GTA IV Does Not Feel Natural on the Nintendo Wii

GTA IV is poised to arrive on the PC on November 18 with a host of improvements, some of them linked to the multiplayer aspects, which will be handled via Games for Windows Live, others related to the look of the game. And there is a lot of talk regarding the Nintendo DS GTA release, called Chinatown Wars, which is now under development at Rockstar.

What people are not talking about is a Nintendo Wii version of Grand Theft Auto IV. It would be a gigantic success to pair up the motion tracking control of the Wiimote and the Nunchuk with the cool gameplay of GTA IV. Imagine how easy it would be to shoot while driving or handling a helicopter, things which have never been easy to do while using a gaming console controller. But Dan Houser, one of the co-founders of Rockstar and one of the leading developers on the title, said that “It didn't feel natural to us” to do a Nintendo Wii version of the game. He told Nintendo Power that “It really was that the DS felt like it had a lot of interesting challenges that would be totally different from what we'd done in the past”.

The bad news is that, at the moment, Rockstar has its hands pretty much full with developing Chinatown Wars for the Nintendo DS and with creating the extra content that the Xbox 360 version of the game is set to receive. The good news is that Rockstar is not ruling out the possibility of bringing a GTA game to the Nintendo made console. Houser said that “We haven't really done any concrete, major thinking about the Wii, one way or another. They're sort of separate issues”.

The Wii is already a leader when it comes to simpler, so called casual games. Adding a hardcore title like GTA IV to its library of games would make it an even more interesting console to gamers.