Slashdot Log In
Nintendo Confirms Wii on GC Housing at E3
Posted by
Zonk
on Fri May 19, 2006 04:06 PM
from the still-some-wiggle-room dept.
from the still-some-wiggle-room dept.
kukyfrope writes "Nintendo's PR Manager, Matt Atwood, has confirmed accusations that Wii demo stations at E3 were not running inside the Wii case and instead were running inside Gamecube housing using Wii-spec hardware. 'The Wii hardware we exhibited at E3 2006 was made specifically for the E3 show and is not the final mass-production version. Some of this hardware was cased in Nintendo GameCube housing.'" Update: 05/19 21:08 GMT by Z : Changed 'hardware' to 'housing' in title.
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
Nintendo Confirms Wii on GC Housing at E3
|
Log In/Create an Account
| Top
| 205 comments
| Search Discussion
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

And this changes.... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.licenseprofessor.com/)
Oh well, I guess that changes everything (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Sunday October 22 2006, @10:27PM)
Come on Sony, you can poison the well better than that.
Re:Oh well, I guess that changes everything (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://bitterlittleman.blogspot.com/)
Re:Oh well, I guess that changes everything (Score:4, Insightful)
Sony was using actual PS3 hardware... (Score:5, Informative)
They're not PCs in there. They're not "representative hardware". They're PS3s, devkits.
No, they weren't in final plastics yet either.
Re:Sony was using actual PS3 hardware... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent is correct. I think the real issue is Nintendo made it look like they had production Wii hardware on the floor while Sony actually went out of their way to have big glass cases showing that they were not using retail hardware (which didn't make much sense to me, but bravo Sony for showing just how far of your Spring 2006 release date was).
Personally I don't think it's a big deal. Almost everything you see at E3 is 90% hype, or just plain lies (I'm looking at you Phantom). You should trust anything you see at E3 about as much as you would trust anything said by a used car salesman.
uh, so? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:uh, so? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.thecosmotron.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday February 22 2006, @08:36PM)
Re:uh, so? (Score:4, Insightful)
In this case, it's too little, and too late, for character assasination.
This is why this will blow away into the nothingness; it's not a big deal to begin with, and it's even less of a deal because of the qualified success the Wii showing at E3 was. Just shows how scared they are because their "hardcore I want 32 buttons to mash in a game that takes 10 hours to learn" crowd is getting smaller by the generation, yet Wii is set to appeal to non-gamers, former-gamers, and existing-gamers is a virtually unlimited potential audience.
AE
Re:uh, so? (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://mistshadow2k4.deviantart.com/ | Last Journal: Wednesday May 31 2006, @02:37PM)
I don't get it either. How is this even a news story? (Note I'm not blaimg Zonk for posting it, rather whoever wrote it and thought this mattered even slightly.) Hell, I don't care if they use a GameCube housing for the final product, let alone the demo. I wouldn't even care if the Wii housing was as butt-ugly as my 9th grade English teacher, what I care about is how well the system works and what games will run on it.
It makes me wonder if the author didn't write this up in the hope that it would be misinterpreted and make Nintendo look bad, while retaining some journalistic integrity. Hmmm, maybe I do get it after all.
Interesting... (Score:5, Insightful)
It showcased what they wanted it to do - they could have cased in hardened dog shit for all I personally would have cared
Re:Interesting... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
(running for cover, grinning like hell)
Misleading subject: Disagrees with summary, even. (Score:5, Informative)
They weren't running ON Gamecube hardware. They were running IN Gamecube shells. The summary is more true to fact than the subject.
From TFA:
Nintendo confirmed that they did indeed use GameCube housing, but that the "guts" or internal architecture was certainly from the Wii. "The Wii hardware we exhibited at E3 2006 was made specifically for the E3 show and is not the final mass-production version. Some of this hardware was cased in Nintendo GameCube housing," the company explained.
Accusations? (Score:5, Insightful)
GBA SP, DS lite, WiiCube? (Score:4, Funny)
(http://myatomic.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday November 19 2006, @12:31AM)
If the GBA SP and DS lite are any indication, I predict that 18 months after Wii hits the market, Nintendo will announce the WiiCube, a Wii console shaped like a GameCube with a larger disc well and more built-in memory for more Virtual Console products.
