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Adinnieken on 06 October 2013
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attaboy said:
Adinnieken said:
Mr Khan said:
It's convenient in not having to keep multiple consoles hooked up. It bothered me that Wii U didn't keep GameCube b/c (although i understood it, given the difficulty of getting a slot-loading drive to have variable disc-sizes), meaning that i'll have to dig up my GameCube if i ever get the urge to run a GC game.

Back in the day of CD singles, you could buy a plastic carrier that would allow you to snap a 3.5" disc into a 5.25" disc carrier.  Disc size isn't an issue.  To explain this further, initially when CD singles were released, they were released on 3.5" discs, however they fell out of favor for 5.25" discs.

The bigger issue is the fact that Wii and GameCube games work by including the OS used for the game on the disc.  If you're running the OS from the disc you can't alter the game to emulate hardware, which despite the Wii U using similar hardware, it isn't 100% the same.  Even if you just want to slow down the CPU performance so the game plays at a normal level, you can't. 


I'm not one of those tech savvy guys but I guess that's why, when you play an Xbox game on a 360, a DS game on a 3DS, a GBA game on a DS, or a Gamecube/Wii game on a Wii/Wii U, you don't have access to virtually any of the newer console's extra features.  I think it's a blessing from the heavens above that the Wii U controller can display Wii games, now--with Wii Remote support, too!

Point taken, but I think the context is that on the Xbox and PlayStation a game is by all rights an application that is running on a given system/OS and the OS is upgradable to the point where the game can still run.  The fact that a game may not be able to take advantage of the new hardware is the fact that the game wasn't designed for it. 

That said, Xbox LIVE games from the original Xbox were usable with Xbox LIVE on the Xbox 360. 

With Nintendo, games are self-contained entities.  It's like having a planet with a fully breathable atmosphere, but all the residents of that planet breath their own unique atmosphere.  The Xbox 360 and PS3 aren't that way.

The feature to switch to a second screen is a feature of the hardware, not the OS.  The GPU supports two screens, as do most GPUs in modern computers today.  So getting that to work isn't much of a big stretch.  A nice feature, I'm sure, just not technically difficult.

The way Nintendo did games on everything from the Wii prior was an interesting way to do it, it had its advantages.  It made pirating the games more challenging and hacking the console more difficult.

The drawbacks became apparent early on in the Wii's lifecycle when a game got released with a serious game ending bug in it.  The only option Nintendo had to resolve the problem was to press new discs and send them out to affected customers.  They couldn't push down a game update, not because they didn't have enought storage for it, which they didn't -- though they could have forced those users to use an SD card to put the update on, but because there was no way to start the game from the updated code or have the game check for the updated code even if it existed on the system.  The system was never designed that way.