Annoying Old Party Man said:
The Gamecube was in some way a machine born in the "middle of the road", between Nintendo's old philosophy and the new, re-emerging Nintendo.
Yes, the machine was built to compete with the existing machines, but from the status quo of the last three generations (NES=powerful home "computer"), Super NES (MODE 7, Most powerful machine), N64 (no need to even go there), we went to Gamecube, which essentially had nothing to boast technically wise against PS2. I remember that the press tried to hold on from something being used to boast about the power of the new nintendo machine, and we ended up with a motto that reminded us that "...it's actually 25% more powerfull than PS2!".
I don't see that at all. I see the GCN as being Nintendo's next step up, more of the same. And I see them realizing, midway through the course that that wasn't working. It was their decision that more of the same, only more powerful, wasn't working for them, that caused them to very nearly abandon the cube halfway through it's life. Around the time the DS released 1st party games for the GCN tapered off seriously. I think their course correction began sometime during the GCN's life, not before it.
One last comment, the success of the Wii right now seems more like a matter of marketing and proper managerial decisions than anything else. For a machine that promised to change gaming forever, Wii has only proven that it can offer something different. Yes, it is mass market, but does it really offer a better gaming experience than it's competitors?
Um, yes, it does. The problem here is your definition of 'better'.
Video Games are an entertainment industry, not a technology industry, no matter how important technology is to them. When introducing new technology on a mass market entertainment device, it has to be one of the following 3 things:
1) More interesting
2) More useful
3) More intuitive
Take VHS -> DVD. Multiple formats attempted to replace VHS over the years, but while they were all clearly superior to VHS, they offered nothing truly interesting, useful, or more intuitive than VHS. Now, take DVD, which offers not only greater storage, but chapter skip, no need to rewind and is generally easier and less messy than VHS. But you ever wonder why the controls for the DVD are virtually identical to VHS controls? It's because VHS controls were so fantastically intuitive, that attempting to rewrite the whole thing would have been asking for failure. Instead, they expanded the existing interface to adopt the added features, and focused on what DVD really offered, greater utility than VHS, and something generally more interesting (which is why special features are so prevalent on DVDs, it's a primary selling point of the advance in technology).
Fast forward to Blu-ray, what does Blu-ray offer over DVD? It's not more interesting, it doesn't really offer anything new, it's not more useful as it has all the same features and tools as DVD, and it's not more intuitive, it's using the same control interface we've been using for years. All it offers is greater space and greater quality, and if greater quality were enough to convince the mass market to upgrade, we'd all have been using laserdiscs years ago.
The Wii hits all 3 of these points. It is more interesting than what the PS3/360 have to offer because of the simple fact that it is different. When the same status quo has existed for 10-12 years (3d gaming of the PS1-PS2 generations) anything that is completely unlike the status quo is automatically more interesting, because it is
different. It doesn't have to be better, that's not what people care about, all they care about is something that can grab their attention.
It is more useful. The Wii has a controller that allows you to do things the PS3/360 can't really emulate, and it also perfectly accepts their control schemes as well. It has the highest level of usability of all 3 consoles because it offers the most options.
It is more intuitive. Aside from the simple fact of the Wiimote itself, which mimics tools and technology the general public is already used to, the interface of the Wii menu itself is extremely focused on ease of use and transparency, and more than that, it uses a metaphor with which we're all already familiar, that of channels on a television.
When making tech for the mass market, the better tech is
almost never the tech that wins out. The tech that is the most usable, easiest to learn, and most different wins. And that's what the Wii offers. So yes, by those 3 criteria, the Wii
does offer a better gaming experience, from the perspective of the general public.
Personally, i would say that it's dynamic, new gameplay propositions that the controller offers are "neutralized" by it's technical shortcomings in many fields (not just raw power).
It's new gameplay propositions are not neutralized by it's technical shortcomings. They're completely irrespective of them. The only weakness the Wii has in the gameplay department is it's newness, the fact that people just do not know how to make games to use the versatility and power it does offer, because developers are not used to thinking in that fashion. Wii controls are not a matter of tech, the Wiimote is a hell of a lot more technologically advanced than people give it credit for, and it does a lot of things that devs never use, because there's no apparent gameplay advantage to those things. But just because it's not apparent doesn't mean it isn't there. Only time will tell what all the Wiimote has to offer, but already it's offering things that people were not finding in the previous generation, and are not finding on other consoles in this generation, and that
interests people and excites them.
I'm not denying that marketing is a major, major part of it all. Marketing always plays it's part. But the Wii hits all the necessary points to market entertainment technology. The PS3 hits only one, and the 360 hits none.
