Wii version Duel mode.
That's an IGN.com screenshot of the Wii build of Force Unleashed. If you look at the Rebel soldier (character to the right) there is some strong evidence of a lighting and shader effect being applied (possibly a normal map?) to his sleave as well as pant leg. Why bring this up? Well being such an important game I'm quite curious to see if this game suffers the PS2-itis port issues that so many other games have been suffering. I'm still pretty convinced that the Wii build is a upscaled version of the PS2 title with shaders and maybe better textures but so far I've yet to see any real show of the physics as well as any screenshots of the PS2 version. However, also of note the Wii version's duel mode footage did show an interesting curiosity: all the objects (at least assuming ones that can be picked up) and characters display a shadow, hopefully a much more comprehensive lighting and shadowing system as opposed we're used to for Wii games. Looking at the geometry, my gut tells me they are using the same polygon models as the PS2, with shaders applied, however thats not too big a deal, because we know what shaders can do to improve visual fidelity.
I am also interested to see how the physics are going to be applied on the Wii and PS2 versions, as well as the PSP game too. Elebits showed off the Wii running many physicalized objects at once (pretty impressive too, and Boom Blox looks to do the same) however this game is going to be a much broader case, with lots of AI and orchestration to calculate outside of the physics engine. I wonder if the AI will still retain the "survive" motive as shown in early tech demos that were meant for the 360 and PS3. Either way I'm happy to see the Wii version actually being able to stand on it's own merits, as it's got the duel mode of course, but supposedly 5 extra missions, and the nicer graphical output. Now I'm just wondering how the PS2 and PSP versions will turn out.
