I totally, iOS gaming is absolutely growing and starting to take a piece of the portable gaming pie. But I think it’s much more likely that spending $1 or $2 at a time on a bite-sized is done a lot more often than dropping $30 on the latest Pokemon. So what happens is that by the next time you’re ready to buy another DS game, you’ve unknowingly spent $50 on iOS games.
Not that that’s common, but I’ve definitely seen it happen.
While I’m sure my name is a curse word when it comes to Game Room modding, as you said, I didn’t do anything wrong. I’m sorry that I’m passionate about certain topics in gaming, but I want to know I never try to break the rules around here when I’m arguing. So I’m probably going to continue to be in the thick of it in future.
I read today that the Wii 2 is expected to have dual analog sticks and a 6" screen on the controller. Supposedly you will be able to literally play the games directly on the controllers if you like.
How do you fit a 6 inch screen on a controller and still have room for sticks and buttons? Isn’t that larger than the iphone?
It’s larger than nearly every portable device (the PSP clocks in at 4.3 inches with the NGP jumping up to 5). So while it’s big, it’s not gargantuan. Although, rumor has it the screen itself will feature buttons, essentially remaking the controller for every game.
Dude, it’s totally already leaked. You can see it for yourself.
Man you’re one of my favorite posters in the Game Room but you go off the rails over any criticism of Nintendo. So much so it’s hard to engage in conversation with you about them.
Otherwise I really like reading your posts here because you are clearly well informed about these topics.
I didn’t. I simply think you’re using a specific, but useless, technical measure.
Nobody’s console is the most powerful on the market for very long, becuse of the nature of product cycles. I think the PS3 has been the reigning champ for the longest time, but it is awfully crippled in the technical areas which matter and has in many ways wound up playing third fiddle in this generation to the less beefy, but more useful, technical solutions in the 360 and Wii.
Again, you’re confusing processor power with being the best, technically, which isn’t the case. There are a lot of areas for competition. Nintendo’s. In any case, I count the NES, SNES, and N64 were all the winner by your measure, anyway. That’s hardly rare. Now these days they’ve dropped out fo that race, but even so they continue to lead in other areas.
Sadly, over the years they’ve also made it clear they think of any third-party developer this way, whether they want to make big-budget titles or not. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say anything good about their organization in that sense.
I saw a rumor today that GTA V is being worked on for this.
The “project cafe” name gives me an image of Nintendo positioning the console like WiFi hotspots are now. You keep your controller with you like a portable, and when you go to Starbucks or wherever they have a console running that will stream games to you. It’s like a cloud-based system, so the controller doesn’t need its own processing power, just the ability to stream video from the console. Speculating is fun :).
I’ve seen this said a couple times in this thread. I didn’t notice a major difference between the Cube and the PS2’s capabilities. Was it really that much more powerful?
Substantially. Faster CPU, GPU, with greater shader support. While the PS2 had some good looking games, the GameCube was definitely more powerful. Which isn’t terribly surprising; it did launch nearly 2 years after.
Wow. I never would have guessed! I have all three consoles from that generation (four with the dreamcast), and when you have one set of RCA jacks on a TV, the one with a set to go DVD player got priority.
IMO, I think this is a silly idea as advertised. I can honestly say that I play my wii more than any other console. I’ve downloaded a ton of wii original games, and I’ve yet to find an iPad one that I enjoy as much as something like Lilt Line or Fluidity. Give me a bigger hard drive so I’m not swapping out sd cards left right and center, but are monster graphics really going to be the seller to their niche market? I have all the current gen consoles, but I don’t think I’d buy this.
I actually totally agree with all of this.
Good lord, the following post turned into an essay. My English teacher always told me to start essays with a statement of contention, and mine is “It’s not completely unlikely that the Wii’s successor will be the most powerful console when it launches, even when taking Nintendo’s target audience and corporate personality into account.”
