In a new interview with British newspaper The Guardian, SimCity and The Sims creator Wii Wright has described the Wii as the only next generation console, while criticizing the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 as incremental improvements.
Asked about which games he played for fun (where he mentioned a love of Guitar Hero and Advance Wars) Wright mentioned: “Somebody asked me what I thought next generation meant and what about the PlayStation 3 was next generation.”
“The only next gen system I've seen is the Wii – the PS3 and the Xbox 360 feel like better versions of the last, but pretty much the same game with incremental improvement,” he continued.
Wright added: “But the Wii feels like a major jump – not that the graphics are more powerful, but that it hits a completely different demographic. In some sense I see the Wii as the most significant thing that's happened, at least on the console side, in quite a while.”
Asked what game set-up he had at home Wright answered: “We've got an Xbox 360 collecting dust in the background, a Wii hooked up that we use quite a bit. I don't have a PS3. I still, for the most part, prefer playing games on the computer – to me the mouse is the best input device ever.”
“Every generation it's like ‘the PC's dead! The PC's dead!’. But it carries on growing when consoles are flat for five years. At the moment I can get better graphics on my PC than I can on the PS3,” said Wright.
Wright’s personal platform preferences can seen to be reflected in his games, with his major titles such as SimCity, The Sims and the forthcoming Spore all being primarily developed for the PC. However, SimCity did prove an influential hit on the SNES and versions of Spore are planned for both the Wii and Nintendo DS.
