That's the kind of nonsense I expect from a gamer brainwashed by gaming media. We're supposed to be living in a free market economy. Who the hell cares how much money and "effort" it took to make a product? If it's good, it's good. The problem is that most "hardcore" gamers no longer have their own opinions - they cannot tell a good game from a bad one. They need to have their decisions made for them, and Gamespot obliges.

roxlimn

So if someone disagrees with you "he must be brainwashed", good reasoning. I always care about how much effort something takes to be done and reward their work accordingly. Dead Space had to be done from scratch, while Extraction had a solid ground to work on. Plus a rail-shooter is naturally easier to program as you know where the player is, the path he will go, and what he is looking at.

Feel free to disagree with me and my $30 price, it's my opinion nothing else.

Before I go into detail in my answer, did you play Extraction?

fleig_man

Tamborific:

Sales for Tiger Woods PGA Tour Wii were fantastic for the month of its release. The other versions weren't even in the charts. Where are you getting your data and how reliable is it?

roxlimn

I don't know how reliable http://www.vgchartz.com/ is, if you have a more reliable source please tell me. Being misinformed is bad, but passing misinformation along is the worst.

I can see where you're coming from with Dead Space's price point, but let's look back at last year with the 360/PS3 version of Dead Space.

360/PS3: 10 hour story, little replay value other than achieving higher difficulty levels, no multiplayer, $60 (still a fantastic game mind you)

Wii's Extraction: 9 Hour story, challenge maps, unlock all pages for the comic, 2-player co-op, multiple difficulty levels, $50 (also fantastic)

Frankly I see Dead Space Extraction as the better value

fleig_man

But the development of the original Dead Space needed a bigger budget, and has more appeal than Extraction. The number of hours really is an important aspect of what you get for your money, but as many posted in this thread, they would be willing to buy Extraction if it had the original gameplay. You kind of become more willing to pay more if you see more effort put into it. I see a great $30 game/movie.

My Wii from 2006 is fine. The only concern I have about it is that while playing Dirt 2, I had some framerate issues, and no review I read, or Gamespot user at the time said anything agreeing with me, quite the contrary.

But otherwise it's fine and that game is bad anyway.

We obviously have different points of view. I was going to say how Legend of Zelda looks dead, with characters walking fixed scripts or just standing still waiting interaction. Of course TP is not meant to be a city simulation so it's quite a moot point, that's why I talked about GTA evolution. But considering you see LoZ as an example of a busy city shows how different we think about the very same subject.

I agree that early iterations of GTA where great, but you can't look at recent versions and not see the environment differences, NPCs interactions increased complexity. The DS version of the game is also great, the core gameplay is there, but GTA IV have a lot more going on, something I'm yet to see an "optimized" Wii game do. Maybe you are right and it's possible, but I'm skeptic.

The Wii has the biggest market for the PGA Tour, and yet it sells poorly. We have twice the number of Wiis around, the best version and yet we can't get so much more games sold. That's why they don't invest more.

Developers don't risk building games for Wii and upscale because it doesn't sell enough games on its own. Besides the Xbox, and PS have exclusives that sets the bar higher, in complexity, and obviously graphics. Basically the same reason we get pissed when a PSP port is launched on Wii. Once Legend of Zelda, and Super Mario Galaxy were launched they raised the bar of what the Wii is supposed to deliver. Anything less and you will be disappointed. The same would apply to ports from Wii to Xbox, PS.

Excluding the Xbox doesn't make sense unless you exclude the PC too. If you develop to one, you hire some monkeys to port to the other. If you are asking me if buying an Xbox makes sense, I have to say it doesn't unless you have a weaker computer, or friends playing online with it. But the Xbox console market is solid right now, so it doesn't make sense to make it to PC, and not deliver the Xbox version too.

And again I agree, DSE is a great game, great story, but too expensive for what it is. In my opinion it's worth $30. I bet if they did the marketing at this price point it would sell much more.

Every discussion about gameplay seems to go nowhere. But I sand behind the evolution I see when I watch GTA IV with alive cities, for example. You always can trim down the number of NPCs, cars, and everything surrounding the core gameplay and make it to Wii. But you lose part of the immersion these games offer. Yes HD plays a big part in many games, but if you look past that, you will see much more going on behind the scenes. You may not care about them, but many others do.

Tiger Woods 2010 sold the most on Wii individually, but my point is the Xbox360, PC, PS3 combined still sold more (vgchartz), even with the Wii version being arguably the best. "Combining them is not fair", but the developer just make a PC version limited by the Xbox360 power, and make the port without changes. While the Wii version requires a completely different approach with model changes, textures, a different control, reduced environment features... This path has proven to be problematic to some developers. We have some successful cases, but they still sold poorly on Wii.

When you exclude the Wii, you are not excluding every Wii owner. I would assume Wii owners also have a PC. One not as powerful as an Xbox 360, or PS3, but they can at last run any game the Wii can, minus motion controls. Besides some Wii consumers also have either one of the other consoles. Developers and publishers only care about reaching the end consumer; if they can do that by more successful means, they will do that.

We have a vicious circle going on right now. No 3rd part wants to take changes with big budget games on Wii because they are afraid it won't sell. Most games don't sell well because they are cheap cash-ins. Our hope is Japan developers making good games that sell over 2 million in America. Until that happen the safest route for high budget projects is everything but the Wii.

I cannot take any developer seriously when they say that they're limited by the Wii's hardware. Wii processing is RELATIVELY weak compared to that found in the 360 and the PS3, but even those are RELATIVELY weak compared to what can be done on the PC. Why are they limited by Wii hardware, but not by 360 hardware, huh? It's totally bogus reasoning. If they want to reason that way, they should only be developing for the PC.

the Wii is only RELATIVELY weak. It is more powerful than the Xbox, which was the most powerful system last generation, and whose true power was not fully utilized. Games like SMG could not have been done on previous machines, and there's a lot of really nice artistic direction given power in that game. Developers want the HD so that they can simply plunk down high def graphics and fool gamers into thinking they're playing a "beautiful" game, when they're really just playing a high-def game. Gamers today are so unimformed, and so easily dazzled by technology that they can no longer tell the good from the bad. Plants vs. Zombies can't be "good" because it's using lower amounts of pixels and power. UC2 can't be terrible because the resolution is higher.

roxlimn

Developers are limited by Xbox, and PS hardware, but they have to compromise somewhere. Right now the common ground is PC / Xbox / PS multiplatform. Developers can only take so much risk; publishers are satisfied with multiplatform game sells.

Unless you have a genre that absolutely require motion controls, or pointer capabilities it's not reasonable to expect an effort towards the Wii. FPS and TPS have used the analog stick for quite a while and evolved gameplay wise far beyond what the Wii can do.

That doesn't mean we will never see strong 3rd party games being released ever, but they will be far and few between. Plus even with the huge install base, games that explore the Wii in a good way doesn't sell as much even when it is arguably the best version.

Why spend time and money in a Wii game when you can reach the consumers with the other three platforms with minimal effort to make a game run between them.

What's the point of updating really? Is there something new, something that makes you want to update? I don't know, because I'm still at 3.2, and I'm not planning on updating my Wii, like ever.

OniStrat

Avatar is looking good. Some waggle around but the game support M+. Surprisingly good graphics, smooth animations, and framerate. And above all, It looks fun co-op and all.

IGN preview link: http://wii.ign.com/articles/103/1037393p1.html