Falls Short. The Wii is the defining console of this generation, no doubt that when historians look back upon what has happened this gen, they will pick the Wii as the defining console. I would say the Xbox360 and the PS3 would be footnotes in comparison. Whats more! I love my Wii, and getting it working again has given me a lot of JOY! I think however, the Wii falls short of the true potential it could have had. From a sales perspective, Nintendo didn't know what it had for the longest time, weeks and weeks of being sold out has scratched the varnish and sold short the true sales potential of the system. They left a few MILLION sales on the table, and only now do they seem to be rectifying the situation. Ok, production and sales issues out of the way, heres the meat of it all: I believe that the things we will see in the Wii2 were obvious from the beginning to Nintendo. They were just too conservative to do it truely right. They had the Ipod of gaming potentially, but they may have blown it. The crux! Too little money in the initial system! The price was absolutely perfect to achieve the full market penetration from the beginning, they were making loads of money from the start. What i'm saying is that they should have invested more into the parts that went into the system. Just $20-30 more would have made huge differences in the final product. Im not talking about putting in a more powerful GPU or anything here, they should have spent more money on the IR system and maybe a slightly more powerful CPU to run it to its full potential. The IR system really is good, but I find the abstraction between the position of the Wii remote and the feedback from the screen to be one of the last hurdles that holds it back from being truely mainstream. My example here is actually my own mother and my girlfriend. They understand the Wiimote so much better than a controller, but the still struggle a little with having to point it at the sensor bar and not at the screen. They can use it quite well, but I hear all the time "Why can't I just point it at the screen" They can get a little confused from in with games like Zelda. Yet! When they play Wii Tennis, it's perfect! They get it 100%, 100% of the time (Except for the menus but its not as bad as Zelda or SMG) They should have spend more money on the IR system, perhaps with a couple of Sensors or a camera instead on the IR sensor bar. They could have done away with that abstraction and let people of all walks of life more easily "jump into it" Consider a game like time-crisis, which im sure a lot of you have played. It wouldnt be the same if you pointed the gun at some sensor thing at the bottom of the screen. You want to aim and shoot at the screen. I believe its the same for all games that are on the Wii which use the sensor bar. Think of the possibilities that come from true 3d positioning of the Wiimote! That is the scenario where the Wii hype meets reality, and reality surpasses the hype. The difference between what the Wii is and what the Wii should have been, is huge. By the time Wii2 comes around it won't matter so much what they do, because they let their competition get an opening. A great system, but could have defined gaming in the way that the mouse defines computers. Thanks!
Tease.