Re:GBA SP, DS lite, WiiCube? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:GBA SP, DS lite, WiiCube? (Score:5, Informative)
Confused (Score:1, Offtopic)
(http://www.palshife.net/)
So what... (Score:2, Insightful)
I mean, it's not like someone was playing it for a while, then looked down and saw a GCN and said "Eeewww, I've been playing on a previous-gen console."
Re:So what... (Score:4, Interesting)
So by default, the Wii is a next-gen console. Obviously the Wii's cool controller could be achieved on the Gamecube. Hell, it could probably work on the N64. That isn't the point.
The point is that they are making this controller the standard. If they were to release it for the gamecube, maybe one or two cool games would take advantage of it. It would just be more hardware that users had to buy. And most developers would simply ignore the controller since so few people had it. (How many developers make games for linux? Or Mac?)
Since *everyone* owning a Wii will have this controller, every game *can* take advantage of it. While developing the game, the designers will look at possible cool ways of using it to their advantage, even if they weren't planning to originally.
Besides that, they are upping the graphics, storage, and medium a bit. Plus the free internet service doesn't hurt.
Cheated, Cheated, Cheated I say! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.users.qwest.net/~waffleck-asch/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 07, @04:46PM)
I am just appalled.
Oh, wait. No, it's Friday.
Never mind: I forgot I actually have a life.
As you were.
They can put them in brown paper sacks for all I care.
Microsoft did a similar thing last year (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Saturday March 26 2005, @10:20PM)
We have a right to be dubious (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://mhawk.home.gowebway.com/Lark.html | Last Journal: Wednesday January 28 2004, @02:04PM)
But 6 months before the console hits the shelves, the only hardware that exists is in prototype versions. It is not suprising that the floor models were put together with duct tape, GameCube cases and whatever else they had on-hand. I would be suprised if the actual Wii games don't look better than what Nintendo had on display at this years E3, as developers have more time to work on games and get them polished.
So what? (Score:2, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Thursday March 16 2006, @11:29AM)
On a related note, a shoebox Wii would be pretty cool.
odd.... (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.last.fm/user/schmod)
I would have found it much more likely for them to have been put in some generic grey box or something like that for E3........
Missing the point (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://students.cs.byu.edu/~cookd/ | Last Journal: Friday May 28 2004, @11:03AM)
Accusation: Nintendo doesn't have their Wii hardware ready and is just running the demos on GameCube hardware with a new controller plugged in.
Fact: Nintendo doesn't have their Wii hardware ready and is just running the demos on GameCube hardware that has been upgraded to Wii specs with a new controller plugged in.
Difference: Accusation is correct: Nintendo doesn't have final hardware ready yet (no biggie). Accusation is incorrect: Nintendo is just using GameCube hardware for demos and dev kits and hasn't gotten the updated hardware story figured out yet (this would be scary).
Correction: (Score:5, Informative)
(http://forums.allrpg.com/ | Last Journal: Monday March 27 2006, @04:12PM)
Fact: While this was true for most of last year, and some of this year, E3 2006 saw Wii technology housed in black Gamecube casing.
I wish the Wii would come in a cube. (Score:2, Funny)
Anyways.. onlything more cool than a cube is a better looking cube or a sphere. But unless they can make it hover and stuff, I doubt a sphere could be as cool as a cube. It'll just roll around and stuff. Not very practical.
Re:I wish the Wii would come in a cube. (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.hiddenglade.com/threesecond/)
The Gamecube is sixth-generation. The prior generations are:
1. Up to and including Atari 2600.
2. Intellivision, Colecovision, Atari 5200.
3. NES, Sega Master System, Atari 7800.
4. Genesis, SNES, Turbografx 16.
5. Saturn, Playstation, N64
6. Dreamcast, PS2, X-box, Gamecube.
-- and next --
7. X-Box 360, Playstation 3, Wii.
Whatever. (Score:1)
In other online news... (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Saturday October 27, @04:36PM)
Karl Rove has been indicted!
Everything you read on the intrawebs is the absolute truth!
pfft!! (Score:2)
(http://fmorg.sf.net/)
if it gets me my Wii sooner, ship it in gamecube cases!!
sony and microsoft don't have bupkis to play on here...
Odd (Score:1, Flamebait)
My computer is sucks (Score:3, Funny)
GC and Wii processor (Score:2)
Honestly... (Score:3, Funny)
(http://matoushin.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday May 24 2005, @09:28AM)
Can't understand all this bashing of articles.. (Score:1)
What's the big fucking deal? (Score:3, Insightful)
I saw an auction on eBay a while back for an early GameCube dev kit. The CPU clockspeed was listed as only half that of the final GameCube and the graphics hardware was missing a few pipelines. It was also bigger than the final hardware so it couldn't fit in the GC's case. Was demoing GameCube games on that at E3 also misleading?
