Insiders from Microsoft have stated that the Xbox Remote design that has been floating around is rubbish, and wasn’t created by a Microsoft employee. Apparently, the designs are currently “hourglass” shaped, not square. So the picture was just trying to increase similarity between Mircosoft’s Xbox Remote and the Wiimote.

They still sound pretty similar to me, hourglass shaped or not. But in any case, will be keeping our eyes on just how far Microsoft is willing to ripoff Nintendo. Microsoft is expecting to release the new motion sensitive controller around September, and include it bundled in a game that’ll show off its power. If it is coming out that soon, there’ll be some prototypes to have a look at soon

Tags: wii review, wii, new nintendo game, new releases, nintendo wii

High Def:

And I’m not just talking high definition here, I’m talking super high definition. One thing computer systems have over consoles is the ability for super high resolutions. I think the future of both television and consoles lies in tapping into that potential. Now, television have more colors than computer monitors usually do, so if you are far enough away they both look the same. But more and more, people are seeing the crisper view they get on computers. High def is a start, but consoles and TVs still have a ways to go to catch up, and I bet the next generation makes some inroads. The Xbox 360 and PS3 are already a good way there with 1080p support, while the Wii only has 480p.

Surround Sound and More:

Sound is integral to our gaming experience, and the Wii is already making good progress with the speakers in the controllers. Delivering sound on a per-player basis is a wonderful innovation that has a lot of potential. Unfortunately, the sound out of those speakers kinda sucks. Expect that to get better, this generation. Next generation expect much more support for real 7.1 or more digital surround sound. I also expect that one Wiimote attachment is going to be a headset, possibly with a microphone. Nintendo might opt out of the microphone to keep thing kid safe, but the headphones — to give individual people specific sound cues in high quality sound — could have tons of multiplayer uses full of fun.

Developer Tools:

Getting high quality games on the Wii, or any console, is mission critical. I expect that in future generation — when technological progress stops mattering as much as creative progress, a process we are already beginning to see — console produces will provide more developer tools. This might be as simple as controller analysis or as complex as MMO back-end support, both of which I’ve already talked about. I suspect that will start providing simple engines designed low budget third party developers. Just because they don’t have a huge budget doesn’t mean they don’t have a good, innovative game idea.

Just look at what Flash has done for online games. Thousands are floating around now, and a lot of them are very good. I suspect, though, that if tools are provided to make development open, Nintendo will start mandating quality standards, my next point.

Quality Standards:

The Wii is already hurting from the number of bad games it is getting. It is being stuck with a ‘casual only’ image that could be hard to shake. Bad rip-off titles could swing the masses against the Wii. On one hand, Nintendo needs to improve its relations with third party developers. The N64 and GameCube has notoriously bad sales for third parties. Nintendo can’t very well start rejecting some games do to poor quality without further alienating developers. But on the other hand, the bad mini-game packages have to stop. I suspect that once it becomes clearer that the Wii is to be taken seriously, Nintendo will start pushing the quality issue a little harder. By next generation, they will probably be in a position to demand the best.

Multi-Screen Support:

The Wii has made tremendous inroads into fun multiplayer games. Throughout the 90s and early 2000s, games got more and more single player oriented. In the early 2000s the online multiplayer industry started booming, but now, thanks to the Wii, the off-line multiplayer game is back. To help further accommodate this, I think the next generation will feature the ability to display on multiple screens, allowing dozens of players to play cooperative or competitive games at the same time all on one console. This would be really cool.

Most households nowadays have multiple screens anyway, so this would be useful to a large number of families. In addition, I predict that Bluetooth televisions become more popular, and that the new Nintendo console will have the option to communicate to these multiple sets through Bluetooth.

No Sensor Bar:

I don’t know how, but I think Nintendo will be looking to get rid of the Sensor Bar. It is a patched together system that really has to go. It made motion sensitivity cheap this generation, but I think we will need something less likely to produce mistakes in the next generation. One question that has to be asked is how a controller will detect which way is forward without a sensor bar. A good question and one that needs to be answered.

