Speaking at the Burning Mad: Game Publishers Rant session at GDC today, Spore developer Chris Hecker has shockingly branded the Wii as “a piece of shit” and slammed Zelda's creator, Eiji Aonuma.

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

Not mincing his words Hecker claimed that "the Wii is a piece of shit!" likening it to two GameCubes stuck together with duct tape, claiming that the system does not offer the next-gen experience he was hoping for, in terms of both graphics and processing power.

"This thing is totally underpowered... 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 was quoted as saying, "I don't feel that games can necessarily be considered art. There's nothing wrong with that; our goal is just to make games that are fun."

Hecker strongly disagrees: "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.'

Speak your brains Chris, don’t be shy!

Apparently there are more rants on the way - in this deeply formalised session.

What do you reckon? Is the Wii shit? Are games art?