Revolution is officially called...*drumroll*

[Black Dragon37]

Speaking to GamesIndustry.biz, Nintendo's UK boss David Yarnton has praised the "fresh, all-inclusive and all-encompassing" nature of the Wii name for the firm's new console, and dismissed criticism of it as "juvenile".

 

[c0_re]

ok, let's call it 'heavy scepticism' then.


ok, what's this obsession with HD - i'm darn sure you get enough "HD, next-gen looking" imagery off your PC monitor and HDTV every day - i know i do. of course, it is hardly playable (even when it's meant to be) - but we don't care about it ..no, wait, actually we do. and speaking of personal preferences and anecdotal arguments, guess how much time i spend playing in HD on my ultra-high-res, ridiculously-expensive desktop monitor, versus my SD consoles (all of them, including the DC which is hooked to a CRT VGA)?..

zero. i don't play in HD. at all. and the funny part is that i'm not even price-conscious. so, knowing that, the following question pops up - are you really, 100%, totally, ultimately positively sure you cannot have fun on anything less than 720p? at all? are we really that far apart in what we consider fun?

You admit right in your post you don't even game in HD so how would you have any clue at all? I refuse to even goto my friends houses to game if they doni't have widescreen HDTV's. I feel like I'm being ripped off by using s SDTV when I know how much better the game looks when I'm at home. I could care aless about the "power aspect" if they could get games to look as good as GameCube but with 720p graphics I would be tottally satisfied.

I mean whats keep developers from doing just that, dialing back on the textures and effects(to Cube quality) and upping the resolution from 480p to 720p. I REALLY REALLY REALLY want to be excited about the Wii(NintendDogs kicked ass) but Nintendo is making it difficult for me.

 

[Fox5]

You admit right in your post you don't game in HD so how would you hvae any clue? I refuse to even goto my friends houses to game if they doni't have widescreen HDTV's. I feel like I"m being ripped off by using s SDTV when I know how much better the game looks when I'm at home. I could care aless about the "power aspect" if they could get games to look as good as GameCube but with 720p graphics I would be tottally satisfied.

I mean whats keep developers from doing just that, dialing back on the textures and effects and upping the resolution from 480p to 720p. I REALLY REALLY REALLY want to be excited about the Wii(NintendDogs kicked ass) but Nintendo is making it difficult for me.

Personally, I care more about resolution than aspect ratio...
Anyhow, kind of wierd that you point to Nintendogs as kicking ass, yet in no way could the graphics in that be described as anything other than sufficient.

 

[hey69]

nintendo is taking a gamble thats what it is..
they could get away with a "different" handheld. 2 screens, touchscreen etc was al and great , but *I* believe you need more then a gyrocontroller and wifi connected gamecubePlus to conqeur the home console market

 

[c0_re]

Personally, I care more about resolution than aspect ratio...
Anyhow, kind of wierd that you point to Nintendogs as kicking ass, yet in no way could the graphics in that be described as anything other than sufficient.

OK maybe kicking ass was a little overboard but the game was great to sit down and play for 5 minutes here 10 minutes there(and yes I'm a dog geek so...) and thats when I was used to playing Xbox and PS2 now that I have a 360 the only other system that sees any real playtime is my modded Xbox1(and thats not even for Xbox games)

regaurdless I will own a Wii for Zelda\Mario and other mind\puzzle games, I just pray their all in 480p 16x9 and I doni't ahev to order to dam HD cable from Nintendo I can just wlak into a store and buy it.

 

[darkblu]

The point is, the Wii essentially *IS* an overglocked GC with a Wiiremote. So why force everyone to buy a new console?

i don't quite agree with the equation of wii to an overclocked gc, but that's not important. the essential thing is that nintendo are trying to mass-promote a new control scheme here, and this cannot be done marketting-wise as an add-on to a 5-year old console that already has its consumer image entrenched. it has to be done through a new console. a console that says 'i want you to interacted with me through that wand'. it does not matter that not every single wii title will be a wand masterpiece. see the ds as a case study. not all ds games, hell, not all good ds games, utilize the touch screen. but a handful of masterpieces do. take nintendogs - sony have no way in hell a chance to reproduce that phenomenon on the psp, no matter how much higher-res and nicer their handheld can render puppies. nintendogs is a completely different experience. i can assure you of that - i bought the game just to study it, as i generally don't play this genre.

Wii titles won't look light years better than GC titles. They could have saved themselves the trouble of producing new HW and manufacturing/selling it, saved developers from having to bother with another system (other than learning to use the wiiremote), and saved consumers from spending $100-200 to upgrade essentially GameCube Overdrive.

developers already have spades of experience with the cube - wii not deviating radically from its pedicessor, they'd feel much more confident on this platform than on the other two.

