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One of Spore's developers rants about Nintendo's "two GameCubes stuck together with duct tape."

During a session at GDC this morning entitled "Burning Mad - Game Publishers Rant," time was taken about half way through to allow developers a chance to spew their own rants. One speaker, Chris Hecker, currently working on Spore at Maxis, took the opportunity to call out Nintendo for not taking games seriously.

"The Wii is a piece of s***!" Hecker began his talk, which was called "Fear of a Wii Planet." He blasted a few bars of Public Enemy to set the tone. Hecker said the Wii is nothing more than two GameCubes stuck together with duct tape, and that the console isn't powerful enough to provide the next-gen experience he has been waiting for.

Although he stated the system is "severely underpowered," Hecker noted that he wasn't simply referring to the Wii's graphical capabilities. He wants to spend a console's CPU making games more intelligent, and he has found the Wii doesn't have the power to process things like complicated AI.

Hecker 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," he said. To illustrate his point, he searched for references to games as art on all three console manufacturers web sites. While he found numerous such references on both the official PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 sites, Wii.com had none at all. He then shared quotes from executives at Sony and Microsoft talking about games as a serious artistic medium, and then a quote from a Nintendo executive saying the company only wanted to make "fun" games.

Hecker ended his spirited rant with two demands for Nintendo: First, recognize and push games as serious art. And two, "make a console that doesn't suck ass."

Stark wrote:Design decisions and pretentious game 'artists' aside, the Wii's performance point is a strange one. I think the low performance really *isn't* enough to provide everything that's expected, and of course this will only get worse as it's life continues. My mind may be changed if I eventually see an attractive FPS on Wii (something it's control system really leans towards) but I don't think I will. Tradeoffs must be made.

MKSheppard wrote:

Stark wrote:Design decisions and pretentious game 'artists' aside, the Wii's performance point is a strange one. I think the low performance really *isn't* enough to provide everything that's expected, and of course this will only get worse as it's life continues. My mind may be changed if I eventually see an attractive FPS on Wii (something it's control system really leans towards) but I don't think I will. Tradeoffs must be made.

But But Stark, you're not understanding what the wii is about!

Darth Wong wrote:Was he ranting about why people should use PCs for gaming?

MKSheppard wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:Was he ranting about why people should use PCs for gaming?

I just find it interesting that people are discounting this guy's thing, completely forgetting that he's a programmer on Will Wright's Spore.

MKSheppard wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:Was he ranting about why people should use PCs for gaming?

I just find it interesting that people are discounting this guy's thing, completely forgetting that he's a programmer on Will Wright's Spore.

RThurmont wrote:One could reply that at any rate, unlike Spore, at this time, the Wii is not vaporware. Anyone remember the 4Q 2006 release date target???

SirNitram wrote:We ignore because, surprise, it's an Appeal To Authority Fallacy.

I realize you don't know how to argue otherwise, but hey...

'GAMES ARE ART. WHY WON'T NINTENDO RESPECT ME. HOW DARE THEY MAKE GAMES THAT ARE FUN.'

God, this guy is such a pretentious peice of shit.

SAMAS wrote: Although I am looking at my Spore-less game collection, and wondering why the hell doesn't he get back to work instead of wasting our time with this pointless shit.

Stark wrote:He even 'plays a few bars' to 'set the mood'. I'm not sure how anyone can take this guy seriously - bar people who already hate the Wii and just look for soundbytes to giggle at.

Flagg wrote:

RThurmont wrote:One could reply that at any rate, unlike Spore, at this time, the Wii is not vaporware. Anyone remember the 4Q 2006 release date target???

I would hardly call Spore vaporware. By all accounts it's very much in development and signifigant progress has been made. The delays so far haven't been at all unreasonable. It's not like Valve with it's "episodic content" that takes a fucking year for 2-4 hours of gameplay.

So up went a slide that showed the eight distinct phases of Spore, and the types of gameplay they most resembled:

Molecular ->> Tetris
Cellular ->> Pac-Man
Creature ->> Diablo / FPS
Tribal ->> Populous
City ->> SimCity
Civilization ->> Civilization / Risk
Terraform ->> SimEarth
Galactic ->> Masters of Orion

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:I thought MoO3's problem was a poor user interface and an overemphasis on micromanagement, not a gameplay scope that was too large...