I'm agreeing that it's time... the original SNES Star Fox was always billed as a technological powerhouse for the hardcore gamer.  The amusing-but-telling tag line was "why go to the next level, when you could go centuries beyond?" - a jab at SEGA's "welcome to the next level" slogan - and the unique take on 3D gaming was really striking (and felt revolutionary) at the time.

Point being, Star Fox was made as a showcase for a system's capabilities... it was made for mind-bending presentational feats.  The 64 version may not have felt so revolutionary, but it still wowed gamers of its time with its cinematic flair (of rare depth for Nintendo at that time) and its epic action set-pieces.

What better way could there be to introduce gamers to the nascent possibilities inherent to the new hardware than to blow them away with a spectacular, fast-paced adventure with mind-blowing visuals, epically-captivating and imaginative alien environments, and the kind of immersive control experience that could only be available on the WiiU?

It is more likely that Microsoft will release a new console first, but that is not going to be a "super-machine". It will probably be an upgrade of the 360; with Kinect built-in, more ram and use a bigger optical disc capacity. Anything "extra" is likely to be little more than "tweaks".

This seems likely to me, as well.... "elite" editions with some better individual parts (like storage or RAM) or new bundle options for the 360 would make more sense than a new console at a time when anything they could sell for less than $1000 would be only marginally more powerful than WiiU.

As far as the "worry", however... I wouldn't be worried even if MS or PS announced a new console at E32012. Why in the world would that be worrisome? If they want to try to force their install base to purchase a new piece of tech that offers them no real, new play experiences (other than, perhaps, a few more assets from current generation game engines), then good on them. Wii owners have a reason to upgrade, as do the owners of other consoles (due to the controller and the prospect of some truly great IPs in HD for the first time), but PS or MS owners really don't.

But the Dreamcast was more powerful than everything else at its time and easy to develop for, yet nobody flocked to it.

Too true... the hope for the Nintendo console has never been in its superior power.  

It seems that the new system will be adequately powerful, and it is nice to have a system that is relatively up to par with the market... but the real question has always been about the games.  Will Nintendo give us some real, quality 1st/2nd party titles (as well as new, exciting IPs), and will they adequately court quality 3rd party developers?  

Second to this has to be the concern of the online functionality... Will they develop a substantial community network, and will the social buzz be attractive enough to establish a real, involved community of gamers?

I HAVE to think that the only reason you would choose Xbox over Nintendo if you had to choose would be because of these issues... am I right?  Nintendo's hardware has always had impressive quality in terms of reliability and true control innovation (I, for one, would drop my Xbox in a second if there were anything worthwhile to play on my Nintendo systems).  This reinforces to me that Nintendo really must put their focus on these areas...

There are a LOT of very reasonable responses to the original "worries" being posted here, so I won't waste everyone's time by reiterating. I would only add that Nintendo does, in fact, have to "worry" about about its competition... though certainly not, as others have so eloquently explained, because of the obvious fact that its tech will be somewhat "behind" them.

Nintendo's only real worry is the same as it always has been - to stay relevant to a market with decidedly Western tastes and a voracious appetite for social networking. Nintendo has been struggling for a while with these elements... and I think that it is ultimately this battle that will decide the "console war" for this next cycle. Can Nintendo make games that capture the Western imagination (which means some new IPs), and can they keep us connected in the way that we have come to expect from any/all of our electronic devices? I don't know... but I hope so.

MH shouldnt have a difficulty setting, that would be ridiculous.

I could not agree more with this statement... Monster Hunter KILLED me with its difficulty at various points along the way, but that's what is so fun about it. Once you accomplish one seemingly impossible task, you feel like the ultimate bad-a for a while... then you get to move on to the next seemingly impossible task. This is a huge part of what kept my interest, and kept me committed to the game for 600+ hours to date. There is plenty to do in the game when you are "stuck" at a particularly difficult monster.

I think Jikayaki's (very valid) point is that a console version of Monster Hunter simply WILL NOT sell as well as a portable version, even though it costs more to make... at least as long as the franchise remains mainly a Japanese affair.

For reference, Monster Hunter Tri has sold roughly 1 million copies in Japan (the US numbers are rather abysmally low in comparison).

Monster Hunter Portable 3rd, for the PSP, was released the very next year and has sold more than 4.5 million copies to date (and is still going relatively strong).

Console versions just don't make business sense to Capcom...