If the XBOX360 was essentially a XBox-1, with the CPU replaced by a 2Ghz Celeron, and the video chip replaced by an ATI Radeon 9700 PRO, would you buy it? Would you buy it just because of some new peripheral? If the answer to the first is Negative, but Second is Positive, then why can't this peripheral just be added to the XBOX1?

two questions:
1. at what price?
2. how is that new peripheral expected to affect my experience? - and if i expect it to have a major positive effect, do i feel confident this console vendor is capable of carrying it right.

 

[Fox5]

OK maybe kicking ass was a little overboard but the game was great to sit down and play for 5 minutes here 10 minutes there(and yes I'm a dog geek so...) and thats when I was used to playing Xbox and PS2 now that I have a 360 the only other system that sees any real playtime is my modded Xbox1(and thats not even for Xbox games)

regaurdless I will own a Wii for Zelda\Mario and other mind\puzzle games, I just pray their all in 480p 16x9 and I doni't ahev to order to dam HD cable from Nintendo I can just wlak into a store and buy it.

It's a big problem for you if you have to order the cable? I figure if you're as concerned about visual quality as you appear to be, it'd be no problem. Never bought a specialty cable or adapter online, or just bought online so you didn't have to pay $50 for monster cable, or $30 for store brand?

 

[darkblu]

You admit right in your post you don't even game in HD so how would you have any clue at all?

could it be because i have a clue that me not playing in HD be a conscious choice?
apparenlty that causality escaped you. nevermind.

 

[pc999]

Regarding the HW, what's wrong with a modest upgrade? It'll have almost quadruple the main RAM of the GC, which while not ginormous, certainly allows for a lot of things that GC was restricted from. And the GC didn't have quite enough fillrate to manage 480p widescreen as 60fps all the time, and FSAA would have been nice in the 480p games. And wouldn't we all be happy if they upgraded the destination buffer to 32-bit so we won't get the banding resulting from 6:6:6:6 color? Nevermind the fact that GC doesn't have LAN, onboard storage, or an SD card slot (and even with the semi-mythical adapter, you can only put 128 files on a single card regardless of size). For $199 (hopefully), I'm not disappointed with the potential. GC definitely couldn't have done Red Steel, even those early devshots.

Red Steel has been made in GC SDKs that is basically a GC job and in fact I cant see nothing that cant be done in GC (meybe with the expection of textures that seems much better, but even that can be because the smal pics).

And the only developer on record with an actual name says it's more than GC 1.5.

Who? Can you link/quote him please?

A 2ghz celeron with a 9700 pro is likely to be quite a bit more powerful than the Wii will be... and sufficient for standard res with next gen graphics.

A gekko is already better than the XCPU if it is 3x better then it should be better than that.

 

[Fox5]

Red Steel has been made in GC SDKs that is basically a GC job and in fact I cant see nothing that cant be done in GC (meybe with the expection of textures that seems much better, but even that can be because the smal pics).



Who? Can you link/quote him please?



A gekko is already better than the XCPU if it is 3x better then it should be better than that.

Is Gekko better? While do the low latency memory and faster fsb, I wouldn't be surprised to see it beast the xcpu, but given the same memory technology they should be about equal in performance per clock and the xcpu should win due to its higher clock.

 

[c0_re]

could it be because i have a clue that me not playing in HD be a conscious choice?
apparenlty that causality escaped you. nevermind.

Uhhh sorry but someone that has never done somthing b4 yet has has an opinion on the subjet isn't qualified to even make the statement.

Thats like me saying "yea well fillet mignon isn't any better than hamburger, oh but no I've never actually tried it for myself"

And no playing demos at best buy on those little crap lcd's doesn't count.

 

[pc999]

Is Gekko better? While do the low latency memory and faster fsb, I wouldn't be surprised to see it beast the xcpu, but given the same memory technology they should be about equal in performance per clock and the xcpu should win due to its higher clock.

Yes it is better given the memory but IIRC the celeron keep it low cache/fsb and high latency so it should still losing in real world , but if equal memory they should be equal per clock.

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=145081&postcount=26

Anyway I expect something more.

 

[Fox5]

Yes it is better given the memory but IIRC the celeron keep it low cache/fsb and high latency so it should still losing in real world , but if equal memory they should be equal per clock.

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showpost.php?p=145081&postcount=26

Anyway I expect something more.

I think the Celeron had 128KB cache which isn't that low, and it kept full speed cache unlike the half speed ones of the true celerons.
However, Gekko lost out because it had to do a lot of grunt work that the XCPU didn't need to because the Gekko had a less advanced GPU. The time the Gekko could have spent whooping the XCPU's ass was being spent doing things the XGPU was doing far better.

 

[pc999]

I think the Celeron had 128KB cache which isn't that low, and it kept full speed cache unlike the half speed ones of the true celerons.

