Wii Will Rock You
Continued from 'Nintendo's Wii: Evolution AND Revolution'….
Nintendo's heavy-duty cost focus, leading to the company's ability to hit a $250 price point (while still garnering plenty of profit), is evident in many aspects of the system design. One example, which I've alluded to before, is the inability to play DVD-Videos. The CPU, GPU and optical drive are all quite up to the task, I can say with great confidence. But, I suspect, Nintendo didn't want to be cost-burdened by the requisite licensing fees (this is the same reason that Microsoft didn't include out-of-box DVD playback capability in Windows XP/Media Player, for example).
Look, too, at the design of the sensor bar that a user places above the television. Folks had all sorts of exotic ideas about what it contained and how it communicated with the controller and console. But, as it turns out, it's nothing more than a piece of plastic with an infrared transmitter on each end (whose function you can mimic with something as simple as a few candles!), and with the thin wire running to the console only existing to provide the IR transmitters with power.
The final cost-versus-feature optimization that I'd like to focus briefly on is multimedia. Much cyber-water cooler discourse has been spilled over the relative merits of standard- versus high-definition graphics. While I'm enthralled with the detailed, lifelike images that my Xbox 360 renders, at the end of the day they won't hold my attention for long unless the game that generates them is equally compelling (feel free to draw analogies to Star Wars Episodes 1 and 2, or any other special effects-heavy, plot-deficient movie that Hollywood's churned out lately).
I chuckled this morning when I saw, in a post on Ars Technica, that ownership of DVD players (red laser, not the more modern blue laser varieties) has finally surpassed that of VCRs. Folks, DVD players went into production in 1996, a decade ago. Now consider my last-Christmas experience at my sister's home. It'll be quite a while, methinks, before high-definition displays show up in an appreciable percentage of gameplayers' homes. And as you'll see next, Wii is quite fun even for those of us who already have HDTVs. For the same reason, particularly given that Wii doesn't support DVD playback, I don't fault its lack of support for Dolby Digital or other advanced surround sound processing scheme. Most homes don't yet have >2 speaker setups; for those that do, Dolby Pro Logic's matrix encoding algorithm is adequate to deliver immersive gameplay effects.
Two weeks back, I told you that a review Wii console had just materialized on my front door. It took until the following Monday for a component video cable and second remote control set to show up so, although I began playing with the unit over that first weekend, I held off on doing any major testing until I had a full system setup at my disposal. Since Wii's graphics versus those of the Xbox 360 and PS3 were such a contentious topic, I didn't want to unfairly judge Wii's capabilities by tethering my HDTV to the console's bundled composite video connection.
Continued with 'Wii: They Don't Have Arms!'….
