seanraaron

Okay, the X-box and PS3 titles being mentioned are pretty much traditional console titles, right? I mean if the Wii strategy is working, then presumably "big hitters" from Sony and Microsoft may sell to their installed base, but are probably unlikely to result in many console sales -- surely anyone who's a big Halo fan hasn't been sitting around waiting for Halo 3 to buy a 360? I just don't see it.

That's only going to happen if the games sell on other platforms to begin with. If the Wii's momentum continues to a degree that the X-box 360 and PS3 become niche platforms relative to the Wii, and more importantly, their software sales are exceedingly small compared to Wii, than I cannot see how it would make any sense to first develop on X-box or PS3 and then port it over (is it not the case that the Wii is an easier platform to develop for than the other two?).

Okay, I'll check out that review and see if I can get a broader spectrum view on it. Maybe I'll pick up the game eventually after all. I'll not derail this thread further!

Yeah I saw that. Hopefully no one else reads that news and buys their Xmas Wiis early or it gets sorted. Anyone actually state what the cause is? Is there a shortage of silicon on the beaches?

Wait, Mecury Meltdown is US$20 in North America? Isn't that thing going for £20+ here?!?

Well, in defense of the developers, when porting to a console with a control scheme like the Wii's, isn't getting the control down first more important? I mean they can finess the character models and that later right? And to my eyes, the shots don't look that bad, of course the last time I gamed on a tv was with a Playstation, so anything two years old in the graphics dept. will go unnoticed by myself. We aren't suggesting this is a straight PSP-port are we? I would agree that would be an unacceptable level of laziness. How close to release is this, actually? With regard to CoD3 controls, the Gamespot review section on this really put me off (shooting and looking seems to be done well, but the rest...): The game opens with a brief training mission. Here, you'll learn how to fire weapons and throw grenades, as well as how to move around. The training mission is sufficient in other versions of the game where you just have to learn how the buttons are mapped on a standard controller, but here you're learning a whole new control scheme, and the training doesn't get the job done. You'll have to learn on the fly, which initially means a lot of frustrating deaths as you fumble with the controls. Movement is controlled by the analog stick on the Wii's Nunchuk. You look around and aim by pointing the Wii Remote at the screen and moving it. Moving your reticle around the inside portion of the screen affects your aim, while moving it near the edges makes you look up and down or turn left and right. You can fire your weapon by pressing the B button, but this doesn't allow for much accuracy. For precision aiming, you'll want to press and hold A, which raises your gun to eye level and lets you use the weapon's sight. The basic mechanics work quite well and are the easiest aspect of the controls to learn, though it will be quite a while before you're a crack shot. There are a couple of alternate control schemes, but each one is limited in some way by the physical position of the buttons on the Wii Remote--specifically, any move mapped to the D pad. Any time you need to hit the D pad you've got to adjust your grip slightly, and this causes the remote to move, which in turn alters where you're looking or aiming. This makes it extremely difficult to throw smoke or frag grenades with any accuracy. An alternate control scheme lets you toss grenades by making a throwing motion with the Nunchuk. This feels neat when it works, but you still have to press the D pad to select the grenade, and sometimes the game doesn't recognize your throwing motion. You can perform a melee attack by pressing down on the remote or by moving the remote forward. Once again, this almost always screws up your onscreen view.

Okay, nobody likes the graphics, but is the control scheme good? I'm a Call of Duty fan (and I don't feel like it's a one-many army game -- that was Medal of Honour, I believe), but what I've read about CoD3 isn't encouraging in the Wii-controls department. I really don't get the focus on graphics with you guys, you're playing on a goddam TV for crying out loud, not a 2048x1024 monitor! I suppose if you've all got HDTVs (I've still got my 6+ y.o. 80cm Sanyo widescreen CRT) then fine, but why aren't you playing with your PS3/X-box 360, then?

And yet this is the kind of game that's selling the system. I hear yet another person who's upset that the Wii is targeting _everyone_ with a TV, and not just people who spend most of their waking lives in front of a games console. Too bad. If you don't like the broadened appeal, then as a proper "gamer" you no doubt own other consoles you can purchase the latest platform/shooter for. I wouldn't call attempting to cash in on a market completely ignored by Sony and Microsoft "lazy," I'd call it "good business sense." Nintendo doesn't have the money to gamble on systems that won't sell because they cost too much, but clearly the potential gains to be made by appealing to people who might want to spend the odd hour playing a pick-up title (and who don't own HDTVs and therefore could give a shit about the lack of 1080p graphics which are a constant moan on this board) are massive. The more successful titles like Cooking Mama are, the more of them there's going to be. "Gaming" titles will sell because people buy them, but Nintendo's also going after the non-gaming crowd, so they cannot afford to have a drought of titles that appeal to casual gamers or it will turn off the money tap. People that used to wait for the next Zelda just aren't going to keep Nintendo going; if they took that attitude they'd end up like Sega and you'd continue to have gaming be an expensive niche market. I for one wouldn't bother with a console at all if Nintendo hadn't made the decision it did with the Wii, so I'm very happy to see Cooking Mama and Brain Training, even if I won't buy them. I have no interest in yet another RPG or GTA-clone. Once the Wii ecosystem is in place and all developers are on board I'm sure you will see a wide diversity of titles, but the idea that the 1st generation of software for what was an unproven concept should contain all the licensed crap that everyone loved on previous generations of hardware is completely rediculous. Lastly, I'll take a hundred original properties over yet another licensed crap title like Pokemon or any of the numerous movie tie-ins that clog up the shelves every time someone in Hollywood comes up with another cute character to sell to kids and their parents, so no, the absence of Pokemon RPG doesn't concern me in the least.

