I know I lot of people hate this style of debating. You will have to forgive me, I find it clean and easy.
In equating the quality of software (which is subjective) with the power of hardware (which is objective) you are creating the false dichotomy that since one can be measured, the other must be able to similarly be measured, meaning that "opinion" is a defense for both. It isn't. I will repeat the short of it, because the long of it will come up again later: there is a difference between that which can be quantified (that which exists in mathematically quantifiable amounts) and that which cannot (matters which are purely up to perception). Hardware power is of the former, software quality is of the latter.
Moving on.
Here is one:
Given that each collection is necessarily going to be of a limited size, I need only concern myself with the number of games which I can afford to buy at any given time. Given that I can essentially only afford the cream of the crop (and sometimes not even that), I am more concerned with the quality of the best games on the system, in which case I would take the Wii's library any day of the week. Or the year.
You will find another, much bigger, much more terrifying reason at the bottom of this post, in the wall o'text. I hope you like it.
Please. I have never stated anything factually - thee automatic assumption is that I am making a statement of opinion, not fact, and therefore I am not required to tag an "IMO" onto any particular thing that I say. I have never pretended to hold to a factual stance. Your mistake is that you have, which is ludicrous.
Moving on.
This makes the erroneous operative assumption that the average buyer is uninformed about their purchasing decisions, which is radically off-base. Almost everyone who buys a game or who makes the primary decision behind buying a game (including the little kids who pester their parents) are typically completely aware of what it is they want and exactly what it is that they're buying into. It stands to reason, then, that these people are buying games that they find desirable, which is to say good games.
People buy games that they find good. This is reflexive.
Graphics matter, of course they matter, they've always mattered, but only up to the point that they are "good enough" for the consumer. The clear and far away winner in every single console generation so far has been the hardware with the smallest amount of horsepower (depending on where you place the Dreamcast) and the reason for this is that graphics only matter up to a point. There is, in fact, an event horizon where, if you move past it within a certain timeframe (the horizon recedes over time thanks to Hawking radiation or something I guess), people simply cease to care. Graphics matter! But not that much.
More to the point, I was syaing that Nintendo have dominated the industry by not giving developers what they want. Why? Developers as a body don't have a focus that is capable of expanding the audience they already have. If it weren't for Nintendo leading the way, this would probably be the smallest generation in a long, long time. Unless, of course, you want to pretend tht Nintendo did not pull away from its competitors by casting aside the assumptions of iterative hardware, but I can't imagine that you would even pretend to this point.
Innovation is not driven primarily by graphics, that is silly.
Again, you are making the mistake of equating software appeal with something quantifiable in any way except for sales, when that is of course fallacious.
That last sentence is a real headscratcher, I tell you what.
The first form we will say is not quantifiable, up to subjectivity: this may encompass believability, art direction, immersion, and facilitation of gameplay in the context of the genre in which the graphics are implemented. In this respect, yes, one may argue that Goldeneye's graphics are better, and on each of those the point would be both valid and defendable.
The second, though, is quantifiable, and involves all the tech that tends to signify graphics innovation: polygon counts, texture mapping, advances in lighting, texture fidelity, draw distance, refresh rate, all that fancy technical stuff. This is all easily quantifiable and very much objective, and on this front one may not claim that Goldeneye's graphics are better. That is not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of easily quantified fact.
Remember: this difference is crucial.
Oh boy, now to the fun part.
Wait wait wait wait wait.
"Innovation has been primarily driven by graphics"?
Are you trying to imply that the biggest innovation of the past fifteen years, which was the movement into three dimensional gameplay, was driven by graphics?
You couldn't be moe wrong if you tried. People think of the movement into 3-D as being a shift in the graphical stylings of the time, away from sprite based art and toward polygonal graphical modes, but it was nothing of the sort! The shift to polygonal graphics actually came independent of the shift to the 3-D age, and the two have nothing to do with each other!
The shift to 3-D games is referring to the ability to move in three dimensions, the ability to move on more than two axes! This fundamentally changed the way games were designed, not because they looked prettier (Mario Kart 64 showed that 3-D games with sprite based graphics are completely possible in 1997) but because one's interaction with the environment was radically changed by this new freedom!
Every single innovation in the industry has been about interaction, and graphics are just a side effect of this shift. When we forget that, we forget the entire point of it!
Mario 64? The polygonal graphics came as a result of Mario being able to run around in three dimensions, so that objects wouldn't lose fidelity as you drew closer to them! That's why all the textures are so solidly colored in the game wherever possible: so that you can get however close you want and not notice how crappy the spritework looks when it's shoved to tthe forefront of the camera!
Ocarina of Time? The shift to three dimensions necessited polygonal graphics, but the more lasting effect was in how it exemplified the change in design philosophy necessary to work in three dimensional space, so that people were able to logically progress in a game in a more compelx way than just move on two axes and going to the lastl ocked door or pushing on every oddly colored block in a room!
