Coloured Wiis return, upgraded and cheaper

I was talking about this with Huz the other day - he didn’t seem so convinced that a ‘relaunch’ would be a good business decision. Taking inflation into account, the price in the UK would probably drop to around £150, or £130 at the very most. To compensate Nintendo would probably drop the free Opera and Wii Sports. This wouldn’t bother me so much - I don’t plan on interneting it up on my Wii (although the option would be appreciated) and as much fun as Wii Sports looks to be, it’s Super Smash Bros. Brawl which is my ‘killer app,’ so to speak.

Similarly, when the next Mario Kart is announced that will go on my ‘must own immediately’ list, as will Galaxies and the next purpose-built-for-Wii Zelda. I’m getting Twilight Princess on the ‘Cube, so I can wait for that to hit the £20 bargain ‘Player’s Choice’ range or whatever. Should give me enough time to forget about the mirroring!

As for improvements to the Wii itself… I’m stumped. Maybe they’ll give the sensor bar a longer cable, or detach it from the Wii altogether for the minority of people who play it with the Wii on the opposite side of the room to the TV. I eagerly await the developments anyway!

They’re blatantly not going to change hardware at all other than to maybe combine multiple innards down to one smaller component to reduce the size/heat output/price of the system. I doubt we’ll see any DS Lite-esque cosmetic changes this soon anyway, other than colored cases, because it would be retarded business-wise for them to do so this early in. Revised hardware to reduce the price, probably. Anything noticeable cosmetically or feature-wise other than a $40 drop of the price tag, unlikely. In my uneducated opinion at least.

This is just the reason I have not rushed to buy one.

When later releases will include hardware improvements, better wristbands, software improvements etc. it’s foolish to buy release 1.

I feel that is a good decision and I wouldn’t have to regret buying it so early.

Yeah, I completely agree with you there Jake; they’d be mental to change the core hardware of the system, as in the stuff that processes and renders. I was more referring to the actual stuff you hold and point at when I said hardware though, for example like the redux wrist straps that’re shipping with future Wiis.

I’d actually be interested to know what the wireless strength of the Wii is. The DS wireless is really paltry and can very, very barely pick up my router from the other end of the house, despite a network card right next to it doing the job fine; do you have any experience with this Jakeo? Also did the ‘a little sunlight shining on the sensor bar renders the Wii unusable’ stuff that did the rounds prior to the release ever come to fruition?

I know you can make a substitute sensor bar with either two remote controls or two candles… it’s not the most complex piece of machinery, if it works how I understand it to direct sunlight could actually monkey around with it. But I don’t know :)

I haven’t been able to grab myself a Wii yet, but I’m probably just going to try and get one as soon as possible.

Opera is releasing the browser pretty soon now too.
http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2006/12/19/

Reading the opera press release I just came to the conclusion that the future is not far away. And with the future I talk about, you will be able to buy full games directly from Nintendo and other game companies using your broadband connection. Not only these old games (gotta start somewhere). Eventually this will eliminate a lot of retail stores, because there will be no need for them anymore. Just like music will change when the music industry takes out their buttplugs and starts to follow the way the people are heading, instead of fighting against it. Eventually record labels wont exist either when they are not needed to the extent they are today.

Game companies will make a much higher profit cutting out distribution and manufacturer costs etc.

I just wanted to say this. Bye.

It’s a great point Johan, and I totally agree. While I don’t think physical shops will ever disappear completely, I think we’ll start to see a shift towards them only selling hardware such as new consoles and peripherals, and other things associated with gaming such as magazines and collectables — just not the games themselves.

At the moment people are going to cling onto the tradition of liking to hold something they own, but I can see that need loosening its grip as the internet continues to increasingly become a part of our lives and it’s no longer a problem to download a few gigabytes of data.

Eventually it’ll just become impractical to keep upgrading your hardware to the latest storage formats (cassette, cartridge, CD, DVD, HD-DVD, Blu-Ray), especially when they tend to compete with each other. With a download, there’s no worrying about whether or not your hardware can handle what the data’s stored on, and if future consoles come equipped with massive hard-drives (which is likely, considering the average HD size has gone from about 20gb to 250gb in just the past five years) there’ll be little need to worry about space requirements ever.

I remain an advocate of the digital distribution movement, even if I can see why it’s not seen as totally necessary yet.

I think once people actually *trust* online sales and ownership (as in, once online sales and ownership actually allow someone to own something), that will be the end of peoples need to “feel the product in their hands.” Collectors aside, I think that largely comes down to feeling like you in fact own something. Steam is the only service on which I, as a consumer, currently feel like I own the electronic goods I’ve paid for.

