The Digital Home Video: Nintendo will never need a Wii 2
We might see an Xbox 720 in five years and a Playstation 4, but we shouldn't see a Wii 2. Find out why in my latest video.
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Don Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.






Come on - think about it. The "hot streak" that you refer to has lasted since the day the console came out. It's not about the games, and it's not about the graphics. It's about how fun the system is to use. If you think that Microsoft and Sony aren't sitting up and taking notes right now, you're dead wrong. Once those companies up the ante with systems that are as intuitive and fun to use as the Wii, Nintendo will have to escalate.
One of my favourite games to play is still Mario World 3. The best FPS is still Quake 2. Game play is not graphics play. Graphics do not make the game, never have, never will.
See. The 1920p, trillion polygon, billion colour, 400 channel, 500 frame per second, 1 terabyte of texture memory, 10 processors each at a petaflop with a dedicated array of physics processors capable of handling a google computations each frame doesn't actually make for a cool game. All it does is make a very expensive game. A game so hard to develop that takes so many people to do it working at it for multiple years that it makes a game that can take no risk. So is going to be a known brand, with a known style.
The other way, the path of the Wii. Sure it makes plenty crap games, cause people can have a go, try to make a game, be a bit different, and fail. But the good designers, well they are and will continue to make great stuff. Little things like Wii MotionPlus. That is the Wii 2, It will cost $10 (or whatever) and totally remake the console with games never before possible, again. For $10. Not another $600
The other part of what Don is saying that he doesn't say is this.
Actually the Wii is the GameCube. I don't mean the duct taped together flame. I mean the coding environment. If you developed for GameCube, well you don't need to learn much more to code for Wii and whatever Nintendo releases next, well it will be the same again.
From a coders perspective, the PS3, may as well have been released by Puntamunga Corp and be called the S1. That's how much help knowing how to code a PS2 would do for you. So that means even more investment and cash to build completely new tools just to deal with it. So how innovative can you afford to be, best not do anything, cause if this game doesn't make a return, you are so bankrupt.
Nuff. I ranted
Think about it. Right now the internal hardware is only 512, with maybe a small amount of space with an SD card, what max 4GB?
With WiiWare out and becoming more prominent, along with their Virtual Console, and as games become increasingly advanced, they'd have to find some way to store it.
The only other way I could think that they could pull this off without an upgrade would be, let's say, something along of the lines of Apple's MoblieMe/.Mac, where they had a hard drive in the cloud, that you could store an amount of stuff on. I don't know how committed to that they are though.
- by Nintendork13 November 12, 2009 10:17 AM PST
- sorry i messed up the SNES was a 16-bit machine
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