Reggie Fils-Aime points to the PS2 and Wii in defense of the Wii U's power

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calmwaters

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That's pretty understandable too - by the time the Gamecube and the XBox were released, everybody and their dog had a PlayStation 2. Developing for the system made sense, underpowered in comparison or not - it was still going to push those sales like a steamroller.

I forgot to mention that Reggie sticks to specs alone, not the capabilities. The PS2 supported DVD playback, the XBox supported DVD playback, the Gamecube did not support DVD playback. The XBox was Online-Ready out of the box, the PS2 was made Online-Ready via an adapter and later Ethernet was included in the Slim revision to support it out of the box, the Gamecube used a Network Adapter and only ever had four games that even supported Online. One of those consoles sold the least units - hmmm, which one?

Raw numbers alone don't make up for the entirety of the console's real-life performance - it's what the console can actually do that interests the End User. Effectively both the PS2 and the XBox could be used as home entertainment centers as well as consoles, and that was a big deal at the time of their release - the Gamecube? Not so much.

End users should be interested in playing games; that is what the system is for. The Internet can increase the amount of games you can get. But this wasn't as important as it is today. It sounds like the XBox influenced online gaming since the Playstation and the N64 didn't have internet access. Hmmm... we also know that one of these systems had pretty bad third-party support.
 

FAST6191

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That mofo can cite the PS2 all day long but his excuse is a crummy one. The PS2 was also a good example of "how not to kill off your current console while releasing a new one" but hey... Nintendo loves murdering their last console in favor of the new one. Nintendo's issue in regards to me is that they decided to take six years of blue ocean progress and toss it out the fucking window. I like casual gaming. I like MOTION gaming. Instead of pushing forward and having developers find creative ways to use motion gaming, they chickened out and with with a traditional play style with a added touch screen. Are you shitting me???

You may have a point somewhere in the there but looking back on the last few years of the wii and it was dead on its feet for most of that.

Sad but true, people really don't care about that anymore.
Did they ever? I should probably stop here as I have serious issues with censorship and we do not get to off on that tangent again.

Also zombies as something so horribly mindblowing that the little ones can not see them?
 

Mantis41

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In terms of bare specs, it was at the bottom, except for maybe the Dreamcast. Believing what just about everybody else believes doesn't make you a dick.

Even so. I don't think there was much in it. This was more like the comparison between the 360 and PS3 with each platform having it's own highs and lows. It was nothing like the performance chasm between the Wii and PS360. The same performance chasm looks to continue into the next generation. The Wii hit at a perfect time in the market and flourished. The WiiU does not have this advantage. I think the statement processing power doesn't matter is flawed.
 

SolidSnake95

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Nope, the reason the Wii sold well was the Wiimote (and the price of course). At the time, motion-controls were new and innovative. They haven't been used in a serious manner in videogames before and it really had a "cool factor" to it. Even before the Wii launched, everyone wanted to try out the system.

Part of the genius of the Wii was that the barrier to the casual market were broken thanks to the simple control-scheme. Instead of having to press all these buttons on some complicated controller to play golf, just swing the Wii Mote like a golf club! Or to play tennis, just swing it like a tennis racket. That shit was simple and easy to understand.

It even garnered a significant amount of interest from the hardcore in the beginning as well. I mean, using the Wii Mote as a gun in Metroid Prime 3 was pretty fucking cool at the time. As well as being able to actually swing a sword in real-life and have it work in-game (even if that wasn't realized properly until Red Steel 2).

With the Wii U, Nintendo forgot all about the casual market. Instead of the simplistic controls of the Wii, they introduced a controller that had a huge screen and all the traditional controls that scared casuals away in the very beginning. Even worse is that it had a very "been there, done that" feeling since the advent of tablets such as the iPad. If they had launched two years back before or around the time the iPad came out, the Wii U would likely be selling much much better right now.

So the casual market is gone, what about the hardcore? Nintendo hasn't done much there either. They still released a console that pales in comparison to the other next-gens in terms of specs. They get a lot of late ports that everyone has already played and they sell like shit because Nintendo hasn't done much to cultivate a hardcore base on their system. They've failed to properly advertise the benefits of the Wii U's controller with their own games, with Ubisoft even doing a better job than they are with ZombiU.

