Spore Dev Down On the Wii

An anonymous reader writes "As reported by IGN, Spore developer Chris Hecker made a very quotable statement at a traditionally contentious GDC panel. At the 'Game Publishers Rant' event Wednesday morning, Hecker stated that he thought the Wii is a piece of sh*t. He went on to refer to it as 'two GameCubes stuck together with duct tape.' He also took Nintendo to task for not taking games seriously enough. 'It's not clear to me that Nintendo gives a s*** about games as an art form.'"

Re:I may be mistake, but I don't think it sucks...

[KDR_11k]

According to him, the XBox 360 and Playstation 3 suck because they push graphics over gameplay and Nintendo sucks for pushing gameplay over "art".

Re:sony?

[moonbender]

FOr what it's worth, the deletion log message "CSD A7" refers to Criteria for Speedy Deletion: Unremarkable people, groups, companies and web content. Warrented in this case, in my opinion, but I think an AfD discussion would have been more sensible.

Re:Can game developers be Divas?

[Aladrin]

The other response said The Sims was the best selling PC game of all time, but didn't bother to cite it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best_selling_ computer_and_video_games [wikipedia.org]

It is, but it doesn't come close to the best selling console games of all time, sadly. (16mil vs 30mil and 40mil)

Having said that, The Sims -is- a great game, but aimed at a different audience than their old games. I'm amazed at how many expansions they've managed to sell. Seasons? Pets? WTF?

Wright has said that all his Sim games are different, but in the same vein. The Sims was just a natural progression of it. Spore takes all this Sims games, plus some games like Civilization, and wraps them all into one. I find this amazingly hard to believe (even after seeing the videos) and I'm very much looking forward to finding out exactly how well it was all put together. If I tried it, I think it'd be amazingly disjointed and it would be like 8 seperate games, 1 after the other, instead of smoothly moving from stage to stage.

We'll see how it comes out.

As for the Wii... Wright has already said he plans to have it on ALL consoles, the PC, and even phones, I believe. There's not much change he'll ignore the Wii.

I agree with the sentiment but...

[Neo_piper]

I have to point out that the only two games that are REALLY breakaway sellers
ie. MUCH More than 16 million copies
are Super Mario Brothers (NES) and Tetris (GB) both of which were pack ins with their respective systems and not ACTUALLY sold.

Misleading article

[Funk_dat69]

This article mentions it, but it's easy to miss. Chris was talking in the annual "Developers Rant" forum, which is sort of an tongue-in-cheek, humor-laced exaggeration-fest. I'm sure he doesn't hate the Wii *that* much. His point was he wishes it was a faster, basically. You have to be able to see through the satire and wit, to understand what he's talking about.

Of course I wasnt there though - it's possible he could have taken it too far, it's always hard to judge where that line is and this guy seems to enjoy pushing that line.

In my day, we had to walk 5 miles in the snow ...

[ClosedSource]

He should try writing a game for the Atari 2600. That would make him appreciate the hardware riches he has:

CS: The 2600 doesn't have a two-dimensional bitmap.
Chris: What!? You mean the bitmap can only hold one scan line worth of image?
CS: Well, not a whole scan line.
Chris: What?
CS: Did I mention that background pixels are about 1/4 inch in width.
Chris: Arrgh! Give me a Wii, give me a Wii!