If I log into my iTunes account on my [ hypothetical :( ] brand new MacBook Pro, I don’t see any of the songs or TV shows or movies that I “purchased” on the old G5 desktop sitting right next to it. Do I “own” any of that? I can’t tell. It sure doesn’t feel like it. Because of that, I don’t buy things from iTunes, other than the occasional single track I wan to listen to for a minute, or an episode of a TV show that my DVR missed. Any music or videos I purchase otherwise I always get as a hard good in a store or from Amazon or something, because the hard goods don’t feel like they’re going to disappear or suddenly stop playing on me.

With Steam on the other hand, no matter where I log in, even if it’s at my friends house, everything I “purchased” is actually right there! It’s as if I carried my Half Life 2 CDs over to his house, except I didn’t have to bother - the Internet carried them over for me. I don’t own hard copies of anything I’ve bought on Steam (other than burned backups I made with the Steam client itself) - I’ve never felt the need because Steam feels trustworthy.

That said, having used the Wii shop as it is now, I might buy anything a few $5 NES games (or maybe some affordably priced episodic adventure games or something like that, god willing), but I wouldn’t buy anything substantial like a full $50 game. If my Wii broke none of my purchases would be valid again, or even if I had to send it in for repair there’s a chance that I would have to re-purchase everything because they would replace a key component that would either 1) erase its memory, or 2) cause the system to generate a new ID code for itself, rendering all of my purchases tied with DRM to the old code potentially unplayable.

This is crap, and nobody other than Valve gets it right (well, MP3.com got it right back in the day, but they got bought out and butchered). Apple and Nintendo both act very friendly but when you get into it, you blatantly don’t actually own anything, so everyone feels uneasy, and therefore clings to their packaged goods.

At Telltale I try as hard as I can with the site to reinforce that, despite appearances and despite people’s preconceptions of online purchases, you do in fact own the games they buy. This is a horribly uphill battle because it seems nobody in the ecommerce world is even aware that peoples confidence and trust is a problem. In fact, most people seem to take it for granted that people have nothing but trust and love for online purchases, so most ecommerce providers go so far as to try and take advantage of that trust… that is, of course, a totally insane strategy, since *in reality* people instictually think that online purchases (especially ones with DRM) are there wholly to lie to them and to disappear from under their noses the moment their back is turned. For every “order history” page I try to build and tie to someone’s user account on Telltale’s site, there is a message that pops up on a 3rd party purchase path saying “your download link is only good for 30 days, after which point youw ill need to buy download insurance” or some hilarious rubbish. Everybody does this shit, and until it stops nobody is going to feel confortable spending real money online for electronic goods.

As for DS wifi reception, I haven’t had a problem with it, but my apartment is as big as most people’s living rooms.

And I wouldn’t consider the new Wii strap a real change worth “holding out for,” if it’s a change at all. That’s the sort of garbage people on the Internet obsess over for days and days, but in real life, if the Internet didn’t exist, nobody (including the people who fawn over this shit for the rest of their lives) would notice at all. I took the wrist straps out of the box, looked at them, and put them in a ziplock bag next to my Gamecube microphone in the back corner of my entertainment center shelf.

Nice swear filter with the trainspot. That word was was b*llsh*t, by the way.

Ah, pissing hell. That filter plugin isn’t meant to be turned on; it must have gotten enabled when I last updated WordPress — sorry Jake! I can’t wait until I feel inspired enough to sort out Folded and do away with all these crufty plugins and hacks.

Anyway, I think that’s quite seriously the best take I’ve heard on the whole subject so far. You’re right in saying that with Steam, there’s a sense of ownership over the games because they’re always available, and always right in your face. While I’ve not much experience with other distributors, I can totally understand what you mean about not feeling a connection with the stuff you’ve purchased; to a lesser extent, I’ve experienced this with some smaller online shops who don’t give you much indication that you’ve actually ordered successfully, and provide no control panel or anything to keep track of the order. It could have just vanished into thin air for all I know, and it really hurts my confidence in the company and puts me off ordering from there again.

I think the key is, as you’ve explained a lot better than I ever could, to enhance the user experience of digital distribution significantly rather than assuming people are fine with it and instead implanting all sorts of confidence-denting restrictions such as DRM. It really bothers me how extreme some of this DRM stuff is, because at the end of the day if somebody’s going to buy something they’re almost certainly going to keep it to themselves, or at the most a few friends and family members. People’ve been doing this for decades with real vinyl, tapes, CDs, etc, so it’s very annoying when these new digital systems try to play God by preventing people from even downloading them more than a few times.

