It’s also hard to gauge what the current hardcore actually want if you go by online standards and even the press.

Or rather, if it does, it’ll only be because no one else is offering any sort of competition at all. That means that Sony and Microsoft would have to basically fail with whatever next gen parts they come out with, and Nintendo would have to be able to coast by on the current Wii hardware well past the launch of the PS4 or whatever they decide to call the next XBox. This is a possible scenario, but there’s a big risk that the other two will attempt to innovate, and succeed. A Wii HD with incrementially improved parts only works if the other consoles are just like they are today, only with faster processors. Sony and MS would have to be brain dead to do that though, since then the console wars would play out *exactly* the same as they did this time around.

Think about what the Wii *doesn’t* do. And I don’t mean graphically, as HD support is almost a given, if only because that’ll be the most likely display target. Whatever Nintendo does, it needs to go beyond what we can currently do in terms of gameplay. The motion controls were created to deal with a specific design problem that prevented them from making a specific type of game; namely accessible, easy to pick up games. The DS’s touch screen works on the same principle. Whatever the Wii 2 does, it’ll do to open up a new type of game that previously could not be done.

Nintendo is a software company as well as a hardware company. Anything that they build will be built to solve a software problem. What sort of gameplay are we limited in? What *can’t* we do in terms of gameplay? That’s what Nintendo is likely looking at.