EA: We're Blown Away By Wii U

Still not seeing the point or wanting to buy one.

I skipped the Wii generation but I'm looking forward to this thing. Only problem is my toddler just loves to throw my controllers to the xbox around. They are big, bulky and not to expensive so it's not a huge deal but I'll cry if he were to throw one of these haha

I love that. 'There's great horsepower there'. Imagine if it was economic to fit an up to date card in there!

I wonder how much money had to change hands for EA to come out and say these things about the wiiU? Think I will stick to my PS3.

they are 60$ last time i bought one, i think it was 3 or 4 years ago, but still.

the wii pad thing will likely sell at break even price, which is about 90$

sure ...this is a high performance pos....what are they talking about?

The vowels E and A are blown away by the vowel U....lol!

Remember, the N-Gage also had phenomenal EA support.

you know where i can see thw wiiU being great for is madden or other football games making things go faster and opponent won't be able to see what your opponent it doing on the same screen. I also thought it owuld be neat for something like a dungeons and dragons type game people with thier own screen for inv and such but dungeon master more advanced controls and such... I'm optomistic abotu this being great for gamers

no DirectX 11 level graphics means no future PC conversion support. It's a POS

"Innovation" is EA's favorite, hollow, meaningless word.

LOL... Language humor...



They're the only ones... Soooooo... lots of sports games! XD

I agree with most, this is a POS console, nothing more.

Knowing full well this will likely be voted down to oblivian

As a primary pc gamer I agree that dx11 does great things, I am very happy crysis 2 now supports it with the latest update and hope it continues to grow...

but on the console side they are looking at the bottom line. profit. they want to make consoles cheap and if dx11 compatable hardware increases cost then buisnesses are nto going to include it. While this sucks for us in the PC gamer community as game devs are leaning towards just porting console games over it may result in less implementation of dx11 for us, however from a purely fiscal standpoint it is understandable.

That said maybe the new sony and M$ offerings will have dx11 capability which would be great for us pc gamers. but I still thik it is an innovative input control system and in sports games (let's be honest that is mostly wha tis relevant to ea these days) it could work wonderfully

why would you think Nintendo even needs Direct X 11? They aren't going to license that, and they've been doing graphics long before MS created Direct X.

and EA said the same thing about the WII and all they did was make crap games for it

The difference between DX 11 and DX 10 is almost un-noticable.
The difference between DX 10 and DX 9 is very noticable.

I've seen the pictures comaring the differences I would say DX11 is a slight improvement of DX10. So you all need to stop b*tching!

What does EA expect Nintendo to do for them exactly? Did MS or Sony do something magical to make people buy more EA games on their consoles? The Wii was a flop because anyone looking for serious gaming was going to do it on a better console, and all the 65 year old women who bought one only bought it for Wii Sports.

And enough about DX11. The WiiU graphics are a quantum leap above the overclocked dinosaur that is the Wii. That is the most important thing. I'm sure PS4 and Xbox720 will be better, but as long as they are all out of the dark ages, cross platform development will be easier and the differences, while possibly noticeable, won't be night and day as they are now.

this isn't written by me, but taken from another thread:

"X-Box uses a form of Windows and so needs directX. Nintendo and Sony consoles run different operating systems (in Sony's case on the Cell chip) and DirectX is part of an OS specifically for Intel and AMD chips. Only recently have they begun working with ARM chips which have been around for ages.

In other words, DirectX is vendor lock-in. Period. Of course Nintendo and Sony may like the concept -- but part of their business model is selling system development kits to game makers then charging royalties. That in fact is why Sony disabled Linux on Playstation. They had suddenly enabled a rival free sdk which was better in many ways on a machine which costs less than the parts so they were taking a loss on every unit sold. But by the same token, putting someone else's property into an sdk is going to cut into your profits because there are royalty issues. And something which exists to enable vendor lock-in for someone else is madness.

There are arguments for and against Sony and Nintendo using Open GL. I won't even look up whether they do or not. There are arguments for and against their using proprietary libraries of their own. All of the above are valid. But to suggest that they use DirectX -- the arguments against are overwhelming."

The actual API used doesn't matter, the point is that MS's design of DirectX is what drives the design of video cards. The chips in all consoles are variations of the ones used for PC graphics cards, so the point is that the GPU has the capabilities necessary to support a particular version of DirectX, so that it can be used to make games that look as good as those designed for DX10/11/whatever. The actual API used to program it is irrelevant.

And unless they are referring to hacked consoles, PS3 Linux was not usable for game development as it did not have access to all of the hardware in the machine. In particular I believe it couldn't access the graphics hardware, specifically to prevent people from using it to make or play games. If it was hacked to allow that, then Sony would know that by the fact that a company delivered a finished game to them without ever buying a dev kit from them.

All this sounds like is EA "blowing" Nintendo.

Years old Xbox 360 CPU and Radeon 4xxx series GPU= great horsepower? I doubt that.

I don't understand why people keep saying the Wii U has an Xbox 360 type processor, when every leaked spec sheet available has indicated otherwise. Saying the processors are similar simply because they're both IBM Power-PC based, and have similar core counts and clock frequencies is a vast over simplification of the underlying architecture. It's a Power6 based design, coupled with an HD4870 type GPU (there's a big performance gap between that and the x1900 type GPU in the 360), and all in all the Wii U is significantly more powerful then either the Xbox 360 or PS3.

wii u makes me think of kung pow.

weeoo weeoo weeoo pksh

AMD gpus have had DX11 capabilities for years now so they do not need Microsofts DX11 to look just as good, plus who knows what will be added to this custom gpu in the WiiU. Its not going to be an off the shelf part.

Hardware specs don't sell consoles.
Good games and more importantly good exclusive games do.

"I can come up with a dozen titles in the last decade, but it's really tough to come up with a dozen great titles that have been platform-defining for [Nintendo] that weren't their own," said EA CEO John Riccitiello late last year. "I don't care whether it's Mario or Twilight Princess or GoldenEye, it was their own content. I'm going back to [Nintendo 64], and I can go back to SNES if you want, but they've never really been a heavy third-party supporting system. It's not lack of trying – they start the morning thinking what's best for their own intellectual property."

It sounds like he didn't want to mention Konami (Contra, Castlevania) and Square Enix (Final Fantasy) and others.

When people talk about dx11 and consoles, they dont literally mean dx11, its just a quick reference to the quality level of the graphics and effects. Think of it as a point of comparison. It's much easier to say dx9 level, dx10 level, or dx11 level when measuring overall graphics quality and effects. To be API agnostic, you'd have to break it down year by year as it evolved but that's not the quickest or easiest way to reference quality.

The biggest issue is that It CAN ONLY USE 1 OF THOSE CONTROLLERS WITH THE SCREEN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SO . it better cost low.

How is this going to appeal to a hardcore gamer again? Because it uses a gimmicky controller or because it uses 2 generation old AMD hardware? I would argue the hardcore gamer would know that the Xbox 720 or PS4 is right around the corner, and wait for a real console launch, not another gimmick controller tied to outdated hardware.

Dreamcast 2

''The ability to do HD graphics and access game experiences in a completely novel way and a way that's never been seen before....''

think they mean HDTV graphics,720p or 1080p is not HD but hdtv ...at least not for a real hard core gamer.
P.S and i'm not even mentioning upscaling.