A series of posts and my own response on The Wiire encouraged me to write this followup.
I have read and responded to many comments here and on Blogcritics…many well reasoned arguments that have caused excellent debate.
Now, I obviously expected to take backlash from this article. I’m well aware of the excitement being generated over the Nintendo Wii and I think it’s great that many gamers seem up to the challenge of a completely new style of play. It’s promising.
I’ve been writing about games and technology for a long time and based on what I said in my article, It is my opinion that the Wii will be ahead of its time and end up #3 over its lifespan compared to Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.
But certainly, if we’re going that way, Wii will open the door to a future generation of “player motion” consoles. The main point of my article, however, was that I don’t think gamers are 100 percent ready for a total immersion into this completely new technology and never-before-seen style of play.
You are definitely, definitely looking at an Xbox 360 screenshot
I gave the Sony controller points–knowing full well that it doesn’t have the same capabilities as the Wii Remote–because it is a “baby step” into this technology. I never said it was a better controller, and it might not be in the end. But it is a conservative step in an industry where major innovations (changes) seem to always have a guinea pig. Sony’s marketing has been terrible with regards to the Playstation 3. Their E3 showing, as we all know, was shameful. I properly prodded Sony for that and even hinted that the departure of a major public relations person at Sony might be related to their E3 failure.
The Nintendo Wii E3 video is a work of genius. It shows a diverse age group, including people that don’t normally play video games such as grandmothers and an older couple playing a golf game. From a public relations perspective, it’s perfect. If it works, this effort will go down in history as one of the great technology marketing initiatives.
Major changes like this have always taken a few steps to become mainstream. The analog stick that we saw on the Nintendo 64 took a lot of criticism but now analog is the standard on this generation of consoles. It took the N64 to get us ready for it. The D-pad back in those days was another revolution that gamers took their time warming up to at first.
Maybe ‘fail’ was a strong word to use. I meant that in terms of market share being below the competition over the next few years–much like I predicted about the Dreamcast several years ago.
The Wii will be the first step toward what could be a new standard of playing, but my point is that history shows that new standards are rarely completely ingrained in American video game culture with the first try, which happens to be the Nintendo Wii in this case.
So, critique the article and argue with me, but please take the time to read the whole article first, and I don’t respond to personal attacks. (I actually got an e-mail saying: “I didn’t read your article, but you’re a moron for saying that!”) I’ve responded to some good comments on here as well as Blogcritics that were completely against my argument, but that were well reasoned and thought out.
As for the screenshots, the one in question is assuredly from the Xbox 360. You can click HERE to verify that. That link will take you to the EA Sports E3 shots for Madden 07 on the Xbox 360.