Nintendo Wii kicks the shit out of the competition

Oh yeah.... SNES... damn that was a great system. Excellent titles. Off the top of my head-

Super Mario World 1 & 2, Super Castlevania, Mega Man X, Zelda III, Final Fantasy IV-VI, Donkey Kong Country, Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger, F Zero, Star Fox, Contra III, etc. etc.

No, you can't count that if you're talking about the N. American market, but there is definitly a residual effect. Japanese sales drive Japanese game developers, which means more games for any particular system. And you are right, it looks like PSP and DS sales are pretty close, although the DS is definitly selling better now that the DS-Lite is out.

From the GAF Forums:
http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php?tid=8498&page=2

There must be something wrong with me cause there is nothing appealing to me about Wii. Neat little remote I guess. I'd take the Xbox any day.

It looks like the PSP has the DS beat by over a million units in the North American market.

I'm not at all interested in portable gaming but I had to pick a pony I'd probably buy a PSP. It seems to have a lot of cool community development going for it and has some fairly decent features beyond gaming. Plus I really don't trust Nintendo to support their handhelds for any length at all given the constant barrage of new units they come out with.

For me, I have both.

They definitly are different animals. I got my NDS in June and just only recently got my PSP. The PSP is a great lil system. And so is the DS.

The PSP does many things, but doesn't do anything that well. For instance, it's got a photo viewer. But you can't actually zoom in and out of any of your photos. It's got an MP3 player, but you can't even create custom playlists on it. It's got a video player, but you have to spend time converting the files in order to play them. And you're limited by how much memory you buy on those expensive memory sticks. It plays games, but the load times are atrocious! We're talking more than 1 minute sometimes. Plus, it takes an equal amount of time to start up. And the battery life does not last even half as long as the NDS. But it does hold the edge in graphics as well as the sheer amount of games available for it. And as you mentioned, it's got a cool mod community that helps your PSP do all sorts of wierd shit.

The NDS-Lite, on the other hand, has fast load times, a cool little touch screen that opens up a whole bunch of possibilities for games, it ALSO can view pictures, play music and video (via Homebrew) and the battery life lasts between 8 to 10 hours. Plus it's smaller, so it won't feel clunky in your pocket like the PSP. And when you turn it on, you'll be playing your game in less than a minute. It is perfect for when you are standing in line and you have a few minutes to kill and you are bored. The PSP loads so slow that by the time you actually get a game going, the line will have come to you.

Personally, I don't take my PSP outside. It's a neat gadget I keep plugged in beside my nightstand and have constantly turned on so I can pick it up and play when I have a spare minute. But if you are planning on bringing a portable gaming unit places, I would recommend the NDS-Lite over the PSP.

I don't do much as far as PC gaming, we've been sticking to consoles pretty much. Then again my XBox is a PC, so that is only half true.
I expect to have picked up a Wii by the end of the week next week and a 360 by Feb.
I still play the other consles we have, my N64 is at the shop for killing time there. Plenty of games were fun, reguardless of the graphics. I love Banjo-Kazooie, but it looks as if that one has gone the way of the dinosaur. The last BK game, grunty's Revenge, was a supreme dissapointment, it went back to 2D which I pretty much deplore. I have a hard time playing Zelda Four Swords for instance for that reason alone. I like 3D.

We have a DS and a PSP, but they're pretty much dominated by the kid. I stick to my XBox, Cube and PS2.

Looking at combined worldwide sales... Gameboy Advance still leads all other handhelds (helps that they had GBA, GBA SP, and GBA Micro), with Nintendo DS in second, and PSP in third.

Some sites are reporting incorrectly. PSP has outsold the DS. But if you combine DS and DS-lite (which they should because they are the same console), then DS is winning.

The Wii is great. I had a go on my mate's machine and had good fun playing the sports game that comes with it. Can't believe playing a video game gave me something of a workout!

All hail the Wii

National Post
Published: Thursday, January 04, 2007

Despite its odd spelling, the Nintendo Wii has won the gaming-console battle with Sony's more conventional Play Station 3 -- at least during the crucial 2006 Holiday season. The victory was unexpected: The Play Station 3 has superior graphic capabilities; and, as the success of Play Station 2 showed, Sony is able to deliver a mountain of solid gaming titles. So what is it about the Wii that brought the mobs to the mall?

The answer is the Wii Remote, an innovative new free form hand-held control unit that goes way beyond the buttons, dials and joysticks that gamers have been used to, in one form or another, since the Atari 2600 came out in 1977. The Wii Remote senses movement and rotation in three dimensions, which means gamers can use it to jab with a virtual sword or swing a virtual tennis racket.

