Wii Cry: Vengeance

[swaaye]

Xbox didn't have Cube's horrid color depth issues. That really marred RE4's otherwise very nice looks, for example. I do own Rebel Strike for Cube and it does look pretty nice. But really it doesn't look better than Xbox-class. And it slows down a lot. Still it is very impressive.

I don't believe for one second that Gamecube was left "untapped" in any way. IMO that's just marketing talk. The companies will obviously never say that their machine is maxed out. That would be suicide. Xbox GPU was definitely a generation ahead in some ways, but equal in many too. And the Celermine in Xbox was generally faster than Gecko (G3 vs. P3 never was pretty).

Look at Forza Racing on Xbox to see a game that Cube never got close to. Or KOTOR for that matter. Maybe Doom3 too? Half Life 2? Both Cube and Xbox were close overall visually though because there just isn't much of a gap in hardware there. If the devs really pushed and tailored toward Cube, it could look pretty darn good. Especially, and perhaps most importantly, because both Xbox and Cube run 480p at best. Low res SDTV hides Cube's low resolution textures (and texture aliasing) and muddles Xbox's advantages. It sorta normalizes what you see.

Wii really, IMO, seems to be a little above Xbox class. But also I think Xbox has some advantages over Wii. A faster large RAM pool. (Of course, we don't really know how fast the on-package RAM die is). Support for 720p even if the games lack it. I wonder if Broadway is faster than a 733MHz Celermine. Ought to be I suppose, but who knows for sure.

One thing is for certain. Far Cry Instincts on Xbox looks to have much better graphics than this Wii title.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

When do people finally start understanding that most wii games at this point are actually made on GC for most part with a crappy ported ps2/xbox engine? no wonder most games look even worse than your average GC game.

 

[hey69]

i played the beta version on the Wii a week ago.

sorry guys, this game looks and plays like crap.

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Wii know it looks like crap but reviews say they opposite about the gameplay wich seems to be pretty good.

 

[fulcizombie]

looks to me like they should stick to Mario type games that focus on gameplay and leave the graphics to the other two consoles which are capable of doing it well, that looks pretty bad compared to what's available, but considering it's on a Wii, it seems about right

I agree with that.I think that software companies should try different ,visually,things on the wii.I fear that realistic-looking games will look horrible on it as shown by COD3 and Farcry.

 

[swaaye]

When do people finally start understanding that most wii games at this point are actually made on GC for most part with a crappy ported ps2/xbox engine? no wonder most games look even worse than your average GC game.

360 devs didn't have Xenos/Xenon in the beginning either. I didn't see too many games with graphics this far behind at 360 launch (other than perhaps Perfect Dark). Some of the Wii games are sub-Cube IMO. Some of them are almost N64 level. I think what we're seeing is pubs trying to make a buck off of Wii's "expected to be marginal" graphics by doing some ultra cheap development for the machine.

By the way, I wish I could use a cube controller for Zelda.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Perfect Dark and COD2 were IMO way behind what 360 is capable of. How about Tony Hawk and Gun? Launch titles were all over the map.

Only a few Cube exclusives used the low-color mode, and very few Xbox exclusives ran at 60fps, or, for that matter, even a stable 30fps. As for Rebel Strike, there was very little slowdown in that game. The only significant slowdown I noticed was when I spammed the ground with fully upgraded proton bombs.

Look at Forza Racing on Xbox

30fps, jerky reflections, Candy-Land colors. Not that there were any Cube racing sims to compare it to.

Or KOTOR

Since when did that game have great graphics?
[quot]Maybe Doom3 too? Half Life 2?[/quote] Frame rates! In the case of Doom 3, the color banding also got pretty bad.

there just isn't much of a gap in hardware there.

That NV2a has a lot of muscle that Flipper just hasn't got. And 64MB of main RAM vs 24MB is significant.

 

[swaaye]

Perfect Dark and COD2 were IMO way behind what 360 is capable of. How about Tony Hawk and Gun? Launch titles were all over the map.

Only a few Cube exclusives used the low-color mode, and very few Xbox exclusives ran at 60fps, or, for that matter, even a stable 30fps. As for Rebel Strike, there was very little slowdown in that game. The only significant slowdown I noticed was when I spammed the ground with fully upgraded proton bombs.