I would be really excited about this (I'm a HUGE fan of Tri, as it was literally the only Wii game to accumulate a somewhat shocking 500 hours of play time)... but I'm not sure how likely it will be to see the light of day on WiiU.

Tri always had a very strong, dedicated online presence on the Wii, but compared to the franchise's typical audience (PSP and PS2, mostly in Japan) the numbers were abysmally low (the PSP Monster Hunter game following Tri went multi-platinum on day one in Asian markets)!

HD Monster Hunter seems like a no-brainer to me. I think it would look awesome, and they could get rid of some of the annoying parts of the game (like the lack of realistic monster interactivity/ecosystem awareness) and add tons of weapons, locations, and new monsters. To make such a game, however, they would have to pretty much ignore their demographics data, which suggests that the people who are really going to buy their game mostly play old, clunky handhelds!

it's true that the current trend seems to be devices that can "do it all" - and that makes sense to me. It feels clunky to have to fire up a desktop computer when my ipad can really do most of what I want on a regular basis. I think that Nintendo is right about the cost/benefit not being in their favor (with features such as DVD playback), but the perceived lack of functionality could really hurt them if they don't completely fill the niche of what their product CAN do. When you have products on the market that can functionally serve as total media hubs, it's starting to look clunky to have a console that just "console"s. I think that Nintendo will have to take full advantage of web/bluetooth/streaming functionality with this console... because people have just come to expect a lot of options from their electronic devices.

Yeah... I'm with TRON in his disappointment that Nintendo did not push for better tech.  HOWEVER, I get Nintendo's reasoning for not doing so.

Cutting edge tech would make the system very pricey, and Nintendo knows that it can't push its luck with the market (especially after losing the confidence of so many gamers and developers with the Wii).  Better tech means even longer development cycles for the developers that even bother to take advantage of the hardware (and many won't take advantage of it for many years), and even selling hardware at a huge loss, I doubt that many gamers are ready to pay the $600-$800 that Nintendo would have to sell the console for.

The cost/benefit curve just drops off so steeply after a certain point... it would be hard to maintain a solvent business model selling consoles that offer marginally better partical/lighting effects and reflection mapping than a PS3, but for more than twice the price.  You and I might take the plunge, but I'm guessing (from the sales data on high-end graphics cards, if nothing else) that not many others will.

Give me some insane speed, some mind-bending tracks, and some killer music and I am SO THERE!!!

As long as it includes user names, friends list, voice chat, a messaging system and all that other good stuff I'll be fine with it. It'd be cool if Nintendo could take some tips from Steam and have instantly changable display names, community groups etc. as well.

Yeah, see, this is what actually makes me WANT a pay service.  I agree that Nintendo will most likely NOT charge for a unified online service... but what this leaves open (and what some of Ninty's own comments and the comments from EA have seemed to indicate) is that the online play component will be fragmented into a plethora of individual services on a company-by-company basis, some charging and some not.  In Japan, Monster Hunter Tri has its own subscription fee for online play, and other games have fees of their own... it's the 'friend code' headache all over again, but this time one that potentially involves me subscribing to a different service every time I want to play a new game online... and if I have to pay $5-10 USD to get a robust, intuitive, unified online experience, so be it.

No i dont think they will charge.

With that being said i find it to be rather annoying that everybody wants nintendo to have a better online service then xbox live and psn yet they arent willing to pay.

this.  people are used to receiving robust social networking services for free, and I get the feeling of not quite being certain about what Xbox is actually selling you with the Live service... but really, a clean, intuitive interface that brings all gaming and media services together under one gamer ID?  It's a valuable service to me, at least.

Sony/Nintendo IP trading system..yep.that's what we need. Nintendo gets to build a LBP, GOW and Resistance..Sony gets to build a Mario, Zelda and Kirby....

My brain almost crashed trying to contemplate this idea... it'll never, ever happen, but it's a fun thought experiment. I don't know that the relevant studios would exactly know what to do with the genres, though...

For example, imagine a Zelda where you can travel between different times.

Man, the number of good possibilities like this is just staggering... X-ray glasses for Bond, Thermal Scopes for FPS, time or dimensional warp sight for supernatural/sci-fi games and thrillers (like that new Amy game, where the same space keeps shifting between the real world and the parallel hell dimension)... one doesn't know where to begin.

Of course, like others have said, it REALLY all depends on the games that developers actually make. Ideas are great, but until they put some sort of wonder-developer's-kit into each of our hands and tell us to go to town making our own games, we needs some solid 3rd party interest and some green lights from major publishers.

