Wii’s Little Problems

Let’s face it, Wii was the big winner that came out of E3. The console has made even the skeptics a little curious about what you could do with the Wiimote. Loyalists are already declaring that the Wii is Nintendo’s second coming.

Despite all that, the Wii does have a few things that could go against it. Billy Beghammer of GameInformer has identified several of the Wii’s potential problems.

First off, the system is pretty much weaker than its bigger and beefier opponents. Technically, it’s a beefed up GameCube. It only supports 480p resolution and widescreen games. The Xbox 360 and the PS3 are all going High Def. Regardless of how much Nintendo says that they’re hellbent on gameplay, people still do care about graphics. As much as we’re hoping that we could get a high-def experience on the Wii, it probably won’t happen. Thank god the console comes out cheap. If there’s an HDD upgrade for it, we’d have money to spend for it.

Second, while they’re proud of a huge launch line-up, but if you take time to observe, Nintendo only has two first party games available at launch. No Mario. Just The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Excite Truck. This is another launch where Mario is absent. Scary thought, isn’t it?

Read the rest of the article after the jump.

Let’s face it, Wii was the big winner that came out of E3. The console has made even the skeptics a little curious about what you could do with the Wiimote. Loyalists are already declaring that the Wii is Nintendo’s second coming.

Despite all that, the Wii does have a few things that could go against it. Billy Beghammer of GameInformer has identified several of the Wii’s potential problems.

First off, the system is pretty much weaker than its bigger and beefier opponents. Technically, it’s a beefed up GameCube. It only supports 480p resolution and widescreen games. The Xbox 360 and the PS3 are all going High Def. Regardless of how much Nintendo says that they’re hellbent on gameplay, people still do care about graphics. As much as we’re hoping that we could get a high-def experience on the Wii, it probably won’t happen. Thank god the console comes out cheap. If there’s an HDD upgrade for it, we’d have money to spend for it.

Second, while they’re proud of a huge launch line-up, but if you take time to observe, Nintendo only has two first party games available at launch. No Mario. Just The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Excite Truck. This is another launch where Mario is absent. Scary thought, isn’t it?

Perhaps they’re delaying Metroid Prime 3, Super Mario Galaxy, and Super Smash Bros so that they’ll have enough ammo left to go head-to-head with the PS3 when it launches. If history repeats itself, they’ll probably spread out those games to fill out the 2007 year. If you recall, that didn’t work out too well for the GameCube and the N64. Face it, Mario is required to lure in the casual gamers when the console launches. Yes, the Wiimote plus Wii Sports might do the trick, but just imagine Wiimote plus Mario. Gives you the fuzzies, doesn’t it?

Third problem is that while Developers have been saying that Wii is a system easy to make games in, getting your game to fully take advantage of the different control system is a challenge. Some third party games for the DS suck because they didn’t make full use of the stylus. Developers have to allot whole teams just to make sure that their game has the Wiimote in mind. This could be costly and could delay releases of third party games for the system. No games for the system equals bad news. The Gamecube failed because it just had no games available for it.

Lastly, Nintendo just has to get online gaming right. Mario Kart, Metroid Prime, and Zelda are franchises that just beg for online play. If they mess this up, they might piss off a lot of Nintendo zealots. They don’t have a good enough track record that could assure us they can follow in Xbox Live’s footsteps.

Nintendo’s got a lot to watch out for. They’ve already messed up (according to critics) with the N64 and the Gamecube. With the Wii having so much potential, they better not disappoint.