I'm guessing Nintendo figured that, if you already had GC games, there'd be no way you didn't have a GC controller and memory card, so they didn't feel the need to put an abstraction layer between the Wii and GC modes when the could just switch hardware modes and be done with it.
Either Nintendo didn't think people would go out of their way to acquire GC peripherals (by the way the Wavebird is awesome and is compatible with some Classic Controller Wii games as well, but it is also rare and expensive now, unless you buy a knockoff) since they didn't think of it as anything more than a bone to throw at their previous fans...
...or they wanted to subtly discourage people going out and buying stuff that didn't really make them money any more instead of newer stuff that did.
I still think even sort of half-assed backward compatibility is better than removing backward compatibility altogether - but I've got Wavebirds.
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Linespider5ALL HAIL KING KILLMONGERRegistered Userregular
The Wavebird was damn near perfect. Tinier built-in rechargeable batteries with a plugin cord for easy charging and that thing would be the handiest damn little controller over. Almost makes me wonder about those gifted nutjobs that make custom consoles. There have to be some well-done modified Wavebirds out there, I wouldn't mind paying good money for a Wavebird sculpted PS3 controller.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
I don't see any of that in there, and you flat-out said that "gamers are not looking for new input experiences," a broad and sweeping generalization, with no evidence whatsoever.
Ross, c'mon. You can't say "what I actually said was this!" when what you actually said is easily accessible a few pages up. Give me a little more respect than that.
I also do have to say that allowing the use of all my GC controllers on the system was welcomed by me - it saved me a lot of money and made big Smash Bros and Dokapon Kingdom nights with my friends less potentially frustrating by keeping me from having to buy more Wiimotes and nunchuks and Classic Controllers and whatnot.
I don't see any of that in there, and you flat-out said that "gamers are not looking for new input experiences," a broad and sweeping generalization, with no evidence whatsoever.
Ross, c'mon. You can't say "what I actually said was this!" when what you actually said is easily accessible a few pages up. Give me a little more respect than that.
What Nintendo seems to have gotten all backwards is that gamers are largely looking for new gameplay experiences, not new input experiences.
Still speaking for the entire gaming audience there with zero evidence to back it up, plus you didn't bother to contradict all the other stuff I caught you revising.
...you do realize there's an easy, 100% guaranteed way to keep me from going this route, right? :P
I don't see any of that in there, and you flat-out said that "gamers are not looking for new input experiences," a broad and sweeping generalization, with no evidence whatsoever.
Ross, c'mon. You can't say "what I actually said was this!" when what you actually said is easily accessible a few pages up. Give me a little more respect than that.
What Nintendo seems to have gotten all backwards is that gamers are largely looking for new gameplay experiences, not new input experiences.
Still speaking for the entire gaming audience there with zero evidence to back it up, plus you didn't bother to contradict all the other stuff I caught you revising.
...you do realize there's an easy, 100% guaranteed way to keep me from going this route, right? :P
Have you got anything to back up your counter-assertion that gamers do want new 'input experiences' besides sales data of specious utility in actually supporting either side of the argument? Perhaps rave reviews of the manner in which motion controls improved the games that were released on both the Wii and GameCube, or the few titles that were released on both Wii and non-Nintendo consoles?
I'm not saying that such things don't exist, just asking 'cause I've never seen them. I've read a lot of reviews wherein Wii games are slammed for the waggle, and up-thread someone posted about the MetaCritic ranking for Twilight Princess being a point higher on the GameCube than on the Wii. Considering that the games looked alike and had the same story and content, I'd expect the Wii version to be more highly acclaimed if the general public were after the new input experience.
I don't see any of that in there, and you flat-out said that "gamers are not looking for new input experiences," a broad and sweeping generalization, with no evidence whatsoever.
Ross, c'mon. You can't say "what I actually said was this!" when what you actually said is easily accessible a few pages up. Give me a little more respect than that.
What Nintendo seems to have gotten all backwards is that gamers are largely looking for new gameplay experiences, not new input experiences.
Still speaking for the entire gaming audience there with zero evidence to back it up, plus you didn't bother to contradict all the other stuff I caught you revising.
...you do realize there's an easy, 100% guaranteed way to keep me from going this route, right? :P
Have you got anything to back up your counter-assertion that gamers do want new 'input experiences' besides sales data of specious utility in actually supporting either side of the argument? Perhaps rave reviews of the manner in which motion controls improved the games that were released on both the Wii and GameCube, or the few titles that were released on both Wii and non-Nintendo consoles?
I'm not saying that such things don't exist, just asking 'cause I've never seen them. I've read a lot of reviews wherein Wii games are slammed for the waggle, and up-thread someone posted about the MetaCritic ranking for Twilight Princess being a point higher on the GameCube than on the Wii. Considering that the games looked alike and had the same story and content, I'd expect the Wii version to be more highly acclaimed if the general public were after the new input experience.
I didn't actually present a position on this -- I'm just pointing out that Ross' argument, as presented, is overly broad, lacking in concrete evidence, and presented... inconsistently. I definitely do think there's an argument to be made that motion controls didn't add that much to gaming experiences and might not last over the years (as well as a counter-argument), but making sweeping proclamations on the critical and commercial success of an console's input scheme based solely on one's personal thoughts on a single game isn't exactly a position of rhetorical strength.
As far as your comments, I think it varies... there have been a lot of times that waggle has detracted from the experience, but there have also been a lot of shovelware that was released that were shoddy in a lot of ways, motion controls being just one of them. Which may be the source of a lot of the "waggle sucks!" sentiment. Twilight Princess and its multiplatform release is an interesting one to think about, though. True, it is telling that the cube version is a tenth of a point higher, but why? Is it because reviewers didn't think the motion controls lived up to its promise in that game? Or is it because it could be considered a technical marvel on the Gamecube yet somewhat of a technical disappointment given what the more powerful Wii was capable of? Personally, I think it was a little bit of both. In hindsight Twilight Princes wasn't awful but it was far from the best example of what motion controls could do, compared to other launch games like Wii Sports, Excite Truck and WarioWare.
cloudeagle on
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Still speaking for the entire gaming audience there with zero evidence to back it up
Other than the extremely lengthy posts containing objective data to support my arguments, what evidence are you looking for?
All I've ever posited is that motion controls are arguably not a consistently sought-after feature in the venue of traditional gaming once you account for branding and novelty. I've offered data to support my suggestion. When engaged in discourse, that's as close as evidence as you're going to get.
Still speaking for the entire gaming audience there with zero evidence to back it up
Other than the extremely lengthy posts containing objective data to support my arguments, what evidence are you looking for?
All I've ever posited is that motion controls are arguably not a consistently sought-after feature in the venue of traditional gaming once you account for branding and novelty. I've offered data to support my suggestion. When engaged in discourse, that's as close as evidence as you're going to get.
...I was referring to what you originally put forward, which had nothing "arguably" without it. Like I said, I'm happy to engage in debate and discourse, I'm just not a fan of misrepresentation of what was actually said.
At any rate, I think I've more than adequately made my point in that respect. Like to start things afresh?
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
What prankery? Just plug in a memory card and a 'cube controller, and you're ready to go.
No, that's not the whole story. I can't access my console menu while playing a GC game and I have to use a corded controller, which thanks to the Wii needing to be played a good distance from the TV, I don't have comfortable seating nearby enough for the cord to reach.
You'd think since a classic control nunchuk exists Nintendo would opt for that, but nope.
Why do you expect to play your cube-game in any other way than a cube-game? What you have to go through to play your GC game on the Wii is exactly what you had to go through on the GC itself.
I also do have to say that allowing the use of all my GC controllers on the system was welcomed by me - it saved me a lot of money and made big Smash Bros and Dokapon Kingdom nights with my friends less potentially frustrating by keeping me from having to buy more Wiimotes and nunchuks and Classic Controllers and whatnot.
I never used anything but my GC controller to play Smash Bros. The fact that I didn't have to learn a new way of playing was very welcome.
I didn't actually present a position on this -- I'm just pointing out that Ross' argument, as presented, is overly broad, lacking in concrete evidence, and presented... inconsistently. I definitely do think there's an argument to be made that motion controls didn't add that much to gaming experiences and might not last over the years (as well as a counter-argument), but making sweeping proclamations on the critical and commercial success of an console's input scheme based solely on one's personal thoughts on a single game isn't exactly a position of rhetorical strength.
As far as your comments, I think it varies... there have been a lot of times that waggle has detracted from the experience, but there have also been a lot of shovelware that was released that were shoddy in a lot of ways, motion controls being just one of them. Which may be the source of a lot of the "waggle sucks!" sentiment. Twilight Princess and its multiplatform release is an interesting one to think about, though. True, it is telling that the cube version is a tenth of a point higher, but why? Is it because reviewers didn't think the motion controls lived up to its promise in that game? Or is it because it could be considered a technical marvel on the Gamecube yet somewhat of a technical disappointment given what the more powerful Wii was capable of? Personally, I think it was a little bit of both. In hindsight Twilight Princes wasn't awful but it was far from the best example of what motion controls could do, compared to other launch games like Wii Sports, Excite Truck and WarioWare.
Well, I'm not going to argue with you about what Atomic Ross is arguing about, because that seems...dumb.
The gist that I got from his posts (which agrees with my position, and I've never played any of the Metroid Prime games, so I realy have no position about them) is that he doesn't think the gaming public were terribly happy about getting, essentially, more GameCube games but with motion control tacked on. The 360 and PS3 being more powerful doesn't just lead to HD graphics; the stuff that games on those systems do are things that couldn't have been done in the xbox and ps2 (enemy AI, size of environments, physics, number of simultaneous players, etc.), not to mention the seriously tremendous advances in online experience present on both consoles. I think that tends to get dismissed in discussions about how the Wii stacks up against the other consoles in all the SD vs. HD folderol, and that people tend to forget that online console gaming (and online non-gaming experiences on consoles) were pretty much non-existent in the last generation.
As far as waggle getting a bad rap... I said it before up-thread and I'll say it again: I can only think of one game that I've played on the Wii where motion control improved the experience and wherein the point of the game wasn't showing off motion control (so discouting Wii Sports, WarioWare, and the other Look At The Things This Controller Can Do tech-demo-style games, which are fun and all but aren't exactly germane to a discussion about whether or not adding motion control in any way benefits game-types that existed otherwise). I can't see playing Trauma Center on a console that doesn't have either motion control or touch sensing. I found the motion sensing in that game to be flaky, but that probably would have been improved if I owned a Motion Plus. None of the other games I played and enjoyed on the Wii (Twilight Princess, Muramasa, No More Heroes, various Super Marios, Super Smash Brothers, Resident Evil, probably some other ones I'm forgetting) felt like having motion in them made the game any better. I don't actually know the details on how the GameCube and Wii stack up spec-wise, but if I could have played those games on the Cube, I either would have been ambivalent about which one I used or else have actually preferred avoiding the motion control.
And I haven't seen any Wii game reviews that said otherwise. I know a lot of people are down with the shooting games on Wii, and I'll admit that of that list Resident Evil was probably the closest to an experience that was improved by the wiimote, but, again, I found the sensing to be too flaky to be an unqualified benefit. There were enough times where the pointer sensitivity was too low, or I was at a bad angle on the sensor bar and my position got jittery, or I put my hand down during a non-shooting part and couldn't get the sensor re-oriented fast enough when I need to shoot something that I really would have preferred a traditional controller. But that's just me, so I'll give it that it might improve shooters. Except that people who play FPS games almost universally gravitate toward the 360 and PS3 because A) nintendo don't like to support violent games and FPS fans are usually at the very front edge of the HD graphics crowd. So developing a system where the most obvious use of the control scheme is a type of game that the system is least likely to host in the coming generation seems kind of...weird.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered Userregular
I don't see any of that in there, and you flat-out said that "gamers are not looking for new input experiences," a broad and sweeping generalization, with no evidence whatsoever.
