Nintendo Finally Going HD With New Console? News Item

Nintendo Finally Going HD With New Console?

06 Nov 2009 at 11:37:52 by Gunnar Petzall

Nintendo has announced it will be moving some productions to HD quality in a recent press conference.

"We probably cannot swim against the tide," said Shigeru Miyamoto, implying a change is inevitable.

"The customers' tastes will become more and more refined. Even today, many customers who have seen HD once say they cannot go back to SD... When the majority of people around us say it is OK, we are content with the situation."

Research and development manager Genyo Takeda added: "Since an increasing number of the TV sets at home around the world are becoming HD today, it will be natural for a machine to be able to generate graphics that people will be accustomed to see on HD televisions. Since the ordinary TV programs are now shifting to HD, moving to HD appears to me a natural flow."

Not all games will take the high definition route, however. Costs will increase if games are made in HD, and certain games don't need that extra edge.

Takeda explains saying "[f]or example, we have to ask ourselves if HD is really necessary to develop Wii Fit. Won't HD be better for the games like Pikmin? The developers should choose the most appropriate graphical format depending on the software they make."

Takeda said his department has been looking into "many different things, including HD and SD," and while there won't be any announcements yet, things are heading in a HD direction.

***UPDATE*** Nintendo of America's Reggie Fils-Aime has been quite vocal about HD, and has wanted to make it clear that the HD side of things will not incorporate the Wii. Speaking to GameTrailers.TV (via Kotaku), Fils-Aime has said "Michael [Pachter] continues to be the only one who believes that this is gonna happen. I don't know how forcefully we can say there is no Wii HD."

So whatever the Nintendo team are doing, it seems like it'll be a new console rather than an upgrade to the Wii.

User comments

(1) Posted: 14:17 on 06 Nov 2009

Ser Rodrik Cassel

Sounds logical

(2) Posted: 23:19 on 07 Nov 2009

allenschezard

sounds like nintendo has lost the way... wii is a poor console, full of pitty games, many of them are minigames software. so there are no quality games, the "normal" games has a lack of script they are simplistic about contento... nintendo launched wii too soon and now that wii is everwhere in a very short time they are launching a new console... the same happened with the nintendo ds... they have upgraded it 4 times... ds, ds lite, dsi, dsi xl... so do they know where to go? how could they launch a portable console with less quality than a psp? psp is older but is much better console the games are rather more fun and with more content.. there are almost 6000 ds games and there should be about 1000 decent games... psp have less game but at least half of them are worthless
nintendo made a bad choice about wii graphics... they kept almost the same graphics that the gamecube.. and they focused only in the controls...yeah they are good, but after a while the surprise is over, not all games explore its potential... and the controls are badly designed you have to buy an upgrade like the wii motion plus but it cannot be applied to every game so there are very few games that uses the wii motion pluss, the games that require wii fit are less attractive, and now we have a wii bike... sounds stupid... how many people will buy a wii bike to play a couple of games? is not worthless.
Xbox 360 is a better console... they explode the graphics to its edge... even ps3 have equal or better graphics and it uses bluray support so u can have more quality and better sound because of the format and the capacity of the support.... so... where is nintendo... way below a ps2 and xbox360 quality... they made a very bad choise designing that console... but instead of that the sales of wii are supperior, why? because people download games and play pirated version of them...thats why the same happened with ds