Also, I agree that the system itself is not perfect. It would generate a LOT of confidence from the market to see some announcements made about price point, about hard-and-fast hardware specs, etc. It would also restore a lot of confidence from the die-hard fan base to see Nintendo listen to some of the criticisms about the controller (i.e. lack of analog triggers), even if they seem petty to some. A few loud and happy fanatics go a LONG way in today's guerrilla marketing scene (at least if Nintendo genuinely cares about the so-called "hardcore" market).

Surprisingly, I am NOT as tired of this kind of earnest plea from gamers as I am from Ninty fanboys pretending that they don't know what people mean by "hardcore", and then insulting them or insinuating that they are immature for pointing out the obvious fact that the majority of people who spend money on and play games enthusiastically (in the US, at least) are FAR more excited about Xbox360 games than they are about Wii games.

COME ON... everyone knows that when someone says "hardcore gamer" they mean "gamer that likes the games that it is currently fashionable to like" - games like Call of Duty. And for whatever reason, these really are the games that people want, and the games that they will pay for. There is nothing inherently WRONG with liking Call of Duty - just like there is nothing inherently immature about preferring a beautiful, rich aesthetic experience to... well, what the Wii offers.

Now, if someone comes out and says "Skyward Sword is a terrible game, and its graphics suck... I much prefer Modern Warfare 3 because its graphics are better" then please go ahead and school them for their obvious inability to appreciate artistic styling and depth of play experience. Otherwise... can we please be charitable to the intention of the poster?

See, the thing with these kinds of topics is that the damn console hasn't even been released yet and people are saying either WiiU blows because of it's specs or WiiU rocks because of it's specs, when the actual spec report hasn't even been released yet either. We won't truly know until the WiiU comes out, and even then, we still have to wait another year or so before PS4 and 720 get their chance in the spotlight. I can actually speculate on what the system would BE like, but most of you guys are already on the bandwagon and saying statements like "WiiU DEFINITELY will trample Sony and Microsoft" without even experiencing the actual consoles yet. This is why debates like these are pointless and ends up going nowhere.

QFT... while my GUESSES are certainly more in Desert Punk's realm, at the end of the day they are only guesses and nothing more... and it's healthy for me to remember that. All the logic and analysis of factual possibility in the world (or all the wishful thinking and selective quoatation of 'sources' in the world, for that matter) will not arrive at any kind of cartesian certainty about the WiiU's specs. For all we know, Nintendo could still decide to sell us a $600 console with a totally different enclosure design, which would feasibly allow them to include some high-end hardware (for a console)...

Now... for Nin_Stream's comments... I agree that Red Steel 2 and MadWorld both suited the Wii's abilities very well (as did Okami, WiiSports and a handful of others), which is why I mentioned the Skyward Sword example in the vain hope that readers would take the time to try to hear what I was saying before going into beast mode. Sure, the AI in MadWorld stinks and Red Steel 2 has some pretty severe frame-rate issues, but the cell-shaded look worked very well for the Wii, and I wish more developers had gone in that direction.

My original point was not that developers can't work within limitations... they've been doing that since the very beginning! My point was that there are many, many types of games out there with many different graphical styles, and a system hoping to achieve widespread acceptance should aim to create the kind of hardware that will support these games and these graphical styles. I repeat, there is nothing INHERENTLY wrong with liking Call of Duty. I personally do not enjoy it... but that doesn't mean there's something wrong with it. Some of the COD games have an engaging storyline in campaign and a fast-paced, tightly-built multiplayer component that competitive players really, really enjoy.

Here's the deal. I only ever owned Nintendo systems until I left for college (NES through N64), and I bought EVERY system (handhelds included). My brother bought a GameCube when I was at college, and I came home and played that on weekends too. I never got into Halo during the college days, even though it was all the rage, because I still preferred Smash Bros. when it came to competitive multiplayer fun, and I was loyal to the big N.

But it was the Xbox360 that brought me back to gaming after my college days were done (with no peer influence, as none of my adult friends play games). It was Gears of War that filled me with the same awe and wonder at where games could take you - narratively and experientially - that I hadn't experienced since Mario64. Aesthetic complexity is a valid component of enjoyment in interactive media, as is the compelling mechanics of hitting cover hard and laying down suppresive fire so that your brother (who is playing with you cooperatively) can flank a hardened enemy position. Man, stuff like this is why we play games, just as much as the endearing characters, deep exploration, and head-scratching puzzles in a game like Zelda are why we play games. Have you ever just stared at some of the buildings in the first GoW game, as the dust swept across the ruined landscape and sun filtered through the cracks in the windows? The point is that you can like both (or even just one) without villifying the other.