Ross, c'mon. You can't say "what I actually said was this!" when what you actually said is easily accessible a few pages up. Give me a little more respect than that.
What Nintendo seems to have gotten all backwards is that gamers are largely looking for new gameplay experiences, not new input experiences.
Still speaking for the entire gaming audience there with zero evidence to back it up, plus you didn't bother to contradict all the other stuff I caught you revising.
...you do realize there's an easy, 100% guaranteed way to keep me from going this route, right? :P
Have you got anything to back up your counter-assertion that gamers do want new 'input experiences' besides sales data of specious utility in actually supporting either side of the argument? Perhaps rave reviews of the manner in which motion controls improved the games that were released on both the Wii and GameCube, or the few titles that were released on both Wii and non-Nintendo consoles?
I'm not saying that such things don't exist, just asking 'cause I've never seen them. I've read a lot of reviews wherein Wii games are slammed for the waggle, and up-thread someone posted about the MetaCritic ranking for Twilight Princess being a point higher on the GameCube than on the Wii. Considering that the games looked alike and had the same story and content, I'd expect the Wii version to be more highly acclaimed if the general public were after the new input experience.
Given the massive sales of the Wii I think it's hard to claim that people didn't want new input experiences. I think it's rather hard to argue that people just went out and bought en masse something they didn't want.
Now, whether the Wii actually gave them an experience that didn't suck is up for debate. But Ross isn't saying that people were disappointed, he's saying that they didn't even want that shit.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
What prankery? Just plug in a memory card and a 'cube controller, and you're ready to go.
No, that's not the whole story. I can't access my console menu while playing a GC game and I have to use a corded controller, which thanks to the Wii needing to be played a good distance from the TV, I don't have comfortable seating nearby enough for the cord to reach.
You'd think since a classic control nunchuk exists Nintendo would opt for that, but nope.
Why do you expect to play your cube-game in any other way than a cube-game? What you have to go through to play your GC game on the Wii is exactly what you had to go through on the GC itself.
True, but like I said already, due to the logistical demands of A) the Wii requiring a good deal of empty space between the TV and wherever the player is, and the cords not being very long on the GC controllers, it's a situation that's less than optimal.
The onus is on Nintendo to provide me with a reasonably accessible set-up. If I have to keep pretending the Wii is no better than my Cube, it won't be long before I just break out the 'Cube.
And you know what? I DO expect the next generation console to be more accessible than the last, especially since the foundation for that added ease of functionality already exists with the classic controller for the Wiimote. Call me greedy.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
Not really. Discourse with you has been like arguing with a school teacher who cares more about correcting tedious grammatical issues than what's actually being talked about.
And seriously, I'm not trying to offend, but it seems like you quite purposefully and quite frequently derail conversation with laments regarding rhetorical imperfection. I'll happily rebut arguments all day long with you, but I can't stand constantly talking about the way things are being talked about instead of actually just talking about those things.
If I wanted to argue about the way I'm arguing, I'd call up my wife.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
I don't see any of that in there, and you flat-out said that "gamers are not looking for new input experiences," a broad and sweeping generalization, with no evidence whatsoever.
Ross, c'mon. You can't say "what I actually said was this!" when what you actually said is easily accessible a few pages up. Give me a little more respect than that.
What Nintendo seems to have gotten all backwards is that gamers are largely looking for new gameplay experiences, not new input experiences.
Still speaking for the entire gaming audience there with zero evidence to back it up, plus you didn't bother to contradict all the other stuff I caught you revising.
...you do realize there's an easy, 100% guaranteed way to keep me from going this route, right? :P
Have you got anything to back up your counter-assertion that gamers do want new 'input experiences' besides sales data of specious utility in actually supporting either side of the argument? Perhaps rave reviews of the manner in which motion controls improved the games that were released on both the Wii and GameCube, or the few titles that were released on both Wii and non-Nintendo consoles?
I'm not saying that such things don't exist, just asking 'cause I've never seen them. I've read a lot of reviews wherein Wii games are slammed for the waggle, and up-thread someone posted about the MetaCritic ranking for Twilight Princess being a point higher on the GameCube than on the Wii. Considering that the games looked alike and had the same story and content, I'd expect the Wii version to be more highly acclaimed if the general public were after the new input experience.
Given the massive sales of the Wii I think it's hard to claim that people didn't want new input experiences. I think it's rather hard to argue that people just went out and bought en masse something they didn't want.
Now, whether the Wii actually gave them an experience that didn't suck is up for debate. But Ross isn't saying that people were disappointed, he's saying that they didn't even want that shit.
You're a little late to this argument, I'd advise reading back a few pages. We've kinda been over all this already.
The big rhetorical arguments against that position being that, when accounting for certain factors, Wii game sales (especially games in the traditional gaming sense) don't seem to show a statistically relevant boost from involving motion controls.
You can argue that the games that utilize those factors sold like hotcakes, and I'd agree, but the Wii has seemed somewhat hindered in consistently replicating those figures without some kind of caveat.
I don't see any of that in there, and you flat-out said that "gamers are not looking for new input experiences," a broad and sweeping generalization, with no evidence whatsoever.
Ross, c'mon. You can't say "what I actually said was this!" when what you actually said is easily accessible a few pages up. Give me a little more respect than that.
What Nintendo seems to have gotten all backwards is that gamers are largely looking for new gameplay experiences, not new input experiences.
Still speaking for the entire gaming audience there with zero evidence to back it up, plus you didn't bother to contradict all the other stuff I caught you revising.
...you do realize there's an easy, 100% guaranteed way to keep me from going this route, right? :P
Have you got anything to back up your counter-assertion that gamers do want new 'input experiences' besides sales data of specious utility in actually supporting either side of the argument? Perhaps rave reviews of the manner in which motion controls improved the games that were released on both the Wii and GameCube, or the few titles that were released on both Wii and non-Nintendo consoles?
I'm not saying that such things don't exist, just asking 'cause I've never seen them. I've read a lot of reviews wherein Wii games are slammed for the waggle, and up-thread someone posted about the MetaCritic ranking for Twilight Princess being a point higher on the GameCube than on the Wii. Considering that the games looked alike and had the same story and content, I'd expect the Wii version to be more highly acclaimed if the general public were after the new input experience.
Given the massive sales of the Wii I think it's hard to claim that people didn't want new input experiences. I think it's rather hard to argue that people just went out and bought en masse something they didn't want.
Now, whether the Wii actually gave them an experience that didn't suck is up for debate. But Ross isn't saying that people were disappointed, he's saying that they didn't even want that shit.
Which is why I think sales are a bad way to determine anything in particular about something's qualitative values. Clearly, people wanted the shit out of the Wii. It doesn't tell us anything about whether their desire and preconceived notions about what they were getting actually bore out to being happy with the purchase. It's fairly trivial to say that people want a super-awesome, immersive, intuitive, tactile input system for their games. If you can convince them that's what you're selling them then they're pretty likely to buy it. But did people actually want the input experience that the Wii delivered?
Further, and I think what Atomic Ross was saying, people wanted new Nintendo titles. There is a raging hard-on in the gaming community for new Zelda, Mario, MarioKart, SmashBros, and Metroid games. The simple fact that the box says "Metroid" on it is going to move units whether people give a shit about the input scheme or not. The fact that Metroid Prime 3 (and Twilight Princess, and Mario Galaxy, and Smash Bros Melee, and etc.) could have been released on the Game Cube with little or no content and quality difference mean that if you wanted a new Metroid or Zelda or Mario game and didn't give a shit about the input experience then you are paying the cost of a Wii console essentially for the privilege of buying those games (given that you already bought a piece of hardware that could probably have run them). The 360 and PS3 have online, graphics, and computational value available in their games that simply could not have existed on the Xbox and PS2. Fairly few Wii titles are in the center of the Venn diagram for "Games that aren't just motion-control demos" and "Games that couldn't have been released on GameCube".
So again, sales data on 1st party games in established franchises tell us that people still want those franchise games. It doesn't tell us that they want those games with motion control. Out of curiosity for one of you people who knows where to find this shit: which sold better, Twilight Princess on Wii or Twilight Princess on GameCube? And how about Resident Evil 4 (that was on both, wasn't it?)? Those are the only titles I can think of where people were actually offered the choice between buying the same game with or without motion control. And I suspect that even those results can't tell us anything about motion control preference since there is going to be a significant section of each population who are either buying for Wii because they 1) don't own a GC or 2) want games for the system they just spend $250 on and, in the other camp, bought for the GC because they couldn't get hold of/afford a Wii (whether they wanted motion controls or not).
What prankery? Just plug in a memory card and a 'cube controller, and you're ready to go.
No, that's not the whole story. I can't access my console menu while playing a GC game and I have to use a corded controller, which thanks to the Wii needing to be played a good distance from the TV, I don't have comfortable seating nearby enough for the cord to reach.
You'd think since a classic control nunchuk exists Nintendo would opt for that, but nope.
Why do you expect to play your cube-game in any other way than a cube-game? What you have to go through to play your GC game on the Wii is exactly what you had to go through on the GC itself.
True, but like I said already, due to the logistical demands of A) the Wii requiring a good deal of empty space between the TV and wherever the player is, and the cords not being very long on the GC controllers, it's a situation that's less than optimal.
The onus is on Nintendo to provide me with a reasonably accessible set-up. If I have to keep pretending the Wii is no better than my Cube, it won't be long before I just break out the 'Cube.
And you know what? I DO expect the next generation console to be more accessible than the last, especially since the foundation for that added ease of functionality already exists with the classic controller for the Wiimote. Call me greedy.
I have an old-ass PS3 from the first run when they still had backwards compatibility with PS2 games. I can play PS2 games on it without having to plug in either a PS2 memory card or a PS2 controller. It's pretty sweet. I actually did a fair amount of PS2 gaming with games I hadn't finished after I got the PS3 because I didn't have to futz with cords and memory cards and shit to play. I think the only games I ever bothered digging out the GameCube controllers and card for to play on the Wii after I got one were Smash Bros and Mario Party, largely because their GameCube incarnations were more fun than the Wii versions.
The gist that I got from his posts (which agrees with my position, and I've never played any of the Metroid Prime games, so I realy have no position about them) is that he doesn't think the gaming public were terribly happy about getting, essentially, more GameCube games but with motion control tacked on. The 360 and PS3 being more powerful doesn't just lead to HD graphics; the stuff that games on those systems do are things that couldn't have been done in the xbox and ps2 (enemy AI, size of environments, physics, number of simultaneous players, etc.), not to mention the seriously tremendous advances in online experience present on both consoles. I think that tends to get dismissed in discussions about how the Wii stacks up against the other consoles in all the SD vs. HD folderol, and that people tend to forget that online console gaming (and online non-gaming experiences on consoles) were pretty much non-existent in the last generation.
As far as waggle getting a bad rap... I said it before up-thread and I'll say it again: I can only think of one game that I've played on the Wii where motion control improved the experience and wherein the point of the game wasn't showing off motion control (so discouting Wii Sports, WarioWare, and the other Look At The Things This Controller Can Do tech-demo-style games, which are fun and all but aren't exactly germane to a discussion about whether or not adding motion control in any way benefits game-types that existed otherwise). I can't see playing Trauma Center on a console that doesn't have either motion control or touch sensing. I found the motion sensing in that game to be flaky, but that probably would have been improved if I owned a Motion Plus. None of the other games I played and enjoyed on the Wii (Twilight Princess, Muramasa, No More Heroes, various Super Marios, Super Smash Brothers, Resident Evil, probably some other ones I'm forgetting) felt like having motion in them made the game any better. I don't actually know the details on how the GameCube and Wii stack up spec-wise, but if I could have played those games on the Cube, I either would have been ambivalent about which one I used or else have actually preferred avoiding the motion control.
