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Groucho on 14 October 2008
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HappySqurriel said:
Kyros said:
Realistically, there is nothing about the PSP, PS2 or Wii that means that they couldn't make a great game with the same premise of the HD versions of the game


You mean apart from the fact that the Wii has less power for physical effects, graphics etc. They cannot use the same third-party technologies like Graphics Engine, Havoc or Euphoria because these need more power, they have to design levels, characters and environments with less polygons and therefore less details , may have problems creating the same view distances and therefore level sizes ...

There is no single thing that cannot be done on the Wii but there are overall less resources available so designers will have to cut some things.

(And they are cheap bastards and would rather port the PS2 version than to make a proper job)

I think we're talking about two entirely different things ...

If you look at games from the previous generation the all were designed around the limitations of the systems' hardware and yet very few good games ever felt like the hardware was limiting them. Resident Evil 4 (for example) is broken up into hundreds of tiny rooms in order to devote the most resources towards producing the best looking visuals possible, but you rarely feel like the world is segmented in a particularly bad way.

The problem with a lot of these ports is they look at what can not be done on the Wii and then look for a way to "fix" that rather than looking for what can be done on the Wii and implement that.

 

Exactly.  In this case, the game was, supposedly, developed with the Wii in mind.  However, if 3rd parties design a game around the limitations of the X360 or PS3, and then try to port it to the Wii, it inevitably ends up terrible.

The point of the discussion here is not to point a finger at the Wii and say "look, its attach rate is iNferIoRrz!" and start a fanboy war, but rather to pose the question "why?" to explain what it is, exactly, 3rd parties need to do to bring the attach rate up on the Wii.  

I agree with HappySquirriel with regards to game design needing to focus on the Wii in order to make a good Wii game.. which kinda puts the Wii as the odd man out, with regards to current-gen console development.  Great Wii games can be made, obviously -- there are a ton of them.  Pretty much all of them are simplistic games which easily fit on the Wii (and the HD consoles), or even a PS2, or they were designed specifically for the Wii, however.

At this point I'm thinking that its not really possible to have a cross-platform game on the Wii which isn't relatively small-scale in nature, and thus ports easily across all current gen platforms, and even back to the PS2, or over to the PSP.  The Wii utterly dominates the younger demographic (which isn't to say it "targets" the younger demographic, which some rabid Nintendo fanboy poster mistakenly believed I stated earlier) -- so it seems reasonable to assume that all cross-platform games where the Wii will have a reasonable attach rate may have to involve (not target specifically -- there's a big difference) that demographic.

Before some big-N fanboy gets upset, I'd like to point out that games like SMG are NOT targetted at any demographic in particular.  They are "general audience" -- meaning for everyone, which is exactly what the Blue Ocean strategy is about.  My statement is merely that, in order to actually hit that broad demographic with a reasonable attach rate, you need to have general appeal.  And yes, that almost always means that the game will appeal to kids as well as adults.

There's nothing wrong with that.  I love Nintendo games, personally, and millions agree with that statement.  I'm very surprised that Star Wars didn't hit the general audience harder, however.  Very surprised.  We'll see if the legs carry it through.