Wii U Speculation Thread The Third: Casting Dreams in The Castle of Miyamoto

It's most likely still a racing game, just something with a bigger focus on characters. Maybe F-Zero. If they're even still working with Nintendo, that is.

True, F-Zero did have a massive amount of characters and if you add in detailed ending videos there could be a lot of work involved there.
 
Donkey Kong--yes.

Wario--No.

I think the game has to be big enough to make people want to buy the system. Another DKC will do that, as the first one sold REALLY well.

I still don't get the argument that releasing a Mario game would "overshadow" 3rd parties. That's ridiculous.

Why wouldn't a Mario game overshadow 3rd parties? When casual consumers are looking at a launch game for the Wii U and see Mario, many would buy pick Mario out of brand assurance/familiarity. 3rd party games would get passed over by at least a percentage of potential consumers.

If this happens, then I can bet my hat that 3rd parties will start whining that they're 'competing' with Nintendo on their home ground and just can't win.

Even Iwata seemed to pick up on this and deliberately left the launch window of the 3DS wide open for 3rd parties to exploit. Too bad the 3DS was overpriced and had no appealing launch software. However, with Wii U, if they put something out like DK at launch, not only do they secure strong sales + increased install base, they also won't risk displeasing 3rd parties as much.

No news makes IceDoesntHelp something something

No news makes IceDoesntHelp change her cute avatar into some monstrosity?
 
That's a job for a ragdoll system, not really something that requires a dedicated character animator. Especially not someone with a movie industry background.

Ragdolls handle falling off fine, but not getting back on.

Could we maybe be looking at some stunts? Standing on the handlebars, that sort of thing? That'd be the purview of a character animator.

(Also: The same principle could well apply to jetskis instead of bikes. Or indeed snowboards. On which note, I'm mildly surprised they've never integrated those three franchises into a single game, or at least a single brand. They're conceptually similar enough, I think; indeed, the fact that Ricky Winterborn's been in both Wave Race and 1080 suggests that it's something they're toying loosely with.)
 
With my luck, that'll be me on Launch Day: open box, celebrate shine get, drop prize.

Search/wait all week for replacement..

realistically speaking, isn't the screen going to be pretty tough since it's resistive? I mean the DS screen is pretty hard to scratch permanently.
 
(Also: The same principle could well apply to jetskis instead of bikes. Or indeed snowboards. On which note, I'm mildly surprised they've never integrated those three franchises into a single game, or at least a single brand. They're conceptually similar enough, I think; indeed, the fact that Ricky Winterborn's been in both Wave Race and 1080 suggests that it's something they're toying loosely with.)
Remember when 1080 Avalanche was called 1080 White Storm?
Anyway, ExciteWave? ExciteBoard? Why not.

If Monster really are making ExciteBike, they'll finally have a hit.
 
I thought they were bigger than that, looked em up. First one did 1.5m in US alone but sales seemed to slow and 3 only did 1.3 worldwide.

if a new metroid would trend like MP3 that wouldn't be enough for launch... add pikmin to that and i think that would be ok still leaving some leverage to third parties.

or release a DKC game and no pikmin...
 
realistically speaking, isn't the screen going to be pretty tough since it's resistive? I mean the DS screen is pretty hard to scratch permanently.

True. In my experience, I've had to hold my DS screen up to the light at certain angles in order to see scratches. Nintendo is usually pretty savvy when it comes to choosing screens, thank goodness.

(and Krev: I love your avatar!)
 
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How long to wait to post?
 
True. In my experience, I've had to hold my DS screen up to the light at certain angles in order to see scratches. Nintendo is usually pretty savvy when it comes to choosing screens, thank goodness.

(and Krev: I love your avatar!)

nintendo is pretty savvy when it comes to hw, period.
and that's the reason why they do not want clicky sticks, imho
 
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How long to wait to post?

That train is reversing. Probably about right.
 
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How long to wait to post?

May take a few months for his account to be approved. I think mine took around 3/4 months to be approved.

...that's true?
thanks!

Yay, Rhythm Heaven!
 
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How long to wait to post?

up to one year, and no, i'm not kidding
 
Mine was over 6 months, and I thought that was bad.

Considering they just sent through a wave of Juniors about a month ago, I think anyone who just recently entered the queue will be waiting for some time.
 
You're kidding right? Mine took 3/4 months.

and why did you change your cute avatar to this monstrosity?

one happened a couple of times iirc, but 2 seems weird to me too...

gaf accounts are approved in bulk, so if you are lucky you may even have to wait for just a couple of days...
 
I know two people whose accounts took about two years to get approved. They were both approved recently (a month or two ago, IIRC).


gaf accounts are approved in bulk, so if you are lucky you may even have to wait for just a couple of days...
Yup.
 
Return to Excitebike, perhaps? 'Character' could be referring to the visible riders of the bikes. With all of the crashes/moves/etc, there are a ton of things to deal with.

I'd welcome a return to Excitebike with open arms.

Character likely refers to anything that has a Skeleton attached to it, which I am pretty sure would not count out Excite Bots. (it could also simply refer to vehicles in general, which wouldn't count out excite truck either)
 
Why wouldn't a Mario game overshadow 3rd parties? When casual consumers are looking at a launch game for the Wii U and see Mario, many would buy pick Mario out of brand assurance/familiarity. 3rd party games would get passed over by at least a percentage of potential consumers.

