Monday 27 February 2012

WiiU spec rumours incoming...IGNORE! EVASIVE MANOEUVRES! I'M DOWN!

Nintendo WiiU Specs keep popping up. I could link to about ten different projections over the last few weeks. The problem with these is, like when every console is getting closer - that they have no anchor in reality. When someone says "2x Xbox 360" to you, what images does that conjure in your mind?

The problem is with these unquantifiable reports that are ultimately meaningless. Kind of like this post. I'd love to read some official tech specs - proper ones - but Nintendo is extremely unlikely to trumpet them (and that is a stance I applaud). Ultimately, hardware should be important to Nintendo. They can't launch first and get left behind (like the Dreamcast, for example). I don't think an early lead is a long-term plan. In fact, I think Microsoft were extremely lucky that in the current gen Nintendo decided to ignore stats, and Sony inadvertently crippled their own consoles (dual-CELL design downgraded to single CPU+ancient GPU). I cannot think of any console that has really benefited from a long head start without losing their market for being significantly inferior to the competition hardware-wise. Hmm...PlayStation 2...I guess I can think of one! Though the PS2 may be a poor example, as it was an early release that fared poorly hardware-wise versus Xbox and GCN, but exceeded the Dreamcast.

So please, for the love of all things good and true, ignore the rumours and wait until we see something solid with our own eyes. It will at least match the PS3/360 in terms of power, and I think it would be trivial to exceed them all these years after their release. Nintendo aren't positioning themselves as the '5-year-old hardware guys', so I don't think it's time to be calling out the as-yet unknown WiiU hardware as a failure (though we'll talk about 'game industry analysts' very shortly on an extremely similar topic).

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