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Need more proof that the gaming media can't stand Wii?

Filed in archive News by Robert Howard on April 20, 2008

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Image from amazon.com

Running like a speeding bullet from the blogosphere is the latest slam on Wii from a games industry hotshot, this time the villain being the president of Epic Games (note: I liked it better when they were Epic Megagames!).

I'm not so much interested in Epic's anti-Wii comments: they make super powered middleware that demands monster specifications, so they have a lot to lose if the gaming industry goes away from graphics as the primary driver of technology. So I perfectly well understand why they don't like the Wii. If I was Epic's CEO, I wouldn't either. It hurts sales.

But what was really telling was this exchange, which shows the sort of anti-Wii bias in the gaming media that is so obvious and annoying:

IGN: What do you think of the Wii and Nintendo's...

Capps: Pffffffffft...

IGN: (laughter) I know! I think the same thing! It's like, "Come on, why are you buying this system?!"

Capps: I know. I've got one.

IGN: Everybody does! Bring it out at parties and everyone's like, "Oh it's a Wii!"

Capps: Part of it's being cheap. I think it's a, I mean, so two things: first of all, great credit to them. The first time I played a videogame with my parents - aging myself a bit - was on Atari 2600. The next time I played a videogame with my parents, 25 years later or whatever, was Wii Tennis. So it's about bringing people together, families, Thanksgiving, all that. I think it's kind of like a weird virus because I have not yet found a reason to play with my Wii since then.

IGN: Exactly. For a real gaming experience...


Note how IGN.com decides to jump up and down on Nintendo as soon as Mr. Capps gives them permission to do so. This says a few interesting things to me:

1. It's pathetic and sad how this particular interviewer had to wait for permission to express his/her view. One gets the sense that if Capps said "I really like Wii," then the IGN.com guy/gal would have said:

"(laughter) I know! I think the same thing! It's like, "Come on, why do we care so much about graphics?"

Also, note the IGN snob's insistence on "a real gaming experience." Um, I own a Xbox 360 and a Wii, and I've gotten good gaming experiences on both, but to be honest, I have only gotten a "real" (if real means outstanding) "gaming experience" on Wii at this point. The 360's highpoints (for me personally) of Fight Night Round 3, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Eternal Sonata pale when compared to Twilight Princess, Mario Galaxy, and certainly Super Smash Brothers Brawl (yes I am excluding big megaton 360 releases, but a man can't play everything, and that doesn't change how good those Nintendo games are).

Yet further on in the article, both of them basically write those games off as saying they would be done "better on a more powerful console."

Um, seeing as all of those games run at fast framerates and feature little or no technical glitches, I'm not so sure that's true. They all achieve, on a high level, the objective of their design, and that would be true no matter what platform it was on. In fact, the only difference that a work of genuis, such as Super Mario Galaxy, would have on an Xbox, is that

1. Slightly higher resolution graphics
2. There would be Super Mario Galaxy ads all over the Xbox 360 dashboard
3. You'd have to pay 500 points to get to play the Bee Suit because it's now "downloadable content."
4. You'd lose some of the gameplay variety due to no motion control support.
5. You'd lose the ability to have the nifty quasi-co-op mode.
6. princess peachlinks and Rosalina would appear in Maxim, and their in-game outfits would be tiny bikinis.

So, really, at least in the case of the Xbox 360, the game would probably be appreciably worse!

Read.



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Permalink: Need more proof that the gaming media can't stand Wii?
Tags: Epic  Games  Unreal  Engine  IGN.com  Wii  Hating  on  Wii  nintendo  gaming+media 

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