New PS3/Nintendo Wii, gaming in general

[MskoDestny]

So far I'm not impressed with the Wii. I played with one for a bit at a Gamestop. The only game that seemed to be available was ExciteTruck. It was an okay game, but the Wiimote doesn't make a satisfying controller for a racing game, even an arcady one like ExciteTruck. The complete lack of resistance to your movements is very awkward at first. You get used to it after a little while, but it still leaves you with an unsatisfying tactile experience.

Motion sensing game controllers is nothing new. I think looking at past examples rythm games, "light-gun" games, sword-fighting games and certain types of sports games will work well with the Wii controller, but I'm not convinced that other games will. To an extent, modern arcades survive on their wacky control schemes since home consoles easily match what arcade machines can do graphically and the arcades are certainly no strangers to motion sensors and similar technology. If anyone had a vested interest in pushing the boundaries of funny motion sensing controllers you would think it would be the arcade manufacturers, yet you don't see them venture out of those genres with motion sensing tech. Granted part of this may because not all genres work well in an arcade setting, but it still doesn't inspire confidence.

Perhaps I'll change my tune when I get to try some of the other games, but for now I have no interest in buying a Wii particularly with the $250 price tag. It's too much for warmed-over last-gen hardware even if it has a fancy new controller.

The 360 has my interest at the moment. Graphically speaking, Gears of War looks better than anything I've seen for the PS3 so far (though I've only seen screenshots of PS3 games so far) and while it's pretty standard fare as far as shooters go, the strong support for multiplayer coop is a nice feature. Dead Rising seems to be a great game from the little bit of time I've spent with it and there are at least a few other titles that seem pretty interesting so far. The fact that the door is at least somewhat open for homebrew is also a plus.

[MskoDestny]

So the graphics you will see are GC graphics in most situations...not that the GC is bad, it's not. But again, this is supposed to be "next-gen".

Most of these games were developed on 729MHz hardware. No one knows the true speed of the final hardware, I'm guessing a 325MHz GPU and bus with a 975MHz cpu by Miyamoto's statements of "many times faster than a Gamecube" just the other day.

I wouldn't expect the graphics to get much better. The Gekko gets about 1125 Dhrystone MIPS at 485 MHz. Even if it scaled linearly with clockspeed you'd still end up with only about 2261 MIPS compared with 6400 MIPS for a SINGLE core in the 360 CPU combine that with a GPU that has no support for programmable shaders and you end up with a system that is completely incapable of producing "next-gen" graphics even at 480p. I'm sure there will be some improvement over the current crop of games, but there's no reason to expect any miracles.

[MskoDestny]

lou_dias wrote:
I played Excite Truck and the graphics were alot better than any Gamecube racer I've ever played.

Doesn't seem much better than the Need for Speed or F1 games for the Gamecube. An incremental improvement perhaps, but it's a far cry from something like PGR3 graphically.

I think complaints about Wii graphics on some games is because lazy developers just recompiled GC builds for the Wii with no graphical updates.  And it looked great on a 27" widescreen LCD and even my female acquaintance enjoyed Excite Truck as a non-gamer.

The Wii is fundamentally incapable of the kind of next-gen wow that the 360, PS3 and modern PCs can deliver. Bumping the clock and memory on Gamecube hardware will give you higher poly-counts and higher-res textures, but it won't give you the kind of lighting and physics that more advanced machines are capable of. If it was priced more like an incremental improvement to the Gamecube ($150-180) I don't think there would be much complaining.