THQ Clarifies Claims of "Horrible, Slow" Wii U CPU

An anonymous reader writes "THQ has clarified comments made by 4A Games' chief technical officer, Oles Shishkovtsov, about why their upcoming first-person shooter, Metro, won't be available for Nintendo's new Wii U console. Shishkovtsov had told NowGamer, '[The] Wii U has a horrible, slow CPU,' by way of explaining why a Wii U version of Metro wasn't in the works. Now, THQ's Huw Beynon has provided a more thorough (and more diplomatic) explanation: 'It's a very CPU intensive game. I think it's been verified by plenty of other sources, including your own Digital Foundry guys, that the CPU on Wii U on the face of it isn't as fast as some of the other consoles out there. Lots of developers are finding ways to get around that because of other interesting parts of the platform. ... We genuinely looked at what it would take to bring the game to Wii U. It's certainly possible, and it's something we thought we'd like to do. The reality is that would mean a dedicated team, dedicated time and effort, and it would either result in a detriment to what we're trying to focus on or we probably wouldn't be able to do the Wii U version the justice that we'd want.'"

Re:any objective numbers?

[dtjohnson]

The anandtech wii u teardown included running the SunSpider javascript benchmark. For comparison, the Wii U scored 2581 while an Iphone 5 scored 908. My Pentium M 1.6 Ghz laptop (the original Xbox used a Pentium 3 at 1 Ghz) scores 719 so the Wii U cpu looks to be about 3.5x more powerful than the 1.6 Ghz Pentium M. All of the "Wii U has a slow CPU" might be just FUD at this point.

Re:What does it matter?

[negRo_slim]

Your hyperbole is as tired and rehashed as the blowjibbers your mother hands out like candy behind the local corner store. First and foremost we live in a glorious capitalistic society which we recently honored on Friday leaving no doubt as to our consumptional mores. Therefore it seems disingenuous to me that it is the existence of the console platform is what shackles you to your shitty ports, you and your PC gaming brethren could no doubt vote with your wallets? Or perhaps it just isn't as big a deal as your vitriol fueled post here would lead us to believe? Or perhaps the PC gaming market just isn't that valuable to those that create mainstream games.... Hmmmm. Of course I wouldn't expect a person like you to look at the world in anything other than the immediate, let alone over the course of decades where you would see console sales always slipping this far into a life cycle. But who knows? Hopefully I'm wrong and you can get back to that glorious rose-tinted yesteryear of Grus and ASCII graphics. That is the hey-day you'r referring to isn't it? Or is the glorious era of FMV? Or isometric pseudo-3d? Obviously it doesn't matter as any era of PC gaming was glorious and absolutely head and shoulders above our current console induced catastrophe of gaming we now weather. That fee bro.

So, what you're saying...

[Man On Pink Corner]

... is that this time, it's three GameCubes duct-taped together?