And I haven't seen any Wii game reviews that said otherwise. I know a lot of people are down with the shooting games on Wii, and I'll admit that of that list Resident Evil was probably the closest to an experience that was improved by the wiimote, but, again, I found the sensing to be too flaky to be an unqualified benefit. There were enough times where the pointer sensitivity was too low, or I was at a bad angle on the sensor bar and my position got jittery, or I put my hand down during a non-shooting part and couldn't get the sensor re-oriented fast enough when I need to shoot something that I really would have preferred a traditional controller. But that's just me, so I'll give it that it might improve shooters. Except that people who play FPS games almost universally gravitate toward the 360 and PS3 because A) nintendo don't like to support violent games and FPS fans are usually at the very front edge of the HD graphics crowd. So developing a system where the most obvious use of the control scheme is a type of game that the system is least likely to host in the coming generation seems kind of...weird.
You know, I saw the argument that more power for consoles bring better AI, physics, etc. a lot when the 360 and PS3 came out. But, in all honestly, did all that power truly give us gaming experiences that weren't possible on the oXbox and PS2? The only games I've seen that I think are literally impossible to replicate on the older systems are Ninety Nine Nights, with its umptizillion enemies, and L.A. Noire, with its insanely detailed facial animation (which was absolutely necessary for its game mechanics). Everything else could be perfectly replicated by just downgrading the graphics, I'd argue. I mean, I played Half-Life 2 on the oXbox, and its physics were utterly amazing for its time, even though it was technically downgraded from the PC. Or am I missing something? Has there been games that have without a shadow of a doubt demonstrated AI and physics that were completely impossible to replicate on older consoles? I get the feeling this will be impossible to settle outside of personal opinion, but hey.
Nothing wrong with not liking motion control, but why discount games where the experience was to show off motion control? I mean sure, you could consider Wii Sports a tech demo, but many people find it a genuinely enjoyable game in its own right -- my family and friends still like playing bowling and tennis on it. Besides, isn't "look at what motion control can do" by its very definition a strong incorporation of motion control into games themselves? At any rate -- I can't really speak for Muramasa and No More Heroes, but I do think that motion controls improved Resident Evil 4, mainly in that things were easier to aim and I got this weird sense of enjoyment when it came to using motion controls to move the gun around that I didn't when playing the Cube version. I already mentioned Twilight Princess not using things as effectively as it could, and the Marios and Brawl barely used waggle as a supplement.
As other examples of motion controls adding to the experience, I'd bring up Zack and Wiki, which was an adventure game where you had to manipulate objects with motion controls based on what they were. I think the Gamespot review said it best:
Often times you'll encounter cranks that must be turned, knobs that must be twisted, levers that must be pulled, and items that must be placed just so, and each time you'll have to hold and move the Wii Remote in a very specific way. Save for a few motions that for some reason just don't want to cooperate (cranks that turn left when you turn right and whatnot), all this stuff works great. And the times when the game gets really silly with the motion controls are actually pretty funny. This might be the first game to employ realistic baby-cradling mechanics via the Wii Remote.
There's also Boom Blox, which made virtual Jenga and knocking blocks over via hurled balls ridiculously fun, I've found. That's just my own experience, but I'd encourage you to try that one not just to prove my point, but because it's a surprisingly fun game.
At any rate, Nintendo doesn't like to support violent games? That hasn't been true in a loooong time. They cheerfully gave Rare the go-ahead to make Conker's Bad Fur Day, they asked for the least amount of censorship on BMX XXX, they bankrolled the violent and disturbing Eternal Darkness, they did nothing to block the blood-drenched Resident Evil 4 and MadWorld, etc. etc. It's just that Nintendo's largely family-friendly stable of franchises and the casual-bait nature of the Wii doesn't exactly shine a light on their willingness to allow violence.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
So again, sales data on 1st party games in established franchises tell us that people still want those franchise games. It doesn't tell us that they want those games with motion control. Out of curiosity for one of you people who knows where to find this shit: which sold better, Twilight Princess on Wii or Twilight Princess on GameCube? And how about Resident Evil 4 (that was on both, wasn't it?)? Those are the only titles I can think of where people were actually offered the choice between buying the same game with or without motion control. And I suspect that even those results can't tell us anything about motion control preference since there is going to be a significant section of each population who are either buying for Wii because they 1) don't own a GC or 2) want games for the system they just spend $250 on and, in the other camp, bought for the GC because they couldn't get hold of/afford a Wii (whether they wanted motion controls or not).
Not really. Discourse with you has been like arguing with a school teacher who cares more about correcting tedious grammatical issues than what's actually being talked about.
And seriously, I'm not trying to offend, but it seems like you quite purposefully and quite frequently derail conversation with laments regarding rhetorical imperfection. I'll happily rebut arguments all day long with you, but I can't stand constantly talking about the way things are being talked about instead of actually just talking about those things.
If I wanted to argue about the way I'm arguing, I'd call up my wife.
I'm not trying to be an argument Nazi, it's just that, well, it's pretty painful to see you make sweeping generalizations and misrepresent what you said, both of which open up glaringly obvious opportunities to disprove your arguments. All using nothing but what you said. And you don't want to be proven wrong simply because of sloppiness, right?
You just make things far, far too easy to disprove.
Out of curiosity for one of you people who knows where to find this shit: which sold better, Twilight Princess on Wii or Twilight Princess on GameCube? And how about Resident Evil 4 (that was on both, wasn't it?)? Those are the only titles I can think of where people were actually offered the choice between buying the same game with or without motion control. And I suspect that even those results can't tell us anything about motion control preference since there is going to be a significant section of each population who are either buying for Wii because they 1) don't own a GC or 2) want games for the system they just spend $250 on and, in the other camp, bought for the GC because they couldn't get hold of/afford a Wii (whether they wanted motion controls or not).
According to Wikipedia, Twilight Princess had sold 5.82 million copies on the Wii as of March 31, 2011,[84] and 1.32 million on the GameCube as of March 31, 2007.
Resident Evil 4: According to January 17, 2007 sales figures provided by Capcom, the GameCube version of Resident Evil 4 has sold a total of 1.6 million units worldwide, while the PS2 version has sold over 2 million units.[90] As of September 30, 2011, the PS2 version has sold 2.2 million units and the Wii Edition has sold 1.9 million units.
So surprisingly close, actually.
At any rate, as far as your assertion that sales figures are a bad way to judge the public's desire for new ways to control games -- how to account for the success of Kinect? It became the fastest-selling consumer device ever for a while, and single-handedly and sustainedly boosted sales of the 360 itself around 50 percent, month after month. That kind of sales boost just doesn't happen with consoles, yet Kinect managed it.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
The gist that I got from his posts (which agrees with my position, and I've never played any of the Metroid Prime games, so I realy have no position about them) is that he doesn't think the gaming public were terribly happy about getting, essentially, more GameCube games but with motion control tacked on. The 360 and PS3 being more powerful doesn't just lead to HD graphics; the stuff that games on those systems do are things that couldn't have been done in the xbox and ps2 (enemy AI, size of environments, physics, number of simultaneous players, etc.), not to mention the seriously tremendous advances in online experience present on both consoles. I think that tends to get dismissed in discussions about how the Wii stacks up against the other consoles in all the SD vs. HD folderol, and that people tend to forget that online console gaming (and online non-gaming experiences on consoles) were pretty much non-existent in the last generation.
As far as waggle getting a bad rap... I said it before up-thread and I'll say it again: I can only think of one game that I've played on the Wii where motion control improved the experience and wherein the point of the game wasn't showing off motion control (so discouting Wii Sports, WarioWare, and the other Look At The Things This Controller Can Do tech-demo-style games, which are fun and all but aren't exactly germane to a discussion about whether or not adding motion control in any way benefits game-types that existed otherwise). I can't see playing Trauma Center on a console that doesn't have either motion control or touch sensing. I found the motion sensing in that game to be flaky, but that probably would have been improved if I owned a Motion Plus. None of the other games I played and enjoyed on the Wii (Twilight Princess, Muramasa, No More Heroes, various Super Marios, Super Smash Brothers, Resident Evil, probably some other ones I'm forgetting) felt like having motion in them made the game any better. I don't actually know the details on how the GameCube and Wii stack up spec-wise, but if I could have played those games on the Cube, I either would have been ambivalent about which one I used or else have actually preferred avoiding the motion control.
And I haven't seen any Wii game reviews that said otherwise. I know a lot of people are down with the shooting games on Wii, and I'll admit that of that list Resident Evil was probably the closest to an experience that was improved by the wiimote, but, again, I found the sensing to be too flaky to be an unqualified benefit. There were enough times where the pointer sensitivity was too low, or I was at a bad angle on the sensor bar and my position got jittery, or I put my hand down during a non-shooting part and couldn't get the sensor re-oriented fast enough when I need to shoot something that I really would have preferred a traditional controller. But that's just me, so I'll give it that it might improve shooters. Except that people who play FPS games almost universally gravitate toward the 360 and PS3 because A) nintendo don't like to support violent games and FPS fans are usually at the very front edge of the HD graphics crowd. So developing a system where the most obvious use of the control scheme is a type of game that the system is least likely to host in the coming generation seems kind of...weird.
You know, I saw the argument that more power for consoles bring better AI, physics, etc. a lot when the 360 and PS3 came out. But, in all honestly, did all that power truly give us gaming experiences that weren't possible on the oXbox and PS2? The only games I've seen that I think are literally impossible to replicate on the older systems are Ninety Nine Nights, with its umptizillion enemies, and L.A. Noire, with its insanely detailed facial animation (which was absolutely necessary for its game mechanics). Everything else could be perfectly replicated by just downgrading the graphics, I'd argue. I mean, I played Half-Life 2 on the oXbox, and its physics were utterly amazing for its time, even though it was technically downgraded from the PC. Or am I missing something? Has there been games that have without a shadow of a doubt demonstrated AI and physics that were completely impossible to replicate on older consoles? I get the feeling this will be impossible to settle outside of personal opinion, but hey.
It's not just the AI and physics. It's everything. It's the whole package. Make a list of the value-plus boons console-to-console between the Wii and it's competition and it's not even close. Outside of the debatable benefit of the motion control, the only other upgrades one got by switching to the Wii platform was the VirtualConsole and the, uh, . . weather thing?
The Wii didn't cost all that much, but it was still pretty low on measurable value.
why discount games where the experience was to show off motion control?
I personally was only discounting games sold as pack-ins or games that were requisite for a new peripheral.
What are the sales of games for the Kinect like though?
There's obviously a segment of the public that likes motion-controlly things like the Wii and Kinect. But the question is are they after the shiny newness and then dump it in the closet or are they long-haul consumers of the idea of motion controls?
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
At any rate, as far as your assertion that sales figures are a bad way to judge the public's desire for new ways to control games -- how to account for the success of Kinect? It became the fastest-selling consumer device ever for a while, and single-handedly and sustainedly boosted sales of the 360 itself around 50 percent, month after month. That kind of sales boost just doesn't happen with consoles, yet Kinect managed it.
And how are those Kinect games selling?
The public loves novelty. By definition, things don't stay novel for very long.
It's not just the AI and physics. It's everything. It's the whole package. Make a list of the value-plus boons console-to-console between the Wii and it's competition and it's not even close. Outside of the debatable benefit of the motion control, the only other upgrades one got by switching to the Wii platform was the VirtualConsole and the, uh, . . weather thing?
Um.... we weren't talking about the general worth of a console. We were talking about what that added power adds to games themselves that couldn't have been done the previous generation.
What are the sales of games for the Kinect like though?
There's obviously a segment of the public that likes motion-controlly things like the Wii and Kinect. But the question is are they after the shiny newness and then dump it in the closet or are they long-haul consumers of the idea of motion controls?
Hard to tell since the NPD's clamped down on specific data, but I get the impression they're not that great lately.
