Will “Project Cafe” (Wii 2) Change Everything, Again?

French site 01net claims it knows more about the next Nintendo console than most, suggesting that the Wii follow-up will feature a custom IBM PowerPC CPU (with three cores), an ATI 700 GPU and at least half a GB of RAM.  Reasonably close then, in terms of basic architecture at least, to the Xbox 360.

Of course, this is all speculation, but at the moment there’s a lot of sources all pointing to very similar results – Nintendo’s next home console will be hugely powerful, relatively anyway, and will certainly be better placed to stand up to what the PS3 and 360 are presently doing, performance wise.

[drop2]01net also suggest that Project Cafe (as it’s being referred to, translated here) will also play GameCube and Wii games, as we’ve heard before.  The trick, again, as we’ve mentioned, will be a six-inch touch screen on the controller, a front-facing camera and a full set of regular physical buttons.

But what does this mean for gamers?  As everyone knows, the Nintendo Wii’s been instrumental in attracting a whole new range of more casual and older gamers to the industry, via a range of easier to play, physical titles that rely less on rote knowledge of which button does which, and more about actually just playing.

But some have balked, ignorantly perhaps, at the low resolution offered by the Wii in comparison to the PS3 and Xbox 360.  It doesn’t matter to the majority of Wii gamers, but developers have clearly struggled with porting over key multiformat titles due to a lack of grunt – if Nintendo can convince publishers that 1:1 ports of current HD titles can make their way to a Nintendo platform, they’ll be quids in.

Of course, when the Wii 2 does release (again, all this is currently clearly just rumour) the PS3 and Xbox 360 will be edging towards moving over to the next generations, and then developers will have higher targets to aim at, potentially leaving Project Cafe behind once more.  Is this all too little too late?

And that controller – it sounds like something the scale of an NGP but with a bigger screen (and presumably lots of motion control) – surely it won’t be a good idea to start throwing something that expensive around as you pretend to be whacking a tennis ball back and forth, or will the controller form the base, and things will just ‘connect’ to it, like the nunchuck?

Interesting times, for sure – the Wii changed everything, not always for the better, but anyone currently ignoring Nintendo should be keeping them firmly in their sights.

All eyes on E3, then.