A while back I got a little opinion from a friend at a 3rd party and posted the story which you can read here. Due to a good amount of speculation as to what was meant, I decided to elaborate and speculate a little.

What my friend was implying is that Dreamcast was an improvement in terms of power over N64 and PS, but it didn’t hold its own in the upcoming console generation (which included PS2, GCN, and Xbox).

Was Dreamcast powerful? Sure it was and I’d be willing to bet that if it lasted successfully until Fall, 2004, you’d see some very pretty looking games for it.

However, what I’m being told is that more or less, it looks like Wii’s successor will be significantly more powerful than the current HD Twins, enough so that when the more powerful PlayStation 4 and Xbox 3 come out a year or so later, Nintendo’s machine won’t be “last gen tech”.

I think that that’s one of the fears of a lot of fans. Some are thinking, “crap, I waited all this time to get Mario, Zelda, and Metroid to have as many polygons and effects as Gears of War and Uncharted and now when I finally have it, the other systems are like an Xbox to my N64″…but I don’t believe that will be the case.

From what I’ve been hearing and thus postulating, in the way that PS2 handled Prince of Persia just fine, but it was the GameCube and Xbox versions that looked a significant amount better, the same should hold for the next round of systems.

If Batman Arkham 3 comes out on Striim (Project Cafe, Wii 2, Nintendo HD, N6, etc.), Xbox 3, and PS4, they should all look similar enough that a developer won’t have to make a whole different, stripped down version for Nintendo’s system. That’s one of the things that hurt Wii. You’d have Ghostbusters on Microsoft’s and Sony’s machines be one sku and the Nintendo build would be totally different. Sometimes Wii benefited from having equal or better versions that its HD rivals, but oftentimes (unfortunately), a developer made a poor port or skipped out at all.

I don’t see major 3rd party titles like Street Fighter 5, Resident Evil 6, Metal Gear Solid 5, Mortal Kombat 2 (all examples), and so on, having that great of a graphical disparity amongst the next line of consoles.

Then again, what one industry friend’s opinion is might differ a lot from yours in terms of graphical quality, raw horsepower, performance, etc. Also, it’s probably not too late for Sony and Microsoft to “up” their next systems a little more than originally planned, if Nintendo really wows them (unless of course MS and Sony are already quite far along with the development of their successors).

E3 will tell all…can’t wait. And also, remember that you can come by and ask me any question you’d like in my E3 Q/A and I promise to answer each one of you.