Yet the 360 itself is still selling like it did during the Kinect introduction. Maybe Kinect contributed a halo effect to the console, making it seem more appealing overall without depending on actual Kinect sales?
At any rate, the fact remains that Kinect itself sold extremely well at first. Then again, other than the Gunstringer there hasn't really been ANY good uses of Kinect for games that wasn't more or less copies of Wii games (see: Kinect Sports), not even from Microsoft themselves.
It's not just the AI and physics. It's everything. It's the whole package. Make a list of the value-plus boons console-to-console between the Wii and it's competition and it's not even close. Outside of the debatable benefit of the motion control, the only other upgrades one got by switching to the Wii platform was the VirtualConsole and the, uh, . . weather thing?
Um.... we weren't talking about the general worth of a console. We were talking about what that added power adds to games themselves that couldn't have been done the previous generation.
Bigger environments, more realism, more characters on screen, more interactability in the environment, less load-screens, etc, etc.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
It's not just the AI and physics. It's everything. It's the whole package. Make a list of the value-plus boons console-to-console between the Wii and it's competition and it's not even close. Outside of the debatable benefit of the motion control, the only other upgrades one got by switching to the Wii platform was the VirtualConsole and the, uh, . . weather thing?
Um.... we weren't talking about the general worth of a console. We were talking about what that added power adds to games themselves that couldn't have been done the previous generation.
Well, that's what you bent the argument towards in the whole "What makes next-gen technological upgrades so great?" hole you're kind of digging yourself into.
Several people have listed a litany of things that exactly made the HD consoles so great, and your response was, "Well, what's so great about those things?"
That shit could go on forever, since you're asking for objective responses and then dismissing them for subjective reasons.
It's not just the AI and physics. It's everything. It's the whole package. Make a list of the value-plus boons console-to-console between the Wii and it's competition and it's not even close. Outside of the debatable benefit of the motion control, the only other upgrades one got by switching to the Wii platform was the VirtualConsole and the, uh, . . weather thing?
Um.... we weren't talking about the general worth of a console. We were talking about what that added power adds to games themselves that couldn't have been done the previous generation.
Bigger environments, more realism, more characters on screen, more interactability in the environment, less load-screens, etc, etc.
...yes. That's what I keep hearing. What I'd like are specific examples.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
It's not just the AI and physics. It's everything. It's the whole package. Make a list of the value-plus boons console-to-console between the Wii and it's competition and it's not even close. Outside of the debatable benefit of the motion control, the only other upgrades one got by switching to the Wii platform was the VirtualConsole and the, uh, . . weather thing?
Um.... we weren't talking about the general worth of a console. We were talking about what that added power adds to games themselves that couldn't have been done the previous generation.
Bigger environments, more realism, more characters on screen, more interactability in the environment, less load-screens, etc, etc.
...yes. That's what I keep hearing. What I'd like are specific examples.
It's not just the AI and physics. It's everything. It's the whole package. Make a list of the value-plus boons console-to-console between the Wii and it's competition and it's not even close. Outside of the debatable benefit of the motion control, the only other upgrades one got by switching to the Wii platform was the VirtualConsole and the, uh, . . weather thing?
Um.... we weren't talking about the general worth of a console. We were talking about what that added power adds to games themselves that couldn't have been done the previous generation.
Well, that's what you bent the argument towards in the whole "What makes next-gen technological upgrades so great?" hole you're kind of digging yourself into.
Several people have listed a litany of things that exactly made the HD consoles so great, and your response was, "Well, what's so great about those things?"
That shit could go on forever, since you're asking for objective responses and then dismissing them for subjective reasons.
Um.... no, that's not what this argument is about at all. I'm not saying "what's so great about those things," I'm asking for specific, real-world examples. I even floated the possibility that I could be proven wrong.
It's not just the AI and physics. It's everything. It's the whole package. Make a list of the value-plus boons console-to-console between the Wii and it's competition and it's not even close. Outside of the debatable benefit of the motion control, the only other upgrades one got by switching to the Wii platform was the VirtualConsole and the, uh, . . weather thing?
Um.... we weren't talking about the general worth of a console. We were talking about what that added power adds to games themselves that couldn't have been done the previous generation.
Bigger environments, more realism, more characters on screen, more interactability in the environment, less load-screens, etc, etc.
...yes. That's what I keep hearing. What I'd like are specific examples.
You're really being pedantic now.
Why? If these things were truly self-evident, then it would be very, very easy to give examples, right?
You know, I saw the argument that more power for consoles bring better AI, physics, etc. a lot when the 360 and PS3 came out. But, in all honestly, did all that power truly give us gaming experiences that weren't possible on the oXbox and PS2? The only games I've seen that I think are literally impossible to replicate on the older systems are Ninety Nine Nights, with its umptizillion enemies, and L.A. Noire, with its insanely detailed facial animation (which was absolutely necessary for its game mechanics). Everything else could be perfectly replicated by just downgrading the graphics, I'd argue. I mean, I played Half-Life 2 on the oXbox, and its physics were utterly amazing for its time, even though it was technically downgraded from the PC. Or am I missing something? Has there been games that have without a shadow of a doubt demonstrated AI and physics that were completely impossible to replicate on older consoles? I get the feeling this will be impossible to settle outside of personal opinion, but hey.
It'd be difficult to say with absolute certainty without actually being a developer on each game in question, since there's a wide range of "what's technically possible" in terms of software on a given hardware platform. But there are a lot of 360 and PS3 games that do stuff that I never saw done on the Xbox or PS2. Maybe they could have been done if the engine were sufficiently optimized and you downgraded the graphics far enough that the shared ram and so forth weren't being overly taxed, but what's possible by heavily optimizing your code on one system can be made easy on a more powerful system.
The physics in Half-Life 2 were considered astounding for the time, but are really nothing special anymore. Pretty much every big-budget game that comes down the pipe on the 360 and PS3 have examples of environments and objects behaving with HL2-or-better physics models. And unlike HL2 where the physics engine was made a star with the gravity gun, the physics in games like Gears of War or Uncharted are just there. Shit falls down and crashes into other shit realistically just because it can. The additional hardware makes it easy enough for developers to just plug in the Havoc engine or whatever and let it go.
Same with AI. I'm not an AI programmer and I don't really follow developments in the field, but I know that the AI in games I've played this generation keeps getting better and is significantly more advanced than anything I recall seeing in games of the prior generation.
As for downgrading the graphics... You've mentioned that a couple of times, that people can't tell the difference. I've heard it before, and I even remember hearing it when the PS2 came out, that people couldn't really tell the difference between PS1 and PS2 graphics outside of the gamer community. Obviously I'm biased, being both a gamer and a former professional graphic artist way back in the day, so I guess I'm not qualified to judge, but are there honestly people who can't tell the difference between big-budget current-gen graphics and big-budget last-gen graphics? I can believe not seeing a difference between end-of-life PS2 graphics and launch-title PS3, but are there actually people who can't see a difference between these?
(I admit, the second is a flashier combat screen, but still. I grabbed the first one in GIS 'FFX' and 'FFXIII-2' that was a shot of combat so as to make sure it was in-engine) I'm not really looking to argue the "How much different are the graphics" angle. If you say you don't think they're different then we can agree to disagree, but is this really a thing? Do people really not see a difference?
Also, you left out the online component, which you shouldn't. Online gaming is so big now that it's hard to remember that it, for all intents and purposes, didn't exist on consoles in the previous generation. There was some shitty, flaky online support on all of the major consoles, but absolutely nothing like Xbox Live or PSN. Both of those have added tremendous value to the consoles, as well as to games on those consoles. The Wii's lackluster online support really can't compare at all, even ignoring every other difference between the big 3.
Nothing wrong with not liking motion control, but why discount games where the experience was to show off motion control? I mean sure, you could consider Wii Sports a tech demo, but many people find it a genuinely enjoyable game in its own right -- my family and friends still like playing bowling and tennis on it. Besides, isn't "look at what motion control can do" by its very definition a strong incorporation of motion control into games themselves? At any rate -- I can't really speak for Muramasa and No More Heroes, but I do think that motion controls improved Resident Evil 4, mainly in that things were easier to aim and I got this weird sense of enjoyment when it came to using motion controls to move the gun around that I didn't when playing the Cube version. I already mentioned Twilight Princess not using things as effectively as it could, and the Marios and Brawl barely used waggle as a supplement.
Because those types of games aren't really useful if you're discussing what motion control brings to the table for gaming in general. Yeah, motion control can make a great sports mini-game. What does it do for me if I like playing Madden-style sports games, though? What does it do for platformers? Adventure games? Wii Sports (and similar) is a bad example because the game has nothing to it except demonstrating motion control. Would you play any of the Wii Sports minigames if the inputs were mapped to a standard controller instead of motion controls? I wouldn't and I don't think most people would. The games are only fun -- and, mostly, are only even games -- because of the existence of the motion controls. That's why I tend to them of them as tech demos instead of games. Mario Party is a better example of a motion-focused game where we can talk about what motion control brings to its table. The Mario Party games are, essentially, controller function exercises. Move the stick in a circle. Press this button fast. Press these buttons in order. Wave the wand this way. Wave it that way. Shake it quick. Does replacing button-and-stick exercises with waving and shaking actually change the Mario Party game in any meaningful way? Is Mario Party any more fun because it has motion support than it was prior to having it?
I'll grant you shooters, despite my personally negative experiences, because people do seem to enjoy them. But, again, are shooters really a good example on a console that has almost none of them? A console whose manufacturer actively avoids the genre?
I haven't played Zack and Wiki, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. So we've got Zack and Wiki, Trauma Center, and whichever Wii shooters don't play like baked ass (I've heard people say positive things about RE4 and Metroid Prime 3; not so much any other shooters on Wii). Do you feel that this is a strong argument in favor of motion controls improving the gaming experience? Does this showing imply that developers want to make awesome motion control games? Does it seem likely that people bought a lot of copies of Metroid Prime 3 and Skyward Sword on the basis of wanting to play Metroid and Zelda with motion controls, as opposed to buying them because they wanted to play Metroid and Zelda at all?
There's also Boom Blox, which made virtual Jenga and knocking blocks over via hurled balls ridiculously fun, I've found. That's just my own experience, but I'd encourage you to try that one not just to prove my point, but because it's a surprisingly fun game.
At any rate, Nintendo doesn't like to support violent games? That hasn't been true in a loooong time. They cheerfully gave Rare the go-ahead to make Conker's Bad Fur Day, they asked for the least amount of censorship on BMX XXX, they bankrolled the violent and disturbing Eternal Darkness, they did nothing to block the blood-drenched Resident Evil 4 and MadWorld, etc. etc. It's just that Nintendo's largely family-friendly stable of franchises and the casual-bait nature of the Wii doesn't exactly shine a light on their willingness to allow violence.
I didn't really care for Boom Blox, and I'm not sure it's really more of a game and less of a tech demo than Wii Sports or, on the other side of the fence, Kinect Adventures. It's fun, yeah, but is there anything there beyond the input method?
I feel like I recall RE4 being censored on the Cube and Wii as compared to its PS2 release, but that may be my imagination. MadWorld I'll give you, even though it's stylized enough to be almost cartoonish violence. I never played Eternal Darkness, BMX XXX, or Conker's Bad Fur Day so can't comment on their contents. But I do recall that when MadWorld and Conker came out there was a great deal of media noise regarding how atypical of Nintendo those games were. In fact, I recall MadWorld's release being accompanied by a lot of hoopla about how Nintendo were trying to court the mature, 'hard-core' gaming audience again after being more family friendly for so long. Not that that really went anywhere. Still: the Wii isn't exactly a home to shooters, despite that being the arguably best possible genre of game to be developed for the system.
