Miyamoto: Wii successor will likely feature motion controls in 'more compact' form

It sounds like Nintendo's plans for the next console are going to continue largely in the direction they've always been going (you know, the one that has resulted in millions of dollars). Shigeru Miyamoto told Popular Mechanics that, despite not having a solid plan yet for upcoming hardware, motion controls are likely to stick around.

"With both the Wii remote itself and Wii MotionPlus, what we've been able to do is introduce an interface that is both I think appealing and at the right price for a broad audience," Miyamoto said. "And while we don't have any concrete plans for what we'll be doing with hardware in the future, what I can say is that, my guess is that because we found this interface to be so interesting, I think it would be likely that we would try to make that same functionality perhaps more compact and perhaps even more cost-efficient."

This could result in a single unit that combines the base Wiimote functionality with the extra accelerometer of the MotionPlus, which makes sense. Or, more excitingly, Miyamoto could be talking about the system being more "compact" and "cost-efficient." Either way, it's starting to look less and less likely that the Wii 2 will be just like its competitors, but with Mario games on it.

In much more important news, Miyamoto said that he'd never heard of The Wizard. Bill Trinen's got a night of translating horrible Fred Savage dialogue ahead of him!