Spring is in the air; the sun’s finally shining, flowers are finally blossoming, and “unnamed sources” are again claiming a follow-up to the Wii will be making its debut at this year’s E3. But is there any weight to such speculation this time around?
Possibly? The sources in question belong to Game Informer, who unfortunately offer very little in the way of substance (naturally). Not only are their insiders unwilling to state if it’ll be a Wii part 2 or something totally new thing, or if it’ll be backwards compatible, but they don’t even know if it’ll be graphically on par with the Xbox 360 & PS3. Could be better, could be the same, could be worse. Man, talking about sticking one’s neck out.
Still, if there’s a time for a new console announcement, now is the time. The Wii has been out for almost five years now, which is generally when consoles get refreshed. It’s no longer the hottest thing, and it’s graphical capabilities, which were never the best to begin with, are really looking long in the tooth at this point. Though more importantly, the number of software for the platform has begun to steadily decline, especially from Nintendo, plus a rumored price drop in the coming months.
Other than that new Zelda game coming out, Skyward Sword, Nintendo is being quite hush-hush about upcoming console releases. It actually reminds me of the GameCube’s final days, in which all we had to look forward to was Twilight Princess. Then all of a sudden, bam, a a new console is announced and the one thing that we had to look forward to was magically being ported to become the new thing’s launch title. Does that mean history will repeat itself? I hope not… unless this new hotness does indeed allow for a dramatic graphical update, whereas the Wii’s version of TP looking indistinguishable from the Cube’s version was a bad sign of things to come.
At the very least, such news should make at least one person happy: as Kotaku pointed out a few days ago, the reason why the game industry is in a slump (which far as I’m concerned is a viewpoint that’s COMPLETELY subjective) is that game developers don’t have new toys to play with. I’ve personally spoken to plenty of developers who either are completely happy with the current platforms, due there be much left to tap into, or could care less about horsepower in general cuz they’re too busy making awesome games for the iPhone. And what about gamers? I think most will agree that they’re happy to not have to upgrade their hardware anytime soon.