jarrod said:
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I think we basically said the same thing. DVD is essentially a brand name Nintendo didn't want to pay for, so they had Matsushita/Panasonic craft roughly the same thing for their use. There's no guarantee the follow-up to the Wii will be Blu-Ray. After all, the system probably won't be all that powerful and might not even need large storage space. Microsoft does just fine with DVD format on the Xbox360.
Nintendo's history is that of a company that seems forward-looking, but that always takes one or two steps back for every one or two forward.
N64? Featured an early answer to aliasing, most powerful hardware of the time, and then they limited it all with cartridges.
GBA? Up to then, the most powerful portable system yet, 32-bit hardware, highly effecient with batteries, and backwards compatible. It also lacked a backlight (technology both Atari and Sega implemented in much older handhelds), and was missing two important face buttons.
GameCube? Another substantially powerful machine, featured the most backwards-implementation of online at the time (which was later ignored completely)... and one unused port underneath (now rumored to be for some kind of 3-D add-on). To be fair, I felt the GameCube was firing on all cylinders, but was crushed by the intense popularity of the PS2 and newcomer Xbox.
Wii? Most of it's forward-looking was in motion control, and inclusion of Wi-Fi and a good idea for downloading games. Then of course, Nintendo gimped the Wii in hardware tech, once again dropped the ball on the online mode, implemented those awful friend codes, later all but abandoned the Virtual Console, failed to include a harddrive, failed to court 3rd party developers, failed to include high-def, and for the first two-three years, largely failed to appeal to hardcore gamers who later abonded the system.
3DS? Already, it's going to be compared to the NGP's immense power, the battery life is shockingly short, it's missing a second analog stick/nub, the touch-screen still only handles one input at a time when even many modern phones handle more than that--as will the NGP (front and back), and once again, the launch of another Nintendo system looks overly underwhelming, and is crowded with ports and remakes. Not to mention that the 3DS is arguably the most expensive hardware they've ever made--seems they have some of Sony's ego behind that pricing.
This... is getting a little long-winded, so I'll try to get to my point--while I expect the next Nintendo system to be something amazing, I also fully expect them to simply drop the ball on a wide variety of things. For one thing, Nintendo has noted that they don't understand the modern gaming culture as they are resistant to including an Achievement system in their machines (Sony is already planning on Trophies for the NGP). I'm sure they'll finally do high-def, but I wouldn't be surprised to see only 720 (unless higher than 1080 surfaces, then Nintendo will peak at 1080), and unless Nintendo really does something with the HVD's, I don't expect anything other than DVD's the next time around. If it is some copy of Blu-Ray technology, I wouldn't expect it to be as robust as actual Blu-Ray disks--meaning they'll probably hold less data. I also don't imagine the next Nintendo console will be the tech powerhouse that they made in the past with the SNES, N64, GBA, and GameCube. Part of their new operating formula is "good enough" tech (CPU/GPU) rather than "leading edge."
