Wii2 Update
More Wii2 Rumours
Citing unnamed and anonymous sources, the video game blog Kotaku is reporting a handful of notable, albeit predictable, details about Nintendo’s upcoming Wii successor, codenamed Project Café. For instance, in lieu of the standard capacious hard drive with lots of storage space, Nintendo will buck industry trends by offering only 8GB of flash-based memory augmented by SD card support. If rumours are true and Project Café plans to offer a graphical experience that’s competitive with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, we’re not sure what the storage solution for DLC or larger downloadable games will be. For instance, Red Dead Redemption’s Undead Nightmare DLC was over 1.5GB in size and the downloadable game Comic Jumper was nearly 2GB. With such a drastic reduction in storage memory, digital distribution of retail titles would seemingly be off the table for the Wii successor, as would larger DLC.
Also rumoured is the new disc format for Project Café. It’s believed to hold 25GB of data, which is roughly three times the size of a dual-layer DVD and over five times the size of the single-layer DVD that most Wii titles currently use. 25GB is also the standard storage space of a single-layer Blu-Ray disc, although it’s not clear if Project Café will use that standard and, even if it did, if it would enable movie playback on the console. Remember that the current Wii, despite using DVDs, famously doesn’t support DVD video playback.
Speaking of Blu-Ray video playback, the magic number usually tossed about by Hi-Def home theater enthusiasts (and Sony marketing goons) is 1080, as in 1080p video resolution. Less popular is 1080i, which, while also featuring one-thousand-and-eighty lines of resolution, interlaces those lines instead of scanning them progressively like in 1080p. If that doesn’t sound familiar, it’s because the 1080i standard has been somewhat out-of-fashion since 1080p-compatible televisions and devices have filled the market. Kotaku is reporting that its sources are hearing “mixed things” as to whether Nintendo plans on offering 1080p (or, as Sony would put it circa 2006, “True HD”) or 1080i.
As much as we want to believe every Project Café rumor we hear, we can’t forget the delta between the console that Nintendo announced at E3 2006 and the one we actually got at its release. Nintendo was full of promises then too: DVD playback! USB hard drive support! It remains to be seen if the new successor to the Wii will be better able to live up to the hype than its predecessor. Between now and Café’s 2012 launch date, it’s anyone’s guess.
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