More to the point, what Xbox games look as good as the Super Mario Galaxy games?

Foolz said:

Dvader said:

The wii did not have ONE game that looked better than the best of the xbox.  It's BS that not one game took full advantage of the system. The wii has no more powerful than any old gen system.

Factor 5: Wii is more powerful than Xbox: Gamecube equal to Xbox

Don't forget that the game which pushed the most polygons last gen was a GC game Vader.

Vader what I am trying to make you understand is this:

GC/Xbox PS2 were at the forefront of development, the biggest teams, the best budgets, the greatest talent. The teams that made those awesome graphics then moved on.

ON to the 360 and PS3.

Wii was left behind as a poor neglected brother with 3rd rate developers, smaller teams with less money and less talent. Less money and less talent does not equal better tech or graphics, or scope, or effort. If you argue against this you are being obstinate, illogical and pig headed.

Your argument would assume that Wii games did have the best talent and budgets and dedication (an all things being equal approach - things were not equal), you know what even the middleware wasn't worked on significantly, they just used old middleware.

That said, if Wii's graphics were not as good than how do you explain Retro doubling the texture resolution from Prime 2 to 3 still at 60 FPS? Or Mario Galaxy shitting all over Sunshine's graphics? Skyward Sword is markedly more geometrically complex and rich compared to Wind Waker. Do you think that the GC could do Xenoblade the game which has environments as big if not bigger than 90% of 360 games? If Nintendo is making Mario Galaxy look great, someone else can do better. Nintendo is not a graphics driven developer - the best GC graphics were not by Nintendo and the best N64 graphics were not by Nintendo. Eggebrecht brings up another good point "Outside of that this guys usually haven't work much or at all in the GameCube days on the graphics side, and that comes down to exactly what you were asking earlier and I don't know if with their high end graphics program... as they're willing to look at the hardware and do something completely new." To make the best Wii graphics you probably need to have good experience on making great looking GC games - imagine what Rare could have done on Wii for instance?

Factor 5, when developing their unreleased Wii games (Pilotwings and Superman) said that their Wii engine was doing everything their PS3 Lair engine was doing and more. That means the same or more NPCs, physics AI etc (at Wii level graphics of course). What Wii lacked compared to Xbox was programmable shaders, thats about it.

Custom shaders could be made with the TEV but it took enourmous technical knowhow and dedication to do them properly. In the first link I provided Factor 5 talk about using the GC TEV.  I also believe that you are looking back on Xbox games with rose coloured glasses. Go back and play these games, the best ones with shader effects up the wazoo are usually plagued with frame dips, low res textures and jaggies (Chronicles of Riddick is a case in point). Even if this weren't the case, the best teams who made the best graphics for those systems then passed over Wii and went straight to 360/PS3 (not that there's anything wrong with that) but it clearly shows that the best graphics possible were not exploited, funded or explored on the Wii. Otherwise Wii gamers would not have had to look at the Conduit with hopeful intent.

The best you got on Wii was Metroid Prime 3, by a talented, graphics focused developer with adequate funding. But as I said even this is not the pinnacle of what the system can achieve. It was 60 FPS and most people understand that if you drop the frame rate to 30 FPS you can pack in twice the detail. Prime 3 already has twice the detail of Prime 2, if they made it 30 FPS it could have been even more detailed.

On a side note, most of you assholes who played Wii did so on an HDTV where the scaling of your HDTV made everything look fugly. It stretched, blurred, muddied and jaggied what the native picture was suppossed to look like. If you played Wii with an HDTV for the majority of this gen you should not even be commenting on graphics. As good as you may have thought Mario Galaxy 2 looks on an HDTV, play it on a great SDTV and you'll notice it looks markedly better.

I'll leave you with this Julian Eggebrecht Interview

Revogamers interviews Julian Eggebrecht from Factor 5:

My complaints were actually about the games which try to go the traditional, more photorealistic route, because there you really have to push it, and they're really not pushing it. Why not? Hmmm I don't know, the hardware is very, very easy to understand. Now the problem might be -and it just might be- is that some studios -or some publishers specially- are discarding the graphical capabilities automatically simply because it is a Wii title and they're basically telling the developers "look, we won't pay for any advanced graphics". Because the Wii, I mean not that you would meet a 20 million dollar budget like on the PS3, but if you want to get really, really advanced graphics out of the Wii, then you have to spend probably more money than basically going for the cheap solution, so that might be an inherit problem, so it might actually not be the laziness of certain developers, but it might be the... inability or the non existent willingness of the publishers to actually give them in a budget to do better graphics.

RG: So maybe we can blame the publishers instead of the studios?