What is this Tingle? Anyway, I've got to wait until after the Coca-Cola 30 September competition (first one I've ever entered via text) on the outside chance I might win a Wii (and a 28" LCD tv which would be sold on ebay). After that I'm going to Gamestation!

My mother-in-law just got one for her birthday (she's over 50); she's in the States and apparently over there the ad campaigns are targeting older folks than they are here, so no question Nintendo is going after the non-gamer market. I know people despair over the absence of "hardcore" titles, but one thing I remember enjoying about the original Playstation was the large number of titles available for it and the fact that I, as a retro-junkie, was catered to as well. Now with the Wii targeting a larger demographic _and_ having a massive installed user base, we'll hopefully see the kind of diversity of titles that probably hasn't been seen since the old Atari 2600 days when you could buy a bridge (as in cards) game or chess for a home console. Not to mention with the Virtual Console we no longer are limited to carts or even discs for distribution and the possibilities widen enourmously. Nintendo may even see the light and open up the regions or allow homedev for it. Of course, let's hope that Nintendo keeps a tight reign on the quality control for commercial titles so we don't repeat the 2600s glut of crap titles that ultimately killed it off.

The only high street place I'm even considering is Gamestation because their bundles can include any game in the shop. GAME has a limited selection of games to choose from for their bundles and none of them appeal to me. But there's only a couple of titles out presently that I want, Gottlieb Pinball, and Resident Evil 4 and neither one of these seems to be at Gamestation on West Nile, so if the Gamestation on Sauchiehall Street doesn't have them, then I'll order online. I've noted that mall stores seem to have more problem with supply than high street in Glasgow. Braehead had no Wiis, even in GAME or HMV or Woolworths that I saw -- I didn't bother checking if Argos had stock. Good thing is that the hardware prices seem to be within £1 of each other, so outside of things like the Classic Controller (which seems to be between £13.99 and £17.99), where you buy your Wii is pretty irrelevant. Software is were you get jacked with HMV charging an unwarranted premium, given that much of their shop space is going to PS3 and X-Box 360. Amazon and Play.com will definitely get my business for software over the high street unless someone has a good sale or decent price on used titles.

I think it's a question of what about the game is difficult and what the aim is. If the game is fun to play, then relative difficulty of achieving goals isn't necessarily that relevant. For example, I thought Ecco had the best control scheme possible for that game, I loved the sensation of making the dolphin swim fast; in the actual game I found it incredibly frustrating to get through the various counter currents and tunnels such that I eventually gave up on it and only played the beginning section in the lagoon _prior_ to the game starting. I still don't get what the point was of the actual game design there. I can see putting in some challenges but having someone go through twists and turns for ten to fifteen minutes, just to hit a dead end or get a complete reversal I cannot see being fun in _anyone's_ book. On the other hand my favourite game of all time is Defender, which is an arcade game with some fairly challenging controls which, for me, result in a fairly immersive play experience. The game's structure is just repeating levels of bad guys in a limited world you can fly through, so the experience of controlling the ship and flying around is pretty much what the game is about. I can feel some sense of satisfaction by making it to wave six or getting a new high score, but if I only make it to wave four it's not like I'm missing out. Clearly these are two totally different kinds of games, one being a platform game and one being an arcade shooter, but the point is the same: the design should reflect fun as the central aim. If the only purpose of the game is to be challenging to the point where it will only appeal to people who perservere, then you've limited the audience substantially and, I think, unnecessarily. Compare Ecco to another Sega platform property, Sonic. Sonic is a game I can pick up and play quite readily. I may not get all the rings, but I can get from level to level without doing so. The point of the game is not to get every single ring in the game. You might get extra bonuses or special levels if you do, but it's not the "meat" of the game. I would say this goes a long way to explaining why Sonic was a much more successful game series than Ecco. So, I don't think it's necessary that games are "dumbed down" on the Wii, but I do think that the design philosophy of games on the system needs to change to take advantage of the target audience of the system. I mean, who wants a bunch of ports of X-box and Playstation games on the Wii anyway? If the control scheme is easy to adapt without sacrificing gameplay, fine, but it's rare that I've read of a PS2/Gamecube/X-box port that didn't have problems with the control implementation, in which case they might as well not have bothered.

My wife really likes adventure games and bemoans their apparent death, so this might actually get her to pick up a wiimote when the time comes. I'm keen as it looks pretty. As long as the control scheme is good and the mechanics fun, it's golden.

