Next Generation graphics!

[Joelcool7]

Alright now I know that posts about Nintendo's lack of graphical fire power has been done to death. However I must bring it up once more.

Nintendo in the past has always lead the pack (Sales wise) till N64/GCN and as far as graphics were concerned Nintendo was always second best. Sega had far superior graphics with N64 being the one time Nintendo overtook the competition. While Nintendo was not the prettiest graphics game publisher they always delivered amazing looking titles for their times. I mean Donkey Kong Country and StarFox for the SNES and then games like ResidentEvil4 could appear on the GameCube. Nintendo never gave the competition a clean lead.

Then in 2004 Nintendo made one of the biggest decisions a company can make. They chose to target a non-existant user base over their own installed user base. Rather then making a console for just their hardcore gamers they decided to target casual gamers.

 

The Nintendo DS was born, it was the pinnacle of next generation technology a major leap from the GameBoy:Advance. But it was inferior visually to Sony's freshly announced PlayStation:Portable. Nintendo had the support of its die hard fans in competing with Sony and jumpstarting the war machine. The Nintendo DS managed to kick PSP's butt sales wise and the casual user base began to grow. However as the years pass the DS remains a pretty normal system the touch screen innovated a bit and many innovative games have come from its utalization.

 

Nintendo witheld on unvieling its Nintendo Wii's graphical capabilities till last minute and fans were pumped. The hardcore expected Nintendo to deal a heafty blow to Microsoft and Sony and unviel something spectacular. Well Nintendo delivered but just like the DS Nintendo chose to target the casual non-gamers over its own installed user base. The graphics on the Wii were horrible in comparison. I'm a major Nintendo fan but having an uncle who works at IBM and had worked with Nintendo I know they could have done way better. Nintendo purposely chose to build a cheap innovative system over a more expensive powerful one.

 

Now what am I getting at?

The hardcore and true Nintendo fans bought both the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS. We bought them because Nintendo is the greatest games publisher on earth. Or because we have devine faith in Nintendo's ability to create amazing games. But are the casual games beginning to over run Nintendo's consoles are they becoming a turn off. As games like Turok and HarvestMoon:InnocentLife give the competitions consoles some flair!

 For me I know I am getting sick about all of the Brain training games, Nintendo has made some , UbiSoft followed then everyone jumps in. Then we have the Petz and Nintendogs and the other couple Pet sims that rapidly followed. Now we have eduware and casual games overflowing the market everywhere I look I see games like Cranium and cheaply developed crap like Anubis. 

I hate to ask the question but, Has Nintendo lowered itself to far?

 I am a major Nintendo fan but Nintendo has in my opinion taken innovation too far. Allowed developers to get away with too much. The Official  Seal of Quality used to mean Nintendo quality games. Sure the odd crappy game got published and there were a few of them back in the day. But Nintendo didn't just let anyone make anything for their systems. Nintendo used to only liscense the best we didn't get crap like Bubsy3D.

But now when I go into my local game store I see two sides. I see all the good third party games on one side (X-360) and all the crap on the other (Wii). Sure I see Nintendo's killer apps and the few AAA+ third party titles that exist but when I look at the near future. I only see two games I want to buy in the 2008 line-up while on 360 I see half a dozen. 

So with Nintendo sacraficing graphics they also sacraficed their reputation of quality. When we see Dogz8 and BrainAge22 opposed in the future that is Casual Nintendo opposed to Pwning Noobs in the future that was Nintendo. What do we want.

 

Do you want a future Nintendo that caters to the casual gamer over the hardcore.  (For every good Nintendo published game their about 20-crappy third party games)

Or do you want good old Nintendo back with its higher quality standards and graphics?