Nintendo game roll-out pace plunges
Wii 2 imminent as history repeats itself
A famine of first-party Nintendo Wii titles over the coming months means the Wii 2 release is imminent, it has been suggested.
The shortage of forthcoming Wii titles is history repeating itself, according to Kotaku, which has looked into patterns of Nintendo's game releases over the last decade to see if there is a precedent. Apparently there is.
The last big game drought, in 2002, was very similar to what we are going through now. Nintendo has launched a major piece of handheld technology and is facing the gradual retirement of its most popular home entertainment system.
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Source: Kotaku
The timeline of the Gamecube can be likened almost identically to that of the Wii. If history is anything to go by, the Wii 2 is on the way, with developers already hard at work on the launch titles.
With Wii sales falling, and game publishers dubbing the current console a "legacy platform", only a fool would bet against a successor coming soon anyway. According to US investment house Sterne Agee, we could get a glimpse of the Wii 2 at this year's E3 Expo in June, with a product launch expected early next year. ®
COMMENTS
sensor bar name misleading
The sensor bar isn't actually a sensor, it is actually just some IR LEDs. Some people have even used candles instead of the sensor bar!
For your problem, I assume you have checked the TV type and sensor bar position are definetly set right, as I have never had any issues with widescreen TVs.
Sensor bar position
Yep, no problems with Up-Down movement, just the extreme left and right.
Resolutions
Games already cope with a few different SD resolutions. It's not too big a jump to imagine that more recent games might have included some headroom in their bitmap graphics to allow for true HD rendering in future. Vector graphics may well "just work" anyway?
As I have argued before, it's quite possible for Wii 2 to be 100% compatible with the Wii, in both directions, and (given the market demographic) Nintendo will be making a huge mistake if they don't capitalise on that.
Upscaling
Well basically, what the TV does ranges (depending on the quality of the TV) from stupid to semi-intelligent raster upscaling -- meaning they start with the final rendered two-dimensional image of so many lines and interpolate to a higher number of lines. The stupidest just do a basic blur-type interpolation; the smartest actually find edges and interpolate lines/curves, but still end up looking a little blurry.
What a console *could* do to a stock non-HD game with no HD textures, is semi-intelligent raster upscaling of textures coupled with a full-HD 3D rendering pipeline. This would produce something better than TV upscaling and akin to running a game on the PC at the highest screen resolution but lowest setting for texture size -- i.e, crisper object definition but somewhat blurry texture graphics.
As mentioned by a previous poster, at least the cross-platform games may actually have the HD textures available as well.
Huh
The graph you linked shows the last drought was in 2002, with the Wii being released in 2006. Yet you claim that a drought right now means that a release is imminent?
If history is repeating itself, it means Wii 2 in... 2015/2016! That's not what I'd call "imminent" by a longshot.