If Nintendo wants to release a console that will have games that look at least as good as the Wii, but can output to high definition, they’ll need to boost the graphics card quite a bit (standard definition is approx 0.5 megapixels, full HD is approx 2 megapixels - just to have games look the same but higher res, you’ll need to quadruple the fill-rate on the GPU). So, my guess is that they’ll be beefing up the hardware at least a bit. In theory they could add more memory and boost clock speed again, but I’d imagine they’ll make things a bit more powerful and add some support for modern features. This means that unlike with the Wii, they’ll have to overhaul libraries, hardware documentation, etc quite significantly. So my guess is there’s no real point in them having outrageously underpowered hardware - it might not be ‘modern’ exactly, but it will probably not be more than one generation out of date. We’ll call that Conjecture A.
Okay so, the Wii is using ten year old hardware (sort of). Pretty old, right? You know what other consoles are using outdated hardware? All of them. The 360 and the PS3 are both around five years old now. You can literally buy an 11" laptop for six hundred bucks that is quite a bit more powerful than those platforms (and that price includes a screen, and a copy of Windows!). So, if Nintendo does boost the specs considerably for their next console, they could probably make it quite a bit beefier than the current HD consoles without it cutting into their desire to make a profit on consoles they sell. Because it’s not just small cheap gaming laptops that can out-graphics the current consoles - we’re getting pretty close to some of the newer tablets being up there, too. I heard somewhere (compelling cite, I know) that the PSP2’s going to be in the ballpark of the 360 in terms of GPU power. So they could probably bring a console that’s more powerful than the current pair of consoles without it hurting their bottom line too much - they could still sell it at a reasonable price and make a profit. I think. I’m going to call that Conjecture B.
Right so, what are MS and Sony doing right now? They’ve both just launched, like… sort of new platforms. MS talked quite a bit about how the Kinect would be treated like a new platform, if I recall correctly - certainly developers are having to rethink things a lot to get good use from it, and there’s very little overlap between games that work with Kinect and games that don’t. The Move is a bit different - it would make more sense to give a game optional Move controls than it would optional Kinect controls, and also the Move has been a bit less successful than the Kinect too I think. Anyway, point is, in a sense Sony and MS are at the start of a new console generation of their own right now. Sony also spends a bit of time talking about how the PS3 is the most powerful thing ever and has a shelf life of ten years, but I don’t think that’s a good indicator of when we might be graced with the PS4. Either way though, it’s possible that Sony and Microsoft won’t be joining Nintendo in the eighth hardware generation for a little while yet. This is the weakest of the conjectures so far, and I will therefore call it Conjecture C.
There’s another conjecture required here, and that is that Nintendo’s next console will be a ‘traditional’ console - ie, a computer that you plug into your TV and play games on it with controllers of some kind. Maybe that’ll happen, maybe it won’t. That’s Conjecture D.
Okay. Now if we assume all these conjectures come true (and I’m in no way pretending that that’s not a big assumption), Nintendo will be able to use the ‘most powerful console’ crown to its best advantage for at least a year or two for very little cost to them. I know they’re all casual friendly and stuff right now, and it’s done their bottom line no end of good, but the core market is not nothing. The main reason they lost that market last generation was simply power - anyone wanting to make a game that in any way depended on looking good wanted nothing to do with the Wii because it was just so far behind. Porting to the Wii meant massive overhaul of assets and codebase. It was worth it for Nintendo because competing with Sony and MS at that point would have been expensive, but it seems to me that if my above conjectures are correct, and Nintendo can claim the ‘beefiest console’ crown for at least a little while for little cost to themselves, it would be worth their while.
I’m confused by what your conjectures are supposed to be.
I could see Nintendo releasing more of a generation 7.5 system. Essentially a Wii with hard disk, HD graphics, easier online capability, and those new controllers. The new controllers aren’t even all that new in terms of thinking for Nintendo. They can link to the DS already, and they had the capability to link the Gameboy advance to the Gamecube. They could re-release Four Swords adventure.
If they can improve the graphics on existing Wii games, it would give existing Wii owners an additional reason to upgrade. I’d expect they would also drop Gamecube support.
Huh? A console, by definition, is “a computer that you plug into your TV and play games on it with controllers of some kind.” The Wii is a console. The Atari 2600 was a console. Project Cafe will be a console. That’s not conjecture, it’s stating the obvious.
Current rumors point to Cube and Wii backwards compatibility. Also current rumors don’t point to a PS4 or Xbox 720 until 2014.
