Speaking at the Burning Mad: Game Publishers Rant session at GDC today, Spore developer Chris Hecker unleashed a shocking outburst about Nintendo’s Wii console, describing the machine as “a piece of shit” and slamming Zelda creator Eiji Aonuma.

Spong reports that Hecker, the founder of developer Definition 6, also accused Nintendo of failing to recognise games as an art form.

Hecker likened Wii to “two GameCubes stuck together with duct tape”, claiming that the system does not offer the next-gen experience he was hoping for.

“This thing is totally underpowered,” he stated. “This is not about graphics, more polygons, all that kind of crap. What I want to be able to do is spend CPU to make the machine smarter, more interesting and more automatically intelligent.

“It's about interactivity – that is the key differentiator of our art form, and interactivity is about doing something interesting with that input and threading it back to the user. You can't do that with a piece of shit underpowered computer."
 
Hecker then slammed Zelda creator Eiji Aonuma, who has previously claimed that games should be about fun, and not artistic merit, saying: "This is not good enough for people who are leading our industry. If we're going to make games the art from of the 21st century, we need people who care more than just, 'I'm going to make some fun toys'.”