30fps, jerky reflections, Candy-Land colors. Not that there were any Cube racing sims to compare it to.
Since when did that game have great graphics?

Maybe Doom3 too? Half Life 2?

Frame rates! In the case of Doom 3, the color banding also got pretty bad.
That NV2a has a lot of muscle that Flipper just hasn't got. And 64MB of main RAM vs 24MB is significant.

Well I've read that Cube could never have even done Doom3 or Half Life 2 so, IMO, that settles the ages long "similar power" debate. I actually thought they did a pretty amazing job with Doom3 RoE. I would honestly prefer to play it on Xbox instead of my PC just for couch factor.

And for the record, I played Rebel Strike two days ago (I own it and wanted to try it on Wii) and yes it does slow down quite a bit, even in the first level (Yavin). It does not hold 30 fps very well. It doesn't even look that great except in some spots with some bloom/hazing. It is one of the best looking Cube games though.

I thought Forza looked pretty darned decent for the most part. And I don't recall really any slowdown. I was playing it pretty regularly a few months back. But yea, Cube had zip for contemporary racing. That was too bad. Wii looks just as bad though.

Tomb Raider Legend on Xbox is quite impressive too, although I hear it just recently hit Cube. Dunno what they did to it for Cube tho.

But again, Far Cry for Wii here is pretty fugly. And devs should know Wii hardware at least a bit because all infos say it's extremely similar to Cube. 360 is nothing like Xbox 1. Considering I doubt Cube could even do Far Cry Instincts (it obviously never did), the fact that Wii seems so similar to Cube on many levels does lend itself to explaining the resulting look of this Wii version.

 

[winstonsmith1978]

This game looks worse than Resident Evil 4 after I’ve smeared my own shit on the TV screen. This is a good example of developers gone lazy.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Well I've read that Cube could never have even done Doom3 or Half Life 2 so,

See, and I thought Doom 3 looked like turd on a stick when running on Xbox. Once I quit being impressed by the mere presence of normal maps, the color banding, bad framerate, blocky models, and low-res textures stuck out to me. I know it couldn't run on Gamecube, but IMO, it wasn't a good-looking game to begin with. Superman 64 also can't run on a Super Nintendo.

I've never heard anything good about Half-Life 2 on the Xbox. The game just plain wasn't designed for a Celeron and 64MB of RAM.

It's not like I'm totally down on the machine, though. It's just that I think Doom 3 and HL2 are some of the worst possible examples of teh xb0x p0wah. There are a handful of Xbox exclusive games that I've either played or watched and think look really great (i.e. don't have so many IQ/framerate problems that it offsets the shininess that shaders add). Far Cry Instincts is a great example of the Xbox being used well.

the fact that Wii seems so similar to Cube on many levels does lend itself to explaining the resulting look of this Wii version.

It doesn't explain why the texture resolution stinks. The texture resolution in well-developed areas of Red Steel is as good as or better than any Xbox game. Wii probably has a smaller texel fillrate than NV2a (about 1 G texel/sec), but with the massive cache, Gamecube was already coming close and seemed to be limited by RAM more than anything else.

It also doesn't explain why the water effect sucks. Beyond Good and Evil, Rebel Strike, and Final Fantasy: CC all had great water effects. Sonic Wii has a water effect as good as anything on Xbox.

Sorry, nothing is adding up. And given how glitchy everything looks (tons of lighting glitches on the hands), I'm saying it's one of the following 3 things:

1. It's an untalented sub-studio that does Ubi's crappy ports and shovelware. Maybe the same folks that did the broken ports of Splinter Cell.
2. It's a work in progress.
3. They just don't care.

 

[pc999]

1. It's an untalented sub-studio that does Ubi's crappy ports and shovelware. Maybe the same folks that did the broken ports of Splinter Cell.
2. It's a work in progress.
3. They just don't care.

See the 1up.com video (640x480) and you will think that is more like 1+2+3+4+5+... The game is really horrible, low rez textures, lots of pop up, very low detail, almost N64 level carachters, very litlle draw distance, a animated texture as water (even worst than in the first videos), really bad bloom, horrible animations...

