Adinnieken said:
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.
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Thanks. I've learned much on this day!