If Nintendo is trying to draw in a large variety of gamers, it needs to pay attention to what a large variety of gamers want, and to provide a system that will accomodate them. That is all I'm saying.

The only console I ever pre-ordered was the N64, because it gave me Mario 64 and a real Pilotwings game on day one, with Shadows of the Empire right on their heels. Those games BLEW MY MIND at the time, especially Mario. I'm just not sure that they could impress me again in the same way, and if they could, it would *probably* take more than a Mario game.

If they give me a game that revolutionizes my play experience, I'll put money down tomorrow. Until they do, I'll wait and see what the catalog looks like a few months after release. I have not been genuinely impressed (in the way that Mario 64 impressed me) by a game since Gears of War, and that makes me sad... sad that it was Epic/Microsoft and not Nintendo that impressed me, and sad that Nintendo really hasn't stepped up to the plate in the intervening time.

The idea of Wii and its motion controls excited me, but the experience itself didn't live up to its promise (though I have had some pretty enjoyable moments with Wii Sports and Red Steel 2)... what I really wanted, a GOOD, realistic baseball experience, never came. The idea of the 3DS really excited me... but what do I play on it? Can Nintendo really not come up with anything more revolutionary (in terms of actual gaming experience) than what they did 15 years ago? I'm not looking for a "good" game... I'm looking for a game that fills me with wonder - a game that transports me. I would say that I'm being unrealistic if Nintendo hadn't done it before...

Come on big N, impress me!

Guys it is so bad, if its true..  That means also wii U will come without this special nintendo patent of blu ray disc? It will be discless? lol

Woah, calm down... he said that BOTH will be available.  They are introducing digital downloads (which is why he was talking about it so much, because it's new for them), but regular, hard-copy packaged games will still be available.  lol, I admire your ability to converse on a forum in your second (or third? how many do you speak?) language... it must give you a few scares every once in a while, though!

Is it certain that WiiU will not play DVDs or BluRay? I am one of those crazy people that do kinda care about this, if only because I like to keep the number of devices I have to keep connected down to a minimum.

Well, Nintendo and Google already do work together (on the ES operating system, at least), so it's not so farfetched a rumor as it might seem... still, it's my understanding that the controller itself only streams content (not generates it), so I don't think that the "tablet" itself will run an OS.

I would personally love to see Nintendo team up with a marketplace like Android to provide media content... that would mean a lot more content with a lot less burden on Nintendo!

Yeah, running UE3 in some form is not a big deal (even the iPhone can do it)... as far as the iteration announced in that video goes, that requires DirectX11 compatibility (at last report), and thus probably won't run on the WiiU, whose latest spec announcements indicate that it will only support DirectX10.1... so, there will be more assets of UE3's current build that could be utilized on the WiiU than on the current gen systems, but the system will likely not support UE3's next steps (as demonstrated in that video).

Is ID Tech5 that good? I've looked up some screenshots of Rage and while it looks quite amazing for a current gen game (dat clouds! http://media.teamxbo.../1250708202.jpg and some nice rocks/shadows http://www.pcgamesha...90325093927.jpg ) I don't think it could compare with what UE 4 is likely to be. UE 3.5 impressed me more than IDT5.

I have to kind of agree that Rage doesn't look that good on a purely aesthetic level, but I might have to just blame the art resources for that.  stewox (and may others on these forums) are most likely admiring the engine on the level of programming and software development, I suppose... and of course the effects made possible using the engine itself are rather astounding.

thanks for sharing the Carmack video, stewox... hadn't seen that, or had forgotten about it.  I wonder, though, how may 3rd party developers are really going to bother developing "assembly-level" code specific to the WiiU hardware in order to fully utilize its power (or even write custom shaders to take advantage of the GPU's specific architecture)... it seems like even big studios have tended to balk at the process and give a "the-platform-doesn't-have-those-features" shrug.  and i get it... they're running a business and have to think about costs involved.  But in all honesty, do you believe that we will see a lot of developers focus on the WiiU in this way?

wow, this would be an interesting turn, indeed... I'm not inclined to believe it, as most of the "interviews" with "developers" that have been "leaked" (I put all of this in scare quotes in an attempt to acknowledge what everyone is constantly pointing out about the lack of any real method of confirmation) have referred to DirectX10 support only... but it would sure be nice.

i have a hard time seeing Nintendo spring for a powerful gpu... i just do.  the solid, quality, efficient ones are too expensive, and the alternatives are all too risky, inefficient, etc.  As you pointed out, Nintendo's hardware has been nothing if not reliable.

