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Wii has rumble after all; moral learnt that magazines aren’t always correct

by Darren

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There’s been quite a bit of excitement during the past couple of days surrounding popular Nintendo magazine, “NGamer”. Not the good kind of excitement, though. No, I’m talking about the kind of excitement where two thirds of the community take a shocked step back after being told that Nintendo’s Wii will not have rumble feedback built into the controller. Rumble feedback is the technology which became pretty much standardised as an essential component of a video games controller ten years ago.

What made this news particularly panic-inducing is that a huge fuss was made a couple of months ago when it was revealed that the PlayStation 3 was exchanging its rumble feedback system for some basic motion sensitivity. So when it was then reported that Nintendo’s Wii — the home console with the most innovative controller in roughly a decade — would be scrapping this much-loved feature, you can imagine the unrest.

Fortunately, the excitement’s become so intense that NGamer has opted to send out a statement withdrawing what it said in the magazine. The Wii does have rumble feedback after all, and gamers everywhere can return to peace. In addition to the withdrawl, Kotaku claims that a games developer working on the Wii has gotten in touch with them to confirm that it does indeed have rumble feedback, and that the prototype they’re using it has it.

But this whole thing just goes to show that contrary to what many assume, printed magazines don’t have all the facts after all. Just one sentence has managed to throw the whole gaming community into a frenzy simply because it appeared in a physical magazine rather than on a website. Sure, magazines do have a certain level of authority due to their built-up reputation, but the proof is in the pudding that they can’t be used as an end-all information resource.

Fact checking has to be carried out, and it seems kind of bewildering to me that nobody though to get in toucht with Nintendo or a developer to confirm the story. Instead the whole situation was hyped up beyond belief on the likes of Digg, countless respectable gaming websites, and of course blogs everywhere. Hopefully this whole spectacle will remind people to never get excessively excitable over just one source. Magazines have to speculate just as much as the rest of us.

After all, the rumble feedback was there and openly promoted at E3 2006, the largest games press event of the year. Why would it not be now on the say-so of just one magazine?

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