I down with this. My iBook G4 doesn't have the guts to play Lego Star Wars 2, so I'm ebaying the first one and planning on getting this. The game was a hoot. I can see breaking it out every six months or so. I'm hopeful they get the control scheme correct or at least include an option for the Classic Controller.

Williams_Pinball_Collection...is there no further information? Also what's the official name of it here? I've seen it referred to as both Williams Pinball Collection and Williams vs. Gottlieb, but that makes little sense since I don't believe there's any Gottlieb tables on it. This is the most important release in my mind; I'm sure I'm in the minority, but anyone know anything about System 3's release schedule?

Zelda_Rules, If your Wii were to die and you got a new one, I take it Nintendo has a method of transferring them a la iTunes tracks on computers?

Last time I owned a console was a Playstation which I had for several years and I was very glad I decided to get a modchip installed because there was a huge disparity in US and Japanese releases at that time (I'm an immigrant to Scotland from the States). Now it looks like the Nintendo scene has been a bit more even in that regard, however there are some Gamecube titles I'd like to get that aren't in PAL-land; sadly I won't be since Nintendo seems bent on restricting that. With regard to getting foreign versions of consoles, last time I checked these things are multi-voltage, correct? So the only "legal" way would be to import the console and run it through a voltage converter? No thanks. The fact that a software-only solution in the form of Freeloader has been available in the past is a good sign as I don't like the idea of a hardware modification, however, I cannot see getting into the cat-and-mouse thing with having to get newer and newer versions just to play a few old games. Nintendo is not the entire games industry; if they want to stop region-coding their own software they can. I think it might be an idea for people who are keen to import titles to express themselves to Nintendo Europe on the issue. I'm not interested in grey-market importing; I'm happy to buy local titles over imports, but as long as titles aren't being localised and we can find out about them via the interweb, I don't see why we should be prevented from buying and running that software.

Yeah, I read that. Bites bites bites, but it saves me a few bucks on GC games and accessories, so thank you Nintendo for that. So, back on-topic, I assume that even though VC games can only be run from the built-in flash memory, they can be backed up to SD, correct? Backing up flash memory appears to be the only reason I can see to get an SD card at present.

Well, I was thinking about it and originally thought the Zapper would be brilliant for FPS games in changing the way we play them. The mouse-keyboard combo cannot be beat by an analogue joypad, but I could see the mounting of what is effectively a lightgun combined with an analogue stick as a good alternative, but you really would need to make sure the control scheme was Zapper-specific, because from what I've read some FPS games are using movement of the Wiimote to the screen edge to facilitate a look as opposed to aiming in-screen, but some use the d-pad, which clearly wouldn't work with the Zapper. It looks like a brilliant substitute for a lightgun. I mean, modern LCD/Plasma displays just won't work with a traditional lightgun; since the Wiimote can control on-screen cursor movement, why not leverage that and do away with an expensive dedicated peripheral, when you can have a cheap frame like the Zapper that achieves the same purpose with the controls you already have, or don't and still be able to play the game? This seems much more in line with the Wii philosophy. I'd be very surprised to see any game which _requires_ an optional peripheral to play it over the Wiimote.

I figured that; also realised that both the titles I indicated are imports and according to the Freeloader documentation I've found Japanese games want to reformat your card -- guess I can just get two 8MB cards instead of one 16MB, then. The Freeloader thing is very interesting...no hardware mod required for GC, and apparently Wii-compatible. With any luck the Wii will have similarly easy-to-defeat region-coding, although I've yet to see any Japanese or US release Wii titles I'd want to import...

Okay, I've never owned a Gamecube, but my pending Wii ownership had me looking at some GC games like Mr. Driller and the Intellivision Collection. I know that for whatever reason the Classic controller doesn't work with GC games, so I've got to pick up a GC controller (guess I can skip the Classic one, though), but can you do GC saves to the Wii SD card, or do I need to plump for a GC memory card as well -- of course I don't even know if those games support the memory card...

Well, if they're going to make it easy, then that's cool. I sure wouldn't want to end up with a doorstop, and I doubt that the Japanese units will be multi-voltage so there's no way I'm running one through a voltage converter. The problem I remember with the original Playstation was that Sony started to actively combat modding, so that some of the newer games would run code to look for it somehow and refuse to play, I'm not into that. If Nintendo takes a region-free policy in the future and won't try to mess with people who had modded systems I'll definitely look into it (of course, I'd have to find out about some kind of Japan-only title to entice me).

Well, I'll carry on. It sounds like there's some kind of voting channel on the Wii, correct? Maybe this will evolve into something. Given how consumer-friendly Nintendo is generally, and how restrictive they are with whom they allow to develop on their platforms historically (I seem to recall that it used to be developers had to have Nintendo approval before a game release in an attempt to head off the glut of crap games that killed the Atari VCS), they would probably be interested in developing any system that garnered them some free marketing feedback, even on 3rd-party reception.

All are rubbish reasons. The EU/UK have multi-standard TVs as common; no one in the States/Japan is likely to import a PAL title without knowing what's involved. Voltage only applies to the console itself; again, if you're going that route you already should know the potential issues.

Right, but if you only look at sales you can only say "well that title didn't work," but you cannot say _why_ without feedback.