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Wii Hardware Discussion

Ashley

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Dante Newbie

Dante

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Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime

 

Nintendo Co. Ltd.'s new video game system will be released in the United States on Sunday as the No. 3 console maker continues its quest to expand the gaming audience beyond kids and young adults.

 

"It's the same roughly 35 percent of households that are playing games," said Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime in an interview on Friday.

 

"So our focus truly is on growing the industry -- getting more women to play, getting older consumers to play. To do that we needed to have the remote be easy...and second we needed to have the games."

 

The Wii is hitting the U.S. market two days after Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 launched in the United States, setting the stage for a three-way video-game console showdown this holiday season between the Wii, the PS3 and Microsoft Corp.'s already available Xbox 360.

 

Gamers lined up by the thousands to try to get their hands on a PS3, which went on sale on Friday but sold out in minutes. One man was was shot early on Friday morning in a robbery attempt outside a Wal-Mart store in Connecticut while he was waiting to buy a PS3.

 

The Wii, with less computing power than a PS3 or an Xbox 360, comes with a unique, motion-sensitive remote that lets players simulate swinging a tennis racquet, hitting a golf ball or wielding a sword.

 

It will launch with the hotly anticipated game "The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess" and Ubisoft's shooting game "Red Steel." Nintendo said it will have 20 new titles available for the Wii at launch and 13 more by year end, compared with the 22 titles planned for the PS3 by Dec. 31.

 

The Wii will also be priced at $250 in the United States, a fraction of the price of the PlayStation 3's two price levels of $500 and $600, and the Xbox 360's price tag of $300 and $400.

 

"We think that's in part why the industry has become so insular -- very expensive machines, machines that arguably do more than you need them to do," Fils-Aime said.

 

"We took a pause to say 'We're not going to do high definition. We're not going to include a DVD because consumers already have two or three different DVD playback machines in their household. We wanted to bring it back to a core gaming machine."

 

The decision to keep the technology at a lower level is a gamble for Nintendo. Experts suggest each PS3 could last 10 years, but the Wii, which does not offer lifelike graphics or a high-definition DVD player function, is not expected to have as long of a shelf life.

 

Fils-Aime said a four, five or even six year life span for the console will be "just about right."

 

But the Wii is expected to be profitable for Nintendo.

 

"We designed it from the get-go to be profitable, so it will be past this weekend and throughout its entire life," he said "Because we're a gaming company, we have to be profitable in the gaming business. It's not like our competitors who can make profit in operating systems or TVs to offset their losses on the gaming side."

 

Sony, the No. 1 video game console maker, is expected to lose money initially on each sale of the PS3, which in addition to playing games, can surf the Web, download video and music and play movies with its Blu-ray high-definition disc drive.

 

The Wii also should be in better supply than the PS3.

 

Fils-Aime expects to have sold 1 million Wii units in the Americas by early December, and 2 million by the second week in January.

 

In contrast, Sony said that it hoped to sell 1 million units of the PS3 in the United States by the end of March.

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Dante Newbie

Dante

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A few days before the Wii launch, Editor-in-Chief Jim Louderback caught up with Nintendo's Senior Vice President of Marketing and Communications, George Harrison, in his offices in Redmond, Washington. Their discussion covered the Wii, of course, but also Sony, the DS, Miyamoto, and what's next.

How do you change the world's view of gaming from twitchy teenagers to something that's more broadly appealing?

 

It's sort of a misnomer as to who gamers are. We've started a couple of early things. The Wii ambassador program, for example, in eight cities, where families and soccer moms come to try the product. We chose ambassadors that were known for being thought leaders and influential with their friends, and evangelizers. And we see a real generational difference as to how it (the Wii) will be used.

 

The two-screen Nintendo DS was really the start of that, right, where you redefined hand-held gaming and brought new users into the fold?

 

Yes, 20% of our DS buyers are new, playing games like cooking. We set up the possibility for (interactivity) with the DS. You can set it up as a wireless hub, do Wi-Fi activities on the DS. Early games from third parties, and ours, like Nintendogs, used wireless, the voice, and used the touch screen. And we're on TV with 25-to-39 year olds with our "Touch Generation" games.

 

Speaking of TV, how are you going to promote the Wii?

 

With Wii, our target is 25-to-39 year olds. We'll have advertising on the "Dancing With the Stars" finale. We have a deal with TiVo, to deliver on-demand long form. We're also spending more online than we've ever spent before, doing takeovers of Yahoo, AOL, and other things. We built a community space on MySpace, more like a town square, where users can have a place to talk about the Wii.

 

When will we be able to download older N64 and NES games? I was disappointed that so few would be available this year.

 

It will be up and running by the end of December, and we'll deliver about 10 games a month after that.

 

What else can we expect from the Wii online over the next few months?

 

New content, promotional downloads, micro transactions, new games, new levels for your existing games. There's no subscription fee for online, you'll be able to purchase virtual console games, based on points, and $5 for NES, $8 for Super Nintendo, and $10 for N64 games.

 

Jim Louderback already spent a quality weekend (wiikend?) with the Wii. Go to his full product review to read all about it.

