Nintendo Wii Fanboy

People should probably stop asking them about it. Seriously. We think that's what Mark Rein wants.

But, people still keep doing it, the latest being an interview with GamesIndustry.biz. When asked about Wii development, Rein busted out his Fragalator 5000 and shot the possibility down into a heaping mess of blood and guts. "That's like asking a sculptor when he's going to start painting," he said. "That's just not our medium. That's not our area of expertise - our area of expertise is the more high-end consoles and things that push technology higher. That's what we do - there's a lot more water in that well for us, when that runs dry then maybe we'd have to think of doing something else but I don't think that well is going to run dry anytime soon."

Oh well, not like Unreal Tournament would be the same with Miis anyway ...

Yup, Unreal Engine 3 is headed to the Wii, but Epic won't be handling it. No, instead the engine will be adapted for use on the Wii by an unnamed licensee. Mark Rein, who you all know full well, commented as such during a recent interview with Kikizo.

"It's their own port, in the same way Ubisoft brought Unreal Engine 2 to the Wii [for Red Steel]," he said. Of course, he couldn't help but toss in his own pessimistic view regarding the whole idea, adding "I just don't see a big market there to bring this big hulking memory intensive engine over to a much smaller system."

And now, we're left wondering what the engine is being adapted for. Anyone care to speculate?

[Via Joystiq]

Mark Rein is talking about the Wii again, this time commenting that his company is sticking to work on consoles that can push the graphical envelope. Even though a lot of developers and publishers are looking to the Wii for some future projects due to its success, Epic could care less.

Rein comments "I don't think there's a lot of money on making engines for the Wii because the big software dollars right now are being earned on Xbox 360 and they're going to be earned on PlayStation 3, and I think unless you're going to sell your engine to Nintendo, you're going for scraps on that platform." Rein also states that he thinks the big bucks are to be made on the Xbox 360 and PS3, where the budgets for games are a lot higher.

He said as much last year (wow, seems like yesterday we were calling this thing the Revolution), but the hopes of seeing the Unreal Engine 3 on the Wii is still strong in the community. And this year at GDC, again the question came up and again Mark Rein took the time to take those hopes into a headlock and proceed to give them the Yoga noogie of a lifetime.

Mark said "this is kinda a high definition engine. Designed for a certain level of graphics card and certain amount of CPU. You know, I'm sure one of our licensees will squeeze it down into the Wii. The way Ubisoft squeezed Unreal Engine 2 into the PSP," he explained in a little bit more detail exactly why the Wii and Unreal Engine 3 won't become best buddies, "Unreal Engine 3 is designed for a high level shader architecture and the Wii doesn't have that. I mean, you know, it's just not what we've been aiming for, so it's not something we're looking to do or support." Mark didn't go on to talk about specific companies that were already looking to license the engine, if there even are any, but apparently its fairly cheap to license as Mark said he "only saw a splinter of the money from Splinter Cell."