More controller innovation:

Nintendo has had a long history of controller innovation. The N64 controller was crazy and the GameCube controller was its own monster. Both, in my opinion, were flops. Now Nintendo has stumbled upon a design people are saying is Good. Will that stop them from innovating? I don’t think so. In designing the next generation, Nintendo will probably want to keep backwards compatibility, but I bet they’ll do that by having some type of compatibility with the old controllers rather than having a similar controller. Nintendo is showing with the Wii beautiful and complex ideas about input flexibility. I think Nintendo has several surprises up their sleeve this generation, and next generation — when they get to build things from the ground up again — I bet they’ll that all the feedback from gamers and developers and really improve upon the system. I trust Nintendo to do a good job with this, and look forward to seeing what they come up with.

Input processing is a complex field even when you only have analog sticks and buttons. Making the gamer forget about the fact that he or she has a controller in their hand requires a lot of smart programming. Think of the original Super Mario Bros, even though there were really just a total of 8 buttons on the controller (two that were never used in game), the programing really had the think about the input to make it smooth. Remember how Mario would slowly speed up over time? Remember his skid when you changed directions. Remember how he would take a tiny jump is you tapped jump quickly. They took those few buttons and put a lot of intuitive power into they. With the Wii, there is so much more information coming at the programmers, and processing it all can be tricky. In the next generation, I expect that Nintendo will have preprocessing routines for the data based on comprehensive fuzzy logic systems that get a feel for each users style. This won’t be as obvious to the gamer as a huge processor, but the developers need this.

With some rumors floating around about a Wii 2, there has naturally been speculation about what the next generation of Nintendo’s console will look like. Here are my thoughts about what Nintendo is probably considering in design

More Competitive Processor:

The gamers don’t care, they don’t see any limitation and we’re loving the low price. But it has been hard to get third party developers to take the Wii seriously with so little power. Developers want to make the next big bad beautiful game and the Wii just doesn’t seem powerful enough to break any molds. Instead of top of the line stuff, third party developers have been dumping drivel for the Wii, and that has made the average rating of Wii games significantly lower than the other consoles.

I’ve got some news for those developers, the Nintendo Wii has had two games so far with unheard of rating, over 97% according to Game Rankings — Super Smash Bros Brawl and Super Mario Galaxy. The Xbox 360 and the Playstation on the other hand have had a total of zero titles in that category. The Wii is big, bad and beautiful, and developers need to realize that the gold standard in gaming if no longer in how many triangles you can show a second. In fact, there has only been one other game ever — The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for Nintendo 64 — to get such high ratings.

On the other hand, 36% off all Wii titles have failed (gotten a average rating under 60%), while only 23% of Xbox 360 games have failed and only 15% of PS3 games. Why are developers unloading worthless junk onto the Wii? Because they don’t think the Wii is ‘powerful’ enough for Read more »

For those of you that have been living under a rock for the last few years, Spore is Will Wright’s (creator of The Sims) new game. Spore is absolutely epic in scope and nature. The player starts off as a microorganism, and evolves into a fully fleshed creature that you can create from scratch to look almost any way you want. But it doesn’t stop there. After you have developed and evolved your creature, you go on to lead multiples of them in a tribe, and then advance to control of an entire civilization, and finally explore and battle in the riches of space. Epic? Oh yeah. This is the one game I’ve been looking forward to more than I thought possible.

And yes, it is confirmed, some type of spin off is coming to the Wii. We don’t have any news as to whether it’ll just be some stupid knock off or whether it’ll be the full blown thing, but we know it is coming. Should we worry that they are calling it a ’spin off’ and not a port? I think it might be a good thing. The Spore team is saying that they are building everything from the ground up to take advantage of the Wiimote. This sounds like good news to me. The Wii needs games made for the Wii, not just ports of games you can play on any console.