Really I’m just saying “Here are a bunch of things that aren’t definitely true, but could be true, and if they are it would make sense for Nintendo to launch a more powerful console than the others currently on the market.” In response to the idea that Nintendo is obviously out of the business of trying to compete graphically with anyone - I don’t think that’s a foregone conclusion yet.
Fair point - I suppose instead of ‘Nintendo’s next console will be a traditional console’ I should have said ‘Nintendo’s next thing will be a console’. Knowing Nintendo’s recent history as well as the weirdness that’s been going on in the gaming platform world lately, I’m not sure this goes entirely without saying, though. Before we had info about the Wii, for instance, it would have seemed obvious that Nintendo’s next console would be significantly more powerful than the Gamecube. I might not be up to date with the rumours currently flying, but let’s say for instance the N6 of whatever it’s going to be called comes with the controllers with reasonably large screens built in - perhaps Nintendo intends for a large quantity of gameplay to be happening on those screens? If so, that would do some rather odd things to what we’d expect the graphics hardware to be. For all I know the controllers will have a GPU of their own. Or some other weird thing. I included that conjecture as a way of saying “This argument assumes that the next Nintendo console isn’t some crazy-arse thing that totally destabalises any reasoned prediction of what its internals will be like.”
ETA:
That sounds right - as far as I know the platforms are similar enough that they might as well include both if they’re going to include one, unless they’re trying to distance themselves from traditional controllers completely or something.
As far as I know, the article I linked, and the press source it gave said that the hardware would be “significantly” better than current 360 hardware. This can mean anything depending on your definition of significantly, but they have quite a few years of technological advances to choose from when going for a profit.
If it turns out to be true that the next Nintendo is considerably far ahead of the XBox 360 graphics-wise, and that the XBox 720 and PS4 don’t come out until 2014, the console gaming landscape of the near future will be an interesting place indeed. 
In the broader sense of next gen conversation, I’ve got my fingers crossed for better support for small developers, and a graphics card that supports shader model five (equivalent of DirectX 11) - I would be all over that shit, and a lapsed Nintendo fan no more. I can dream, can’t I?
For some reason that would crack me up, if nintendo out-xboxed the 360, and built a little core 2/5770 type rig. Then we could be playing slightly less shitty SuperWii DX11 ports instead of shitty dx9 ports.
It seems fitting, since Sony and MS are kind of trying to out-Wii Nintendo currently.
The thing that’s most exciting to me is a console with Dx10/shader model 4 capability (or more - tessellation would be sweet too). Ideally, when this tech became available for PCs (years ago now), it could have brought in a huge change in gaming - it was the first time when graphics hardware could really be used to enhance things other than just graphics. GPGPU programming (CUDA, OpenCL, stuff like that) can be used to do mass artificial intelligence, fluid simulations, rigid body physics on a huge scale, and any other clever easily parallelised task, massively faster than the CPU (and by ‘faster’ I really mean ‘stuff that wasn’t feasible now is’). Geometry shaders let us move away from stuff like heightmapped terrain - now landscapes can elegantly contain overhangs and land bridges and whatever else. Especially indie developers who aren’t quite so constrained by their games having to compete in every way at the same time, amazing stuff is now possible. Right?
Unfortunately, there were some problems. The consoles are still shader model 3. Some GPGPU stuff is possible through careful shenanigans with pixel shaders but it’s not really the same. Microsoft don’t give XP users DirectX 10 even if their cards support it. It not really feasible to release a game that requires that level of hardware. Sure, you can use it to do fancy stuff, but that fancy stuff must not have an impact on gameplay, because you can’t really have the gameplay change significantly due to an optional graphics setting. So all this rad stuff is stuck making the hills in Crysis 2 slightly rounder, or whatever, but not really revolutionising gaming the way it could.
But the moment a console comes out that has a modern graphics card in it, that will hopefully change. Developers being able to assume support for those sorts of features will, I think, lead to some exciting stuff. Especially if small developers can get stuck into it, because they can get away with making games that are based around a single piece of tech and not required to compete on every other front as well. So that’s why I’ve got the relevant fingers crossed for this rumoured Wii successor.
