Nintendo Wii News!

[used_me]

I found this on a message board which is now mysteriously shut down. Vast Nintendo conspiracy? I doubt it. This reads more like the most fantastic piece of fanfiction I've ever read. For your pleasure, here goes:



Hello, I thought I would share some info on the Nintendo that you might not know. I have no and will offer no credibility so take these words as what they are…typed and posted on the internet. Beyond that though, I challenge you to wait for the announcements to see if I am indeed truthful. No matter how you swing on the speculation pole I hope you enjoy the read. I apologize for the sloppy typing.

Nintendo Wii: Final Secrets revealed

-Nintendo will hold a Space Word 2006 in late August, planning is already underway.

-Nintendo decided to withhold a great deal of knockout news from E3 for two reasons. One being that they wanted to reveal it at a show that solely featured Nintendo and Nintendo products, and two wanted to build hype close to launch day.

-Nintendo will show a radically improved sensor bar, and announce that the range from user-to-TV concern has been nullified.

-Nintendo will give a brief overview of the Wi-Fi Connect24 interface and Virtual Console, that will be demoed.

-Nintendo will reveal 13 new titles, four of which being new Nintendo IP’s to be released from between Q2 2007 through Q4 2008. One Shigeru Miyamoto himself will be producing and directing.

-One being a movie-based game from Shinji Mikami.

-Another being a Russian spy/insurrection game from Zoonami, directed by Martin Hollis (Goldeneye007 Perfect Dark fame) is to be rated AO.

-Another being a racing game from THQ called Deux Throttle: The World. -Another being a sort of master chef cooking game.

-Another being a game called “Coolman’s Journal” from Monolith.

-Another being a game called “Uni Oku Ray“, is to be rated AO.

-Another being Suda 51’s/Takashi Miike’s “Hero’s” based on film Ichi the Killer. Rated to be AO.

-Sadness gameplay to be showcased.

-Excite Truck’s new innovative approach to Burnout-style crashes and destruction.

-Another being a followup Wii title to the critically-acclaimed Kid Icarus. Will be rated M.

-Another being a showcase of Red Steel’s furthered polish and enhanced graphics detail, as well as full 3d-tracking applied to the sword-play.

-Another being gameplay footage of Disaster: Day of Crisis, will sport mind-blowing graphics and innovative control.

-New Super Mario Galaxy footage will be shown where you manipulate momentum and manipulate environments with the Wiimote to move Mario indirectly.

-Space World 2006 will last 120 min. and Shinji Mikami and Martin Hollis will make appearances. Mikami will also announce a Resident Evil 4 Ultimate Edition for Wii that utilizes the innovative control as well as include everything the PS2 version had and much more. This will be playable.

-Also will promise a Resident Evil 5 version of Wii to ship simultaneously with other platform versions as well as a much later Wii-Resident Evil exclusive towards late 2009. A keynote of the main speech will probably focus on Nintendo’s philosophy to make Wii an “All-Inclusive” console, supporting all genres and age groups.

-Will also make mention that alongside Mario and Zelda, AO games will have a home as well for the sophisticated aging gamer.

-Nintendo will reveal prices and launch date. A $299 bundle that comes with two Wiimotes, nunchuku attachment, classic game pad attachment, DVD9 attachment, wireless headset (limited) 2GB SD card, Wii sports game, plus ten free virtual console downloads. The $199 bundle to come with one Wiimote, nunchuku attachment, classic game pad attachment, Wii Sports game, &five free virtual console downloads. Launch date will be set at Nov. 10 2006 is revolution day.

-Nintendo will announce support for a modified HD-DVD format for space reasons, hencing the need for a separate DVD9 attachment. Nintendo Wii will not include or support third-party HDD initially.

-Launch titles as of right this second include Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Wii Sports, Red Steel, Call of Duty 3, Disaster: Day of Crisis, Excite Truck, Madden 2007 Wii, Super Monkey Ball: Bananna Blitz, Trauma Center : Second Opinion, Rayman: Raving Rabbids, Blitz: (working title), X-Men: Ultimate Alliance, Elebits and Dragon Quest Swords. Which Nintendo is aiming for a very appetizing launch from day one, some titles may get pushed back if not ready as a side note.