JE: I think that at the end of the day it's a mixture of both, because as a developer who is working on a more photorealistic title I think they also have to step up to the plate. They've to take a look a bit deeper and then go to the publisher and say look, just because we've done ten comic book type graphic titles, this one needs different graphics, so let's take a look a bit deeper into the hardware. You're giving us millions of dollars to find out how our assets end in the 360 GPU's work, we want to take a look a bit deeper into the Wii GPU because obviously you can do more. Many have proven... Resident Evil 4 clearly from Capcom or our own Rouge Squadron series has prove that you can do a lot more with the hardware, so it's not secret that it's in there, somewhere. But developers need to step up to the plate and the publishers as well... or they need to be open about it and if they're really willing to do it then they need to find the graphical style which is simply different, I mean that's another solution they have there.


RG: Can it be because of their tools? That it would be easier if the Wii had standard shader effects... or is it a matter of work because you have to prepare the shaders for yourself?


JE: The one thing which makes it probably harder for developers who are coming from the traditional direction is that the shader system inside the hardware works quite differently, you have something more right about that than the traditional AGI and the video pipelines. Because the thinking back when the basic graphics hardware structure was developed was to get very, very efficient, that hotwired a lot of things. But there're many possibilities in terms of how to use that hotwiring and actually rewire it, if you're clever about it. If you connect you can get a lot of shader effects which would've been on the 360 or the PS3.


RG: If you "create" them on the Wii

JE: Yeah, because... on the Wii, you just have to be more ingenious. But the Wii, on the other hand... I mean, think about it: it's got so much more power compared to the GameCube. If even with the extremely similar shader hardware, the system clockrate is so much higher, you can do so much more advanced things, so if people just would look at Rouge Leader, Rebel Strike and Resident Evil 4 and then say: this hardware is significantly faster than those games it should have the very minimum they should get that and then they should build on top of it.


RG: And with much more memory...


JE: Yeah, exactly, and the memory! That is a very good point. Aside from the shaders, our main limitation which we always found on the GameCube was the memory: the memory was a struggle the whole time; it was a very hard struggle. That was actually our biggest struggle. When we got the Wii specifications we were excited because we said "wow, this is actually the amount of memory which we needed"


RG: The memory problem you had before


JE: Yes, exactly, that would've been our "dream memory". (laughs)

Outside of that this guys usually haven't work much or at all in the GameCube days on the graphics side, and that comes down to exactly what you were asking earlier and I don't know if with their high end graphics program... as they're willing to look at the hardware and do something completely new.

I know you're typing on a phone in an airport Vader but the discussion on Wii graphics has to be more complex than just: SHOW ME ONE Wii GAME THAT LOOKS BETTER THAN XBOX

It has to because otherwise I'm going to get the biggest facepalm headache of all time.

edgecrusher said:

Many, but of a totally different art style.

The Galaxy games looked great, but I've never understood why people act as if they were jaw dropping amazing looking.

No way. I think people completely underate SMG's graphics just because it's cartoony. Bowser's got some pretty badarse textures for example, but you're more likely to see people masturbating over some decent ground texture on an Xbox game. That's bullshit.

Anyway I looked up stuff like Conker, Ninja Gaiden, Chronicles of Riddick etc., and you cannot tell me with a straight face that their graphics are more advanced than Metroid Prime 3. In many cases more polished, and less jaggies, but there's significantly less detail in all of them, and most of them hide stuff with shadows, or have no lighting effects; in other words they're all hiding a lot of stuff to make themselves look better and doing simple things well, but nothing complex.

If we're talking about art style, though, then yep, you're wrong. SMG>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>anything on Xbox by a country mile.

This is a pretty important story:

http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/27/forget-six-axis-gamepad-nine-axis/

Wii U pad sensors 15 times higher resolution than cell phones

Becky Oh, chief executive of PNI Sensor Corporation, the company behind the GamePad’s geomagnetic sensor, has spoken in an interview with GamesBeat about how the technology improves the accuracy and reliability of the GamePad.


[The gyro and accelerometer] are good at tracking relativistic change. But it doesn’t tell you absolutely where you’re pointing and where the pointer is. What the magnetic sensor does is use the Earth’s magnetic field as a reference. It can always guide [the GamePad] back to what the absolute position is.


Oh believes the new geomagnetic technology will allow the failings of six-axis devices — such as the Wii Remote — to be eradicated, saying she thinks several genres of games can now be played much more responsively.


I think games such as first-person shooters, driving games, or some type of flying game would be a good candidate for this type of technology. Sony’s Sharpshooter [Move peripheral] did something like this, but when we played with it we saw it was not accurately tracking. There was both latency and inaccuracy. In that case, hardcore gamers would go back to using a joystick or game controllers, but if you had a very accurate way — with no latency or very little latency — to use the gun to point what you’re shooting. I think that does change the way the game is played.

Basically you know the Wii remote had to use IR to track the position of Wii's motion controller but if you lost line of sight between the bar and the end of the wiimote you lost position? Also in motionplus you have a more accurate motion by far but it still cannot tell the position relative to the screen? PSMove uses a camera to track it but this story is saying that the U pad has even more accurate sensors, 9 axis control that can "always guide [the GamePad] back to what the absolute position is."