It's not just the AI and physics. It's everything. It's the whole package. Make a list of the value-plus boons console-to-console between the Wii and it's competition and it's not even close. Outside of the debatable benefit of the motion control, the only other upgrades one got by switching to the Wii platform was the VirtualConsole and the, uh, . . weather thing?
Um.... we weren't talking about the general worth of a console. We were talking about what that added power adds to games themselves that couldn't have been done the previous generation.
Bigger environments, more realism, more characters on screen, more interactability in the environment, less load-screens, etc, etc.
...yes. That's what I keep hearing. What I'd like are specific examples.
Why? Are you denying that better hardware makes these things happen?
Shit, I can point at elevators and environment size in Mass Effect 1 as an example of how hardware limitations effect gameplay.
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AtomikaLive fast and get fucked or whateverRegistered Userregular
It's not just the AI and physics. It's everything. It's the whole package. Make a list of the value-plus boons console-to-console between the Wii and it's competition and it's not even close. Outside of the debatable benefit of the motion control, the only other upgrades one got by switching to the Wii platform was the VirtualConsole and the, uh, . . weather thing?
Um.... we weren't talking about the general worth of a console. We were talking about what that added power adds to games themselves that couldn't have been done the previous generation.
Bigger environments, more realism, more characters on screen, more interactability in the environment, less load-screens, etc, etc.
...yes. That's what I keep hearing. What I'd like are specific examples.
Why? Are you denying that better hardware makes these things happen?
Shit, I can point at elevators and environment size in Mass Effect 1 as an example of how hardware limitations effect gameplay.
I wouldn't even bother. He's moving the goalposts, and moving them in a circle, and then saying, "meh, it's all subjective anyway."
You know, I saw the argument that more power for consoles bring better AI, physics, etc. a lot when the 360 and PS3 came out. But, in all honestly, did all that power truly give us gaming experiences that weren't possible on the oXbox and PS2? The only games I've seen that I think are literally impossible to replicate on the older systems are Ninety Nine Nights, with its umptizillion enemies, and L.A. Noire, with its insanely detailed facial animation (which was absolutely necessary for its game mechanics). Everything else could be perfectly replicated by just downgrading the graphics, I'd argue. I mean, I played Half-Life 2 on the oXbox, and its physics were utterly amazing for its time, even though it was technically downgraded from the PC. Or am I missing something? Has there been games that have without a shadow of a doubt demonstrated AI and physics that were completely impossible to replicate on older consoles? I get the feeling this will be impossible to settle outside of personal opinion, but hey.
It'd be difficult to say with absolute certainty without actually being a developer on each game in question, since there's a wide range of "what's technically possible" in terms of software on a given hardware platform. But there are a lot of 360 and PS3 games that do stuff that I never saw done on the Xbox or PS2. Maybe they could have been done if the engine were sufficiently optimized and you downgraded the graphics far enough that the shared ram and so forth weren't being overly taxed, but what's possible by heavily optimizing your code on one system can be made easy on a more powerful system.
The physics in Half-Life 2 were considered astounding for the time, but are really nothing special anymore. Pretty much every big-budget game that comes down the pipe on the 360 and PS3 have examples of environments and objects behaving with HL2-or-better physics models. And unlike HL2 where the physics engine was made a star with the gravity gun, the physics in games like Gears of War or Uncharted are just there. Shit falls down and crashes into other shit realistically just because it can. The additional hardware makes it easy enough for developers to just plug in the Havoc engine or whatever and let it go.
Same with AI. I'm not an AI programmer and I don't really follow developments in the field, but I know that the AI in games I've played this generation keeps getting better and is significantly more advanced than anything I recall seeing in games of the prior generation.
As for downgrading the graphics... You've mentioned that a couple of times, that people can't tell the difference. I've heard it before, and I even remember hearing it when the PS2 came out, that people couldn't really tell the difference between PS1 and PS2 graphics outside of the gamer community. Obviously I'm biased, being both a gamer and a former professional graphic artist way back in the day, so I guess I'm not qualified to judge, but are there honestly people who can't tell the difference between big-budget current-gen graphics and big-budget last-gen graphics? I can believe not seeing a difference between end-of-life PS2 graphics and launch-title PS3, but are there actually people who can't see a difference between these?
(I admit, the second is a flashier combat screen, but still. I grabbed the first one in GIS 'FFX' and 'FFXIII-2' that was a shot of combat so as to make sure it was in-engine) I'm not really looking to argue the "How much different are the graphics" angle. If you say you don't think they're different then we can agree to disagree, but is this really a thing? Do people really not see a difference?
Also, you left out the online component, which you shouldn't. Online gaming is so big now that it's hard to remember that it, for all intents and purposes, didn't exist on consoles in the previous generation. There was some shitty, flaky online support on all of the major consoles, but absolutely nothing like Xbox Live or PSN. Both of those have added tremendous value to the consoles, as well as to games on those consoles. The Wii's lackluster online support really can't compare at all, even ignoring every other difference between the big 3.
Oh, I'm not saying that visuals aren't important. And I'm not saying online isn't a gaming revolution in its own right. I'm just focusing on the stated notion that better horsepower does more than just beef up the visuals.
And sure, we're seeing physics more often in games, but it may be a matter of developers seeing the success of previous physics games and realizing they'd be a boon for the game. And, given that they existed alongside everything else in Half-Life 2, was there really anything preventing developers from putting it in their games last gen, had the trend existed back then?
Honestly, this kind of notion is maddeningly hard to prove OR disprove. It all comes down to personal experience. My experience is that I haven't really seen any huge revolutions in AI, physics, environment sizes and the like, but your experience is different. I think this is an area where we'll have to agree to disagree.
Nothing wrong with not liking motion control, but why discount games where the experience was to show off motion control? I mean sure, you could consider Wii Sports a tech demo, but many people find it a genuinely enjoyable game in its own right -- my family and friends still like playing bowling and tennis on it. Besides, isn't "look at what motion control can do" by its very definition a strong incorporation of motion control into games themselves? At any rate -- I can't really speak for Muramasa and No More Heroes, but I do think that motion controls improved Resident Evil 4, mainly in that things were easier to aim and I got this weird sense of enjoyment when it came to using motion controls to move the gun around that I didn't when playing the Cube version. I already mentioned Twilight Princess not using things as effectively as it could, and the Marios and Brawl barely used waggle as a supplement.
Because those types of games aren't really useful if you're discussing what motion control brings to the table for gaming in general. Yeah, motion control can make a great sports mini-game. What does it do for me if I like playing Madden-style sports games, though? What does it do for platformers? Adventure games? Wii Sports (and similar) is a bad example because the game has nothing to it except demonstrating motion control. Would you play any of the Wii Sports minigames if the inputs were mapped to a standard controller instead of motion controls? I wouldn't and I don't think most people would. The games are only fun -- and, mostly, are only even games -- because of the existence of the motion controls. That's why I tend to them of them as tech demos instead of games. Mario Party is a better example of a motion-focused game where we can talk about what motion control brings to its table. The Mario Party games are, essentially, controller function exercises. Move the stick in a circle. Press this button fast. Press these buttons in order. Wave the wand this way. Wave it that way. Shake it quick. Does replacing button-and-stick exercises with waving and shaking actually change the Mario Party game in any meaningful way? Is Mario Party any more fun because it has motion support than it was prior to having it?
I'll grant you shooters, despite my personally negative experiences, because people do seem to enjoy them. But, again, are shooters really a good example on a console that has almost none of them? A console whose manufacturer actively avoids the genre?
I haven't played Zack and Wiki, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. So we've got Zack and Wiki, Trauma Center, and whichever Wii shooters don't play like baked ass (I've heard people say positive things about RE4 and Metroid Prime 3; not so much any other shooters on Wii). Do you feel that this is a strong argument in favor of motion controls improving the gaming experience? Does this showing imply that developers want to make awesome motion control games? Does it seem likely that people bought a lot of copies of Metroid Prime 3 and Skyward Sword on the basis of wanting to play Metroid and Zelda with motion controls, as opposed to buying them because they wanted to play Metroid and Zelda at all?
But I'd argue that the games built around motion control DID bring something to the table for gaming in general -- they helped invent new game genres or make niche ones more viable. Wii Sports sparked multiple collections of simplified, quick to get into sports games.
Wii Fit helped inspire an explosion of fitness games. WarioWare and Rayman Raving Rabbids more or less pioneered motion-controlled minigames. What you think about the quality of those genres is one thing, but they did have a very noticeable impact on the industry.
And actually, Madden for Wii was completely reworked around motion controls. I'll point to a review of Madden 07 as an example, since I'm a horrible judge of sports games:
Zack and Wiki, as described above, is an adventure game, though in the more traditional Lucasarts adventure game kind of way, which I'm not sure you meant.
As far as why other shooter games didn't work as well, it could be a lack of talent that held them back. And sure, sales of Metroid and Zelda don't make a slam-dunk case that people were clamoring for motion controls, but it sure doesn't indicate that they were turned off by motion controls, either.
But no, I don't think that developers were hot to develop deeper games for the Wii as I've argued before, which I feel is partly because they didn't want to go to the time/money/expense to truly make something new and good around the control scheme, partly because Nintendo didn't reveal to the third-parties what the Wii could do until just a few months before launch, forcing them to play catch-up (they didn't, and honestly, why should they? Nintendo's strategy in that regard is a mistake) and partly because the system quickly got pidgeonholed as the casualware machine because there was little released for it in the start that wasn't casualware (which was at least partially caused by the previous point).
There's also Boom Blox, which made virtual Jenga and knocking blocks over via hurled balls ridiculously fun, I've found. That's just my own experience, but I'd encourage you to try that one not just to prove my point, but because it's a surprisingly fun game.
At any rate, Nintendo doesn't like to support violent games? That hasn't been true in a loooong time. They cheerfully gave Rare the go-ahead to make Conker's Bad Fur Day, they asked for the least amount of censorship on BMX XXX, they bankrolled the violent and disturbing Eternal Darkness, they did nothing to block the blood-drenched Resident Evil 4 and MadWorld, etc. etc. It's just that Nintendo's largely family-friendly stable of franchises and the casual-bait nature of the Wii doesn't exactly shine a light on their willingness to allow violence.
I didn't really care for Boom Blox, and I'm not sure it's really more of a game and less of a tech demo than Wii Sports or, on the other side of the fence, Kinect Adventures. It's fun, yeah, but is there anything there beyond the input method?
Why isn't fun enough? Why does something have to be more than "fun" to count? Is that not the main reason we play video games to begin with?
I feel like I recall RE4 being censored on the Cube and Wii as compared to its PS2 release, but that may be my imagination. MadWorld I'll give you, even though it's stylized enough to be almost cartoonish violence. I never played Eternal Darkness, BMX XXX, or Conker's Bad Fur Day so can't comment on their contents. But I do recall that when MadWorld and Conker came out there was a great deal of media noise regarding how atypical of Nintendo those games were. In fact, I recall MadWorld's release being accompanied by a lot of hoopla about how Nintendo were trying to court the mature, 'hard-core' gaming audience again after being more family friendly for so long. Not that that really went anywhere. Still: the Wii isn't exactly a home to shooters, despite that being the arguably best possible genre of game to be developed for the system.
Actually it came out on the Cube first and the PS2 second. I don't recall any differences in content between the two, though I could be wrong. But no, I really don't think it's a matter of Nintendo not wanting violence that prevented a lot of Wii shooters, I think it was the points I argued above.
It's not just the AI and physics. It's everything. It's the whole package. Make a list of the value-plus boons console-to-console between the Wii and it's competition and it's not even close. Outside of the debatable benefit of the motion control, the only other upgrades one got by switching to the Wii platform was the VirtualConsole and the, uh, . . weather thing?
Um.... we weren't talking about the general worth of a console. We were talking about what that added power adds to games themselves that couldn't have been done the previous generation.
Bigger environments, more realism, more characters on screen, more interactability in the environment, less load-screens, etc, etc.
