Wednesday, September 20, 2006

My thoughts on the Wii(posted on Gonintendo as well)



The Wii has gotten a little bad press lately because of the price. Mainly its been from sites like 1up and Joystiq that seem to like to start rants on that to up their site hit count.

How can people be shocked at the $249.99 price point? Nintendo never lied or said what the price could be beyond just saying “it will not exceed $250.”

The media should be blamed for getting everyone’s hopes up for a sub $200 price point. They were the ones that were saying $170, $175, $199, and even $150. Everyone seemed to forget about Nintendo’s one statement about it not exceeding $250. They said that price for a reason and the reason was that it was “probably” going to be $249.99 but they just were not quite ready to say that price because of issues with pricing the controller and the pack-in game or the inclusion of the DVD playback. So once they got all that straight they could settle on that $249.99 price point. It doesn’t bother me at all.

Perrin Kaplan said that the Wii “is a Ferrari under the hood”. All the sites just throw out the “Why are we paying this much for a Gamecube 1.5″ stuff and I don’t really think they can truly know that right now. The Power PC CPU they are using in the Wii is the latest in power efficiency. Not just in using less power in your household, but in processing power too. 729Mhz will perform more like a 1.5Ghz CPU without the HD. So I would say that the Wii is plenty powerful and capable of way more than Gamecube. The ATi GPU is another story that is more of a mystery, but I guarantee that they didn’t just add 100Mhz and be done with it. The Wii is a very deceptive console in terms of its power and I can’t believe that these people on these sites just pass it off as GC 1.5, or just a Gamecube with a new controller.

I think that the Wii is totally worth the money. State of the art motion sensing tech. and state of the art architecture built into a small console the size of 3 DVD cases. I don’t know about you, but that is extremely impressive to me.

If anyone complains at all about the launch lineup(some sites have dared to) because of no Metroid or no Mario or Smash, they need to stop right now. Close to 20 games on day one, and over 30 by the end of the year. Zelda is supposed to take you close to 100 hours to complete, that makes the number of games seem even more because that is a lot of playing time for one game. The Third Party lineup is so strong too:

Red Steel
Far Cry
Splinter Cell
Rayman
Tony Hawk
Call of Duty 3
Madden 07
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
Dragon Ball Z
Monkey Ball
Trauma Center
Need for Speed:Carbon

Each of those games could be very worth buying and I know I’ll be getting a few of them myself on launch day(besides Zelda).

I’ve seen developers trying to do more than just make crappy ports from the current gen(Marvel) and that will add to sales of those games too. People aren’t stupid, they can tell when a company is just releasing a game with no effort and trying to make a quick buck.

The controller has already proved that it IS revolutionary(Wii Sports, Mario Galaxy, Metroid, Madden 07). Many games have proved successful using it and fine tuning for others is all that is needed. The controller is no doubt the selling point of the Wii and it is going to sell the system out come launch day. How could you not want to play the Wii after seeing all the other people on those videos playing it and swinging their arms all about. Everyone will want a piece of that action, no doubt.

The Wii is also the most talked about console on the internet, and its starting to even get spots on local news channels(I saw a report on the Wii on my local news last week) as the “next big thing”.

My thoughts are that the Wii will be awesome and that this launch will still be the best in videogame history regardless if Metroid is there or not. I will be playing this system this year and I’ve never been more excited to play a videogame system since the NES and THAT is saying a lot.

Link to Gonintendo

3 comments:

dishonorable missionary said...

couldn't agree with you more. The Wii makes me feel like the day I went and got my super nintendo.I see nintendo blowing eveyone's mind who didn't think they'd be outselling Sony and xbox. They have so much under their belt to be king this round isn't just obvious

game on said...

I concur my good man. Let's be honest. 250 is a good price, it is not a great price but good none the less. At least we get Wii sports which will be amazing. Traditionally Nintendo launched their systems at $200, so I was kind of hoping that this would occur again. However, I look at it like this, you can still buy a wii with games and controllers for cheaper than a PS3 unit alone.

Also- Mario is looking better than anything I have ever seen. There is a HD level run on the net now and it looks outstanding.

Metaldave said...

Yeah I've seen that Mario HD clip and man does it look great. That probably has the best graphics on the Wii so far, it just has such a high quality that not many other Wii games have. Who would've thought?