I think this editorial summarizes how a lot of us feel about the Wii. I honestly have not been that excited about the machine since E3 demos made it pretty clear that we most certainly are not dealing with an up-to-date GPU here. I'm a bit comforted that Red Steel has made marked improvements (much improved since they were working on overclocked Gamecubes), but I still think Nintendo totally dropped the ball on the processors.
I'm not quite as rabid about graphics as some of y'all. I didn't get upset when the DS was substantially less powerful than PSP (the price made sense enough after the first drop, didn't need a Memory Stick, no load times, 10-hour battery life, touchscreen, still a big leap over GBA), and I'm certainly not of the same mind as folks who will seriously rethink a console purchase when they discover that the FSB on the CPU is 15% slower than they expected.
But here Nintendo's offering us a machine that's designed around two features that I don't think matter in the slightest: Gamecube backward compatibility and being able to be connected to the Internet 24/7. The first doesn't matter because everyone who cared about Gamecube games has a Gamecube already. I'm going to guess that the real reason was to speed up the porting of Gamecube projects to Wii...which only matters for launch window. So in other words, we're putting up with vastly inferior hardware for 4-5 years for the sake of a few launch titles. The second doesn't matter because there's not much of a difference between downloading game updates automatically at night and just downloading them when you turn the machine on. Is that going to be a console-seller to anyone? I don't think so.
No, I'm not as upset about the pricetag as some folks. I think it's a bit much, but it's so not much over my $200-$230 expected price tag that it won't be down in my price range within a year. I wasn't expecting 64-player online matches. I don't really even care all that much about "true" HDR, HD resolutions, or parallax mapping. But I think that for the price Nintendo is asking, the profit they want to make, and the hardware profile/heat signature/power consumption they're going for, they could have made the machine substantially more powerful, and that bothers me. They could have solved the generational pet peeves everyone had with just a few transistors, but judging by the games, they didn't, and that bothers me, too. Because that's just not good engineering, if you ask me. And I just don't like buying products that I feel are poorly designed.
I'm not quite as rabid about graphics as some of y'all. I didn't get upset when the DS was substantially less powerful than PSP (the price made sense enough after the first drop, didn't need a Memory Stick, no load times, 10-hour battery life, touchscreen, still a big leap over GBA), and I'm certainly not of the same mind as folks who will seriously rethink a console purchase when they discover that the FSB on the CPU is 15% slower than they expected.
But here Nintendo's offering us a machine that's designed around two features that I don't think matter in the slightest: Gamecube backward compatibility and being able to be connected to the Internet 24/7. The first doesn't matter because everyone who cared about Gamecube games has a Gamecube already. I'm going to guess that the real reason was to speed up the porting of Gamecube projects to Wii...which only matters for launch window. So in other words, we're putting up with vastly inferior hardware for 4-5 years for the sake of a few launch titles. The second doesn't matter because there's not much of a difference between downloading game updates automatically at night and just downloading them when you turn the machine on. Is that going to be a console-seller to anyone? I don't think so.
No, I'm not as upset about the pricetag as some folks. I think it's a bit much, but it's so not much over my $200-$230 expected price tag that it won't be down in my price range within a year. I wasn't expecting 64-player online matches. I don't really even care all that much about "true" HDR, HD resolutions, or parallax mapping. But I think that for the price Nintendo is asking, the profit they want to make, and the hardware profile/heat signature/power consumption they're going for, they could have made the machine substantially more powerful, and that bothers me. They could have solved the generational pet peeves everyone had with just a few transistors, but judging by the games, they didn't, and that bothers me, too. Because that's just not good engineering, if you ask me. And I just don't like buying products that I feel are poorly designed.
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