...yes. That's what I keep hearing. What I'd like are specific examples.
Why? Are you denying that better hardware makes these things happen?
Shit, I can point at elevators and environment size in Mass Effect 1 as an example of how hardware limitations effect gameplay.
I wouldn't even bother. He's moving the goalposts, and moving them in a circle, and then saying, "meh, it's all subjective anyway."
There's no point.
...so you're not even going to try to prove your point, then? You're just going to engage in random personal attacks? Since apparently your point is so self-evident?
Please, for the love of god, provide examples. Prove me wrong. I'm begging you. Or at the very least, provide concrete examples of how I'm "moving the goalposts," using exact quotes as evidence. Surely you can do that... right?
It's not just the AI and physics. It's everything. It's the whole package. Make a list of the value-plus boons console-to-console between the Wii and it's competition and it's not even close. Outside of the debatable benefit of the motion control, the only other upgrades one got by switching to the Wii platform was the VirtualConsole and the, uh, . . weather thing?
Um.... we weren't talking about the general worth of a console. We were talking about what that added power adds to games themselves that couldn't have been done the previous generation.
Bigger environments, more realism, more characters on screen, more interactability in the environment, less load-screens, etc, etc.
...yes. That's what I keep hearing. What I'd like are specific examples.
Why? Are you denying that better hardware makes these things happen?
Shit, I can point at elevators and environment size in Mass Effect 1 as an example of how hardware limitations effect gameplay.
I wouldn't even bother. He's moving the goalposts, and moving them in a circle, and then saying, "meh, it's all subjective anyway."
There's no point.
...so you're not even going to try to prove your point, then? You're just going to engage in random personal attacks? Since apparently your point is so self-evident?
Please, for the love of god, provide examples. Prove me wrong. I'm begging you.
It's pretty simple cloudeagle:
Do you or do you not acknowledge that better hardware allows a game to do more? ("more" here defined as more detailed environment, larger envirnoments, better physics, better graphics, better AI, etc)
If you don't acknowledge this well ... honestly, I wouldn't even know where to begin. Not acknowledging that point would be an amazing willful denial of reality.
If you do acknowledge that then the point is pretty much settled since better hardware makes those things possible.
Unless of course you are asserting that developers aren't yet using all the things the hardware has to offer, in which case I'd point you again at ME1 or at 360vsPC loadtimes in ME2 just off the top of my head.
Or you are arguing developers have no interest in advacning these aspects of games, in which case you are gonna have to post some support for the shit cause the history of game design is a long line of bigger more detailed environments and better AI and better physics and all that shit, so I'd wonder why they'd stop now.
Your whole "prove me wrong" schtick is based on underlying assumptions that make no fucking sense. The only way you could be right is if games weren't limited by the hardware they run on.
Do you or do you not acknowledge that better hardware allows a game to do more? ("more" here defined as more detailed environment, larger envirnoments, better physics, better graphics, better AI, etc)
If you don't acknowledge this well ... honestly, I wouldn't even know where to begin. Not acknowledging that point would be an amazing willful denial of reality.
If you do acknowledge that then the point is pretty much settled since better hardware makes those things possible.
Unless of course you are asserting that developers aren't yet using all the things the hardware has to offer, in which case I'd point you again at ME1 or at 360vsPC loadtimes in ME2 just off the top of my head.
Or you are arguing developers have no interest in advacning these aspects of games, in which case you are gonna have to post some support for the shit cause the history of game design is a long line of bigger more detailed environments and better AI and better physics and all that shit, so I'd wonder why they'd stop now.
Your whole "prove me wrong" schtick is based on underlying assumptions that make no fucking sense. The only way you could be right is if games weren't limited by the hardware they run on.
You and Ross are reading a little too much into what I said. I never said that better hardware doesn't allow a game to do more. What I asked was -- did the resulting games actually do more? Did gamers really see a concrete, measurable benefit beyond graphics?
You're right, the heart of my argument is, in essence, "developers are lazy bastards." (I'm being knee jerk, there's a lot of other factors that could play into that -- skill, deadlines, money, etc. Also laziness.) And I really, really do appreciate you giving the example of ME1 vs. ME2... though the problem is that the two games are on the same system, so I'm not sure it's a case of expanded hardware allowing the developers to do more, rather than a case of a talented developer learning the system more and getting better tricks out of it. Then again, we did see a single, unified world with no elevators or loading of any kind -- Jak and Daxter on the PS2. Run from one end of the expansive world to the other, and you'll never encounter a loading time or any kind of artificial barrier, which is what (I think) you're arguing Mass Effect 2 did.
The only reason I said "prove me wrong" is that Ross implied that my position is so pants-on-head ridiculous that it could be easily disproved. So, since he believes that way, I asked him to prove it and back up his assertion. But it's not something I would demand from you, since you're being more reasonable about it. Again, I get the feeling that there's no real way to answer that definitively without relying on personal experiences and opinion... but then again, that's exactly where "I placed the goalposts" when I first posed the question. Debate and discourse and all that.
ME1 and ME2 are two different examples, not one game improving on the other.
In ME1, hardware limitations are obviously responsible for the nature of things like the Citadel. It's broken up into sections because the 360 literally couldn't load environments that large all at once.
The ME2 issue is related to loadscreens. Specifically on the PC version you can disable them and transitions become almost instantaneous because a decent computer can handle loading ME2's levels way way faster then the 360 can.
Both are examples of how hardware enforces limitations and compromises on game design.
The issue is, as I said, the only way your argument holds water is if developers aren't pushing the limits of current technology (which they are, as examples like the 2 above show) or they are just not interested in pushing those limits.
And considering developers have historically always been chomping at the bit to push limits on things like level design, detail, physics, etc (as evidenced by the fact that games have drastically changed in more then just graphics over the past ... any time frame), I find the second argument kinda ridiculous and would require some explanation/evidence for why that's suddenly changed.
Do you or do you not acknowledge that better hardware allows a game to do more? ("more" here defined as more detailed environment, larger envirnoments, better physics, better graphics, better AI, etc)
If you don't acknowledge this well ... honestly, I wouldn't even know where to begin. Not acknowledging that point would be an amazing willful denial of reality.
I for one would certainly challenge this assertion.
All the hardware in the world hasn't helped anyone make a better 4X game than Alpha Centauri.
MW 2: Mercs is better than MW 4: Mercs.
Half-Life 2 isn't a better game than Half-Life.
Deus Ex: HR may look prettier than the original, and it had a lot of gameplay improvements, but the levels are smaller and the overall game/plot structure is not as complex.
Dwarf Fortress. Although I admit this might not be the best example given how much it depends on brute force computational speed.
Better hardware is a nice thing to have, obviously. But it can only make good games better, it can't make shitty games good. And if it forces the price of consoles and game development up, forcing people to go for appealing to the common denominator, or making the cost of entry so high it discourages innovation, it can actually make what could have been good games mediocre, or not exist at all.
So I for one am glad that at least one company is not on the HD-crack and still remembers what actually makes games fun.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
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Either Nintendo didn't think people would go out of their way to acquire GC peripherals (by the way the Wavebird is awesome and is compatible with some Classic Controller Wii games as well, but it is also rare and expensive now, unless you buy a knockoff) since they didn't think of it as anything more than a bone to throw at their previous fans...
...or they wanted to subtly discourage people going out and buying stuff that didn't really make them money any more instead of newer stuff that did.
I still think even sort of half-assed backward compatibility is better than removing backward compatibility altogether - but I've got Wavebirds.
I have no gripes about using the classic controller. It'd be nice to have a wireless way to play GameCube games, though.
Still speaking for the entire gaming audience there with zero evidence to back it up, plus you didn't bother to contradict all the other stuff I caught you revising.
...you do realize there's an easy, 100% guaranteed way to keep me from going this route, right? :P
Have you got anything to back up your counter-assertion that gamers do want new 'input experiences' besides sales data of specious utility in actually supporting either side of the argument? Perhaps rave reviews of the manner in which motion controls improved the games that were released on both the Wii and GameCube, or the few titles that were released on both Wii and non-Nintendo consoles?
I'm not saying that such things don't exist, just asking 'cause I've never seen them. I've read a lot of reviews wherein Wii games are slammed for the waggle, and up-thread someone posted about the MetaCritic ranking for Twilight Princess being a point higher on the GameCube than on the Wii. Considering that the games looked alike and had the same story and content, I'd expect the Wii version to be more highly acclaimed if the general public were after the new input experience.
I didn't actually present a position on this -- I'm just pointing out that Ross' argument, as presented, is overly broad, lacking in concrete evidence, and presented... inconsistently. I definitely do think there's an argument to be made that motion controls didn't add that much to gaming experiences and might not last over the years (as well as a counter-argument), but making sweeping proclamations on the critical and commercial success of an console's input scheme based solely on one's personal thoughts on a single game isn't exactly a position of rhetorical strength.
As far as your comments, I think it varies... there have been a lot of times that waggle has detracted from the experience, but there have also been a lot of shovelware that was released that were shoddy in a lot of ways, motion controls being just one of them. Which may be the source of a lot of the "waggle sucks!" sentiment. Twilight Princess and its multiplatform release is an interesting one to think about, though. True, it is telling that the cube version is a tenth of a point higher, but why? Is it because reviewers didn't think the motion controls lived up to its promise in that game? Or is it because it could be considered a technical marvel on the Gamecube yet somewhat of a technical disappointment given what the more powerful Wii was capable of? Personally, I think it was a little bit of both. In hindsight Twilight Princes wasn't awful but it was far from the best example of what motion controls could do, compared to other launch games like Wii Sports, Excite Truck and WarioWare.
Other than the extremely lengthy posts containing objective data to support my arguments, what evidence are you looking for?
All I've ever posited is that motion controls are arguably not a consistently sought-after feature in the venue of traditional gaming once you account for branding and novelty. I've offered data to support my suggestion. When engaged in discourse, that's as close as evidence as you're going to get.
...I was referring to what you originally put forward, which had nothing "arguably" without it. Like I said, I'm happy to engage in debate and discourse, I'm just not a fan of misrepresentation of what was actually said.
At any rate, I think I've more than adequately made my point in that respect. Like to start things afresh?
Why do you expect to play your cube-game in any other way than a cube-game? What you have to go through to play your GC game on the Wii is exactly what you had to go through on the GC itself.
I never used anything but my GC controller to play Smash Bros. The fact that I didn't have to learn a new way of playing was very welcome.
Well, I'm not going to argue with you about what Atomic Ross is arguing about, because that seems...dumb.
The gist that I got from his posts (which agrees with my position, and I've never played any of the Metroid Prime games, so I realy have no position about them) is that he doesn't think the gaming public were terribly happy about getting, essentially, more GameCube games but with motion control tacked on. The 360 and PS3 being more powerful doesn't just lead to HD graphics; the stuff that games on those systems do are things that couldn't have been done in the xbox and ps2 (enemy AI, size of environments, physics, number of simultaneous players, etc.), not to mention the seriously tremendous advances in online experience present on both consoles. I think that tends to get dismissed in discussions about how the Wii stacks up against the other consoles in all the SD vs. HD folderol, and that people tend to forget that online console gaming (and online non-gaming experiences on consoles) were pretty much non-existent in the last generation.
As far as waggle getting a bad rap... I said it before up-thread and I'll say it again: I can only think of one game that I've played on the Wii where motion control improved the experience and wherein the point of the game wasn't showing off motion control (so discouting Wii Sports, WarioWare, and the other Look At The Things This Controller Can Do tech-demo-style games, which are fun and all but aren't exactly germane to a discussion about whether or not adding motion control in any way benefits game-types that existed otherwise). I can't see playing Trauma Center on a console that doesn't have either motion control or touch sensing. I found the motion sensing in that game to be flaky, but that probably would have been improved if I owned a Motion Plus. None of the other games I played and enjoyed on the Wii (Twilight Princess, Muramasa, No More Heroes, various Super Marios, Super Smash Brothers, Resident Evil, probably some other ones I'm forgetting) felt like having motion in them made the game any better. I don't actually know the details on how the GameCube and Wii stack up spec-wise, but if I could have played those games on the Cube, I either would have been ambivalent about which one I used or else have actually preferred avoiding the motion control.
