Sketchy Fletchy

Wii guitar makes perfect sense. They can make it cheaper by essentially making it an extension peripheral connected to the wiimote (like the nunchuk attachment), neatly avoiding the need to develop and manufacture all the wireless electronics.

Basically, they can make it cheaper and easier because the wiimote already provides the wireless communications and button press interpretation hardware (and even the tilt measuring) with a ready, extensible interface. The guitar is just a shell.

It's true, the Governmennt here has entirely ignored videogames as a growth industry in a flagged IT market, where there is a shitload of interested and talented young programmers and content creators coming into the industry right now and being somewhat disappointed when the best they can get in the gaming industry is a job with a spinoff (read 'Tax writeoff') studio of a US company, or a pokie machine manufacturer. Honestly, I think most people outside of Australia would be quite surprised at just how many of our young programmers, etc., move overseas once qualified so they can become a game developer. There's quite a lot of Aussies in the industry, just that they're not... Y'know... Here in Australia.

But, then, being interested in living 50 years in the past is pretty typical of our government at the moment.

Considering that typically in the past most people here in Australia didn't really 'get' the Nintendo ethos, this is a huge turnaround.

It's mainly because they put up a good public profile, promoted the Wii well (Nintendo of Australia almost NEVER advertise. Anything. Ever.), didn't make stupidly large public cock-ups and treat their fanbase like arseholes (I'm looking at you Sony), and priced the damn thing reasonably (remember, out here, Wii=$400, XBox360=$600-$700, PS3=$1000)!

Sadly, the Xbox 360 still has bogan appeal (a fact I despise immensely) as it basically plays sports games, racing games or shooting games (by which I mean Halo).

But yeah - go Wii down under!

Also, just quietly, I think Nintendo should be paying me on commission, 'cause just from taking my Wii around to parties and getting people to try it out at my place, I reckon I've sold about 12 of the things. :D

You know what, if this was the original prototype put forward by sony, I can see why Nintendo might have dropped it. Notice the complete lack of Nintendo badging? Notice the entirely non-descript lack of nintendo console design? Notice the big Sony nametag in prominent place on the front of the thing?

If I was involved in management of this project from the Nintendo side, of course I'd see that as dodgy. To be perfectly honest, I'm not even sure that Sony were ever really keen to continue along a collaboration path. Even if this product saw light of day, I think it highly likely Sony would still have gone off and produced their own console in direct competition after getting a leg up and a shitload of information of Nintendo.

I'd actually prefer they only tell us the basics - only the sort of stuff that appears in the manual. Half the fun of early life cycle play in SSB games is the 'HOLY SHIT' factor of unlocking new characters, items, levels, etc.

Personally, I wanna know a little - the starting roster for instance. You know, the characters useable from the get go. The initially available levels. Basic game modes and control scheme.

But I don't want all the information on everyone that's gonna be in it, the nuances of every item and level, etc. I want them to be a surprise, and I'm pretty certain that's why they've been so tight lipped about all this stuff up until now. I certainly don't want to know what 3rd party characters are gonna be in it until I've unlocked them.

I'm not even sure I'll keep checking the SSBB site, purely for that reason. That, and the fact thatI'm sure everything will be echoed here at Wii Fanboy, so when that all important release date gets announced I can check it then. :D

MUSE!

F#$% YES.

Take it easy, all - the page still says 'starts today'.

My guess is, they're waiting 'til all you buggers over the pond are asleep so the site server doesn't get raped with video stream requests. Haha! Being in a nearer timezone to Japan is awesome. Yay Australia! ;P

And now, back on topic...

Yeah, I'd say trailer, probably containing one or two new characters (but I think they'll still mostly be a surprise...), and hopefully a release date. Please? A release date? PLEASEPLEASEPLEASE?!?

This product is bullshit.

Make sure you vent into a free air space and you're golden. YOU DO NOT NEED AN EXTERNAL FAN.

Ironically, the act of connecting said fan is only likely to cause the console to heat up more, as USB power transmission is not the most efficient of beasts and generates quite a lot of heat inside the device when enough power is drawn to, say, power a fan.

Personally, I think there's a plateau of the importance of graphics. If graphical quality is so poor that it affects gameplay (for instance, it's hard to discern objects that may be important to the game or frame rate drops to that of a slideshow) then yes it's important. But once you get past a certain level of detail it's just extra work. It's true, good quality graphics can put the extra polish on a game that makes it really memorable, but unless there's gameplay to support it, what's the point?

I agree with the general argument here that the perceived poor quality of Wii's graphics can be attributed to either (a) Third party devs porting over last gen titles + waggle or (b) Third party devs rushing games out the door without the full development cycle or funding apparently spent on some other titles. If you look at the machine specs and compare them on hardware alone, a Wii outstrips and XBOX. For that matter, there were relatively few titles that ever really took advantage of everything the gamecube had to offer graphically, so even if it is just two GCN's duct taped together, that's a powerful little box you got right there.

It will just be a matter of time - be patient, the goodies are coming. Please, Nintendo - release Brawl or Corruption or Galaxy soon and show the third parties just what the box can do! And third party developers: if you're gonna make a Wii game, MAKE A WII GAME. Don't make a crappy cut down port of something else you've got in the pipeline for the X360, don't port a PS2 title, do something original and actually follow through on what you say you're committed to (that's right EA, I'm looking at you).

How the hell did people manage to come to the conclusion that the PS2 and Wii are in a similar league of graphical prowess anyway? That's just ridiculous.