I totally agree, so much so that I feel like I said it alread— nah. 
While I agree with you, the simple fact is that there is a certain group of consumers out there (typically young males, the core audience) who demand a certain standard of graphics. Not necessarily high quality artwork, but a certain level of detail in the textures and models and they’re the ones that Sony and Microsoft are chasing.
Sony and Microsoft have decided that this is the time for HD content. Personally I think they’re a few years early on it and the next generation of consoles will be coming right as HD reaches the masses, but they’re going to milk those prerendered tech demos for everything they’re worth pre-launch before everyone sees what the real graphics look like.
But this isn’t a two level scale where one must be good and the other bad. For most people’s standards the Wii’s graphics will be good enough; to the bulk of the consumers “good graphics” on consoles means the sense of design not how many polygons there are. Even our exitting generation can compete with that, something which might wind up being the killer of the next generation consoles.
The old hardware doesn’t vanish and if people don’t have a compelling reason to upgrade they may just stick to their old consoles. Sony and MS are betting on the changes in the graphics while Nintendo is betting on new gameplay concepts. There is a distinct possibility that all of the new consoles could be losers with the “winner” being a pyric victory in a 1984 style market implosion. The next year is certainly going to be interesting.
I predict the Xbox & PS3 will eventually out-sell the Wii. It’s not a big surprise to me. We live in a culture dominated by the hard-core gamers and they have no use for the rest of us casual gamers. Go to one of the video game message boards and complain about how you’re a casual gamer and [whatever] game was a little too hard. You’ll get flamed right off the board.
Hard-core gamers are like drug addicts. Who knows how they do it, but they do come up with the cash to buy the latest & greatest. Sony & Microsoft could price their latest boxes at $1,000/pop, and hard-core gamers would scrape together the funds.
We also live in a culture where lots of parents are willing to drive themselves into debt to make sure their kids get it all because God forbid one of your kid’s friends gets an Xbox and a PS3 and your kid doesn’t.
I’ll buy a Wii and be thrilled with it. So will lots of other people like me. Nintendo isn’t going to go broke this generation any more than it did during the last two or three generations of consoles.
The hard-core gamers will continue to criticize Nintendo for being mostly a “family & kids” gaming machine. Our pimply-faced 19-year-old hard-core gamer can sit there in his parents’ basement with pizza sauce dripping down the front of his shirt, bragging to his friends about how he made it to the secret bonus level and the heroine bent over and you could see her panties. In Hi-Def! “Dude, it like totally rawked!”
We Wii fans (hah!) will just smile like we always do when a game like Resident Evil 4 comes out on the Wii and we get all the “serious” action gaming we know we always get from Nintendo.
And you know they’re going to be jealous of our controller no matter what they say.
I just hope that thing doesn’t cause tennis elbow.
Yes, but I included the Star Fox DS link. 
Is the Wii still going to have access to every old NES title? Have they announced how we’re going to pay for that? I’m very much looking forward to that feature, and I hope it doesn’t disappoint.
Apparently Gran Turismo 5, one of the PS3’s flagship titles, will have a pay-for-content model.
It might cost over $400 to DL all cars and tracks:
I meant a Star Fox game for the wii. One that has graphics that don’t look like they were developed with QuickBasic.
We will have all three.
So are we supposed to say “we” or “wheeeeeeee!” when referring to the Wii?
http://darkzero.co.uk/news.php?newsid=9887
Your wish is my command.
Comparing serious gamers to drug addicts, referring to them as “pimply-faced,” and insinuating that they’re perverts…what’s next, smacking us in the ass with a towel?
As for the next Resident Evil game, Gamespot says it’s coming out primarily on PS3. No mention of the wii.
^ A Resident Evill Wii has been announced as well:
Here’s what Wiki has to say:
So you’ll hook it up to the internet and shop in an iTunes-like store & download the games. Not sure if they’ll have all the old games, but it sounds like lots & lots.
No way. Hard-core gamers scare me.
Argent Towers nearly all your points are wrong, and I hope you were exagerating when you said it was going to be a flop. Come on, the next Dreamcast? Even if PS3 kicks the Wii in the throat and then rubs it’s face in the mud, the Wii’s going to fare far better than the Dreamcast did. They are rather family-friendly, but that is a selling point to many.
Serious gamers and some of the problems they encounter can be likened to some of the symptoms of addiction. I’m suprised anyone who fancies themselves as a “real gamer” (or at least has some knowledge of serious gaming) wouldn’t be aware of that.