-Nintendo President Satoru Iwata will take stage and introduce “One of Nintendo’s newest best friends”, Hideo Kojima will then take the stage. Following this introduce he will go on to explain the idea behind Elebits and then announce that a new ”disruption” will take place. Going to the big screen will be shown a montage of all past MGS games followed by the Wii slogan, announcing that all past MGS major releases will be available on Virtual Console. Then news will be broken that MGS4: Guns of the Patriots will also be coming to the Wii console…with all visuals in place. -Following that the second half of show will begin explaining revolutionary ideas embedded in Wii hardware.

-This news will undoubtedly come as a shock to everyone who had thought that Wii would not be able to compete in the graphics department. But I suppose that it is why they saved this news for this show after MGS4 was announced, later Zoonami’s game and Shinji Mikami’s game will be shown in the show as Shinji Mikami and Zoonami CEO Martin Hollis will introduce these games.

-The truth is that IBM and ATI have openly stated they are working on hardware specifically suited for Wii…why? The truth is that IBM isn’t developing a CPU at all, nor is ATI developing a GPU. I may have lost you so lets swing back to the developmental stages of the N64.

During that time an internal study was being done called “Project Reality” to allow visual, user interaction AND development to be mainly handled by procedural artificial intelligence. Needless to say this study was not ready for the release of the N64 so it was withheld until it was ready. The need for this “Project Reality” experiment was the fact that you can only push processors and video cards so far until you either create too much heat to be anywhere near consistently workable for the consumer, or two become radioactive. So something needed to be done to continue to improve visuals to meet customer satisfaction.

This AI process for visualizing, interacting with and developing games is built on the term RID. Standing for Reactionary, Instinctual, Domino AI. And can produce graphics and physics 100% true to life. The development console tool that is built for this tech can literally take nearly all the work out of producing the visuals/physics and allow the development teams to almost solely focus on story and gameplay.

One demo that will be shown at the Space World show is that you can take actual video footage from say a camcorder, then translate it over to this special development console tool and be able to interact with it (switching camera angles as the A.I predicts how the objects should look and react from every angle), then map complex controls to it, and finally tweak it to become a gameplay scenario.

Among other things that can be done. In essence this takes the majority of work out of the development of the graphics, allowing developers to scale the visuals to anywhere they want with a very user-friendly set of tools allowing visuals akin to an art deco style 1940’s to 100% real world realism. I could get into the deep technical jargon of how this is done but it will be much easier to understand if you just go to Space World this year. The “revolutionary” components of the Wii console are really from a development sense that the consumer will reap the rewards from.

[used_me]

As I said before IBM and ATI are not making processors and video cards. They are building what Nintendo has dubbed “bridges” that will support and regulate the parameters of the advanced artificial intelligence. The two bridges will not function in the same way as CPUs and VPUs they will become (in the final product) one structure that will operate and communicate seamlessly. The bridge that IBM is responsible for will handle physical interpretations, and predictability etc. The bridge ATI is working on will handle structure, basic instinct patterns, etc.

As I said I could get more into that kind of stuff but you wouldn’t have any idea what I am talking about. My job here is to train other techs to introduce this new technology to developers and teach them how to apply this radically different albeit much cheaper and easier process into mainstream development practice. This reason this has been kept so far under wraps is that Nintendo since finalizing the code and hardware had to patent it extensively. Which is a very expensive and tedious process, every single line of code from this technology has been patented. So that means that Microsoft and Sony could release three or more consecutive generations of consoles and still not being able to come close to the graphical/physics prowess of the Wii console.

The Wii console will also have a sound card that will support Dolby Pro Logic 2 sound (at the moment). The AI bridges will be inclosed inside the very sleek and compact Wii console (the actual module the bridges are housed in is quite small). This console also produces very little heat. What makes this an ideal decision if a drastic one at that is that it is extremely inexpensive seeing that extremely complex A.I is simply command line and leaves no room for error, which made this an extremely unforgiving project to undertake.