If this happens, then I can bet my hat that 3rd parties will start whining that they're 'competing' with Nintendo on their home ground and just can't win.

Even Iwata seemed to pick up on this and deliberately left the launch window of the 3DS wide open for 3rd parties to exploit. Too bad the 3DS was overpriced and had no appealing launch software. However, with Wii U, if they put something out like DK at launch, not only do they secure strong sales + increased install base, they also won't risk displeasing 3rd parties as much.



No news makes IceDoesntHelp change her cute avatar into some monstrosity?


And exactly that is the reason why Nintendo will receive all the support from 3rd parties that they want!!
See, imo 3rd parties dont want Nintendo to go SEGAs way, they fear that.
Why?
If Nintendo manages to sell 25.000.000 copies of a game on a single plattform - how much will it be on 2 or 3 plattforms?!

Honestly I dont think that it will be a prob if a Mario game is there for start or at any other point. Its something completly different to other games. (and you will not only buy one game or?)
 
Why wouldn't a Mario game overshadow 3rd parties? When casual consumers are looking at a launch game for the Wii U and see Mario, many would buy pick Mario out of brand assurance/familiarity. 3rd party games would get passed over by at least a percentage of potential consumers.

If this happens, then I can bet my hat that 3rd parties will start whining that they're 'competing' with Nintendo on their home ground and just can't win.

3rd parties have to deal with that with every system, not just Nintendo.

If the game is of high enough quality and gets people's attention, it won't matter if a Mario game is out or not. That's the 3rd party's problem.
 
Waiting for news back when I was 12+ was a lot more bearable when we didn't have 24/7 gaming news sites. I relied mostly on magazines and looked forward to them each month. Was so excited when the magazine would mention e3 coming up in the next months issue. Now I spend a year waiting, picking like a vulture at any morsel we can find. Would love to go back to the days when e3 would sneak up on me.

Yeah, I know what you mean.
 
I couldn't see anyone else having a stab at trying to answer this -- I'm no expert, but my understanding of it would be something like this:

Although you might have small dedicated lines of laptops (think Acer Timeline or something), they do actually share components with millions of other laptops and computer devices. i3/i5/i7 compatible motherboards are in everything these days, memory is standard, they use standard (onboard or otherwise) mobile graphics parts from ATI and Nvidia, they all use similar broadcom (or other) wireless interfaces, they all have mass produced cooling solutions, mass produced hard disks, mass produced optical drives, mass produced LCDs and so forth. Yields are high and sold to multiple manufacturers, so by virtue, the hardware comes cheaper. If you get a laptop that is doing something special - like if it has the Macbook air style form factor, or if it has a 10+ hour battery life and amazing graphics, you quickly find that the price goes above and beyond $500 because it is more specialised. OEMs have bulk licensing deals on the OS, so that isn't as burdensome a cost as you might think.

In a console, everything about the architecture is customised. Memory isn't just slapped onto the board, the whole architecture is designed to work optimally with the other 'known' components, the CPU will be a customised variant of an existing product, but it will have redundant instruction sets culled, special ones added, it'll be clocked and optimised for gaming, and perhaps unified with other components in a System On Chip design. They will attempt to eradicate or compensate for all bottlenecks. There will be specific design decisions made to reflect security concerns, for example - the starlet ARM based chip in the Wii handled a lot of security functions, the Matsushita drive design was designed to perform differently from a regular DVD drive and also had special security instructions built in. In essence, I can say this in a much simpler way - consoles require much more specialised and targetted R&D / testing at the hardware level. Then you should factor in any R&D needed on peripherals, SDK / engine licensing costs (although these should be factored into the cost of a dev kit, the manufacturer may choose to eat costs in order to encourage support), the cost of ongoing support and maintenance... it all adds up.

All of this said, a $199-250 new console could probably perform appreciably better for gaming than a similarly priced laptop will come this fall. At least for a short while.

Thanks for taking the trouble. This was kind of the answer i was expecting, but i'm not entirely on board here. First of all, i'm making a double argument. Partly about heat and cooling in a small budget casing. Partly about hardware cost. Concerning heat, i don't understand why it would be impossible for Nintendo to get the needed cooling when budget laptops can too.

As for hardware power/cost. How much would standard laptop hardware outperform a 360 at the moment? I expect it to be better on all accounts except the GPU? Drop the screen, battery, harddrive, keyboard, OS... and you're basically left with the key components, yet might have easily shaved off some 30% or maybe more of overall costs (this number randomly pulled out of my finely shaped buttox). Take an aditional loss and put some of that budget towards a better GPU. Then wouldn't Nintendo be able to use basic laptop tech (including mainboards etc), put it into a small casing, with a fraction of R&D costs, and sell it at a small loss at 350 bucks, while easily more than outperforming the 360 two times?

I'm sure this is a rather naive way of looking at things, but one has to wonder with current low-end PC tech outperforming the 360 so easily.
 
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How long to wait to post?
Fail

I see no E3 Bear
 
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