The Wii will be fine (and more popular, at least initially) provided it offers the gameplay that Nintendo is known for. Look at how many people still play the NES or SNES and why they do it. I’ll give you a hint: it’s not because of the graphics. When the PS3 drops in price they may eventually outsell the Wii, but I predict due to the low price (this will be a huge factor) and the loyal fanbase of Nintedo, the Wii is going to tear it apart at the start if not completely. Though it depends on how well they are going to price and handle it, the access and download capability to their really old games would be an amazing selling point. I know many people who are willing (and plan) to purchase a Wii for that capability alone. The back catalog of Nintendo blows the other companies out of the water. Does anyone have any news on that front?
Regarding controller evolution, I know Nintendo was not the first to utilize a “light gun” (i.e. Duckhunt, Hogan’s Alley) but were they they first to popularize them?
One last question: does anyone know if they have any fishing titles planned? This has the potential to be the first ever platform to handle that (albeit small) genre succesfully.
If the Wii is successful, it will be because it appeals to “casual” gamers. As World of Warcraft has proven, so-called casuals make the difference between a game that’s successful because lots of gamers play it, and successful because lots of gamers and lots of people who would otherwise not play video games at all play it. There’s a reason WoW has over 50% of the MMORPG market, and it certainly isn’t because of ground-breaking graphics.
The PS3 may do well for itself, but if that happens it will be in spite of Sony’s efforts, not because of them. The high price will guarantee that only so-called “hardcore” gamers will buy it. The inclusion of BlueRay (or was it the other one?) in the system drives the cost up without providing anything for the average user.
I stopped playing console games roughly the time they started having more buttons than I have fingers. The last console I owned was a SNES. I’ve yet to see a console that I thought lived up to the SNES. The Wii may be able to make that claim, but I’ll wait and see. If the controller is as intuitive and fun as it appears, then Nintendo will rake in the dough.
One more thing: Nintendo will make money on every Wii sold. They will also make money on any games sold. Sony and Microsoft will lose money on their consoles, and hope to make it up in game sales. I don’t know about Sony, but I’ve heard that Microsoft’s XBox division is practically hemmoraging money. So it’s quite possible that Sony and / or Microsoft will sell more consoles or even more games, but that Nintendo will still come out the winner this round.
It’s not quite what you’re looking for, but Zelda: Twilight Princess has a very involved fishing mini-game built into main quest. It’s the successor to the one in Ocarina of Time, which was widely regarded as one of the best virtual fishing experiences available, despite it not being the game’s focus.
Don’t look for a major PS3 price drop any time soon. It costs Sony almost $900 to manufacture a PS3 at the moment and the prices on blue ray drives and cell processors is not going to drop fast.
For those who don’t understand why a company would sell their product for almost half of what it costs them to make it, Sony (and Microsoft as well) want to build a user base fast. They make as high end of system as they can to push those early sales while taking as much of a loss as they think they can sustain. There’s a snowball effect with console sales: early adopters drive developers to make games which drive more sales. Eventually the hardware prices are supposed to come down enough that there’s a crossover in the middle of the console’s life span and the company is making money with each sale instead of losing it.
The problem here is that blue ray drives and cell processors are far earlier in their manufacturing lifetime than, for example, DVD-ROM drives were in 1999. Sony pushing manufacturing may help a little bit with the blue ray drives but demanding more doesn’t magically make chip yields improve for cell processors. The blue ray drive alone adds over $350 to the price of manufacturing the PS3. Two years from now that might be cut in half if things go really well for Sony, but that’s not cheap enough.
There’s a certain point where people will be willing to splurge and get a console and psychological barriers that hold them back. When a console crosses the $200 is when the hardware sales really take off and that should be when it’s entering the middle of its lifespan. Wii might get down that low by Christmas 2007. The X-Box 360 is going to start dramatic price dropping soon and could match the Wii’s introductory price next year though they’re going to have a hard time doing it. Sony won’t be able to afford going lower than $399 for the base console next year (and I would be shocked if they can afford that much of a drop).
Except that the Entitled Ones and the folks who make video games a spending priority are going to be buying all three systems. Sony’s problem is that, as long as the price stays at $600, those are the only folks who’ll be buying a PS3. Nintendo will have that market, but they’ll also have the market of the new parents who want colorful interactive cartoons for their kids, and the guy who can’t get down to the lanes every weekend and wants to bowl at home, and the folks who think it looks fun and buy it on a whim. Add in the fact that there will be games which will work for the Revolution but not for the other two systems (due to the innovative controller), and you may even see some semi-hardcore gamers who choose one of the 360 or the PS3 (which are both offering basically the same thing), and also get a Revolution (which offers something different).
