have alienated some people (I'll take your word for it), but Sony has made things just as hard in the opposite direction. The PS3 is a pain in the ass to program for. Yes, it's very powerful. But all that power is useless if you can't easily make a game for it.
They said the same thing about the PS2 and it dominated the last generation regardless. There were plenty of talented developers who pushed the PS2 to its limits despite its supposed programming difficulty.
When it comes to programming, some frameworks are more difficult to use than others, the general rule being that the easier the framework is to use, the less flexibility when compared to more complex frameworks. I build all my web applications in ColdFusion because it's fast and easy. However, there are times I need to dig into the underlying Java because ColdFusion doesn't provide an easy tag or function that does what I need it to do. I appreciate what ColdFusion does on its own because it allows developers and designers to focus more on functionality and user experience instead of trying to get things to work; that ease of use comes at a price though.
Making games is similar. Some dev kits do a lot for you and allow you to focus on the creative aspects instead of grinding away on source code, but if the system doesn't allow you to go deeper, it'll peak early in terms of technical capabilities.
Developers who don't want to do the work to make beautiful PS3 games have other options. That's why the 360 gets so many games first and the PS3 gets a poorly done port. There are good reasons why Kojima refuses to port MGS4 to the 360; it just can't handle the game as it is and he doesn't want to sacrifice the game's quality to put it on the 360.
It's also possible that Nintendo will come up with a way to make all those titles easily "upgraded" to HD. HD seems to be the real crux of the argument right now anyway. The Wii doesn't do HD and for the "hardcore gamers" that's a must have. Sorry, I just don't buy it. A visually stunning game is nice to look at for a while, but if it doesn't have good gameplay, it won't last 5 minutes.
Oblivion might be great to look at, but the retarded beginning of beating up giant rats with a sword kind of turned me off. It really shouldn't take more than one stab to kill a rat.
You keep bringing up good gameplay like the PS3 doesn't have it. It does. Tons of it. More than I've been able to find on the Wii, frankly. All while managing to look good at the same time.
Sorry you didn't like Oblivion, but it seems to me you're stuck on one somewhat silly gameplay aspect in an otherwise outstanding game. And why exactly should a giant rat half the size of a man take only one stab to kill? Let's assume it should. If that's the case, why doesn't a headshot in COD immediately kill your opponent? I'll tell you why...while that may be more realistic, it would only make sense to apply the same rules to the player, and then the game becomes frustratingly hard. Games aren't real life and real life rules and mechanics don't work.
As far as upgrading existing Wii titles to HD, it may be possible for them to run the games at 1080p, and while that may smooth the edges out a bit, that will do nothing for the texture resolution, which is where all the real detail comes from. They'll look like upscaled games, just like DVDs look like upscaled DVDs and not HD. And would that be much of a selling point? How many people bought the PS3 because it upscales PS1 and PS2 games?