Anyway it still losses.

However, Gekko lost out because it had to do a lot of grunt work that the XCPU didn't need to because the Gekko had a less advanced GPU. The time the Gekko could have spent whooping the XCPU's ass was being spent doing things the XGPU was doing far better.

That is true, I really expect they do somethingh about that with Wii.

 

[c0_re]

Anyway it still losses.



That is true, I really expect they do somethingh about that with Wii.

Well Wii has a true DX8-9 GPU right?(unlike NGC)

 

[LunchBox]

Sorry for having to rain on your parade pal, but you're a bit late to this particular party dude. Yada yada. Yes the name stinks, we all know it by now, and we don't need to hear it yet again by Some Random Guy On Teh Intarwebs. But you don't play the name now do you? It's the games that matter, right?

Right.

actually, i wasn't refering about the name of the console...

i have no problem with it's given nomenclature...

the thing that i was apalled at was the cheesy puns the marketing department made...

which was totally unecessary...

and the fact that they got paid for it...

 

[NANOTEC]

A 2ghz celeron with a 9700 pro is likely to be quite a bit more powerful than the Wii will be... and sufficient for standard res with next gen graphics.

I don't think we can say that quite yet. It has been said that the GPU is DX9 and that it's equivalent to a X800? The CPU even if it's based on Gekko can be quite powerful. For example single core Gekko at 1GHz with two VMX units or dual core Gekko with 1 VMX for each core.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Who? Can you link/quote him please?

From IGN's Madden interview:

IGN Wii: Obviously, Wii is not going to have the graphic horsepower of competing next generation consoles. Some developers have called it a "GameCube 1.5." Would you agree with that estimate and how are you maximizing on the graphic capabilities of the machine?

John Schappert: I don't think I would agree with the GameCube 1.5 estimate. I would say that I think the Wii should be evaluated by itself. I think it's a unique device and I think what makes it unique is the controller. As for graphics, we'll be showing Madden in 480p and 16:9 widescreen mode running at 60 frames per second. I think it looks great. I think it looks really good. It's also kind of hard for me to judge any of these machines before they're final. We get updates to all kinds of hardware quite often as the stuff is being revved and it's always getting better. I can tell you that we had a couple of guys from Tiburon come by and they hadn't gotten hands-on with the controller, aside from some demos. They thought Madden for Wii looked stunning and played great. So my answer is that it's a unique system and we're going to maximize our power for it. I think the games are going to look really good.

Regarding the CPUs of Cube and Xbox, you can talk about theory all you want (I know, it's a tech board, that's what people do), but in real life, Cube did incredibly well, especially in situations with large numbers of moving objects on screen (Pikmin, Rebel Strike, etc), and the XCPU wasn't exactly quick at anything going much beyond vanilla ragdoll physics, nor was the Xbox winning any awards for animation or knocking anyone's socks off--certainly not after FFX on PS2 and RE4 on Cube.

 

[darkblu]

Uhhh sorry but someone that has never done somthing b4 yet has has an opinion on the subjet isn't qualified to even make the statement.

for somebody who doesn't have an idea what i do you seem to waste too much bandwidth commenting on it. i said i did not play in HD, i did not say i didn't have any touch with it. and before you waste yet more bandwidth, allow me introdurce myself to you. i'm a desktop gamedev, have been on and off for the past 8 years, and i can assure you i have a clue how resolution affects gameplay - that from the production side of the fence. plus it's safe to say i fancy good graphics, given what part of my life i've spent working on such, and i can recognize good visuals even after a couple'o good beers.. actually especially then. so when i say me not playing in HD is a conscious choice you can trust me that's the case.

 

[c0_re]

for somebody who doesn't have an idea what i do you seem to waste too much bandwidth commenting on it. i said i did not play in HD, i did not say i didn't have any touch with it. and before you waste yet more bandwidth, allow me introdurce myself to you. i'm a desktop gamedev, have been on and off for the past 8 years, and i can assure you i have a clue how resolution affects gameplay - that from the production side of the fence. plus it's safe to say i fancy good graphics, given what part of my life i've spent working on such, and i can recognize good visuals even after a couple'o good beers.. actually especially then. so when i say me not playing in HD is a conscious choice you can trust me that's the case.

No offence but woopdee doo you want to whip out our units and measure, I travel around the world setting up Airline reservation systems and work hand in hand with developers on a daily basis, I've spent many hours in Microsoft and Cisco labs and I've worked with both microshaft and sony on a professional level. I could send pics of my view from fat office on the 30th floor but THIS IS THE INTERNET NO ONE CARES ABOUT THAT CRAP!

You still didn't even address my argument about playing games in HD even though you've never even done it you seem to have an opinion, this is just asnine.

How is my my Hamburger comparison not tottaly valid, or do I need to make another primary school level comparison?