No matter how much you talk about Kinect for Xbox 360 and PlayStation Move, you’ll always know that they weren’t the ones to start it all – the Nintendo Wii did it five years ago! And that legacy is now set to take a new turn: Nintendo has just announced that their next-generation Wii gaming console will be announced this June at E3 2011!
That's probably not what it will look like.
Unfortunately, that’s all we actually know about the upgrade. Nothing else is official, but several rumors have been flying around. Here, are my top three, most fascinating picks:
- The new controllers will have screens. One obviously thinks of the Dreamcast after this, but think of what small screens have been able to achieve today – near-HD resolutions, touch-screen controls… It’s like having an iPhone – or maybe the 3DS – as a motion controller for the Wii and that sounds really, really good!
- It won’t be called Wii. Historically, Nintendo hasn’t called anything the same as it’s previous iteration with a ‘2’ tacked on to it, barring variants of some consoles such as the GameBoy (Color, Advance, Micro) and the DS (DS Lite, DSi and now 3DS). After five years, it’s unlikely that a successor to the Wii is going to be just a variant and hence, there are exceptionally strong chances of it not being called the Wii.
- It won’t be overly powerful. Reports suggest that it’ll be as or even more powerful than current consoles such as the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3. I don’t think so. Nintendo’s game systems never rely on brawn, but on brain. The motion-controlled Wii and the the dual-screen DS weren’t successful because of the high-speed CPU or GPU or any other specs. They introduced throughly revolutionary and innovative ways of using what was available. So I don’t think we’ll see a console that’ll crunch more numbers than all the cores on the 360 or the PS3, but I’m confident that it’ll be much, much more fun. And HD capable!
What do you think the next Wii will have? What do you want it to have? Let us know in the comments box below!
