HappySqurriel on 21 May 2007
| albhum said: As far as I remember, graphics have always been the biggest sinlge selling point of a system in western countries at least. Japanese have always favoured gameplay and style over realistic graphics, but very few in Europe or America do this. First BIG exception to this rule, the great success of the DS. Second, the great success of the Wii. Nintendo pushes playability, but from the NES to the Wii, graphic power has not been their main advantage (SNES, N64 and GC being closer to that approach, which did not make them much money). I'm happy to see Nintendo pushing playability again. But I'm also sorry to see that great productions might be seriously cut this gen due to the low costs of developing for Wii, which is going to be the leader if nothing radically changes in this market. So far what I've seen in Wii is below average quality of Gamecube games (I own both consoles), and that's a bit insulting, since even if not much more, it is for sure more powerful. I trust Nintendo will push the hardware, but, will third parties do it? Most will not, we'll see zillions of bad ports from the PS2 as they already started flooding the catalog. And that's sad for the industry. |
Actually, graphics have never been much of a selling feature on systems, after all the Sega Master System was more powerful than the NES, the NEO-GEO was more powerful than the SNES and Genesis, the N64 was more powerful then the Saturn and Playstation, and the Gamecube and XBox were more powerful then the PS2.
Certainly, graphics has been the main reason why people have moved from one generation to the next but it is not the graphics that are motivating people; they have bought into a new generation because the games have "improved" dramatically and it is a new (cool) thing to own.
