By using this site, you agree to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Use. Close
curl-6 on 05 February 2013
Edit Thread
Scisca said:
S.Peelman said:
Scisca said:

I have a different point of view. This is what I think about Wii and Wii U and which generations they really belong to.

Think about yourself in 30-40 years, when you're explaining to your grandson what a game console was ;) Now you give him all the consoles starting from the NES (let's just skip the older ones), Sega Master, SNES, Mega Drive, PSX, Saturn, N64, Dreamcast and so on up until Wii U, PS4 and X-box 8. You let the kid play every console for an hour and ask him to segregate the consoles into 6 generations. Where would the little kid put the Wii and the Wii U? Just basing on what he experienced, without any additional knowledge.

I think he would put the Wii right next to the PS2, GCN, Dreamcast and X-box. Wii U is still in the air, but so far my bet is he would put it together with PS3 and X-box 360.

This is the way I see this issue.

Okay, that is fine. But then you're not talking about 'generations' as by the meaning of the word anymore. More like... 'families', or 'groups' or whatever word you'd find best.

One can group things in an indefinite amount of ways. For example I could group them all by advancements in controllers. Which would put NES, Genesis and Master System, 5600, 7200 and Jaguar in 'group 1' (only digital four-way input) and thus the least advanced systems; the Atari 2600 in 'group 2' (digital joysticks); the many Pong consoles, the N64, Saturn, Dreamcast and the Odyssey2 in 'group 3' (more accurate analogue joysticks); all the PlayStations, the GC, WiiU and the two XBoxes in 'group 4' (dual analogues), the Wii in group 5 (motion control) and the Virtual Boy as the most advanced one with (yes) 'virtual reality' in 'group 6' ().

No matter how you look at it though, it doesn't however change the fact that in reality, the WiiU is still the successor to the Wii by 'time', which makes it a generation (as defined by the meaning of the word) up from the Wii and the GC, N64 etc. before it. Even if the WiiU were to only have the power of the SNES, it would still be the successor to Wii and thus 'next-gen'. A crappy one by today's standard of-course .

Ok, Wii U is the next generation OF NINTENDO CONSOLES. But when we're talking about the general console generations, which include the compatition, I think that a totally unbiased person with no knowledge (like the kid I told about) would consider GCN and Wii the same generation. Wii would be pretty much a reboot instead of a new generation.

A generation means the next iteration of hardware, regardless of graphical power. What a theoretical child would think doesn't change the established definition.