I was aware of that, and it is not what I am looking for. One of my friends is a huge Zelda fan, and he is planning on buying a Wii just for the new version. I never tried Ocarina of Time though I had heard of it’s fishing. How is it implemented that makes it so deserving of the high acclaim? Most likely a title will come out but it won’t be as good as it could be. Thank you anyways **Red Barchetta[/]. Slight hijack: you don’t by chance go to ASU do you?
I, technically, have only two video game consoles, a PS2 and a Dreamcast. The Dreamcast I actually bought after Sega got out of the hardware side. Anyway, the PS2 is a launch day PS2 and still working fine 6 years later. Sure, I paid $300 for it, but it had backwards compatibility with all my PS1 games (a lot of which of the later ones had graphics that were just as good, if not better, than the launch titles) and a built-in DVD player. That DVD player was a wonderful thing and made the console, at the time, a great deal indeed. Plus, I needed a PSX player of my own because the console we had was technically my brother’s, even if he never played it. You figure the going rate for a DVD player was at least $200 and a brand-new PSX console was still $100 and the PS2 was a steal. What happened? I went to college, stopped playing as many video games, and really spent my money on DVDs instead. In fact, I just went and counted (well, I used DVD Profiler for some of it.) I have 18 PSX titles–more if you figure that some, like Final Fantasy Chronicles, Origins, and Anthology are actually two games in one package. I have 13 PS2 titles. I have more than 140 DVD titles, which is probably actually closer to 200 individual discs. So my PS2 has spent much, much more time as a DVD player than it ever has as a gaming console. Heck, if it wasn’t for the Jak and Daxter and Ratchet and Clank series, I’d have even fewer PS2 titles, most of which I’ve never played all the way through anyway. (Ape Escape 2, for instance, is fun but I got stuck. FFX hit that wall I often find in FF games. Crash 4 just plain stinks. I’ve never really been good at Madden 05, MLB Slugfest, or Blitz: The League. Orphen is a game I like, but suffers from various problems giving it little replay value and you have to be a fan of the anime anyway.)
So, if I spend so little time playing video games compared to watching DVDs, I’m not about to spend $600 for hardware that’s overpowered for my setup and something I’m not even sure I’m interested in to begin with (by which I mean HD and HD-DVD/BluRay) that’s ALSO part of a format war, for games I mostly don’t want to play, and for having to deal with potentially crippling DRM. Not when I could still go and buy almost any PSX or PS2 game I’d like (and there are several I’d still like to get, although I never seem to), and still have the Dreamcast, where I can also still get games (and the Dreamcast had some good ones.) But I’d still like a Gamecube and I’m interested in the Wii. I’ve never really liked sports games or FPSes, which is what MS and Sony appear to be pushing. I don’t have time these days, really, for RPGs. My other favorite genre, platformers, doesn’t really need to push the graphics either. Heck, I’m still playing Super Mario World on my GBA, Commander Keen on the computer, and Crash 2 on the PS2.
I also have, thanks to many, many years of playing computer games and not owning a console, at least 40 games on CD-ROM and even more that I can play these days thanks to DOSBox that I have from about 1985 on. And there are still freeware games and shareware games out there as well. I could spend hundreds of hours just trying to ascend in NetHack. I finally (after 16 years!) just got a registered version of Moraff’s Revenge instead of just playing the shareware version. I don’t know if making it to level 70 in Moraff’s Revenge will be any easier than ascending in NetHack, but I can find out. And you can’t say the graphics in either game are pretty.
Well, it’s just like real fishing - it’s ridiculously boring and it takes forever to catch what you want to catch.
(I mean that completely in jest. Well, mostly. Seriously, who are these people who have been cheering on the fishing minigame in Ocarina of Time? That was the only part of that game that WASN’T fun.)
Re: the topic - well, the Wii and the PS3 are not really in direct competition. In economic terms, they’re not really even imperfect substitutes. There may be some overlap in the markets they’re aiming for, but the target markets themselves are not the same. Objectively, there’s no reason both can’t be successful; subjectively, they both SHOULD be successful, but some unwise decisions by Sony (particularly the aforementioned blu-ray escapades) may well jeopardize that.
I didn’t buy any of the systems in the last generation, though I likely would have bought a PS2 if my housemate didn’t have one, and we had a cube in the house that was great for party games and such. Whether I get a Wii or not will depend completely on how many good games there are that use the old-school controller instead of the silly remote. Whether I get a PS3 or not will depend entirely on how fast the price comes down into my budget range. Frankly, I’d like both, but I’m not rich, and I’ll pick keeping a current gaming computer over either.