by Crono Wed Jun 08, 2011 2:33 am
I chimed in a "great". I really don't like the name, but I'll get used to it, more importantly, I do understand it. It's a smart name. With the Wii, they brought in this large crowd of gamers who never played games before ... and if they want to keep them (which they do) they need to give them something that will make them comfortable ... and that resides in the look of the console and the name of it. (as well as the strong support for Wii peripherals and titles)
The demos they showed, the Nature demo and the Zelda recreation of that spider fight from Twilight Princess ... are real-time running on early dev-kits with equivalence hardware. The footage shown of the third party games, of course, is from other platforms, just because ... you know, the thing doesn't exist yet.
If you look at those demos ... there's some stuff you should notice, graphically, they've all got lots of dynamic light and shadows. They've got subsurface scattering and plenty of anti-aliasing. The draw distance is particularly impressive, and it's all suppose to be running at 1080p@60, which ... as long as they don't render lower and upscale ... is nothing to sneeze at. (Sure we can have 1600p experiences on our PCs, but it's still a much more expensive machine)
They did talk about their plan for online ... which sounds much more promising than what they've said before. They want to make a non-rigid open online platform. Of course that's "open" as in free to choose, not open as is open source. So, I imagine, Nintendo understands the complaints about the Wii ... and that they're going to answer a lot of them, at the least, with Wii U.
I'd be particularly excited, actually, to see an FPS using that view screen on the zapper.