| prayformojo said: I'm talking about software. Metroid Prime was alot more expensive and risky than NSMB. Yamauchi's Nintendo was the one that released cutting edge hardware and cutting edge software. The SNES, N64 and Gamecube all had equal to, or more powerful specs to their competition and featured games with huge budgets. OOT? What PS1 game rivaled something with that scope? It DWARFED every other game in the console market at the time. What Wii or Wii-U game can we say that for? Whatever Galaxy's budget was, it was nothing compared to say, GTA4 or GTA5. That's what I meant. Yamauchi was a more head on, take no prisioners, victory or death leader where as Iwata isn't. |
And yet under Yamauchi's approach, N64 and then GC continued to sell lower and lower. NES and SNES ruled their generations. Then Nintendo home consoles, while still awesome, started dwindling a bit compared to the super popular Playstation. At least with the Wii, Nintendo was back on top in a big way for one more generation. Besides that, Iwata was in charge of things, more or less, at Nintendo by the time games like Metroid Prime, Pikmin and Eternal Darkness were being developed. He wasn't Prez yet, but he was running things, after he was hired over from HAL.
Besides, Metroid Prime 3 was far more ambitious than it's previous entries, Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 were far more ambitious titles than Sunshine had been, her oversaw games like The Last Story and Xenoblade being made for Wii, bringing back old franchises like Punch Out, Excite and Kid Icarus, etc.
I get some of what you're trying to say, but I still don't buy the "Iwata plays it safe" bit. Nintendo couldn't afford to continue making super-powerful hardware no matter who was company president, because they have to pay someone else for the hardware development, unlike Sony and MS.
And I still say that we'll be seeing games that are quite "bold" and impressive (even graphically and CPU-use wise), on Wii U. Just look at Mario Kart 8. That's the most advanced "giant leap" for Mario Kart that the franchise has honestly seen since MK64.