The Wii Remote was a bold move: It would have quickly become an object of Internet mockery if the technology had worked less than perfectly in gamers' hands. And Nintendo deserves a lot of credit for pulling it off. Its introduction marks one of the true landmarks in videogame technology -- perhaps even on a par with the glorious trackball from Missile Command and Centipede 27 years ago.

There is a larger corporate lesson here, one that goes beyond the video game industry. For years, console producers have focused on brute computing power -- providing more pixels, more speed, more colours, more realistic explosions. Sony has been a leader in this area, which is why PS3 games look so spectacular. But computer technology is already so far advanced that improved special effects now bring consumers very marginal returns. (Indeed, some guns-and-gore games now are arguably too realistic.) The folks at Nintendo, like their i Pod-designing colleagues at Apple, turned the issue around. Instead of merely grasping at the next iteration of gigahertz, they asked how they could change the basic way humans interfaced with their tech toys. To wit: How could they import the three-dimensional motion we take for granted in our non-gaming lives into a game world that, since days of yore, has generally limited players to binary input formats.

At Nintendo, the original code name for the Wii was "Revolution." It's a pity they didn't stick with the label when the product was rolled out -- because a revolution is exactly what the company's new console represents.

Last I read, the 360 had been projected to have had the most sales during the holiday season (just edging out the Wii). Microsoft and especially Nintendo did pretty damn well. Sony, not so much.

For pure humor on the subject there's nothing better than the recent report that Sony was projected to sell 75 million PS3s by 2010.

Xbox 360's sales are due in part to Gears of War and other good titles coming out recently. A friend of mine even got a 360 for Christmas, due in part to the selection of games. It's also a kickass gaming system. If Wii can get a better selection of games than the 360 and PS2, it will win. So far, it's been show to have the more innovative games.

The lower price than the PS3 and wide availability couldn't hurt either. Hopefully this will be a wakeup call to Sony. Their sheer arrogance and the disconnect between their customers has really hurt their image.

The console wars are just starting out. It's going to be an interesting year.

Yes it will be Ryan. There will be no way to tell who is really winning until late this year.

Nintendo stands to do very well, it all just depends on how long the wii-mote holds people's attention.

I picked up Call of Duty 3 yesterday, and while it has its flaws, it's the first time I've been able to actually get into a FPS on a console due in no small part to the better controls.

Should be interesting in the next year as more games come out which really utilise the controls in interesting ways and show off the graphics the Wii can do better.

A new graphics card is a lot cheaper than a brand new system.

If you want a dx10 card right now, the cheapest you'll find one is about $450.

New version of Vista well over $100.

Why? Aside from FS X, which will also run on DX9, not one title supports it

Once DX10 is actually used, every card in the market will support it. And I really don't see why anybody would buy a GPU that gobbles up a whopping 200 watts over its two external power connectors

Not a thing.

Except what's the motivation?

Nintendo already stands to make an absolute ton of profit, and it is easier to develop Wii games means that more developers will be able to take risks on titles that wouldn't get developed for the PS3/360.

Nintendo is going for a disruption strategy rather than trying to take the competitors on directly. Rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing a new high end system to try and compete with the PS3/360 they are instead aiming to make that approach irrelevant.

Third party support is going to be a big thing for Nintendo. If they can get developers to jump on board, they will have it made.

Yeah, and right now the Wii is a pretty attractive platform to develop for.

I'm posting this from my wii! this is quite interesting. Definitely not how I would want to use the board all the time but the browser does a pretty good job of adjusting the page to be readable on the monitor. The interface is interesting as well. Gives the choice between > standard onscreen keyboard or an onscreen keypad like that on a mobile phone, both methods giving the option of predictive text.

I'm been trying to find a Wii for three damn weeks now! Everybody is still sold out around here. On the other hand everybody has PS3s laying around.

Which is basically what I was getting at, though not sure if that was in this thread or not. I don't see a reason to buy a dx10 card right now. Big, giant waste of money. Better to buy one when there is a midrange card out and they have been tested a little more.

Also, to ever take advantage of dx10, you'll have to have Vista. Which so far, some features in Aero support dx10.

I refuse to just download Windows anymore. Not after the amount of legwork or fixes you had to do with the later versions of XP just to get the latest patches, download other MS software, etc. Best to just buy a copy and be done with it now. In my opinion of course.