Dead Rising? Do you think that those tons and tons of zombies are there just to look pretty? No, of course they aren't, that would be immensely silly. Up-close they aren't pretty at all! The reason that the game could only be done on the 360 at the time of its released was that an entire core was devoted to controlling the AI of all the hundreds of zombies - that push in technological advancement was for gameplay purposes.
Gears of War 2's dozens of enemies? Same thing! They aren't there to look prettier, they are there to change the experience that you have in interacting with your environment! Yes, they look pretty, but this is a secondary effect of the advancement undergone in order to reach this point.
Do I need to go on? Do I need to point out how Doom's awesome graphics hid the fact that you were actually playing on a flat field, and you could shoot an enemy a hudnred feet above your head if they spawned on there? Or, more realistically, you could shoot one ten feet above your line off fire if he was standing in an alcove? It happened constantly because Doom was a 2-D game with a first person camera. Its sprite graphics? Incidental!
Moving on.
It is difficult to imagine a scenario in which you more spectacularly miss the point! I feel that this picture of everyone's hero, Godzilla, is the only way to express my astonishment.
Imagine he is saying "What." if you will.
Now we are going to talk for real-real, not for play-play. Pull up a chair.
There are two points that need to be addressed after all of this, those being the matter of "general consensus" and the matter of "who determines what is good". They are related, but they are different.
Now, you assert that metacritic and the "general consensus" are in fact the same thing. They are not. In fact, the average gamer is not necessarily indicative of the general consensus either.
It is a common assumption that in order to get a scientifically and statistically valid sample is a matter of size: if you get, say, two hundred critics together, or twenty thousand gamers of various "alignments", then you are probably going to have a sample representative of the population. Right? Unfortunately, no, it is not that easy.
Back during the early twentieth century, the singl largest and most expensive telephone survey in the history of of the telephone was conducted in order to predict the outcome of a presidential election (you can look this particular incident up, as it really happened - I just forget the name of the polling company and the two candidates). Their polling showed that a decisive majority of the population (with a difference of at least 10%) would vote for one candidate whose fiscal policies were of a certain beent, so the polling company published conclusively that this candidate would win the election.
But when the election actually came around, that candidate lost, by an even larger margin than by which he was predicted to win.
What happened? Their method was sound, and certainly their sample size was large enough: it was easily in the tens of thousands. In theory, it should have been an accurate prediction based on the polling of the voting age population.
The flaw with the poll was that the only people who owned telephones at the time were relatively wealthy, a demographic who would benefit most from the fiscal policies of the candidate for whom they said they would vote. An overwhelming majority of the population actually voted for the other guy, but because of the medium of the poll it was impossible to tell. It wouldn't have mattered if they had called up every single telephone in the country: they would have been just as wrong, regardless of the size of their sample, because they unwittingly narrowed the demographic to which their poll applied. Whoops!
Similarly, you are makign the mistaken assumption that "general consensus" says the Wii library is inferior to - well, anything's, be it the PS2, the 360's, the Gamecube's, whatever. The only problem is that even if you get every single person on every gaming forum on the internet, up to and including the hellpits of the #chans, you will still be missing the entire band of people who do not congregat in those places. And the scary part?
Those people, the ones who have essentially elected the Wii as the greatest system ever made, with a library that blows every single other one out of the water?
They are legion. There's so many more of them that it would be difficult to put to you in limited words. And yes, through their buying habits, they have proclaimed in a single voice:
The Wii is the system to own, and its games are just the bestest, I am not even kidding.
That is the general consensus. The PS2 cannot match the Wii in that sense.
Now, on to a somewhat more problematic (but hopefully more concise) problem: who determines what is good?
Now, the matter of what is good and what isn't is obviously subjective, but if we take "majority rules" as the ultimate qualifier, then we come to a horrifying realization: the Wii has the bestl ineup in the entire universe. Oh no!
But nea, hope is not yet lost, because the majority is not what determines quality in artistic endeavour. Do you want the secret? The great, wonderful secret?
Nobody determines what's good. Eeeee!
That's right! There is no higher authority to which one can appeal for quality! The closest we get to things like that is scholarly discourse, which needs the perspective of time in order to properly operate - there is no scholarly discourse for games yet. The closest we have is the Game Developers Conference, which has previously recognized Wii Sports as one of the best and most important games ever made. So we have an approximation of a fascimile of some kind of authority when it comes to proper, objective quantification about artistic merit in the medium!
Should you care?
Not even a little.
See, that's the beautiful thing: art is one of the only things that is fully and actually subjective, where qualitative assessments can vary so widely from person to person that there's no need for a reconciliation between different viewpoints.
It's why Soriku can pretend Tales games are the best things ever!
It's why I can say that Turok: Dinosaur Hunter kicked Goldeneye right in the eggs!
It's why so many people picked up the Playstation 2.
It's why so many more are picking up the Wii.
It's why I can hold up the Wii's library as the best thing about this generation.
And it's why it's impossible to support your point, even in a non-scholarly discourse like this one.
There. If you want to argue these points, fire away. I'm ready for a fight.