So, maybe we’ll have a Spore themed collection of mini-games and they’ll suck. I prefer to be optimistic and think we’ll have Wiispore, a perfect combination of the most creative console ever and the most create game ever. I think it’ll be a long time before we find out though. Spore is scheduled for release on September 7th and I’m sure they won’t even be giving the Wii version serious time until after that. In any case, I’ll be watching for development with my fingers crossed.

Will Wright, creator or Spore has given praise to the Wii console in the past. He has said that while the PS3 and the Xbox 360 seem like they are a step up from their predecessors, the Wii seems like it is a giant leap, not just a step. I feel that he understands the point of the Wii and so I trust that he’ll really take advantage of the medium when he creates his Wii spin off.

If you’ve never heard of Spore before, do yourself a favor and look up some spore videos. It’ll blow your mind. Spore is the most interesting game coming out this year. Period. And news that it’ll be hitting the Wii sooner or later, especially in some customized form, is good news for the Wii. If this is done right, I predict that Wiispore could be the biggest game to hit the Wii.

Some rumors have been flying around lately that the “Wii 2″ or rather a Wii with “memory and graphics upgrades” may be on the market before the expected next-gen date of 2011. Let me explain things a little better. So far, we’ve had a generation of consoles roughly every 5 years. The next expected generation would be around 2011, so news of a “Wii 2″ sooner than that is pretty big stuff. Apparently, the rumors include Mircosoft whispering the same thing about the Xbox.

So, are the rumors true? I don’t know. There is some evidence that it may be a good move, but it might also be a very bad move. One reason why Nintendo and Microsoft might consider pushing their next console release forward is because they don’t want to fall behind technologically. The PS3 is way up there in processing power and can read blue-ray discs that can hold up to 50 gigs of data, as apposed to the modest 9.7 gigs the Wii discs hold. At the moment, that is pricing the PS3 out of a competitive range, but in a few years, people might prefer the cutting edge in technology the PS3 gives them. And after the long Pentium 4 stall, computers are now multiplying their processors at an unprecedented rate. It is very possible that in a few years the Wii will seem to light for “real” gaming, or it might not have the umph to handle big-name game ports.

It is possible, but I don’t think so. If Nintendo or Microsoft released their next console early, it would undermine them a good bit. Everyone would be frustrated that they have to buy a new console only a few years after they got their last one. One of the main reasons people prefer consoles over computer gaming is because they know their console won’t go out of date as fast as a computer would. I think this would be a bod move for either company to make.

So what if, like some rumors suggest, they just put out a more powerful Wii. A “Wii Plus” or something. I don’t think this is going to happen either. People don’t want to have to worry about what version they have and whether it is enough to run a certain game. This is another big reason people prefer consoles over computer gaming, they know that the games they buy will just work. no hassle or upgrades.

Ultimately, holiday 2011 is only three and a half years away, I think they can wait. I think it is part of the Wii philosophy to stand on the strength of the games, not the console, and I don’t think they will go back on that anytime soon. I don’t think Nintendo is going to try and cut in the console generation line. Microsoft might try a move this boneheaded, but I think it will give them a very bad wrap if they do. Consoles have to be compatible and long lasting. It is their one key strength over computer gaming and with computers so prevalent, they need that edge.

Conclusion: This is either one of the stupidest moves in console history, or just a rumor. Don’t hold your breath for the “Wii 2″, or wait off on buying a Wii. The Wii is here to stay for a long while.

If you need additional Nintendo branded Mario Kart Wii steering wheels you won’t have to buy shell out for another copy of Mario Kart Wii. Nintendo plans on selling extra Wii Wheels on April 11, the same day Mario Kart Wii debuts in Japan.

Each extra plastic steering wheel runs for 1200 yen ($11). Of course, Nintendo’s Wii Wheel isn’t required to play Mario Kart Wii. Ubisoft’s wheel should work fine and so should a standalone controller.