Wii are the Future.

I have been reading for over a year how the Wii is a fad and that the novelty of its unique motion sensitive controller will wear off. Video game experts “in the know” repeat over and over this old chestnut and state that either the Xbox 360 or the PS3, depending on their personal favorite, is going to “win” in the next-gen war. The theory is that because the Wii cannot compete against the graphic and processing prowess of the Xbox 360 and PS3, that the Wii’s huge sales numbers are going to begin to fall as gamers move back to “traditional” video games.

In my mind, this past weekend proved that the people “in the know” don’t know what they are talking about. And it is because they are too close to the industry as it was, to see where the industry is going. Anna and I hosted about 13 members of her family for a small weekend family reunion. During this time, it seemed our poor little Wii was never turned off. After countless games of baseball, tennis, snowboarding, bowling, billiards and tennis, both Anna’s brother (who hasn’t owned a gaming console since the Atari) and her uncle (who has never owned a video gaming console) have decided that they are going to get their very own Wii.



What the industry experts don’t realize is the intense appeal of a gaming system that is obviously fun to the non-gaming public. These family members would never have been enticed to play a traditional video game with people sitting around holding a controller pushing buttons, but the wild gyrations involved in playing a Wii game are irresistible. Video game pundits just can not grasp the fact that Nintendo has effectively tapped an untapped market that the conventional wisdom did not believe existed.






Coming in the spring of 2008 we are going to see the release of Wii Fit which will include everything from aerobics to yoga poses to muscle conditioning, and it will even measure your BMI. It is titles like these that will persuade people to purchase a Wii that never would have dreamed of buying a 360 or PS3.

This means that hardcore fanboys are not going to be the only audience in town. Right now the average production cost of a traditional first person shooter is in excess of $50 million dollars. If you aren’t a first person shooter or sports fan, then console gaming really wasn’t up your alley. Things are going to change. With such a large audience in place that doesn’t really care about these type of games, you are going to see a decrease in the amount of resources a video game publisher will be willing to invest in these sorts of titles, when they could concentrate on a cheaper to produce and more widely accepted title for the Wii. I recently read a quote from an EA Games executive that they can have four to five teams working on various Wii games for the same cost as one PS3 game.

For me personally this revolution is a wonderful thing. I don’t really care about Halo or Madden ’08, but love games like Civilization, SimCity and Alpha Centari. In the past these types of games only appeared on a computer and usually required a top of the line computer to run them effectively. That all started to change today. Will Wright, the legendary creator SimCity, announced that his newest project called Spore will be released on the Wii. The interview that announced this wonderful news quoted Mr. Wright as stating that “Somebody asked me what I thought next generation meant and what about the PlayStation 3 was next generation. The only next gen system I've seen is the Wii – the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement, but the Wii feels like a major jump – not that the graphics are more powerful, but that it hits a completely different demographic. In some sense I see the Wii as the most significant thing that's happened, at least on the console side, in quite a while.”

Spore is my idea of a dream game, the game allows a player to control the evolution of a species from its existence as a multicellular organism to a spacefaring sapient creature. The game is mindboggling in its scope. For example, just in the spacefaring section, you will be able to beam down your creature to interact directly with an alien species. You may interbreed different species genetically, or place a "monolith" (in the style of 2001: A Space Odyssey) on a planet, triggering evolution of intelligent life, then come back later to see what has evolved. Also, Will Wright explained that there would be over half a million different stars, each one having its own planets, more than anyone could visit in a lifetime. If your console is connected to the internet, many of these worlds will be populated with creatures and civilizations created by other players. The creatures, vehicles, and buildings the player can create will be uploaded automatically to a central database, catalogued and rated for quality (based on how many users have downloaded the object or creature in question), and then re-distributed to populate other players' games. As is traditional with most of Will Wright's games, the game never presents the player with an absolute ending and the Space Phase continues for as long as the player wishes.

Viva La Revolucion!