And what have we got this year? Wii hardware that's too big to fit in Wii cases, so they stuck it in a GC case. Even if Nintendo were just using GCs and there wasn't any Wii hardware in them, I don't think it's particularly important because a) the Wii isn't about graphical power and b) the GC is essentially a subset of the Wii's final spec. So it's the equivalent of working on a cut down Wii anyway, like the early GC dev kit I mentioned above was a cut down version of the final GC hardware.
Preface... Getting the wii (Score:2, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Sunday November 06 2005, @02:43AM)
Small is hard... That's why PDA's aren't crazy fast...
Crazy heat issues etc... one of the hottest components is wireless (radio waves)...
If the Wii has several seperate wireless connections (8 it sounds like) that thing is going to be REALLY REALLY REALLY hot, depite the mediocre graphics and cpu the wireless alone provides a massive technical challenge.
Reading through 20 Nintendo apology posts made me sad... they're scamming, it sucks, they admitted it... gamers are NOT picking on Nintendo about this, it blows that anyone would do this and it's especially problematic because some 3rd parties DO get their info from E3 while Nintendo seems to be using it to mislead(however minorly) the consumer.
Whoever said that games will probably look better later could be right but what kind of attitude is that to take when someone lies to you.
The Wii Controller was meant for the Gamecube (Score:5, Interesting)
Back in 2004, there were many rumours [gamesindustry.biz] that Nintendo was going to announce a new peripheral add-on [ign.com] for the Gamecube that would add new functionality and possibly extend the life of the Gamecube [ign.com]. Let's assume that this peripheral was the "Wii-mote".
So let's put all this logic together about 6 months after this announcement:
1) The Gamecube never really got it's established fanbase.
2) Around the same time, Nintendo launches the DS. The "Wii-mote" would have distracted Nintendo from the DS launch.
3) Let's say that had trouble making the "Wii-mote" work... say... the Gamecube lacked the CPU horsepower, or they needed to "refine" the controller more.
4) Sony and MSFT both announces their next-gen consoles at this same time.
So, you have this potentially revolutionary controller. Why try and compete against Sony and MSFT with the dying Gamecube? Add some horsepower to the Gamecube. Add a new GPU, and voila... you have a new console.
Therefore, it doesn't surpise me that they COULD have a "pushed" Gamecube at E3 to demonstrate Wii's capabilities.
1) It explains the un-exceptional graphics... or at least graphics the Gamecube could do.
2) It explains the huge amount of games demoed at E3.
3) It explains the "Gamecube" housings.
4) It explains how "polished" the demos were, and how refined the Wii-mote works.
5) It explains why the Wii development kits are so cheap... they are probably very much similar to the Gamecube.
So it doesn't surprise me that the Wii was disguised in the Gamecube housing. In the end, does it really matter? I'm still buying one at launch.
Wii in a Gamecube case? AWESOME! Where can I buy? (Score:2)
Slow slow ati :3 (Score:1)
sowhat (Score:2)
(http://www.diggdot.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday July 02 2003, @01:26PM)
--
http://www.wiishlist.com [wiishlist.com]
wow. This is the best they can do? (Score:2)
(http://teasphere.wordpress.com/)
C'mon. Normally I could care less and stay far away from this "console war" marketing crap, but this is just re-damn-diculous. People need to realize that no matter if _they_ will buy a Wii or if they even hate every game released for it, that the Wii is the single greatest thing that could happen to their beloved industry as it will cause a rapid break from the never ending sequels and stagnant genre's that have been dead and beaten continuously for years now.
Re:This makes me wonder... (Score:4, Funny)
(http://www.users.qwest.net/~waffleck-asch/ | Last Journal: Wednesday November 07, @04:46PM)
Well, maybe it can, but I want to know if we can make a Beowulf cluster out of Wii hardware.
Then we can have a Wii Beowulf cluster.
Thanks, I'll be here all week.
Yes, it did. (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Wednesday August 18 2004, @07:52AM)
http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/15
Re:This makes me wonder... (Score:3, Funny)
(Last Journal: Wednesday August 18 2004, @07:52AM)