I'm going to take you back in time for a moment. E3 2005, the first official unveiling of the Wiimote/Nunchuck controllers. Wow, what a watershed moment. When few were bashed for saying something as blasphemous as "Okay, you have my attention, now what are you going to DO with it?" everyone else was in LOVE with the Wii. Nintendo, capitalizing off that love, said something inspiring. This is going to change the way you play games and offer a Nintendo console truly exclusive experiences. Everyone bought the hype.
Three years later, very few games have proven that concept true but titles like Boom Blox and Mario Galaxy justified the differences in the controller setup. We all knew the graphics weren't going to be great on the console, it was the experience they were selling. Regardless, company after company tried to create that "true Wii" experience. Everytime, we get people wanting said game off of the platform.
This sentiment isn't new either. It's been around for a long, long time. Take Rocket Knight Adventures. "If it was on SNES, it could have a richer palette, better sound, and sell 100 times more copies like Acro the Acrobat." Really now? What was the basis for this arguement? Who's to say all that wasn't out of budget for Konami? And better sound?!? RKA was hardly stretching the Genesis abilities, let alone tapping into a Sony sound chip in SNES. But the arguement persists today with any console exclusive and with one base reason, jealousy.
"Uncharted is too good for Sony fans"
"Gears would be better with a Wiimote"
"Conduit would look much better on PS3"
Idiotic statements not really meant to insult the game, but rather showing a mental belittling of the system. The advanced layers of this phenominon turns incredibly ugly and effects metacritic userscores and just genuinely makes asses out of all gamers.
"Uncharted 2 is for stupid people who are dumb."
"Gears 2 is about as awesome as a cancerous tumor on your nose that looks like a rancor"
"Mario Galaxy? More like Mario Faggotry."
If you can make a legitimate arguement about your hopes, I'm all for it. But nine times of ten, it's typically "I can't have it, so it's shit." Now despite the victim claims from many Wii fanboys, they aren't really embroiled in the real war (check user reviews of PS360 marque titles sometime before playing the victim that not everybody likes Mario Kart and WiiFit), which is good. But along comes any number of Wii Exclusives and typically the first question is why it isn't on PS360.
Normally, I'm not one to defend Wii and even had an apparently anti-wii blogpost here where I argued some of my feelings towards the $50 Wiigame price tag. But ever since Epic Mickey has been rumored, I've seen a steady stream of "Why is this on the Wii?" and "I want this in high def" comments from both blogposts and podcasts. What we know about this game is still basically nothing and comments of this nature assume two distinctly different things.
1. Epic Mickey is NOT designed specifically for the Wii in the integral gameplay aspect. If the Wiimote/Nunchuck combo is the core of the design, this would make porting difficult/stupid and we still have NO fucking clue about the gameplay.
2. Epic Mickey has, of course, the much larger budget required to develop high resolution content. The assumption here is that Warren Spectre still pulls in an enormous amount of clout and Disney is more than willing to funnel vasts amounts of resources into an unproven concept. Who footed the bill for Kingdom Hearts again? Oh yeah, Square. Who's to say this game project has the monetary support to be a PS360 game? Gamers? Yes, they are VERY generous with other peoples money while buying used games or waiting for anticipated titles to hit clearance bins, but I digress.
All of this is building towards one central point. Let Nintendo Wii have the fucking console exclusive. Let game consoles in general have their exclusives without bitching. A company had SOME business plan in action when they started development and we, as outsiders, have no clue what that is. So lets quit pretending and let every console have exclusive reasons to own it.
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As much of a Nintendo fan I am, I am putting green eyes in Uncharted 2 and Brutal Legend. They are looking stupid brilliant. Still I do not try to draw lines begging a Wii port or something liek that. (you do know what happened with Dead Rising after all)
Competition is what breeds innovation. Period. Evidence of this is all around. Even in the PSP vs DS war. DS came out, sucked major ass, and was a lazy launch all around. This is because DS, unlike GBA, was not launched in the middle of a handheld war. PSP hit the scene with a killer launch, started doing very well, and ONLY THEN was Nintendo compelled to step up their game. Console exclusives are what drives a company out do competing console exclusives. Without them, the game industry as a whole would be stagnant as a mother. Everything being multiplatform would kill innovation and more importantly, hardware cycles.
@ShawnKelfonne,
That would be a valid point made if most of the people saying this were not professed Wii owners. I think your stance falls a little more in the "Wii are victims of gamer mainstream" category. My stance is we have not seen realtime assets, or gameplay, or even know what the gameplay is like. They also assume the budget for Epic Mickey is huge. There is a REASON why it's a Wii game. Not knowing anything about it yet demanding it would be better on a beefier system is just wrong.