posible port del residet evil 5 a wii

Resident Evil 5 was a huge success upon its release on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, achieving the fastest sales in the series’ history. It may not have lived up to the massive expectations, but players lapped it up in their thousands upon thousands. It’s no wonder then that many Wii owners feel a bit disappointed at the lack of announcement regarding Resident Evil 5’s arrival on their system. After the Wii version of Resident Evil 4 being hailed by many as the greatest Resident Evil release ever, surely it makes sense to develop RE5 for the Wii? The rumors of such a release have certainly been around for a while. Ever since Sega of America President Simon Jeffrey stirred things up this time last year by hinting that RE5 would come to the Wii, the buzz has spread on whether the game would even be possible on the Nintendo system.

Events this week served only to confuse matters further. During a preview of the Wii’s new Resident Evil light gun game Darkside Chronicles, Capcom’s Chief Producer Maschika Kawata announced that RE5 on the Wii was technically possible, but with inferior visuals. Kawata then explained that “a gun shooting game like Darkside Chronicles makes much more sense for Wii so, in short, ’Resident Evil 5 Wii Edition’ isn’t likely to happen”. Fair enough, then, except he then changed his mind later by stating that developer “Cavia has surprised us with the quality of graphics in Darkside Chronicles, so it may actually be possible after all…”. Confused yet?

Looking at screenshots and video footage of Darkside Chronicles, I’m as impressed as Kawata by what Cavia have managed to achieve with the Wii’s capabilities. It doesn’t rival the PS3 and Xbox 360 graphically, but it does an extremely good job of trying. I very much doubt that Wii owners would mind slightly inferior graphics if it gave them the chance to play RE5, especially if the game was adapted to Wiimote controls like RE4 was to great effect. I do have some concerns regarding the co-op mode introduced in RE5, namely whether the graphical engine would struggle to deal with two players at the same time. Although there’s a lot going on in both RE4 and Darkside Chronicles, the engine in both didn’t have to deal with two players having 100% free movement, something that could put strain on the Wii’s processing power.

I think it’s pretty unlikely that we’ll see Resident Evil 5 on the Wii anytime soon as everything seems rather uncertain in the Capcom camp regards what’s actually going to happen. However, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it appear eventually. There’s certainly plenty of interest for it, with RE4 still proving extremely popular on the Wii and the original Resident Evil recently being released for the system. More significantly, I suspect many people who own a Wii as well as a PS3 and Xbox 360 would still buy RE5 for the Wii, simply because of the change in controls. It’s just a matter of whether Capcom thinks it’s financially worthwhile to get, for example, Cavia to port the game across using Resident Evil 4’s game engine. With RE4 on the Wii being the best-selling version of the game, that surely is a no-brainer.