Aimless Gaming Rant. Please disregard.

I’m fairly certain that when Nintendo is being attacked as a greedy money-grubbing corporation and Sony and Microsoft are being praised by gaming geeks (there’s a lot of overlap between gaming geeks and computer geeks, and the latter group usually despises Microsoft) for being less greedy, something is very, very wrong with the universe.

See, Nintendo is making money every time they sell a Wii at the proposed $250 price point, and since it’s the only manufacturer to make hardware cheap enough to actually sell when priced above its manufacturing costs, that makes Nintendo evil.

Companies make money, or they die. Sony and Microsoft aren’t subsidizing the price of the PS3 and the Xbox 360 because they’re nice, they’re doing it because they think they can make money by selling lots and lots of copies of expensive games. And I hope they’re right, because I rather like gaming, and would hate to see the industry die.

Well, okay. I hope Microsoft’s right, anyway If Sony went down in a ball of fire, I wouldn’t shed a single tear. Sure, I own a PSP and a PS2, but I’ve played the two, combined for less than half the time that I spent on a single game (Pikmin) for the GameCube. (If you count the times I’ve used the PS2 as a DVD player, that’s less true.) They just weren’t fun.

If Nintendo can make a gaming system that is fun to play and cheap enough to make that they can sell it at a profit, more power to them.

I’m also seeing the complaint that Nintendo is using “inferior hardware” in the Wii, so it’s not truly a “next generation” system. It strikes me as a bit amusing that these are very likely the same people who would call me a heretic and burn me at the stake if I pointed out that the original Playstation, hardware-wise, belonged in the same generation as the Sega CD, but I digress…

I apparently need to repeat my basic philosophy on gaming systems, so you’ll have a better idea of where I stand on the issue of Nintendo’s “inferior” hardware: If Nintendo can make a gaming system that is fun to play and cheap enough to make that they can sell it at a profit, more power to them.

See how that says nothing about powerful hardware or cutting-edge graphics? I don’t care if a system can play really, really pretty movies (which, incidentally, was all that the previous Playstation systems could make pretty — the games themselves weren’t particularly impressive, most of the time). I care if the system can have games that are fun to play, and Nintendo has consistently proven that they make fun games, so I’m all for supporting the Wii (even with the stupid name).