Akuma587 brought up a point about how third parties are supposed to be familiar with the Wii architechture in another thread. This was my response to that. 

"The problem is few third parties are really all that familiar with the Gamecube's hardware. You can count the ones that actually delved into the GC's hardware on one hand. Capcom, Sega (Amusement Vision), Namco, Rare (now with MS), and Factor 5 (Now with Sony).

Most other third parties only produced second rate ports on the Gamecube. Ubisoft's Splinter Cell ports were a prime example of this. Instead of basing the GC version off of the X-box game. They had Ubisoft Shangai slap together rushed port based on the PS2 build. Sega disbanded Amusement Vision and they were behind F-Zero GX. Rareware is the property of MS. Factor 5's Rogue Squadron games were the most impressive games of the generation from a technical standpoint, but they are working exclusively on PS3. The talent that made RE4 and Viewtiful Joe for Capcom now works at SEEDs. Monolith which produced the Baten Kaitos games for Namco are now owned by Nintendo. Outside of the team that worked on Tales of Symphonia for Namco, which looked good with the exception of the overworld, I can't think of any third party development team that has done any real work on the GC hardware.

In other words, I view the third party developers "familiarity" with the Wii architecture as suspect. Outside of the ones I listed, I can't think of any third party developer that developed a game engine from the ground up on Gamecube. I certainly could have missed a few but I don't think that I have."

What is everyone's thoughts on well...my thoughts. I feel that a good deal of third party developers really are intimately familiar with the Wii hardware because they never reall pushed to GC to its limits. Do you think my assessment is fair? 

Yes. Your conclusions hold merit. I never thought about it that way.

that's good. Hopefully we'll see some improvements in games then.

This just convinces me that there's still plenty of juice left in the old Wii yet. And with the install base growing rapidly, more and more developers will push themselves to create better and better games for it.

I actually forgot to mention Silicon Knights but neither MGS: Twin Snakes or Eternal Darkness were graphically impressive. So thats probably why I didn't think to mention Silicon Knights. Don't get me wrong they weren't bad looking games and they played well but didn't impress me from a graphical standpoint. Still they were built from the ground up on GC and looked better than the majority of the GC's third party efforts.

Several years ago, one of my friends did an internship with a large American publisher and was one of the main people involved in porting games to the Gamecube; he said it was odd that Senior developers with 10+ years of experience worked on the PS2 and XBox versions and a couple of new grads and an intern worked on the Gamecube port ...

This is the reason that UBISoft idiot said the Wii couldn't do specular-mapping when it is quite clear that even the GC was able to this (RE4 had tons of it). When you look at UBISoft's GC offerings, most, if not ALL were PS2 ports that were ported up with minimal benefit. Beyond Good and Evil is the only one I'm aware of, and no version had spec-maps. So he basically based his judgment of Wii's capabilities by numbers on a sheet instead of REAL performance, and had no experience of REAL performance with Nintendo's hardware.

Its a very good point. Only studios that excelled at GC work should really be able to excel at Wii work.

Hopefully now that Wii titles are getting more publicity/expectation, studios will put better teams on Wii titles. Also dev tools (in general) have significantly improved over the last few years (editors, etc..).

I would so love to work on a real middleware solution for the Wii...

Good point.

In the unlikely event that the Wii was 2 PS2s duck taped together then I think we'd be seeing some great stuff from a graphical standpoint even though it'd be quite a bit less powerful than the real Wii.

Unfortunately it took devs a long time to get the hang of PS2 and make games like GoW2 so we may have to be patient.

I'm sure there have been recent rumours regarding Factor 5 possibly getting back in bed with Nintendo, fingers crossed.

Very good point! I always figured that the Wii's similarity to the Gamecube would mean the developers are familiar with it, and that the poor quality of early third party Wii games was due to laziness, but not that many third parties were on board for the GC.

Might very well be that the possible PS4 runs into the same problem if Sony tries to cut corners by keeping the Cell. =P

Developers are already broadening horizons on the Sony front. (read: making new partnerships) so I wouldn't be suprised to see Factor 5 come back to Ninty. It just makes good business sense.