And I haven't seen any Wii game reviews that said otherwise. I know a lot of people are down with the shooting games on Wii, and I'll admit that of that list Resident Evil was probably the closest to an experience that was improved by the wiimote, but, again, I found the sensing to be too flaky to be an unqualified benefit. There were enough times where the pointer sensitivity was too low, or I was at a bad angle on the sensor bar and my position got jittery, or I put my hand down during a non-shooting part and couldn't get the sensor re-oriented fast enough when I need to shoot something that I really would have preferred a traditional controller. But that's just me, so I'll give it that it might improve shooters. Except that people who play FPS games almost universally gravitate toward the 360 and PS3 because A) nintendo don't like to support violent games and
Given the massive sales of the Wii I think it's hard to claim that people didn't want new input experiences. I think it's rather hard to argue that people just went out and bought en masse something they didn't want.
Now, whether the Wii actually gave them an experience that didn't suck is up for debate. But Ross isn't saying that people were disappointed, he's saying that they didn't even want that shit.
True, but like I said already, due to the logistical demands of A) the Wii requiring a good deal of empty space between the TV and wherever the player is, and
The onus is on Nintendo to provide me with a reasonably accessible set-up. If I have to keep pretending the Wii is no better than my Cube, it won't be long before I just break out the 'Cube.
And you know what? I DO expect the next generation console to be more accessible than the last, especially since the foundation for that added ease of functionality already exists with the classic controller for the Wiimote. Call me greedy.
Not really. Discourse with you has been like arguing with a school teacher who cares more about correcting tedious grammatical issues than what's actually being talked about.
And seriously, I'm not trying to offend, but it seems like you quite purposefully and quite frequently derail conversation with laments regarding rhetorical imperfection. I'll happily rebut arguments all day long with you, but I can't stand constantly talking about the way things are being talked about instead of actually just talking about those things.
If I wanted to argue about the way I'm arguing, I'd call up my wife.
You're a little late to this argument, I'd advise reading back a few pages. We've kinda been over all this already.
The big rhetorical arguments against that position being that, when accounting for certain factors, Wii game sales (especially games in the traditional gaming sense) don't seem to show a statistically relevant boost from involving motion controls.
You can argue that the games that utilize those factors sold like hotcakes, and I'd agree, but the Wii has seemed somewhat hindered in consistently replicating those figures without some kind of caveat.
Which is why I think sales are a bad way to determine anything in particular about something's qualitative values. Clearly, people wanted the shit out of the Wii. It doesn't tell us anything about whether their desire and preconceived notions about what they were getting actually bore out to being happy with the purchase. It's fairly trivial to say that people want a super-awesome, immersive, intuitive, tactile input system for their games. If you can convince them that's what you're selling them then they're pretty likely to buy it. But did people actually want the input experience that the Wii delivered?
Further, and I think what Atomic Ross was saying, people wanted new Nintendo titles. There is a raging hard-on in the gaming community for new Zelda, Mario, MarioKart, SmashBros, and Metroid games. The simple fact that the box says "Metroid" on it is going to move units whether people give a shit about the input scheme or not. The fact that Metroid Prime 3 (and Twilight Princess, and Mario Galaxy, and Smash Bros Melee, and etc.) could have been released on the Game Cube with little or no content and quality difference mean that if you wanted a new Metroid or Zelda or Mario game and didn't give a shit about the input experience then you are paying the cost of a Wii console essentially for the privilege of buying those games (given that you already bought a piece of hardware that could probably have run them). The 360 and PS3 have online, graphics, and computational value available in their games that simply could not have existed on the Xbox and PS2. Fairly few Wii titles are in the center of the Venn diagram for "Games that aren't just motion-control demos" and "Games that couldn't have been released on GameCube".
So again, sales data on 1st party games in established franchises tell us that people still want those franchise games. It doesn't tell us that they want those games with motion control. Out of curiosity for one of you people who knows where to find this shit: which sold better, Twilight Princess on Wii or Twilight Princess on GameCube? And how about Resident Evil 4 (that was on both, wasn't it?)? Those are the only titles I can think of where people were actually offered the choice between buying the same game with or without motion control. And I suspect that even those results can't tell us anything about motion control preference since there is going to be a significant section of each population who are either buying for Wii because they 1) don't own a GC or 2) want games for the system they just spend $250 on and, in the other camp, bought for the GC because they couldn't get hold of/afford a Wii (whether they wanted motion controls or not).
I have an old-ass PS3 from the first run when they still had backwards compatibility with PS2 games. I can play PS2 games on it without having to plug in either a PS2 memory card or a PS2 controller. It's pretty sweet. I actually did a fair amount of PS2 gaming with games I hadn't finished after I got the PS3 because I didn't have to futz with cords and memory cards and shit to play. I think the only games I ever bothered digging out the GameCube controllers and card for to play on the Wii after I got one were Smash Bros and Mario Party, largely because their GameCube incarnations were more fun than the Wii versions.
You know, I saw the argument that more power for consoles bring better AI, physics, etc. a lot when the 360 and PS3 came out. But, in all honestly, did all that power truly give us gaming experiences that weren't possible on the oXbox and PS2? The only games I've seen that I think are literally impossible to replicate on the older systems are Ninety Nine Nights, with its umptizillion enemies, and L.A. Noire, with its insanely detailed facial animation (which was absolutely necessary for its game mechanics). Everything else could be perfectly replicated by just downgrading the graphics, I'd argue. I mean, I played Half-Life 2 on the oXbox, and its physics were utterly amazing for its time, even though it was technically downgraded from the PC. Or am I missing something? Has there been games that have without a shadow of a doubt demonstrated AI and physics that were completely impossible to replicate on older consoles? I get the feeling this will be impossible to settle outside of personal opinion, but hey.
Nothing wrong with not liking motion control, but why discount games where the experience was to show off motion control? I mean sure, you could consider Wii Sports a tech demo, but many people find it a genuinely enjoyable game in its own right -- my family and friends still like playing bowling and tennis on it. Besides, isn't "look at what motion control can do" by its very definition a strong incorporation of motion control into games themselves? At any rate -- I can't really speak for Muramasa and No More Heroes, but I do think that motion controls improved Resident Evil 4, mainly in that things were easier to aim and I got this weird sense of enjoyment when it came to using motion controls to move the gun around that I didn't when playing the Cube version. I already mentioned Twilight Princess not using things as effectively as it could, and the Marios and Brawl barely used waggle as a supplement.
As other examples of motion controls adding to the experience, I'd bring up Zack and Wiki, which was an adventure game where you had to manipulate objects with motion controls based on what they were. I think the Gamespot review said it best:
There's also Boom Blox, which made virtual Jenga and knocking blocks over via hurled balls ridiculously fun, I've found. That's just my own experience, but I'd encourage you to try that one not just to prove my point, but because it's a surprisingly fun game.
At any rate, Nintendo doesn't like to support violent games? That hasn't been true in a loooong time. They cheerfully gave Rare the go-ahead to make Conker's Bad Fur Day, they asked for the least amount of censorship on BMX XXX, they bankrolled the violent and disturbing Eternal Darkness, they did nothing to block the blood-drenched Resident Evil 4 and MadWorld, etc. etc. It's just that Nintendo's largely family-friendly stable of franchises and the casual-bait nature of the Wii doesn't exactly shine a light on their willingness to allow violence.
Zelda:TP- 6.4 Wii/1.6 GC
RE4- 2.0 Wii/1.7 GC
I'm not trying to be an argument Nazi, it's just that, well, it's pretty painful to see you make sweeping generalizations and misrepresent what you said, both of which open up glaringly obvious opportunities to disprove your arguments. All using nothing but what you said. And you don't want to be proven wrong simply because of sloppiness, right?
You just make things far, far too easy to disprove.
There's tons of shit you can do with better hardware.
According to Wikipedia, Twilight Princess had sold 5.82 million copies on the Wii as of March 31, 2011,[84] and 1.32 million on the GameCube as of March 31, 2007.
Resident Evil 4: According to January 17, 2007 sales figures provided by Capcom, the GameCube version of Resident Evil 4 has sold a total of 1.6 million units worldwide, while the PS2 version has sold over 2 million units.[90] As of September 30, 2011, the PS2 version has sold 2.2 million units and the Wii Edition has sold 1.9 million units.
So surprisingly close, actually.
At any rate, as far as your assertion that sales figures are a bad way to judge the public's desire for new ways to control games -- how to account for the success of Kinect? It became the fastest-selling consumer device ever for a while, and single-handedly and sustainedly boosted sales of the 360 itself around 50 percent, month after month. That kind of sales boost just doesn't happen with consoles, yet Kinect managed it.
It's not just the AI and physics. It's everything. It's the whole package. Make a list of the value-plus boons console-to-console between the Wii and it's competition and it's not even close. Outside of the debatable benefit of the motion control, the only other upgrades one got by switching to the Wii platform was the VirtualConsole and the, uh, . . weather thing?
The Wii didn't cost all that much, but it was still pretty low on measurable value.
I personally was only discounting games sold as pack-ins or games that were requisite for a new peripheral.
There's obviously a segment of the public that likes motion-controlly things like the Wii and Kinect. But the question is are they after the shiny newness and then dump it in the closet or are they long-haul consumers of the idea of motion controls?
And how are those Kinect games selling?
The public loves novelty. By definition, things don't stay novel for very long.
Um.... we weren't talking about the general worth of a console. We were talking about what that added power adds to games themselves that couldn't have been done the previous generation.
Hard to tell since the NPD's clamped down on specific data, but I get the impression they're not that great lately.
Yet the 360 itself is still selling like it did during the Kinect introduction. Maybe Kinect contributed a halo effect to the console, making it seem more appealing overall without depending on actual Kinect sales?
At any rate, the fact remains that Kinect itself sold extremely well at first. Then again, other than the Gunstringer there hasn't really been ANY good uses of Kinect for games that wasn't more or less copies of Wii games (see: Kinect Sports), not even from Microsoft themselves.
Bigger environments, more realism, more characters on screen, more interactability in the environment, less load-screens, etc, etc.
Well, that's what you bent the argument towards in the whole "What makes next-gen technological upgrades so great?" hole you're kind of digging yourself into.
Several people have listed a litany of things that exactly made the HD consoles so great, and your response was, "Well, what's so great about those things?"
That shit could go on forever, since you're asking for objective responses and then dismissing them for subjective reasons.
...yes. That's what I keep hearing. What I'd like are specific examples.
You're really being pedantic now.
Um.... no, that's not what this argument is about at all. I'm not saying "what's so great about those things," I'm asking for specific, real-world examples. I even floated the possibility that I could be proven wrong.
So.... got any?
Why? If these things were truly self-evident, then it would be very, very easy to give examples, right?
It'd be difficult to say with absolute certainty without actually being a developer on each game in question, since there's a wide range of "what's technically possible" in terms of software on a given hardware platform. But there are a lot of 360 and PS3 games that do stuff that I never saw done on the Xbox or PS2. Maybe they could have been done if the engine were sufficiently optimized and you downgraded the graphics far enough that the shared ram and so forth weren't being overly taxed, but what's possible by heavily optimizing your code on one system can be made easy on a more powerful system.
The physics in Half-Life 2 were considered astounding for the time, but are really nothing special anymore. Pretty much every big-budget game that comes down the pipe on the 360 and PS3 have examples of environments and objects behaving with HL2-or-better physics models. And unlike HL2 where the physics engine was made a star with the gravity gun, the physics in games like Gears of War or Uncharted are just there. Shit falls down and crashes into other shit realistically just because it can. The additional hardware makes it easy enough for developers to just plug in the Havoc engine or whatever and let it go.
