But it's all well and good the hardware doing its job; it's another thing to turn that functionality into something meaningful to play - which is where the Wii picture becomes a little cloudier. Simple point point-and-shoot gameplay - exemplified in Konami's Elebits, in which the Remote sumply moves an onscreen reticule as you would move one in a PC FPS with a mouse, allowing you to line up shots before stabbing the fire button - throws up no concerns, but it's when game designs become more ambitious - when gesture-based inputs become involved, for example - that the system's complexity becomes an issue of greater stature. “Working out actions which cross over with other actions is very tricky and developers need to work around that, or design games differently,” says one developer with close ties to Nintendo. “Things like Wario Ware can work because the movements are very restricted in general, so it can react in real time (there's no technical reason for lag in the system). Similarly, sensitivity, and when to decide an action has been started/completed, etc, is really tricky - in many game cases, literally impossible. Like with the DS, some games will fit, some new ideas will shine, some will get away with it, and others will fail miserably.” The hey, then, lies in implementation. And you can be sure that we'll see as many half-baked games that fail to make worthwhile use of Wii's capabilites as there are with DS games that fail to exploit that piece of hardware's suite of options. Because, since Wii's full playable debut at E3 in queues than anything else in LA that week, publishers have been scrambling to ramp up their commitments to their platform, most having previously marked it down as a low priority (Sega, for example, is said to have moved a significant number of development staff from PS3 to Wii projects).
What's clear is that Wii's innovative control mechanics have a strong appeal within a traditional non-gaming audience: to someone who's never played a game before, removing a complex contemporary joypad from the equation is to lift a particularly unfriendly-looking barrier. But what about those whose gaming lives have long since incorporated DualShock-shaped mechanisms? Certainly anyone who's truly into videogaming will be keen to see how Nintendo's new controllers work, but how many of them will actually prefer to use the Remote and Nunchuk rather than a traditional joypad once that first giddy wave of inquisitiveness has given way to a level of familiarity? The appearance of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess in two different flavours will surely bring answers to some interesting questions for Nintendo.
The second big Wii design reisk is the console's image-processing capacity. Nintendo has put Wii's graphical fidelity at "two to three times" better than GameCube's. Do Twilight Princess or Super Mario Galaxy, some of the best-looking Wii games, really look twice as good as the best GameCube titles? Well, they're certainly being rendered in true 16:9 widescreen format, but there's nothing in either title to stomp on the most eye-pooping moments of, say, Resident Evil 4. And, with an old-fashioned single-core system architecture, there's not as much left to be squeezed out of the box as there is from Xbox 360 and, more significantly, PS3.
And it's Wii graphical performance when compared to Xbox 360 and PS3, not GameCube, that is the nub of the issue here. As informal research at your local game retailer will reveal, many buying decisions are being made on the strength of the pictures on the back of the box and the visual quality of the action being pumped on to promo and demo pod monitors. To these consumers, Motorstorm on PS3 is going to absolutely steamroller Excite Truck on Wii if the two are demonstrated side by side. Taking the rougher-looking Wii games against the top-tier PS3 titles, the scenario will be akin to putting an 8bit console next to a 16bit machine. To those uninterested in the finer points of the respective platforms, there will be no argument, no contest. And remember: PS3 has that there new-fangled motion-sensing control, too, right?
Why did Nintendo pull out of the graphical arms race? Not only because it wanted to pledge a very public commitment to gameplay over graphics but, more than that, because it wanted to create console that had the potential to become truly massmarket, having decided tat the comparatively high price points of Xbox 360 and, particuarly, PS3 would resign those formats to ploughing established furrows when the real revenue opportunities existed in the neighbouring field, whose surface has only been scratched.
