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Sensei on 03 February 2013
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Nirvana_Nut85 said:
Corey said:
Nirvana_Nut85 said:
PS1 - weakest console
PS2 - weakest console
Wii - weakest console

Can you tell me what they all have in common besides what was stated above?

If I was a betting man I'd say regardless of what is happening now, in 5 years the Wii U will be added to that list and the industry will be perfectly fine.


The PS1 was only marginally weaker and the Sega Dreamcast was the weakest of the PS2 generation.

The Wii on the otherhand was a whole generation behind but had motion control and wii sports, which at the time really appealed to the mass market, that's what made the Wii sell, it's level of power was irrelevant. The WiiU is a different story, not only is it going to be vastly behind tech wise but it's new "innovative" controller does not have the same appeal to the mass market that the wiimote had.

The wiiu so far offers very little in comparison to current generation consoles, it's not going to fare well against the next gen systems from Sony and Microsoft.

Marginally weaker? Please name one game on PS1 that even remotely looked as good as Majora's Mask. I'll reiterate again that as for that console war, dream cast was already dropping out by the timeGC and Xbox came around making the PS2 the weakest console, which ended up being the clear market winner.

The Wii U is not vastly behind in the same way the Wii was. I'd say at most the PS4/720 from the current rumoured specs are 4 times more powerful whereas the PS3/360 were at minimum 10X. We are not going to see the same difference in graphics as we did last generation and this will be confirmed once 3rd party games that are being developed for the next gen get ported to the Wii U.

I completely agree with you on that one and as Iwata explained, this is due to the fact that the final versions of the Wii U dev kits were not given to developers until several months before the Wii U's release which was a huge fault on Nintendo's behalf. I believe Nintendo's E3 showings will lay to rest any comparisons of the Wii U to the current gen.


The original PlayStation did not have the 3D filters the N64 had, but the 3D looked 'good enough' and it had CD instead of cartridge. The CD allowed for awesome looking pre rendered movies (and great audio) for its time that the N64 could not have. Final Fantasy VII, VIII, IX and most other RPGs come to mind. Thus, the graphics battle was indeed not a clear win for the N64 - many games were plagued by blur and fog (which was largely used to hide clipping), and the games on PlayStation still looked crazy good for the time even if most stuff was just pre-rendered backgrounds.

Against the Saturn, PlayStation did better on 3D games (which were the flavor of the time), but suffered in 2D games, specially fighters, due to lower RAM. So it is really debatable as each console did something better that time, however all around, the PlayStation was the best balanced of the three, although not winning in every area. It did 2D fighters well enough to warrant a port, did 3D well enough to stand against N64, and did CGs better than anyone.

Thinking of Sega Genesis x Super NES, the Sega Genesis was inferior but it had a faster CPU, which allowed fast games like Sonic to give it an edge, or games to allow lots of stuff at once in the screen (coop beat em ups like Streets of Rage). The weakness in CPU of Super NES allowed Sega Genesis to do well in USA.

The PS2 won because of massive third party support combined with a long head start. Wii, motion controls / price.

So, even if a console isn't the most powerful, it has to have *something* unique going for it. We need to figure out what the Wii U has going for it that could be what makes it stand against PS4 and 720; maybe the tablet? It has to have something or else things may get tough.