“Our competitors would have you believe that the next generation of gaming will be solely defined by high definition graphics. High definition graphics look fantastic, but come at a price. To shine, high definition games must be played on high definition televisions, which aren’t cheap. Games with high definition graphics are expensive to develop because they must be developed in both standard and high definition formats. Those development costs are passed on to you in the form of more expensive software. Finally, playing games with high definition graphics requires a system with loads of RAM and costly high-end graphics chips, both of which make it prohibitively expensive for most consumers.”
That’s what Nintendo will tell you, if you ask them why they won’t have HDTV support in their next-gen console, Nintendo Revolution. I think they have a good point, making it more expensive for developers to make the games, it will be more expensive for us, the gamers, to buy the games. I just saw a news article on Slashdot today, that pointed out, that 50% of the HDTV owners out there actually watch HDTV content on their HDTV! And HDTV is certainly not a common thing around my neighborhood, and most of Denmark I think, let a lone be europe in general (That’s just what I think, I could be wrong), so what’s the point of supporting HDTV if it’s not something that most people would benefit from? I certainly don’t get it. Also, HDTV support takes up a big amount of memory which would make the price of the hardware even higher, and keep in mind that Nintendo is trying to expand the gaming market to people they reffer to as “non-gamers”, those people are certainly not gonna pay like 400 bucks to see if this gaming thing is something they *might* be interested in.
Also, why do you need crazy graphics, an insane amount of processing power and lots of violence (blood and gore) to make a fun game? I’ve been playing Mario since I was three years old and I still find it a great game, I’m 17 these days, and a lot of people really love MAME, which is an arcade emulator, that allows you to play 20 year old arcade games like Packman, Donkey Kong, Pong and stuff like that, which is very fun games at times. I think Nintendo is really doing something great with the Revolution, I’m certainly going to be in line to buy one when it launches along with a good handful of games for it. What really excites me about the Revolution is the new ways you’ll be able to play games on it, and maybe even new sorts of games, I’d sure like to see a sword fighting game, wouldn’t that be awesome, sitting in front of the TV, wielding the controller like a real sword! Now that would make of realistic gameplay!! 😀
The bottom line is, you certainly don’t need to have the greatest graphics to have the greatest games.