If you click on a link and make a purchase we may receive a small commission. Read our editorial policy.

Wii is as powerful as Xbox

In an exclusive interview with GamesIndustry.biz, the group producer for the FIFA development team, Tim Tschirner, weighed in on the power of Nintendo's latest console.

FIFA producer Tim Tschirner has said that he believes the Nintendo Wii matches up to the first Xbox in terms of power.

Tschirner's comments came in an exclusive interview with GamesIndustry.biz's sister site, Eurogamer.net

"It's about as powerful as the original Xbox," he said. "The video hardware unfortunately is not as powerful. There's just a couple of key things that you can do on Xbox like shaders which you just cannot do on the Wii... Overall though it's pretty much what the original Xbox was."

Tschirner went on to observe that he has found the Wii "very straightforward to write code for", adding, "I think from a creative point of view it's been awesome working on this platform because there's obviously stuff we couldn't do before."

He also praised Nintendo for attempting to broaden the market with the Wii by appealing to people who don't normally play games.

"That's a bit of a philosophy that we wanted to get into this game as well - that people don't have to be afraid of finding the control scheme overwhelming or overly demanding," Tschirner explained.

"And then on the flip-side, we wanted to make sure that long-term FIFA players would find everything they love in the game still in place."

FIFA 08 is due out on Wii this autumn. To read the rest of this interview, visit Eurogamer.net.