Wasnt direct X for Microsoft only?

well, technically DirectX is just a set of APIs that allow software to communicate with hardware... but yes, it was developed specifically by Microsoft for Microsoft, and is proprietary.  To my knowledge, Xbox/360 is the only console to actually use a version of DirectX.  Sony and Nintendo have their own libraries, optimised specifically to suite their graphics cards (and OS).  When people (well, me at least) talk about a console "supporting DirectX11", they are probably talking about the set of features supported by that version of Direct3D (the graphics API in the DirectX suite)... things like tesselation, multithread rendering, and some advanced blending modes.

Some of these features are really revolutionary, but they depend upon the GPU being able to receive certain kinds of programmable instructions...

I just hope that Nintendo's GPU is better than what we're being told!

tessellation is not a software feature, its a hardware feature, existed from 3xxx or 2xxx series amd cards (cant remember which nvidia series tessellation was a feature), they just used it very recently, its not because of direct x..  So basically Wii U is the first console that will use tessellation.

ok, yes... i was once again not being specific.  while "tessellation" has been around for a very long time, it is MUCH more effective in the latest batch of high-end GPUs, which allow displacement mapping to work seemlessly with streamlined, instantly-scaleable tessellation processes when over a billion triangles are being rendered at any given second - the parallel units (and engine rasters) allowing for a much more dynamic programmable pipeline...

... and, while the tessellation itself is handled by hardware, it seems pretty misleading to me to say that APIs like Direct3D have NOTHING to do with its effective implementation (but that may not have been your point)...

mostly to comfort others, that tessellation is not a microsoft protected thing... it is free for all, and wii U, will use that.  As many people think that this feature appeared in direct x 10-11, so it belongs to MS.. Its not true.. (direct x made use of it..)  Nintendo can update their api's and use it also.. simple as that.

ah... yes, good point.  i guess people do seem to think that tessellation was invented with DX11, lol (as if breaking polygons into smaller pieces was anything new)... and I definitely agree that Nintendo developers will be able to make use of some of these advanced processes (after all, many devs admitted that they could have pushed the wii a lot farther if they wanted too, even with the gpu's "fixed" pipeline, by emulating shaders using the wii processor's existing tools).  out of curiosity, do you personally think that the gpu Nintendo chooses will be a capable piece of hardware, able to support the kind of demanding processes that make cutting-edge graphics really "pop" these days?

Consoles don't rely on APIs - developers can suck out all the features and performance the hardware has, regardless of API features. But advanced machine code programming is very hard - only a few developers have the knowledge, skills and programming resources to fully ulitise the power - these are companies like ID Software, EPIC, Crytek ...etc ; Crytek doesn't have that much of a good skills for console games obviously in design/creativity - crysis 2 disaster.

So the capabilities of the console would appear more than actually when comparing raw hardware, to the equivalent performance on PC benchmarking since becase of all the  driver, API , OS overhead 40% of the performance is lost.

Good point to bring up.  Companies like High Voltage were able to squeeze a lot more out of the Wii's hardware because they were designing their engine from the ground up to be optimized for the Wii's exact hardware... knowing the precise CPU they were working with, they were able to tweak the code pretty specifically, even down to the level of writing some catered code in assembly language (I don't think anyone actually "writes" in machine language, do they?).  They were able to imitate several of the effects that PCs produce with shaders, by using the baked-in hardware features that the Wii's GPU did have.  Still, there are physical limitations imposed by "fixed" pipelines and built-in operations on the GPU... even The Conduit, while pretty "for the Wii", was nothing close to a comparable PS/360 title in terms of graphical performance.

Also, it is worth noting that, while it is technically possible to avoid using APIs at all in programming for a console like the Wii, the dev kits provided by Nintendo include APIs similar to OpenGL for graphics (which many low-end devs will use) and, as you said, very few developers producing cross-platform games are going to go through the immense effort of bypassing APIs (or even have the technical muscle to do so) when they code for the WiiU.  It's just not efficient!

Here's hoping that we get some intrepid devs on the platform, who are able to squeeze every last ounce out of that GPU...