Since truly good A.I. must be flexible and robust enough to make theoretical “foresighted” decisions so to speak it was very difficult to create the interface. Which is also why A.I. is often the weakest element within game design. Since very generic use of silicon was used in the process and everything technologically functions on a command-line AI interface (the development console tool being a GUI that acts as a shell to simplify the development process) and finally the chip or “bridge” yields are 100% consistant with the target performance. Unlike the manufacture of CPUs or VPUs. which enormously heightens the price of manufacturing generic modern consoles.

What the end product yields is something that will drastically shake up the way games are developed and visualized while retaining the same visual result just on a much higher scale. What I have described to you is something that only internal people here and first party and only a few second party developers are partial to.

Nintendo has created a brand new interface for the development community to take advantage of. While being able to produce fully interactive environments and character models in almost pure realism, they have ended the “graphics war” and will be allowing development teams to produce any type of visual style they wish very quickly and allotting more time to the gameplay and story. This process also make developing on Wii much cheaper because a good portion of a game’s budget goes toward rendering visuals and or physics.

Another good portion goes to marketing which is mostly handled by the source company and publisher. Think of this change in development like the change from the original I believe DOCTOR DOS interface when it was bought by Microsoft and a little bit of code was tweaked released MS-DOS. Think of standard development practices as MS-DOS as the analogy. Then Microsoft released the Windows which made interacting with DOS (in those days at least) no hassle at all. It simplified the commands without having to memorize them and executed program with the click of a mouse.

Think of the revolutionary and user-friendly introduction of Windows into the PC space as what this new development interface for Wii will do for the game industry. And now you know full well why Nintendo hasn’t let this one slip. Simply put when Nintendo stated that they are not directly competing with the other companies, they said that because they literally believe the other companies can’t compete with them. Also notice how as developers close to Nintendo will quickly say the Wii is very easy to develop on they are just as quick to either change the subject or elaborate more broadly. This shows just how deep the NDA goes.

Something else that will be revealed is what everyone has been wondering which is what is housed under the flap on the front of the Wii. I will be happy to share that with you. What is under is a camera/sensor that will be able to assist the sensor bar with certain games and also allow the user to record/stream video, take picture and the like. In action this flap will automatically open when certain game use it or when it is needed by the user. Which can be done in-game through the “Home” menu to access the camera and video functions.

I am glad to be able to bring you possibly the first ever actual true evidence of Wii and I hope you and your readers enjoy it. I know a good wealth of people will deny me or say am I a liar or whatnot, or it is impossible what I explain, but I can understand that. So many others have made false claims and been flat wrong, but I do guarantee that everything here is 100% true about Wii.
If anything I know skepticism is a part of the community, so for everyone who is let the announcement of Space World 2006 be my first truth. I ask please if anyone has questions about anything I have mentioned, I do know a great deal about the some games I have mentioned here, but would not like to get overly technical here about specs or hardware, most people will just not understand.

[used_me]

This article from the upcoming Game Informer magazine focuses on the pros and cons of the development environment of the upcoming Nintendo Wii. As well as revealing the last big secret concerning hardware functionality. Here are some summarizations from that article.

-Pros-

-Inexpensive graphics development.

-Developer-friendly “camera” program

-Will support HDR lighting, normal maps, bump-mapping, nurbs rendering, and panoramically-composted depth-composited cubemappng, ray-tracing.

-Chipsets are very inexpensive although EXTREMELY powerful, WILL incorporate many aspects of the Project Reality study.

-Nintendo is providing extensive documentation to ease the incorporation of the Wii-mote.

-Cons-

-Challenging to program effectively for the Wii-mote, due to it being very new to the industry.

-Marketing to be more challenging for bigger third-party franchises due to nature of the innovative qualities.

-The development cycle to possibly equal the time cycles of PS3 and Xbox360 due to the time needed to be innovative and effectively program for the controller.