Right now, Nintendo seems completely lost. They say they want the hardcore but their actions show otherwise. They claim to be trying to reclaim the casual market but seem to forgot how. I'll give them until this holiday season before I put the final nail in the Wii U's coffin but things aren't looking bright right now.

The motion controls weren't my reason for getting a Wii. My main reason was to play Zelda and hack it to run emulators.

If motion controls were its big sells point, then we see how much interest people lost in it as time went on, year after year sales decreased for that system. I guess it turns out that motion controls weren't all that big of a deal after all. Because they sure as hell weren't for me, most of the time I wished they had made a simplistic controller.

But I agree with the things you said about WiiU.

Generally speaking, parents don't give a shit about classifications.

They kind of do. You also have parents that are disgusted at the fact that there is a game store will you just buy and sell games. My mom being a perfect example of that type.

Most of the time you see a kid plead and beg for a particular game because everyone else is playing it and he doesn't want to be left out.

Maybe that's what Nintendo outa do. Fuck Mario. Create something totally brand new that will draw in gamers from other perspectives, hype a new badass 'neverbeforeseen' game and get kids whining to mom and dad to get it. Hence this may boost sales for christmas time.

People are tired of Mario, Zelda and Sonic. Do something new Nintendo. And start with the games first.
 
D

Deleted_171835

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The motion controls weren't my reason for getting a Wii. My main reason was to play Zelda and hack it to run emulators.

If motion controls were its big sells point, then we see how much interest people lost in it as time went on, year after year sales decreased for that system. I guess it turns out that motion controls weren't all that big of a deal after all. Because they sure as hell weren't for me, most of the time I wished they had made a simplistic controller.

But I agree with the things you said about WiiU.
If Nintendo consistently made games for the Wii after 2010, the Wii would probably still be selling decently right now. The reason it died out was because they flat out abandoned the platform. Third-parties definitely weren't making games and Nintendo stopped so there was nothing to play on the system. And sales died down accordingly.

Thankfully, the time they spent not making Wii games were spent getting a headstart so that they could give us all those fabulous Wii U games that were there at launch. >.>
 

Foxi4

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End users should be interested in playing games; that is what the system is for. The Internet can increase the amount of games you can get. But this wasn't as important as it is today. It sounds like the XBox influenced online gaming since the Playstation and the N64 didn't have internet access. Hmmm... we also know that one of these systems had pretty bad third-party support.

XBox Live as a service re-defined what it means to play Multiplayer games - it's introduction changed how console games are made and played and to this day makes the XBox, a hardly successful system iconic.

Internet was a big deal because it was an empty field - anyone could contribute anything and that point and it was important to play this game if you were a major league player like Nintendo, Sony or Microsoft.

As for the games being the one solitary thing gamers should be interested in, this isn't the 1980'ties anymore, a console is more than just a box that plays games, it has to be a center of entertainment, it has to give your living room meaning and the more it does the better, with focus towards gaming. If a console has a BluRay-compatible drive, why wouldn't it play BluRay discs? If it has access to the internet, why wouldn't it have online features like a browser or streaming support? There are the things those systems can do and by adding features like this, you give the user more variety, you give more incentive to keeping that box next to the TV because it makes your life better, or at the very least more comfortable.

If Nintendo consistently made games for the Wii after 2010, the Wii would probably still be selling decently right now. The reason it died out was because they flat out abandoned the platform. Third-parties definitely weren't making games and Nintendo stopped so there was nothing to play on the system. And sales died down accordingly.

Thankfully, the time they spent not making Wii games were spent getting a headstart so that they could give us all those fabulous Wii U games that were there at launch. >.>
You can only take your system so far with first-party titles alone. Once the third-parties stopped supporting the system, the game draught began and even if Nintendo would want to support the system, there's only so many games they could potentially release for it on a yearly basis. The system was dying because the interest died down - it had an amazing run though.
 

the_randomizer

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You may have a point somewhere in the there but looking back on the last few years of the wii and it was dead on its feet for most of that.


Did they ever? I should probably stop here as I have serious issues with censorship and we do not get to off on that tangent again.

Also zombies as something so horribly mindblowing that the little ones can not see them?

