Indie Games coming to Wii... next year...

N'Gai Croal got the exclusive by a few hours. It seems that Nintendo will start selling independant games next year. I wonder if that is intentionally to allow a harddrive to launch before Christmas to allow more memory for these games.

Here is the link: http://blog.newsweek.com/blogs/leve...6/level-up-exclusive-on-nintendo-wiiware.aspx

 

I'm betting the hard drive will launch this summer. Why? Because Neo Geo games will be available for download starting in July or August.

There's no way to fit Neo Geo games into that 512MByte onboard flash with much of anything else. They've got to sell a hard drive sooner. And hopefully they won't gouge the hell out of us like MS did with that $179.99 120GB elite drive.

 

Are neo geo games over 512mb? arnt that just 2d games? (neo geo is before my time)

 

There are several games that are 125MByte. Most Neo Geo games were around 60-90MByte. The earliest ones, and smallest, were 40MByte.

N64 ROMs, for comparison, topped out around 64MByte, but were typically 16MByte or less. N64 ROMs started off at 4MByte.

Not much room to work with.

 

Ah oke.

Back to the Wiiware, I assume you need some kind of devkit for this? or will you be able to just build everything on a pc, and than compile and emulate it to see if it will work on a real Wii? I was thinking if this cost like a couple of hundred bucks it would be real sweet because everyone should be able to afford one. Not that im capable of making a game, I hate programming but I can make half decent 3d models. Would be fun to get a group of people from lets say school and build something. Not necessairly to make something which can be sold, but just to play around with, see if you can come up with something that is somewhat fun to play to begin with.

 

It's good to see them come on board with this idea. Outside of the PC space, having 3 console platform holders potentially competing for indie content should be good for developers when it comes to negotiating terms etc.

 

Lots of animated High Res(well high res at their time) Textures does that but yeah we are talking more like 768mbits to 1024mbits for a few of them so thats 128MB which really takes up a lot of space. Personally I don't have much space left off already on my Wii from saved files and various current VC content.

Definately need more space!

 

As SD cards are supported in Wii, in they're dirt cheap for a gig these days, I don't see the point of an HDD unless they want big games downloadable. 128 MB downloads are small enough that if you have to clear memory on your SD card, you can redownload the game without having to wait too long.

 

They need to fix their download servers took like 15-20 minutes yesterday for me to download FZeroX which was only a 128mbit cartridge.

 

I'm not sure if they've announced the limits on sizes yet, but the rumours I've heard are on the small side compared to other download services.

 

Does the Wii support SDHC cards? I plan on getting an 8GB SD card.

 

Not official if I remeber correct but I remember reading that lager cards do work though.

 

How about beer mats?

 

FWIW I think this is a really interesting announcement. Unlike live and the PS3 network, I think Nintendos setup really does open up possibilities for new business models.

It's practical for a small shop to build live or PS3 online games, but they are still a considerable investment and require a publisher to get your product out the door. If what I'm hearing about the Nintendo setup is accurate then it would be a much smaller investment and no publisher required. It looks like Nintendo has some rules in place that should stop the big boys saturating the market overnight, and at least allow the small guys to have a shot.

The big question for me is with no QC at the Nintendo end will the dross drown out the stuff that's worth playing and make it difficult to find the worthwhile titles. Effectively making the service worthless. I'd heard that part of the reason that MS started requiring a publisher for live games was as a first level filter to reduce the number of crap concept submissions they were seeing.

 

Maybe they'll introduce some kind of rating system? so better titles will get more exposure than the crap ones. But wont there be some kind of QC? Otherwise you could potentially release some 100kb crap title that doesnt really do anything and have people pay for that. Even if you only sell that to a 1000, at a couple of bucks that is a nice profit for something that actually didnt cost you any money.

 

If they force games to have free demo's, and let people rate them (minimum number of ratings needed to count, to remove noise from rivals down-rating each other!), there's no reason for dross to get through. At least, not dross by the voting public's standards. There's plenty of 'good stuff' highly rated on the 'net that makes me cringe!

 

Didn't you read the LevelUp Blog / our summary of it?

Nintendo decides how much is charged for the title (They're also doing the usual Bug Checking). I suppose this is at least some rudimentary form of QC.

 

No I havnt read that. It makes sense now. If nintendo atleast has a look at it the complete crap atleast wont make it.

 

In that case. Here ya go: http://www.beyond3d.com/content/news/308