Well well, looks like I’m not the only one a little disappointed with the Wii’s capabilities. Take a look at this gem unearthed by IGN today at GDC. Combined with what Sony did today and what we’ve seen from Microsoft, how is it even possible that Nintendo can compete? — I’d tell you the latest rumor we heard here about Nintendo, but then I’d have my fingers chopped off by men in masks. One of the devs on Spore had this to say about the wonderful Wii:
During a session at GDC this morning entitled “Burning Mad – Game Publishers Rant,” time was taken about half way through to allow developers a chance to spew their own rants. One speaker, Chris Hecker, currently working on Spore at Maxis, took the opportunity to call out Nintendo for not taking games seriously.
“The Wii is a piece of s***!” Hecker began his talk, which was called “Fear of a Wii Planet.” He blasted a few bars of Public Enemy to set the tone. Hecker said the Wii is nothing more than two GameCubes stuck together with duct tape, and that the console isn’t powerful enough to provide the next-gen experience he has been waiting for.
Rant continued after the jump.
Haterade much?
Although he stated the system is “severely underpowered,” Hecker noted that he wasn’t simply referring to the Wii’s graphical capabilities. He wants to spend a console’s CPU making games more intelligent, and he has found the Wii doesn’t have the power to process things like complicated AI.
Hecker also took Nintendo to task for not taking games seriously enough. “It’s not clear to me that Nintendo gives a s*** about games as an art form,” he said. To illustrate his point, he searched for references to games as art on all three console manufacturers web sites. While he found numerous such references on both the official PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 sites, Wii.com had none at all. He then shared quotes from executives at Sony and Microsoft talking about games as a serious artistic medium, and then a quote from a Nintendo executive saying the company only wanted to make “fun” games.
Hecker ended his spirited rant with two demands for Nintendo: First, recognize and push games as serious art. And two, “make a console that doesn’t suck ass.”
