Let's look at another game, Brawl, for a perfect example. The classic controller is going to allow you to absolutely *wail* on Wiimote users. Why? A digital button press will always be faster than a small wrist motion. By how much? A few milliseconds - but enough that at the competitive level people will be debating GCN controller versus Classic Controller - Wiimote won't come in there.

So why allow people to use a Wiimote instead of a GCN controller or classic controller? Because some people will prefer it, and it means they don't have to run out and buy four new controllers. It's slower. Yeah, duh - but they can play against their friends who aren't pros and still have fun.

subrosian

To be fair to Brawl, you can completely customize every controller configuration, including whether or not motion is used in the mote-chuck config. Smash attacks (which are the only potentially motion controlled aspect of Brawl as far as we know) can still be done on the mote-chuck by direction+attack button. The only controller that might have a disadvantage is the NES-style wiimote due to the awkwardlocation of the B trigger, and even then you can switch B trigger to taunt thus that isn't much of a disadvantage at all, and two buttons need to be pressed for a smash instead of 1.

See http://www.smashbros.com/en_us/gamemode/various/various14.html for details.

Mario Galaxy says hi.

Mind you, you can beat the 'story' in about 9-12 hours (60 stars) but collecting all 120 stars then playing through it again (due to probably the best post-game bonus) would take you well into the 30-40 hour range.

Edit: I just realized you said 'high production value' games. Though I would argue SMG is a pretty high production game, it just goes to show that sometimes less (graphics) is more.

I think Bethesda could have done a much better job if they had not felt the need to do full voice acting with the 10 or so voice actors they hired. Not only could they have had much more and varied dialogue due to less money and disc space required by text, the RPG elements of the game could have been enhanced by this resultant variety. Oblivion could have had many more guilds or dialogue choices if they didn't have to limit the number of NPC responses due to voice acting.

This is one great example of how increasing technology has hurt deep, epic games by forcing developers to simplify them due to money and time constraints.

Edit: Another great example that others have pointed out is the limited number of weapons and armour available. If the models/textures they used weren't so huge OR if they used multiple discs, there could have been far more along the lines of Morrowind. There a number of possible reasons for the limitations (time, money, storage medium used) but they all boil down to wanting to push technology. Granted, Oblivion looks great and has great atmosphere, but when it comes to Western RPG's, variety is key to creating a character you can call your own. Modmakers realize this and, thus, there are plenty of armour and clothing mods available. I would even say that I'd prefer they completely reused Morrowind's engine in its original form and perhaps just added in distant view and more dynamic lighting, these two elements not requiring any extra disc space or much man-power/time to do. This would have allowed the developers to just focus on the story, interesting questlines (which Oblivion had a good number of), varied NPC's and dialogue, and plenty of weapons and armour.

Stike Commander from Origin Systems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strike_Commander

edit: Great game. I have it on a collection CD along with Syndicate and Ultima VIII.

Human: 10% more rep = 10% less time (talking about days) grinding rep. Look great in plate. +5 sword and mace skills. +10% spirit useless since most plate does not have spirit and healing paladins have to spam heal. Perception is great if you know a stealther is around.
Dwarves: Rifle bonus is useless, treasure finding is meh, stone form is mostly redundant with cleanse (except for removing bleed effects. Also, 10% bonus armour for 8 seconds is pretty useless). 10 frost resist is kinda good.
Dranei: Free heal over timeis good. +1% to hit is also good. Jewelcrafting bonus is meh since blacksmithing, engineering, or alchemy are better for a paladin (good gear or make up for many of the paladin's weaknesses). Bigger character model size makes them stick out and easier to target in pvp simlar to tauren. 10 shadow resist is kinda good.

Personally, I'd go with human.

From my own personal experience, a good rig from 4 years ago runs Oblivion fine on med-high settings. I run it on a P4 2.6 Ghz with 512 mb RAM and a Radeon 9800 pro 128 mb. It's possible to run the game on this rig on 1280x720, high textures, medium draw distances, distant everything, low shadow numbers, low specular distance, and high water details if you're patient with load times. I've found that the main difficulty with my rig is that it either 1) runs low on memory for textures, thus needs to use the harddrive quite often, increasing load times to minutes or 2) the vid card's bus speed is too slow, thus the game bottlenecks loading the higher restextures. As far as I can tell, I don't have any fps problems even on these detail settings, unless there are multiple casters and many particle effects floating around.

My optimal settings after much testing is using the same settings but with medium textures. Load times are substantially improved by doing this. To make things a little better, I'm using a mod that increases the detail of the various bump/paralax mappings on the various surfaces, thus, though I lose the higher res texture details, I still retainimproved bumpy, detailed surfaces.

In conclusion, Oblivion can look outstanding even on old hardware, especially with mods. Hope that gives you an idea as to the settings you can run on.

Wii:7 games not including Wii Sports and Play

Zelda TP
Super Paper Mario
Red Steel
Warioware
Scarface
Resident Evil 4
Spiderman 3

yeah im more of a console gamer. but i cant play gears or oblivion right now so i need something to kill time. andi was thinking morrowind, but i probably wont, i just hate the graphics in that game, it is a decent game though i just cant play it.

paulplaysdrums

Ah but with the power of mods, you can upgrade the graphics to near Oblivion quality (texture-wise - I don't think anyone has added paralax/bump mapping to the engine). There's even a mod out that extends the view distance to Oblivion-esque levels.

I think the mod is called "Morrowind Graphics Extender".

Might I also ring in that he not only requires the use of 2 'next-gen' consoles, one of which costs double the amount of a Wii, and PC, he also needs to use games that are not exclusive to those conoles (eg. GTAIV, Assassin's Creed, Unreal 3, Fallout 3).

If that is the case, you might as well throw in Alien Syndrome, RE4: Wii Edition, and Zelda: TP for the Wii.

Concerning your list of games to pit the Wii against:

- Killzone 2 - as far as we know, an average shooter that looks great, might have some great atmosphere but seems to be your typical run and gun. Metroid Prime 3 owns this according to E3 previews.

- Halo 3 - Similarly, not many details. IMO, Halo 1 was a terribly ordinary shooter that was still catching up to Half-Life in terms of gameplay, which gave me no real enthusiasm for Halo 2 (which I have not played).

- FFXIII - No details, would probably sell well but we have no idea how good a game itwill be.

- Ratchet and Clank, Banjo - According to all of the glowing E3 previews, Super Mario Galaxy can take both on... with only one Wiimote.

- Tekken 6, Virtua Fighter 5 - IMO Smash Bros. Brawl is far funner AND far deeper AND has battles that are far less predictable and repetitive AND has more unique characters than either of them and wins by a landslide. I also give SSBB a nudge for having far better multiplayer.

- Assassin's Creed - Are you really claiming ownage with a game that had floating corpses, buggy hit detection, and rather abrupt and stiff transitions into repetitive looking close-combat moves? It'll probably get better, but I think that it's a Thief wannabe at the moment.

- Uncharted - Looks great, seems to play like a Tomb Raider clone with extra fancy moves.

In conclusion, all of the consoles have some highlights but perhaps aren't what they're hyping selves up to be. We'll see how this all pans out when these games actually get released or we get more details.