We thought that the U pad had the IR port for IR aimng but it was just for TV control. The tech inside the pad means you do not need IR or an external camera it always knows the exact absolute position is. The tech company says they tried using PS Move's Sharpshooter to aim and said it had accuracy and latency problems. They say the U pad sensors have little to no latency and is very accurate which can change the way FPS are played.

Feasibly what this means is that you can still have IR style aiming control whilst using the U pad and all its other features at the same time instead of swapping out for Wii remotes.

This would be great for IR FPS with touch controls too.

Archangel3371 said:

That's some pretty sweet concept art. I'm a big fan of Bungie's previous work, mostly Halo, so I'm very much looking forward to this game.

I went back to look at the old gamespot metroid prime 3 thread what year was that? 2007? LOL even back then I was telling Vader to play on an SDTV:

P.S You really shouldn't be playing Wii on on HDTV, I've seen the frigging difference. You know what scaling does to SD content. Think of your dvds man.

Gamespy said:

"The two best qualities that Corruption brings to the table are its amazing visuals and its brand-new twitch-based control scheme. We could go on for half of the review about how the graphics, lighting and other visual stimuli are on a par with some of the better games seen running on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. The fact that Wii is vastly underpowered compared to these other two systems is a resounding testament to Retro's graphics and art design team that have certainly milked the Wii hardware for all it's worth. We doubt that even the most snobbish next-gen owners would disagree with our assessment here."

1up said:

"Amazing as it is to say about a Wii game, Corruption contains some of the best visuals in gaming, period. It can't always mask the hardware's technical limitations (pixelation every time you're up close waiting for a door to open, for example), but in most cases the lighting, attention to detail, and wonderfully cohesive and imaginative art direction more than make up for the Wii's lack of raw horsepower. Put it this way: I found myself wandering through rooms two or three times just to look at them. How many games on any system can you say that about?"

IGN said

"It dishes out larger, more detailed environments, crisper textures, dramatically improved particle effects, depth of field blur, screen shakes, and what is easily the best utilization of bloom lighting in any Wii game to date. Environments, objects and particle effects alike are illuminated with a neon-like hue that fits exceptionally well within the game's science-fiction setting. It yields the fastest and most responsive first-person controls in any Wii game to date -- possibly in any home console game ever -- and it alone makes the experience so thoroughly enjoyable that you won't want to put the Wii remote and nunchuk down."

Sad seeing all the people besides you guys that I liked at Gamespot and don't see anymore.

• Dutch Mix
• Brain 3000
• Toment
• Mantorok
• Oilers
• Skylock
• m0zart
• HiResDes
• Articuno 76
• OneWingedAngel
• D3s7rUc71oN
• nopalversion
• ymi_basic
• Siddiqui
• trifecta_basic
• Rimnet00

Grammaton's even spoiling the party on page 14

Ah good times.

What happened to the rest of those guys? Anyone know? We know about Oilers of course. I used to see Mantork on GAF, not anymore.

edgecrusher said:

Many, but of a totally different art style.

The Galaxy games looked great, but I've never understood why people act as if they were jaw dropping amazing looking.

This. They look great but nothing special.

Yeah the Wii probably had slightly more power than an xbox but I still dont buy that no company not even Nintendo took full advantage of the console. Their best looking games MP3, Galaxy and Zelda I dont think look much better than NG or even RE4. They look exactly like they could fit right into an Xbox or GC lineup. There is no distinction, you strip away all the names and associations and simply put graphic comparisons up and ask someone to pick out which are Xbox and which are Wii games they cant tell.

Dvader said:

edgecrusher said:

Many, but of a totally different art style.

The Galaxy games looked great, but I've never understood why people act as if they were jaw dropping amazing looking.

This. They look great but nothing special.

To me, trying to trumpet the Gamecube, Xbox, or Wii over one another graphically is pointless...any game that pushes any of the 3 is going to look very close to the same level with microspopic differences, so who fucking cares? When you start comparing PS2 or Dreamcast to these 3 consoles, THEN you can see a difference with your natural goddamn eyeballs.

That was my whole point in the 1st place, that Nintendo shouldn't have even bothered making the Wii any more powerful than the Cube or Xbox if they weren't going to go for HD quality as the jump is so small its pointless. Its like they just did it for PR reasons...so they could say the Wii was TECHNICALLY more powerful than the 3 last-gen consoles. Even though the jump was so small nobody would ever care.

But at least in the case of the Wii U it will be around for at least a year before any other consoles that are more powerful show up, instead of actually releasing AFTER more powerful machines. I'm still waiting to see just how powerful the other machines are as well.

Also in Wii U's advantage is just that no matter what it will be at least somewhat on par being a modern HD console with at least decent online. It will NEVER seem as dated as the Wii. The Wii felt dated on day 1, honestly. Look how long 360 has been around without feeling dated? 2005 was a LOOOOOONG time ago.