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Nintendo Wii $250 on November 19th.

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Just for BMax: :biggrin:

http://www.aussie-nintendo.com/?v=news&p=11492

... Chris Hecker of Maxis' Spore development team blasted Nintendo's Wii, according to GamesIndustry.

Dubbed 'Fear of a Wii Planet,' Hecker began his speech by reminding attendees of his presentation a year earlier, in which he criticised the balance Sony and Microsoft place between gameplay and graphics. "At the end I asked the audience, will Nintendo save us? Will they deliver a balanced machine that's fast enough? The answer to that question is the topic of today's rant," he said.

Hecker continued, "Everybody loves the Wii. 'Oh, God, the Wii, we love the Wii so much'," but concluded that, quite frankly, "The Wii is a piece of shit.

"I have uncovered the secret to Wii manufacturing," Hecker said. "The way you manufacture a Wii is you take two GameCubes and some duct tape. This thing is totally underpowered... This is not about graphics, more polygons, all that kind of crap. What I want to be able to do is spend CPU to make the machine smarter, more interesting and more automatically intelligent.

"It's about interactivity - that is the key differentiator of our art form, and interactivity is about doing something interesting with that input and threading it back to the user. You can't do that with a piece of shit underpowered computer."

...
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Now, I can at least respect the direction this guy is coming from. Rather than just complaining about the graphics, he's actually bringing up a legitimate point (albeit in a rather hostile manner) about AI limitations, and not being able to develop in that field with a machine that doesn't push any computational boundaries.

In that sense, the Wii may miss out on some pretty good titles/studios, but I'm not sure Nintendo is too concerned about that market.
 
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I totally agree with the guy :biggrin:

But again, it all comes back to who is playing the thing. I dont get excited by games like brain age, mario, zelda, metroid, cooking mama, and the 500 different variations of these. Alot of people do. Simple as that.

I do find it hilarious that they are bringing out Manhunt 2 on it. Can just picture myself strangling guys with the cord on between the remote and nunchuck :biggrin:
 
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MolGenBuckeye;774892; said:
Now, I can at least respect the direction this guy is coming from. Rather than just complaining about the graphics, he's actually bringing up a legitimate point (albeit in a rather hostile manner) about AI limitations, and not being able to develop in that field with a machine that doesn't push any computational boundaries.

In that sense, the Wii may miss out on some pretty good titles/studios, but I'm not sure Nintendo is too concerned about that market.
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I agree with that point and am not surprised by this -- I fully expected there would eventually be a Wii-developer backlash, but I wasn't exactly ready to read that a guy at Maxis (of SimCity fame) is the one who hates the console, while John Carmack of id is excited and can't wait to port their older engines to the platform and see what barriers they can break.

My biggest issue with Hecker's rant is that he's writing a damn video game, he's not analyzing radio signals to search for extra terrestrials, he's not mapping DNA, the human genome, folding proteins, or even writing a high-order process to pass the Turing Test or beat the World's most skilled humans at Go or Chess. He's writing a video game, and he isn't even writing it for the Wii.

The guy isn't complaining about the horsepower on the DS, the PSP, or even my Motorola RAZR V3, since those are platforms that Spore apparently will be made available on.

The complaint I expected. The complaint, coming from him, is completely out of left field. Spore's AI can scale to the horsepower of the CPU, just like the SimCity series does, where "Cheetah" on a fast CPU is faster than "Cheetah" on a slow CPU, etc ... etc ...

It also seems disingenuous of him to bash the Wii, and by extension the loyalists, fanboys, and early adopters -- the Nintendo owners -- because I would be inclined to think Spore would sell better on the Wii than any other console platform, plus it'd be easier to play with the IR pointer on the Wii remote than an analog joystick or a D-Pad.

Charlie Weis and I are befuddled.
 
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Damage control. Let me guess, Spore's lead dev Will Wright and a bunch of EA bigwigs tore Hecker a new ass about five minutes after he stepped off the stage?

:slappy:

http://www.gwn.com/news/story.php/id/11595/Chris_Hecker_Doesnt_Really_Hate_The_Wii.html

?I don't know who has read the internet, yesterday. In a [unintelligible] panel I said a bunch of things. I was trying to be thought provoking and entertaining and fun and a lot of the stuff went too far over the top on the entertaining and fun side, so that it was no longer thought provoking, just inflammatory. And in the process I hurt a bunch of people I care about. And so, I want to apologize now.

When I'm on stage, I'm me. I'm talking talk from me. From me. I'm not representing EA or Maxis. I want to make two things perfectly clear.

I do not think the Wii is a piece of shit. Nintendo needs to be applauded for trying to interface on the controller front, the user interface front, on making games accessible, on making a console that you don't need to mortgage your house to afford.
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I think Heckler has some valid points, as previously mentioned, but he definitly went a little overboard. The Wii definitly isn't going to have groundbreaking graphics, or won't have as much processing power to dedicate to AI like in Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and beyond. I think, from a developers point a view, your perspective of a system is determined by what you want to do with it. In Heckler's case, he doesn't care so much for Nintendo's approach to the next gen with a system thats built more around the controller than the console itself.
 
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Wii's still in short supply; Nintendo shops for another manufacturer to assemble units in effort to meet demand. Currently, Wii's are produced exclusively by Foxconn Precision. Companies reportedly considering jumping on the Wii bandwagon include Asustek and Wistron.

Interesting, because Asus currently builds the PS3, while Wistron is one assembly partner for the XBox 360.

http://www.digitimes.com/systems/a20070328PD220.html
 
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osugrad21;775634; said:
I just like Wii Sports...nothing more.

...until the Wii Shopping has a "Mike Tyson's Punchout" download available :)
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Punch-Out!! hit the Virtual Console this morning. :biggrin:

As predicted, it is not the Tyson version, but the "NES Classics" re-release version that replaced Iron Mike with Mr. Dream.
 
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