Hey Edge KOA Reckoning is a blast!

Giant Bomb has a good interview with an EA insider who seems oblivious to all the good beans he is spilling.

Worht a listen to if you like the industry news side of the gaming hobby:

http://www.giantbomb.com/podcast/?podcast_id=312

Yoda must be salivating.

Edge this your chick playin Diablo on top of you?

robio said:

This video has entertained the crap out of me tonight. It's a Rifftrax video where they take clips from Megaman, FFX, MGS4, and some lame ass Sonic game and... well they do what Rifftrax does. And if you don't know what they do, you're lame..... okay fine here's a hint, they're the old MST3K guys.

When the hell is that HD FFX coming out? I need a reason to go back to that game for the first time in a decade.

_Bear said:

Hey Edge KOA Reckoning is a blast!

Sweet...I still haven't played it. And I have no idea when I will have time to.

bugsonglass said:

Edge this your chick playin Diablo on top of you?

Great idea, but no...my chick is very blonde and Irish.

^Why?

DF: high-def Wii emulation suggests great things

Use the HD button to enjoy a full 720p60: Remember to use the full-screen button to see full resolution.

This article is pretty good. Normally I expect a Digital Foundry (tech focused site) article about Nintendo platforms to be trashing the archaic tech. But this is a more subjective piece by their lead tech writer. He plays Wii games in HD with dolphin, there are full screen 720p videos to view and he talks about how they still look good because of the attention to detail, artistry etc. And he goes onto extrapolate what we can expect to see out of Wii U graphics. It's a nice little piece to read, check it out.

Tidbits

Perhaps the more interesting topic is just how some of the world's greatest game designers will utilise the immense level of graphical performance a more modern (Wii U) GPU has to offer.

In comparison to PS3 and Xbox 360, the Wii is undoubtedly backward from a technical perspective, but this has not held back the artists and game designers who have continued to make unique, brilliant games.

The firm's internal development teams have performed miracles with the technology available to them. On this page, you'll see tentpole Wii titles rendered in high definition via the Dolphin emulator: instant "HD remasters" of Super Mario Galaxy 2, Mario Kart Wii and New Super Mario Bros, all looking quite wonderful, each title given a new lease of life simply by virtue of extra resolution, anti-aliasing, improved texture filtering and end-to-end digital reproduction from framebuffer to screen.

The application in terms of the overall aesthetic is often flawless. Detail in the characters - both in terms of Mario himself and his antagonists - is often exemplary, scaling up beautifully into high definition.

The CG cartoon-style animation is also superb: flawlessly fluid, full of character. In the case of the Mario titles (and many others) this is helped immensely by the fact that Nintendo insists upon a locked 60FPS frame-rate. In an era where the major first-party HD exclusives usually operate at half that frame-rate, there is some kind of irony that it is the platform with the weakest architecture that is offering the most "must-have" titles running at full 60Hz. There's no doubt that Super Mario Galaxy 2 could be even more rich from a visual perspective were it to halve target frame-rate. The game's creators chose not to for a very specific reason: the interface between player and game is such a crucial component of the Mario experience that Nintendo refuses to compromise it.

While in many ways the Wii may be operating with antique 3D rendering architecture, Nintendo's key titles will have had enviable development budgets and the best available talent working on them - and there would have been a modern-day approach to game-making applied to the older hardware platform. Those same attributes applied even to an Xbox 360-level of hardware must surely result in some must-have games - and based on the evolution of the franchise, we can make some educated guesses on where Nintendo will take Mario next.

The company has been CG-rendering its flagship character for years now, but as the HD renderings of the Wii title show, Nintendo is getting close to fully realising a complete CG Mario world in-game. We can reasonably expect the next key 3D Mario title to see his in-game incarnation far more accurately represent the reference model, while environments and lighting will obviously be significantly richer too. We should be looking for a Mario game that seeks to emulate the kind of look we see from Pixar movies, with that level of production values as the ideal.

However, last year's "HD experience" demo using The Legend of Zelda assets look much closer to the established idea of a conventional current-generation game engine. The masses of light sources on tap might suggest a deferred shading solution (or at least demonstrate the pixel-shading prowess of the new hardware) while staple current-gen effects such as depth-of-field are all present and correct. Model complexity, texture detail, 720p resolution and a locked 30FPS also suggest a general level of parity with current-gen tech. What would elevate this game beyond the competition would be the "Nintendo difference": the quality of the art, the presentation and the gameplay genius that puts the firm's top-tier games in a class of their own.

The only niggle is that he doesn't mention that streaming a different 3D scene to the tablet eats up resources, so that is why some Wii U games will have 720p on the HD screen, because it's having to render another 480p image to the tablet. Until we see a proprietry engine that is not rendering a seperate 3D view on the tablet you won't be able to judge just how good the graphics can be.

robio said:

I've been saying it for a while now... Star Tropics. Part video game, part fruit juice from concentrate, all awesome.

Sorry I deleted one of my posts, a UK retailer listed Luigis Mansion 2 for Wii U so it's possibly that.

_Bear said:

bugsonglass said:

_Bear said:

Hey Edge KOA Reckoning is a blast!

Should be getting it in the post sometime next week.  What do you think of the story so far?  R.A. Salvatore is a good writer.

It's good if not a bit convoluted, I really like the game it has a much more fantasy feel to it as compared to  Skyrim or some of the other Action RPGish type games. Feels like a fairy tale.

Woo!