Calm down you two… I don’t want to break up a fight!

When I finally get my Wii you can judge for yourself anyway. Happy new year!

Happy 2007.

As you saw from my blog, I thoroughly enjoyed played a game with 8-year old graphics last night. It made my eyes hurt to begin with, but soon enough I didn’t notice anymore. The same goes for great graphics – at first I’ll be impressed, but very soon I’ll become blase about them and it’ll be all about the gameplay. With the need to up the ante on graphics all the time sucking down millions of dollars and therefore seriously reducing the amount of risk-taking in the industry, I personally think it’s gone too far.

Both the Wii and the DS are the antithesis of the accepted norm, and the DS has done spectacularly well at it, despite being the performance underdog. Whilst I seriously doubt the Wii will give 360 and PS3 the same drubbing DS has given PSP, I think Nintendo are on to something. I personally don’t give a rats arse if Wii is less powerful than 360 – that’s really not the point of it at all (and people who complain that it’s less powerful have missed this point entirely). The point is that by getting rid of the tech arms race on the platform, therefore halting the budget bloat, and bundling interesting control options right in there in every console, it makes making it much, much easier to experiment with new ideas. And by God the games industry needs new ideas.

I don’t have a Wii yet but Lee does, and it’s a lot of fun. If you’re too attached to your graphics preconceptions you’ll probably hate it though ;)

With the limited availability at the moment it’s hard to tell.

I still stand by the fact that graphics form an important part of the experience. Many games I used to play in my youth for hours on end just don’t hold the attraction these days – they need to look great as well as play great to form an atmospheric experience for me.

I think it’s easier/more likely for Microsoft or a third party to bring out a Wii style control system for the 360 than it is for Nintendo to produce a more powerful Wii.

If you want to invite me round to show me just how fun the Wii is you’ve got my number ;-)

[)amien

To be honest I’d rather have fun with the Wii now while I wait and see what PS3 does. I regretted not having a PS2 late in its life when the likes of We Love Katmari, Guitar Hero and Okami were about so who knows.

While it is very true that the graphics of the Wii cannot compare to the 360 or PS3, Nintendo have dared to do something a little different and to be frank, this is just the sort of change the the market needs.

Over the last few years, gaming has started to become more and more a niche market. Most of the games on the 360 are geared towards a very hardcore audience, there are very few that have mass appeal. The likes of Gears of War and Halo only apply to a certain demographic and this will never change. The Wii on the otherhand, is designed to open up gaming to a larger audience and in my mind, this is a very good thing.

During Christmas, I took my Wii down to my parents. I don’t think my Mum (who is in her late fifties) has ever enjoyed a game on a console before, but she loved Wii Sports (specifically tennis). She even managed to do reasonably well!

I think that in the next few years, we will see the 360 and PS3 fighting their own little battle whilst in the side wings, the Wii will be gaining greater support and an even larger audience.

P.S. The Wii also support the more traditional gamer… Zelda Rocks.

On why Nintendo needs to be in the hardware game, I’ll just refer you to this article

And sure, someone could make a controller for 360 or PS3. Someone could make a touchscreen for PSP too, but they haven’t even though PSP is utterly tanking compared to the DS (unless you’re a fan of shovelware or less impressive remakes of games you’ve already played. LocoRoco being the one and only exception). There’s several reasons why neither Sony nor MS won’t be able to emulate the Wii with any huge success –

1) Anything they make will be an add-on, thus the market won’t be there
2) their target demographic is all wrong (traditional male 18-30 gamers). They’ve painted themselves into that corner and are unlikely to get out of it any time soon
3) Actually using that kind of hardware well is pretty hard. It’s not something you can just jump on as an afterthought, which is why for a while on Wii the first-party games are likely to be the only ones that use it properly. Others will come in time, but it’s a culture shift of sorts that you can’t make late on in the game.

360 continues to interest me very little. The only thing that draws me to it is the HD output (now I have a TV to take advantage of it), and I’ve yet to see many ‘must have’ games even a year on. Dead Rising looks good, Gears of War looks interesting if a little uninventive and with a little too much “American Machismo in a Can”. No other games that I can’t already play on the PC interest me. I don’t have enough time to play to want to compare scores with people on XBox Live. It’s a nice machine, but I think MS has wasted the lead they had over PS3 – there just haven’t been enough ‘buy me, buy me!!’ games in the time they’ve had and if they’re not careful, PS3 will mop the floor with them in 2007. Wii is just playing it’s own game and for me, that’s far more interesting.