AfterDawn: News

Wii sales healthy in US - No Wii MotionPlus backwards compatibility planned

Two small pieces of news today for the world of Nintendo Wii. Firstly, ahead of NPD's sales figures for gaming consoles, Lazard Capital Markets analyst Colin Sebastian has reported that sales of the Wii system in the United States remained steady in March, despite the large drop in sales in Japan. "Our checks in the US still indicate fairly steady sell-through, albeit within the context of some seasonal sluggishness overall in hardware," Sebastian said.

He attributes its continued success to it's easy availability on store shelves because of, "production increases put in place last summer as well as a more normalised mid-cycle selling pattern." Nintendo president Satoru Iwata admitted that the Wii is in its worst condition yet in the Japanese market last week, but ruled out price cuts as a response.



We also reported the launch date of the new MotionPlus controller for the Wii console. Since it has been publicized, there has been questions about the potential to use the new controller with older games, or "non-MotionPlus" titles. "There are currently no plans to make it compatible with existing non-Wii MotionPlus enabled titles," commented Nintendo.

This shouldn't really come as a surprise in any case, but at least it answers the question officially. The MotionPlus promises to deliver better accuracy, and so a better user experience, through closer tracking of user movements.

Written by: James Delahunty @ 16 Apr 2009 16:47

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• 7 comments

• ZippyDSM

  wut?
  
  FCKERS!!!! My god I swear Nintendo has become trolls...
  
  Theres no point in buying it if I can't use it on any game I think needs tighter control.... I'll wait for a 3rd party knock off that offers multi mode(Wii mote,WM+,WM with enhanced sensitivity)..... even put a slider bard or tunable nob to tweak sensitivity...

  16.4.2009 17:22 #1

• RusSnajp

  lol, and what possible games will I play on wii with motion plus ,
  
  
  They gonna make it (releasing a patch for every game throught wiiware or general download versions) ... so backward compatible ... or it's just not worth it
  
  what games are there only letf, ... F-zero and Starfox. ... soul calibur and banjo kazooie are out (**** M$)

  16.4.2009 18:16 #2

• ZippyDSM

  Metroid prime 3 with tighter controls..... all hope is lost....

  16.4.2009 18:19 #3

• DSWarrior

  This sucks...Nintendo always does the same...Although in this case the MotionPlus reacts to certain code in the programming of the game...and if the old games don't have that code, well bye-bye MotionPlus...unless they release a patch for $10.00 each...and end up charging you more for each game you want to use with MotionPlus... :-(...

  16.4.2009 21:52 #4

• cmcjk

  How is the lack of backward compatibilty a surprise? How do you expect the game code to translate from a Wiimote wiggle making Zelda swing his sword to a MotionPlus wiggle making Zelda wiggle his sword?
  Are you guys sitting in front of you're Wii's wondering why the Nunchuck controller doesn't work in Wii Sport.
  
  In 20 years time you'll all be saying "Damn my mind control device wont make Duke Nukem do the funky chicken!!! What a rip-off!!"

  17.4.2009 05:50 #5

• ZippyDSM

  Originally posted by cmcjk: How is the lack of backward compatibilty a surprise? How do you expect the game code to translate from a Wiimote wiggle making Zelda swing his sword to a MotionPlus wiggle making Zelda wiggle his sword?
  Are you guys sitting in front of you're Wii's wondering why the Nunchuck controller doesn't work in Wii Sport.
  
  In 20 years time you'll all be saying "Damn my mind control device wont make Duke Nukem do the funky chicken!!! What a rip-off!!"
  ....... less physical movement to do the same stuff on screen it took with the old wii mote.

  17.4.2009 10:07 #6

• ChiknLitl

  From "Why the Wii will never get any better":
  
  http://hackmii.com/2009/02/why-the-wii-will-never-get-any-better/
  
  Quote:...Nintendo has decided that every new feature will be developed as a separate fork. Your Wii contains many IOS versions, and the older have never been updated except for security reasons (to fix our exploits). Not that they’ve added many new features, but if you look closely, new IOS features do not operate when you’re playing older games. This includes any updates to the WiiConnect24 downloads code, and even some minor things like the “slot LED blinks when you eject a disc” feature - try it when you’re playing Zelda and you’ll see that it doesn’t work, because it’s using the very old IOS9.
  
  There are 23 IOS versions installed with current updates (this is also wasting the scarce 512MB internal memory!). Any new feature that they want to use in older games would have to be retroactively and individually added to each version, and it could create compatibility concerns because the interfaces with IOS functions aren’t all that stable either. Just doing these updates would cost them an immense amount of effort - it took them well over half a year to fix the fakesigning exploit and ship the IOS updates for all 23 versions, and that’s a minor update that can’t possibly affect games. Every time they’ve added a new feature (for example, the recent Wii Speak support, or USB keyboard support, or USB mouse support) they’ve just made a new fork of IOS for it...
  
  ---Chikn

  17.4.2009 15:38 #7