If somebody’s going to pirate something, they’ll find a way to do it. If somebody’s going to buy something, they’ll likely steer clear of piracy. DRM punishes the wrong people. Even Nintendo has screwed this one up going off what you’ve said, with it being so easy to lose all you’ve bought. Xbox Live, on the other hand, seems a lot better in that you can use a username/password from any Xbox 360 to access your stuff. Or am I wrong?

I’m glad to hear you’re trying hard to steer Telltale in the right direction too. You’re one of the surprisingly few people who seem to actually ‘get’ how digital distribution should work, so it’s very comforting to know you’re in an industry position. Fight the good fight. :~

I wish the TTG site was a better example of what I’d like a digital distributor to be, but its tough once you have to actually make things work instead of loudly write about them on a forum or news site.

It always weirds me out when I hear marketing-type people say how much consumers love all the shit that’s going on. Who loves buying a song from iTunes and then having to re-”buy” it to have it play on their cell phone. Or a TV show? What? You used to buy something, like a song or a videocasette, and then the implication was that you owned that copy as your very own for your personal use.

I hear the argument made pretty frequently that people re-buy things all the time, with the most frequent examples given always eing someone re-buying their favorite album or favorite movie when technology makes the jump from record to cassette to CD, or tape to DVD to HD, but that’s so blatantly different that it makes my head explode. You actually own all those things. They can follow you around form house to house, or stereo system to stereo system in a cardboard box of your choosing.

Now you own nothing and people allegedly “love” it. They love paying $4 to have a stupid basketball replay streamed to their phone, or a 10 second clip from the Big Lebowski. Crap they probably *do* love it at this point, not knowing any better and being too freaked out to write easy to use software to do that stuff for them with the media they already own.

I’m confused now.

Just for the record (as a UK Wii owner :P) the Wii Remotes that are shipped with the console have the beefed up straps and have since launch. Those Wii Remotes bundled with Wii Play are mixed, they were packaged before the re-issue so if you get an original one it will be an old strap (like the one I got) but I’ve seen people with the bigger straps from the Wii Play box.

That said, it really isn’t hard to hold onto the remote. Even after a 4 hour Wii Bowling session with some mates in a room with a log burner blazing away the remotes weren’t anywhere near slippery enough to let go. You seriously have to throw the things out of your hand to get the strap to catch it.

Perhaps Americans havn’t quite grasped that yet, or have some major perspiration problem :P

Amongst my friends with Wiis (about 6 systems shared with what sounded like about 100 people if you cast the net out far enough), I’ve only heard of one person letting go of the Wii remote, and from the story he was a spastic maniac who was either very pissed off at losing or very celebratory at winning (I can’t remember which) - but either way it wasn’t gameplay related at all, it was someone flailing around like a clown who tossed a remote pretty hard while not paying attention. Also the remote didnt break anything or anyone. I’m pretty sure the stories of remotes snapping apart and flying around the room are largely media exaggeration and people fucking with each other on the internet.

Or those of us in America might sweat a lot, in the hands, but I wouldn’t know, as I haven’t got anyone around to compare against.

I think if Nintendo can “upgrade” the Wii somewhat, then they should. I got a Wii at launch, so it would piss me off to know there’s a better model down the line. But they’re a business and I think Nintendo are beginning to see that little things like DVD playback, HD support amongst other things would’ve put them in better stead.

I say if they can do it and get away with it, then they should. Microsoft and Sony have released 2 setups of their consoles, along add-on’s and stuff, so why shouldn’t Nintendo be able to do the same! ;)

It wouldn’t surprise me if we see improved bundles in the future, but I don’t think they’ll alter the core console significantly unless it’s to fix inherent flaws with the hardware. For example, they might start selling all Wii consoles with a new attachment like that gun one we saw at E3; consequently, games might start coming out that require it, and those with pre-gun Wiis have to buy one (or suffer while playing it).

While I’d like to believe that they wouldn’t do something like that, I can’t help but rememer the Nintendo 64 which had a few games requiring the ‘expansion pack’ that plugged into the back of the controller, giving the N64 more processing power; while some games made optional use of it, some simply didn’t run without it.

It’s far too early to really speculate about that type of thing though, and we must remember we’re in a whole new video game climate nowadays. :D

you know what would be sweet? In the new wii lunch thang, they would would make it so that in virtual console they make it possible to play with
wii-mote and nunchuck, like in oot you could play Twilight Princess Style…

I just want a wii for my b day

i am going to save 4 years birthday money for a wii