If you're playing Zelda, yes. If you're playing Wii Sports, no. Now, how many early 360 titles mostly felt like regular Xbox games with more polygons and parallax mapping? How many early DS games felt like GBA titles with some tacked-on touch panel support?
That's kind of a red herring, because it doesn't lack online gameplay in Japan, and it will cease lacking online gameplay in Europe once Mario Strikers comes out, and in the USA once Pokemon comes out. The Wii has online features, and online gaming has been annoyingly slow in coming, but then, the Xbox didn't launch with Live, either, though everyone knew it was coming.*
Irrelevant. The Wii does have the Wiimote. What if the Xbox 360 only had 64 MB of RAM? What if the PS3 didn't have a GPU, but still had a deeply-pipelined but otherwise primitive rasterizer? What if the Wii reverted to 64 MB cartridges?
No, because you could play such "PS3" games on your PS2 if you bought a couple of used Eyetoys. However, it is impossible to play Wii games on your Gamecube, no matter how many accessories you buy. The comparison breaks down because the Wii is not actually the same machine as Gamecube. Also, note that the $299 Xbox 360 lacks the next-gen feature of being able to save your games. I wouldn't really call it a next-gen console until you buy some memory for it.
Yes, how ironic that at a site called "Beyond 3D" that many here can't look beyond 3D.
Since when the path to "next-gen" is adding multimedia capabilities to a console ? To make a proper list :
So ? Nintendo longly stated that consoles are not related to technology, but how you use it. Wii' hardware is outdated, there is no debate to that.
But the Wiimote is there and the developers cannot "not use it". This "if" does not bring anything to your point.
Would Sony have suppressed regular controller and show good demonstrations of gameplay (like Nintendo did) my answer would be "yes", undoubtely.
I know the argument i am going to give here is not very popular here but again : DS ? Hasn't it prove that a path for future does not have to be generationnal leap hardware-wise ?
No they could not. And you perfectly know that, that is why i don't understand why you say that...
First, whe are only 4 monthes after launch : give it time ! DS waited one year before descent use of touch screen, PS2 waited 18 monthes for descent games.
This is going off into a tangential Wii sales thread, but before you can claim these things aren't necessary to sell a console, you have to make sure the Wii is away from any Fad phase and is actually a robust console. The world has had plenty of 'take the world by storm' products that were soon forgotten when the novelty wore off. If Wii is one of those, eventually those missing features will cause the product to be forgotten in favour of the machines with those features. If Wii isn't just a fad, long term sales will remain strong. The nature of Wii's acceptance by the market will only be proven by long-term sales. Until then, we can't say that such-and-such features aren't requirements. At the moment all we can say for certainty is Wii has a lot of immediate appeal. There's no way to gauge from initial high demand what impact low technical prowess will have.
They were last-gen consoles with last-gen features. As the console scene changes (or not) features may become expectations to define a genre. Like mobile phones. In 1995 Sony, MS and Nintendo release mobile phones for talking anywhere. In 2000 they all release mobiles with talking and texting added. In 2005 Sony and MS release phones with talk and texting and cameras inbuilt with multimedia messaging, while Nintendo releases another talk+text only phone.Just because cameras weren't a part of the mobile scene in previous generations, doesn't mean you can discount their worth this gen. The new gen of mobiles adds the features of cameras, and a phone without the camera is surely a last-gen design, no? You won't get anyone selling a mobile this day with the features of a few years ago, so why expect people not to care if their console lacks the features of its contemporaries?
No, because the XB360 and PS3 are selling to the existing console market that we know likes dual-analogue inputs and existing games. Unless there's reason to think the existing 120+ million console gamers will suddenly not want to play console games like they have done, there's no reason to doubt XB360s and PS3's success. With Wii, Nintendo have taken a different, unproven course. At the moment it's paying dividends because people are lapping them up, but it's a different market to the existing and traditional console base, and it's unproven if the non-traditional gamers have 'staying power'. It's like Barbie versus Furbie. Barbie is traditional and can be trusted to continue to sell tothe people that like it. Furby was new and exciting. It appealed to a market Barbie never could and outsold Barbie by crazy margins...but then disappeared because it's market was quickly satisfied. Barbies continue to sell to the Barbie market - the Furby market was different to the Barbie market and the Furby market had no staying power. XB360 and PS3 are still Barbies in essence, though with more optional extras than ever before (and some would say still just as boring as consoles have always been). Is the Wii a new Furby or new Barbie? It has that uncertainty that the other consoles don't have.
Thanks for the clarification.
This whole 'Is wii a next-gen console?' is very subjective depending on the criteria you like to use. If I ignore what's under the hood like you say, the Wii doesn not give me a next-gen experience like it's competitors do at all. It's something weird, something fundamentally different, you either like it or you don't.
On paper, yes you could say that the wii is a new console because of the hardware and the controller.
But like I said, it all depends on the criteria you use and as long as people in this discussion don't agree about what defines 'next-gen', the question remains subjective and intuitive, based on how much you like the system.
And when I look at the poll results, the majority of voters don't like the system that much. So there's your answer.
No, you can't make any of these statements based on the success of the Wii; that is, you can't find attributes that the Wii lacks and turn it around to mean that that attribute is not a strong sales driver.
I wasn't comparing it to mobiles other than as an example of how feature set can't be expected to stay the same. Where devices, be they consoles, mobile phones, cars, or whatever, have more features added over time with new devices, that shows that the next generation of device tends to add features. If PS3 and XB360 add the same features, and Wii keeps the feature set of last-gen, the new features can be consider as differentiating the new from the old - to be a new gen mobile, you need to have 3G and in built camera; to be a new gen console you need to have cutting edge processing and online gaming. Not that I'm saying you have to, but that's the argument for one definition of 'next-gen'.
People say that, but AFAIK it's been growing year on year since PS1 days. I don't know where the decline is...
I don't know who the Wii is selling to. That's why I can't guess if it's a Furby phenomenum or a Barbie phenomenum. Bare in mind a lot of my posts are playing Devil's Advocate, arguing the other POV without neceesarily subscribing to it myself. For the record I voted Yes, Wii is a next-gen console based on my definition. But I can see the argument against and thoght I'd weigh in to discuss it a bit further
Sure, and maybe they'll get lucky that way. Whatever happens, it'll only be proven after a while. Until then, there's no point pointing to Wii's curent sales and saying 'no-one cares about the XB360 and PS3's complex features. Long term, perhaps they will, and Wii is just a cheap novelty experience until the others drop to fit the mainstream bank-balance.
As above, I'm not saying who is buying Wii or why. Only that you can't look at current sales and assume they'll carry on for years and Wii will be the biggest success ever.tongue_of_colicab said:
Not to my mind. Are those who bought DS just for Brain Training buying into other games on DS? Or are the constant software sales of more traditional games on DS the same gamers who owned GBA - not 'non-gamers'?
Except they're not, as per Joshua's post. XB360 and PS3 have fancy HD graphics, online content galore, grandiose network plans, and 'stuff'. Wii has little interest in that stuff and instead offers a different control interface. The moment you lose the different control interface, you're left with something much closer to the PS2 and XB than the XB360 and PS3.