Same with AI. I'm not an AI programmer and I don't really follow developments in the field, but I know that the AI in games I've played this generation keeps getting better and is significantly more advanced than anything I recall seeing in games of the prior generation.
As for downgrading the graphics... You've mentioned that a couple of times, that people can't tell the difference. I've heard it before, and I even remember hearing it when the PS2 came out, that people couldn't really tell the difference between PS1 and PS2 graphics outside of the gamer community. Obviously I'm biased, being both a gamer and a former professional graphic artist way back in the day, so I guess I'm not qualified to judge, but are there honestly people who can't tell the difference between big-budget current-gen graphics and big-budget last-gen graphics? I can believe not seeing a difference between end-of-life PS2 graphics and launch-title PS3, but are there actually people who can't see a difference between these?
http://www.futuregamez.net/ps2games/ffx/ffx5.jpg
http://cdn.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/06/final-fantasy-xiii-2-e3-2011-battle-screen-shot.jpg
(I admit, the second is a flashier combat screen, but still. I grabbed the first one in GIS 'FFX' and 'FFXIII-2' that was a shot of combat so as to make sure it was in-engine) I'm not really looking to argue the "How much different are the graphics" angle. If you say you don't think they're different then we can agree to disagree, but is this really a thing? Do people really not see a difference?
Also, you left out the online component, which you shouldn't. Online gaming is so big now that it's hard to remember that it, for all intents and purposes, didn't exist on consoles in the previous generation. There was some shitty, flaky online support on all of the major consoles, but absolutely nothing like Xbox Live or PSN. Both of those have added tremendous value to the consoles, as well as to games on those consoles. The Wii's lackluster online support really can't compare at all, even ignoring every other difference between the big 3.
Because those types of games aren't really useful if you're discussing what motion control brings to the table for gaming in general. Yeah, motion control can make a great sports mini-game. What does it do for me if I like playing Madden-style sports games, though? What does it do for platformers? Adventure games? Wii Sports (and similar) is a bad example because the game has nothing to it except demonstrating motion control. Would you play any of the Wii Sports minigames if the inputs were mapped to a standard controller instead of motion controls? I wouldn't and I don't think most people would. The games are only fun -- and, mostly, are only even games -- because of the existence of the motion controls. That's why I tend to them of them as tech demos instead of games. Mario Party is a better example of a motion-focused game where we can talk about what motion control brings to its table. The Mario Party games are, essentially, controller function exercises. Move the stick in a circle. Press this button fast. Press these buttons in order. Wave the wand this way. Wave it that way. Shake it quick. Does replacing button-and-stick exercises with waving and shaking actually change the Mario Party game in any meaningful way? Is Mario Party any more fun because it has motion support than it was prior to having it?
I'll grant you shooters, despite my personally negative experiences, because people do seem to enjoy them. But, again, are shooters really a good example on a console that has almost none of them? A console whose manufacturer actively avoids the genre?
I haven't played Zack and Wiki, but I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. So we've got Zack and Wiki, Trauma Center, and whichever Wii shooters don't play like baked ass (I've heard people say positive things about RE4 and Metroid Prime 3; not so much any other shooters on Wii). Do you feel that this is a strong argument in favor of motion controls improving the gaming experience? Does this showing imply that developers want to make awesome motion control games? Does it seem likely that people bought a lot of copies of Metroid Prime 3 and Skyward Sword on the basis of wanting to play Metroid and Zelda with motion controls, as opposed to buying them because they wanted to play Metroid and Zelda at all?
I didn't really care for Boom Blox, and I'm not sure it's really more of a game and less of a tech demo than Wii Sports or, on the other side of the fence, Kinect Adventures. It's fun, yeah, but is there anything there beyond the input method?
I feel like I recall RE4 being censored on the Cube and Wii as compared to its PS2 release, but that may be my imagination. MadWorld I'll give you, even though it's stylized enough to be almost cartoonish violence. I never played Eternal Darkness, BMX XXX, or Conker's Bad Fur Day so can't comment on their contents. But I do recall that when MadWorld and Conker came out there was a great deal of media noise regarding how atypical of Nintendo those games were. In fact, I recall MadWorld's release being accompanied by a lot of hoopla about how Nintendo were trying to court the mature, 'hard-core' gaming audience again after being more family friendly for so long. Not that that really went anywhere. Still: the Wii isn't exactly a home to shooters, despite that being the arguably best possible genre of game to be developed for the system.
Why? Are you denying that better hardware makes these things happen?
Shit, I can point at elevators and environment size in Mass Effect 1 as an example of how hardware limitations effect gameplay.
I wouldn't even bother. He's moving the goalposts, and moving them in a circle, and then saying, "meh, it's all subjective anyway."
There's no point.
Oh, I'm not saying that visuals aren't important. And I'm not saying online isn't a gaming revolution in its own right. I'm just focusing on the stated notion that better horsepower does more than just beef up the visuals.
And sure, we're seeing physics more often in games, but it may be a matter of developers seeing the success of previous physics games and realizing they'd be a boon for the game. And, given that they existed alongside everything else in Half-Life 2, was there really anything preventing developers from putting it in their games last gen, had the trend existed back then?
Honestly, this kind of notion is maddeningly hard to prove OR disprove. It all comes down to personal experience. My experience is that I haven't really seen any huge revolutions in AI, physics, environment sizes and the like, but your experience is different. I think this is an area where we'll have to agree to disagree.
But I'd argue that the games built around motion control DID bring something to the table for gaming in general -- they helped invent new game genres or make niche ones more viable. Wii Sports sparked multiple collections of simplified, quick to get into sports games.
Wii Fit helped inspire an explosion of fitness games. WarioWare and Rayman Raving Rabbids more or less pioneered motion-controlled minigames. What you think about the quality of those genres is one thing, but they did have a very noticeable impact on the industry.
And actually, Madden for Wii was completely reworked around motion controls. I'll point to a review of Madden 07 as an example, since I'm a horrible judge of sports games:
http://www.gamespot.com/madden-nfl-07/reviews/madden-nfl-07-review-6162055/
Platformers? There was Wario Land: Shake It, which had some neat twists I thought was fun:
http://www.gamespot.com/wario-land-shake-it/reviews/wario-land-shake-it-review-6198105/
Zack and Wiki, as described above, is an adventure game, though in the more traditional Lucasarts adventure game kind of way, which I'm not sure you meant.
As far as why other shooter games didn't work as well, it could be a lack of talent that held them back. And sure, sales of Metroid and Zelda don't make a slam-dunk case that people were clamoring for motion controls, but it sure doesn't indicate that they were turned off by motion controls, either.
But no, I don't think that developers were hot to develop deeper games for the Wii as I've argued before, which I feel is partly because they didn't want to go to the time/money/expense to truly make something new and good around the control scheme, partly because Nintendo didn't reveal to the third-parties what the Wii could do until just a few months before launch, forcing them to play catch-up (they didn't, and honestly, why should they? Nintendo's strategy in that regard is a mistake) and partly because the system quickly got pidgeonholed as the casualware machine because there was little released for it in the start that wasn't casualware (which was at least partially caused by the previous point).
Why isn't fun enough? Why does something have to be more than "fun" to count? Is that not the main reason we play video games to begin with?
Actually it came out on the Cube first and the PS2 second. I don't recall any differences in content between the two, though I could be wrong. But no, I really don't think it's a matter of Nintendo not wanting violence that prevented a lot of Wii shooters, I think it was the points I argued above.
...so you're not even going to try to prove your point, then? You're just going to engage in random personal attacks? Since apparently your point is so self-evident?
Please, for the love of god, provide examples. Prove me wrong. I'm begging you. Or at the very least, provide concrete examples of how I'm "moving the goalposts," using exact quotes as evidence. Surely you can do that... right?
It's pretty simple cloudeagle:
Do you or do you not acknowledge that better hardware allows a game to do more? ("more" here defined as more detailed environment, larger envirnoments, better physics, better graphics, better AI, etc)
If you don't acknowledge this well ... honestly, I wouldn't even know where to begin. Not acknowledging that point would be an amazing willful denial of reality.
If you do acknowledge that then the point is pretty much settled since better hardware makes those things possible.
Unless of course you are asserting that developers aren't yet using all the things the hardware has to offer, in which case I'd point you again at ME1 or at 360vsPC loadtimes in ME2 just off the top of my head.
Or you are arguing developers have no interest in advacning these aspects of games, in which case you are gonna have to post some support for the shit cause the history of game design is a long line of bigger more detailed environments and better AI and better physics and all that shit, so I'd wonder why they'd stop now.
Your whole "prove me wrong" schtick is based on underlying assumptions that make no fucking sense. The only way you could be right is if games weren't limited by the hardware they run on.
You and Ross are reading a little too much into what I said. I never said that better hardware doesn't allow a game to do more. What I asked was -- did the resulting games actually do more? Did gamers really see a concrete, measurable benefit beyond graphics?
You're right, the heart of my argument is, in essence, "developers are lazy bastards." (I'm being knee jerk, there's a lot of other factors that could play into that -- skill, deadlines, money, etc. Also laziness.) And I really, really do appreciate you giving the example of ME1 vs. ME2... though the problem is that the two games are on the same system, so I'm not sure it's a case of expanded hardware allowing the developers to do more, rather than a case of a talented developer learning the system more and getting better tricks out of it. Then again, we did see a single, unified world with no elevators or loading of any kind -- Jak and Daxter on the PS2. Run from one end of the expansive world to the other, and you'll never encounter a loading time or any kind of artificial barrier, which is what (I think) you're arguing Mass Effect 2 did.
The only reason I said "prove me wrong" is that Ross implied that my position is so pants-on-head ridiculous that it could be easily disproved. So, since he believes that way, I asked him to prove it and back up his assertion. But it's not something I would demand from you, since you're being more reasonable about it. Again, I get the feeling that there's no real way to answer that definitively without relying on personal experiences and opinion... but then again, that's exactly where "I placed the goalposts" when I first posed the question. Debate and discourse and all that.
In ME1, hardware limitations are obviously responsible for the nature of things like the Citadel. It's broken up into sections because the 360 literally couldn't load environments that large all at once.
The ME2 issue is related to loadscreens. Specifically on the PC version you can disable them and transitions become almost instantaneous because a decent computer can handle loading ME2's levels way way faster then the 360 can.
Both are examples of how hardware enforces limitations and compromises on game design.
The issue is, as I said, the only way your argument holds water is if developers aren't pushing the limits of current technology (which they are, as examples like the 2 above show) or they are just not interested in pushing those limits.
And considering developers have historically always been chomping at the bit to push limits on things like level design, detail, physics, etc (as evidenced by the fact that games have drastically changed in more then just graphics over the past ... any time frame), I find the second argument kinda ridiculous and would require some explanation/evidence for why that's suddenly changed.
I for one would certainly challenge this assertion.
All the hardware in the world hasn't helped anyone make a better 4X game than Alpha Centauri.
MW 2: Mercs is better than MW 4: Mercs.
Half-Life 2 isn't a better game than Half-Life.
Deus Ex: HR may look prettier than the original, and it had a lot of gameplay improvements, but the levels are smaller and the overall game/plot structure is not as complex.
Dwarf Fortress. Although I admit this might not be the best example given how much it depends on brute force computational speed.
Better hardware is a nice thing to have, obviously. But it can only make good games better, it can't make shitty games good. And if it forces the price of consoles and game development up, forcing people to go for appealing to the common denominator, or making the cost of entry so high it discourages innovation, it can actually make what could have been good games mediocre, or not exist at all.
So I for one am glad that at least one company is not on the HD-crack and still remembers what actually makes games fun.