-The challenge of marketing the Wii’s controller in ads and commercial may turn third-parties away from exclusivity. (The challenge to display through ads how “playing is believing”)


-The Final Secret/minor surprises also-

-Wii will include a built-in decent resolution camera that can be used to add your face to character models and add innovation to games. These snapshots can be tweaked as well. It is still being decided whether to allow camera to record and stream video. Mention made to have this feature be a strong feature in online play.

-A wireless headset will be made available at launch.

-SD cards will range from 2GB to 7GB and will be priced “within reason”.

-A new router technology is still in development and not yet available to developers. In the final product Nintendo hopes to be able to make every Wii a sort of “Wi-Fi hotspot” with each user connecting to that user and so on. They also want to be able to allow different users to share things and are thinking about setting up a pseudo-P2P network through Connect24, where users can share content and “other things”. This means that even if you have a dial-up connection or no internet, you can still connect to Wii Connect24.

-The Wii will indeed have a PPU included in final hardware. It will have only 32MB though, which will still take a considerable amount of pressure off of other chips.

-A still-in-development simple dev tool will be made available to users through the Connect24 network. It will allow users to create a simple game in 2D or simple 3D and share it with the world. This will hopefully be available on the network by launch.

-The last big secret is the “graphics solution”. It revolves around a whole lot of non-volatile RAM (opting out of HDD support, RAM is much faster than a HDD). And a development interface that centers on a AI-controlled command-line interface. This additional tech only included in final dev kits, while most developers don’t have access to final dev kits.

[SwyfT]

Lets say this actually happens and is not another attempt to bring net publicity to the wii.

Who the hell wants Real-life graphics in their games? Go play on the fuckin eye-toy if you want that. I personally would never want that in my games, i'd feel like I was playing some shitty movie.

[DetachablePenis]

I don't think those are the kind of 'real life graphics' the articles are mentioning.

[Deakmm]

Wont understand till I see a real time demo

[ZeroTigerX]

$199? Damn! And I see the graphics are better than I thought. MGS4 on Wii? Big news for Nintendo, bad news for PS3, because people could hold off on buying because of the price and the fact that MGS4 will be on the Wii.

Hopefully this is real.

[tripb19]

He got banned.

Idk care about details. Just release it and I'm'a buy one.

<3 Nintendo.

[Knave]

WOw I hope all of that is true. Only time will tell though. Would be awesome to see some AO games on a nintendo platform.

[Eloqution]

Who the hell wants Real-life graphics in their games? Go play on the fuckin eye-toy if you want that. I personally would never want that in my games, i'd feel like I was playing some shitty movie.

Seems like it would mostly be used with pre-rendered environments. Anyway, I think it's bullshit.

[skater910]

I hope he understands that the safety and well-being of his nutsack all depends on whether this is true or not. If what he is saying is true, I might just shit my pants.

EDIT: I've got my knife against his nuts, since I Googled a sentence and found only about five sites, all forum posts. Still possible, but not likely.

[yamahadrummer]

true or not, im buying one.:D

[idontknow]

Nintendo and AO rated games, that is the hardest thing to believe there IMO

[unearth]

Can someone explain what the 'virtual console' will be? Is it sort of like an emulator for older games?

[Deakmm]

Nintendo and AO rated games, that is the hardest thing to believe there IMO

Where did resi evil 4 come from?

[hardXcorey]

Can someone explain what the 'virtual console' will be? Is it sort of like an emulator for older games?
Yep. They say that they'll get a lot of the old games but not all of them.

[AntonJames]

this is the system I'm going to buy.

[shawneboy]

this is the system I'm going to buy.

same here. Fps's on wii are going to be OWNAGE. I already saw a pic of a gun type piece of hardware your wii controller fits into. That will be tons of fun.

[firepiss]

Lies. Probably not all going to happen, probably none of it will. :( Just another rumor to get my hopes up for nothing like always. News sounds too good to be true, meaning it isn't true at all. I hope I'm wrong.

EDIT: We are towards late August and still no space world? http://www.nintendojo.com/infocus/view_item.php?1154870561

But I'm still buying a Wii. :)