 

What about HD support? Over the five-year life of the console, most US consumers will have HD sets. Can you do a slipstream upgrade to support 720p or 1080i?

 

We need to make it easy to work with those TVs, but the Wii is not really designed for HD. It's a trade off for what we felt would be enjoyable. The penetration (of HD) is not great yet; maybe it will be over the next five to eight years. (Not supporting HD) was a decision we made that we thought would serve us for the next five to eight years. We felt like it would serve us well. For other types of things it is not that critical.

 

Nintendo game designer Shigeru Miyamoto is really the Walt Disney of our time. What do you do for a follow on? What happens if he decides to retire?

 

He's a genius coming up with his own ideas, but also a genius in nourishing other people. The Zelda game was led by Mr. Aonuma. Miyamoto is best when figuring out how to make a game easy to get started, then coming up with the totally unexpected ideas. Like Pikmin. Or health software (the fitness capabilities in Nintendo's Wii Sports game). It tracks your health, and keeps track of how long you've played. It's not going to take the place of your annual physical, but it's consumer friendly. He's good at looking around at what you can mimic and what you can enjoy. A lot of people have great creative lives in their twenties and thirties. But he's still going strong. He has a great, childlike mind.

 

What about Mario? Why not do a DisneyWorld around Mario?

 

We went too far with Mario, and backed away. We used to license it. There was even a Mario teaches typing. We did one Mario movie and it was pretty bad.

 

What about Mario Strikers, Mario Golf? Don't those go too far?

 

No, it allows us to keep a flow of Mario games. It allows us to keep Mario familiar and involved in between the big Mario games.

 

When will the other big franchises, like Mario Kart, Metroid Prime, the next big Mario game, and Smash Brothers coming to the Wii?

 

Smash Brothers will be one of the first, and maybe the best game ever for online head-to-head competition. Metroid and Mario (Galaxy) will be next year. This year it is licensees. We have thirty titles from licensees, but the only exclusive one is Red Steel from Ubisoft. We have Madden and Tony Hawk. We want to increase our share of the Madden franchise.

 

The GameCube had limited third-party support. Has that changed?

 

We've gone pretty broad. Over 500 developers have development kits. With GameCube we didn't get the licensees involved early enough. It's pretty wide open. But game development is becoming a studio-type business. It's hard to do a game on your own dime. More independent developers have been bought up. But there are possibilities for downloading online things (that are less extensive).

 

What about porting titles from the other consoles?

 

If they are shooting for Playstation 3, they won't be able to port it over. EA actually formed a special group to focus totally on the Wii. That's good, because the learning curve escalates and they become real advocates for it. The more people spend time with the Wii, the more they promote it.

 

And in the past, one team would port to all three consoles, right?

 

Yes, with those three systems it was fairly easy to port over.

 

Your strategy with the Wii is very different from Sony. You seem to be content to just do games, while they want to own the living room.

 

What they want to do is put up a tollbooth for all things digital. The Wii does have non-gaming functions to manage photos, show a slideshow, surf the Internet and check the weather. Even if I don't want to play games, once I have the controller in my hand hopefully it's easier to interact on some level.

 

PC Mag

 

The Wii site has been design.

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Nintendork Newbie

Nintendork

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Are you serious? PS3 crashed in minutes? If it's true, then LMAO!

It didn't crash, it just stopped reading the discs. It could be a faulty disc but I'm more inclined to believe it's a faulty Blu Ray drive.

 

gmanprime, not sure where you live but 48 isn't that many.

My local game store really struggled with 115 XBOX 360 units, and that was the biggest store in town.

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pedrocasilva Newbie

pedrocasilva

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Bleh 729 MHz sucks. That means it needs a whole lot of extra instructions and cache for it to be 'twice as powerful as GameCube', and I don't see that happening considering the efficiency of the Gekko...
Nah, a shorter execussion pipeline, aswell as bigger front side bus would suffice for that (and of course bigger cache). We lack the exact details, but 5 years later, a 729 MHz chip should double the performance of a 486 MHz one easily. And we've known that it's quite fast for it's speed even compared to gc, meaning any gc code you drop there could run at twice the speed without extra optimization.

 

5 years have passed, further enhancements on gekko were possible. (we don't even know if the core is the same) as it's not being done in the same factory; Broadway is done in the same powerplant they do G5's (PowerPC 970's), it should at least have the reported fritz chip embedded on it.

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Emasher Newbie

Emasher

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with seeing the video's of sd card management i have a quick question before i pick up my wii in 4.25 hours.

 

if you have lets say zelda saved to the sd and the internal flash, will the console ask you when you start a game will it ask you which memory device you want to start from. or will it just start from internal or just start from sd

 

thanks

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DCK Newbie

DCK

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Yeah, maybe, but it's still quite disappointing how slow it is. I mean, it's IBM (clock speed king lately) making 90nm chips and they still don't cross the 1 GHz barrier. Of course, that means it requires a GPU and FSB of 300+ MHz but that's still feasible with passive cooling and a $200 production cost.

 

Overall I have to say I'm quite disappointed with Nintendo's effort to make something of the system's specs. I'm getting the feeling that when they said 'it's not about the graphics' they settled with much of what they had.

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