I don't like it when things are unnecessarily censored, either, but I too will not elaborate. As for kids not being around zombie-related media, not really, zombies just overrated IMHO ;)

Even so. I don't think there was much in it. This was more like the comparison between the 360 and PS3 with each platform having it's own highs and lows. It was nothing like the performance chasm between the Wii and PS360. The same performance chasm looks to continue into the next generation. The Wii hit at a perfect time in the market and flourished. The WiiU does not have this advantage. I think the statement processing power doesn't matter is flawed.

And perhaps it is to an extent. Yes, processing power is important, but it's not the sole determining factor for what makes a CPU as good as it is. You can have two CPUs; one from 2008 with two cores at 2.4 GHz and another from 2013 with two cores at 2.0 GHz and still have the latter perform more efficiently than the older one. How? Many factors come in to play, architecture, whether or not it's an OoE (Out-of-order Execution), has GPGPU, etc.

A CPU with a higher clock rate doesn't mean it's going to perform faster than a CPU with a lower clock rate, and the Gamecube vs Xbox was a good example. Sure, the Xbox had a higher clock rate, but the Gamecube used the IBM PPC architecture which put it on par with the Xbox's CPU in terms of raw power irrespective of the 250 or so MHz difference. Any computer science major will tell you that. The Wii U being the lowest in clock rate doesn't mean it's doomed to fail. The whole mentality of "The Wii U is the weakest of the three and therefore doesn't have a chance in hell of getting good games" is a load of bulls**t and needs to stop.

Architecture > raw clock speed
 

Foxi4

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For those who don't know, CPU frequency is not a measure of processing power - it's a measure of the number of cycles a CPU performs per second. Without knowing how many calculations it can perform per-cycle, frequency is meaningless.

To quote my own post from a long, long time ago, carrying a bucket with 20 apples (Instructions) 10 times across the room per second (10Hz) ultimately "processing" 200 apples (20*10=200) is better than carrying a bucket of 5 apples (Instructions) 20 times across the room (20Hz) thus "processing" 100 apples (5*20=100). Oh gee, but 20Hz is two times as much as 10Hz! Except "so what" if the performance is lower? ;)
 

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For those who don't know, CPU frequency is not a measure of processing power - it's a measure of the number of cycles a CPU performs per second. Without knowing how many calculations it can perform per-cycle, frequency is meaningless. To quote my own post from a long, long time ago, carrying a bucket with 20 apples (Instructions) 10 times across the room per second (10Hz) ultimately "processing" 200 apples (20*10=200) is better than carrying a bucket of 5 apples (Instructions) 20 times across the room (20Hz) thus "processing" 100 apples (5*20=100). Oh gee, but 20Hz is two times as much as 10Hz! Except "so what" if the performance is lower? ;)

I'm glad someone actually bothers to show factual information :P I like that analogy very well, I should quote you on it more often .
 
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the_randomizer

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Of course e meant the default controller.

By the way, I wonder why Nintendo made the Classic Controller Pro without bluetooth.
It would also be really nice if they supported GC games with Classic Controller Pro.
There are so many good opportunities that Nintendo simply avoid, what harm would be in doing those things?
I think gamers would feel pleased to have that.

That would be nice if it was Bluetooth, as I wouldn't have to get up at all and plug it in/unplug it. Oh well.
 

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Of course e meant the default controller.

By the way, I wonder why Nintendo made the Classic Controller Pro without bluetooth.
It would also be really nice if they supported GC games with Classic Controller Pro.
There are so many good opportunities that Nintendo simply avoid, what harm would be in doing those things?
I think gamers would feel pleased to have that.
Wait, it's not Bluetooth? I thought it used the same wireless technology as the wiimote?
 

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No, it doesn't, you have to connect it to the Wiimote in order to play it wireless.

Interesting, didn't know that actually as I don't have one, but I might get one since it looks pretty comfortable.

Wiimote isn't bluetooth...

Wha? Well it ain't infrared, otherwise it would be to be directly in front of the sensor bar. If it's not Bluetooth, I guess people just magically sync them to PCs then without any Bluetooth adapters. First paragraph, the Wiimote is Bluetooth. Get your facts straight, please.

http://wiibrew.org/wiki/Wiimote
http://www.broadcom.com/products/Bluetooth/Bluetooth-RF-Silicon-and-Software-Solutions/BCM2042
 

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