E3: Nintendo Conference

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Holy crap, Ninty's press conference kicked all seven flavours of ass. Sony and MS, hang your head down in shame, and take a look at how it's done. Who was that main guy talking for Nintendo (the English speaking guy)? He was quite confident, secure and charismatic.

Presentation of DS was really well done. Although I don't have much interest in it, the way they presented it made it look so much better than it would have if Sony's Kaz was to show it they way he showed PSP.

New Zelda looks excellent. Nintendo's franchizes as such are always kinda lost on me, but this looked really damn good.
 
Just watched the video. All I can say is:
ZELDA ROXXORS MY BOXXORS :LOL:

Fighting while riding on a horse now how cool is that!
 
Just saw direct screens of DS games posted earlier. Looks a bit meh, I think. Maybe even a bit worse than what I remember N64 games to look like
 
That Zelda is awsome, its cruel for Nintendo to make me wait 5 years from Spaceworld, till that game is released. But I am glad, Nintendo is actually working on it, though it seems they always take forever on things.

That definitely it for E3. Though I still haven't really buy the claimed of innovation that is DS, for best E3, Nintendo gets my vote for Zelda. (Unless Sega shows VF5, than its going to be difficult)
 
hey69 said:
looking at some screenshots, not so impressed with the
3d Quality (just saw mario kart screenshots)

release date 5/11/2004

So far Animal Crossing and Wario Ware look pretty interesting as they seem to use of the DS capabilities the most.

However, if I am not mistaken, they DS doesn't offer texture filtering :cry:
 
marconelly! said:
Just saw direct screens of DS games posted earlier. Looks a bit meh, I think. Maybe even a bit worse than what I remember N64 games to look like

point filtering, and a few "perspective errors" (forgot the exact term in english), software rendering age striked back.
 
Perspective Correction is the term, I think. PS1 lacked it, thus the textures jumped over the surfaces sometimes. N64 had it, and it also had bilinear filtering. Yeah, I just saw better pics of mario kart, that's definitely software rendering, or some poor PS1-like renderer.

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Vysez said:
marconelly! said:
Just saw direct screens of DS games posted earlier. Looks a bit meh, I think. Maybe even a bit worse than what I remember N64 games to look like

point filtering, and a few "perspective errors" (forgot the exact term in english), software rendering age striked back.

According to the press website:

3-D: With the newly developed graphics engine, DS can reproduce impressive 3-D renderings that can surpass images displayed on the Nintendo® 64. Games will run at 60 frames per second, and allow details like fog effects and cel shading.

Sound: The 16-channel sound allows for greatly expanded use of voices and music, and a richer, more immersive game experience. A plug for headphones transmits stereo sound.

I also read somewhere there's now a ARM9 CPU (besides the ARM7TDMI, 16 MHz, which was in the GBA) as well.

They used to have a dedicated hardwired 2D engine in the GBA, so it sounds to me there's now some 3D hardware in the ASIC (probably) they custom designed for the DS. In the past they used Sharp. Probably they did the same thing again.

Sounds is also improved. I think for the GBA they sticked to to four channel Gameboy sound, but added the ability to playback stereo 16-bits
sounds (even samples, added to the MIDI sound).

I agree with the things people said about the Metroids pictures. Look "cheesy" to me. Mario with its more cartoon like graphics looks ok to me.

Also saw the Zelda video... indeed amazing...
 
Agreed, the DS 3D quality is pretty horrific. Not too many games seem to really use the 2nd screen all that well either (map?).

New Zelda looks neat - hopefully it'll have a tighter, more mature narrative to go with the visuals too.
 
Guys, I looked thru hey69 account. I found Animal Crossing screens displaying a chat between players. As Nintendo indicated the DS has online capabilities, Animal crossing might be the first DS online game!

Screen
 
I think it's more than a damn stretch of imagination to say that an ARM9 based software renderer can surpass N64 visuals, with it's nice, dedicated 3D chip capable of many (for the time) advanced functions. These screens certainly don't show any of that 'surpassing', and are in fact quite below N64 quality. I know it will look better on a small screen though, but it's still not fair to say something like that. Judging by these screens it's a problem to achieve even simple polygon transparency in games (not surprising, given the soft renderer...), which was a breeze for N64.

Also, and Nin fans will kill me for saying this, but these high res closeup photos make DS looks really, really cheap (build, and plastics quality). Just take a look for yourselves:

http://www.nintendo.com/media/e32k4/systems/ds/051104_DS-HW_mario-kart.jpg
 
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