On the good side the control seems, at least, on of the bests I ever seen, I hope someday there is game that worth it

 

[swaaye]

Looked at the 1up video. I think the worst issue is lighting. It looks really hardwired-T&L style. Very basic. Indoor light level is the same as outdoor. That Jungle video looks like the same intro area as Far Cry Instincts, and on Xbox it looked a LOT better (mostly because of lighting I think).

The water isn't an animated texture. Looks like a low framerate shader. It's the same on Xbox if I remember correctly.

 

[pc999]

Looked at the 1up video. I think the worst issue is lighting. It looks really hardwired-T&L style. Very basic. Indoor light level is the same as outdoor. That Jungle video looks like the same intro area as Far Cry Instincts, and on Xbox it looked a LOT better (mostly because of lighting I think).

The water isn't an animated texture. Looks like a low framerate shader. It's the same on Xbox if I remember correctly.

It think it is hard to pick the worst, althought it is interesting you say the light because crytek had in their site that the engine (or at least the polybump tech, which make high detail with very nice shadows/lighting and IIRC self shadowing) as fully suported by the GC.

Edit: here is the link (in downloads you ave two mini ss).

Polybump is a new technology developed by Crytek to enhance 3D-rendering quality without increasing the overhead in real-time rendering. Polybump offers huge benefits for real-time 3D games for the PC, Xbox and Game Cube game systems. It allows users to create and render an extremely low poly model using an ultra high poly model while displaying virtually no visible difference between the two. Rendering time is greatly decreased. Polybump is the first commercial package, which allows users to do all this with just a few clicks.


Reduces polygon numbers in real-time 3D graphics.
Increases image quality combining Polybump and self-shadowing technology.
Ability to add more characters on the screen.
Decreases memory usage.
Increases rendering speed by applying the calculation for skinning to less bones/vertices and for stencil shadow volume to fewer polygons.

Anyway you can just look at this and see that a few months ago it is possible to do all they should want to go, but done much better, in much larger quantity and with much more things (particles, AI, (subtle)bumpmapping...) at stable fremerates in a game that dont even try to be reallistic or is supossed to excell (or even being particulary good) at doing jungles. What they are doing here is just ridiculos no mater the Wii Vs XB winner.

 

[swaaye]

I loaded up FC Instincts Evolution on my Xbox last night. And man that game is really quite beautiful to be honest. The lighting is a bright, colorful bloom. Lots of dynamic shadows. Detail textures. Water is actually the same as in that Vengeance video, a low framerate shader for sure but very wavy. Looks really quite good on Xbox though. The water changes when out at sea vs. an inland river. The water is different than original FC Instincts (that was more like PC FarCry; very smooth water). The game runs a seemingly solid 30fps.

Decent video of the Xbox game.
http://www.gamespot.com/xbox/action/farcryinstinctsevolution/media.html

Xbox FC Instincts Evolution shots:

I did notice though that the trailer for the FC Vengeance game strangely looks a lot better than these actual gameplay vids. I wonder what's up with that? It does seem that Vengeance is definitely using some of the same locales as this older Xbox game, so it's probably a good comparison.

One more very obvious difference between both games is that the Wii version has horrible interior lighting. Dark areas aren't dark anymore. It's like there's some permanent ambient lighting instead.

 

[pc999]

I agree that the XB version looks very good, but I also agree that there is no technical reason to the game on Wii look so bad and BTWii (thta particular level) is a good proof of it as it does more or less the same scenarios but in a qualitity and quantity way higher in every way than this thing while adding a lot more things.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Even if you don't have a fancy lighting engine, how hard is it to set a flag to say "OK, inside this cottage is dark?" They do it for other areas. Heck, old 2.5D and early 3D games did it. I'm going to have to blame the developers, not the hardware on this one.

 

[Fox5]

Well I certainly agree with you. I don't have any hands-on or insider knowledge, just what I know from reading here on Cube vs. Xbox. Cube was extremely efficient, but XBox is hands-down more capable feature-wise and in brute force. Hollywood should be slightly more powerful than Xbox, at least for the non-shader stuff simply because it is still very efficient, but it is now clocked almost 100 MHz higher (at least we think that it is).

IMO, Xbox and Wii are really on-par with each other. I don't believe that Cube was ever equal to Xbox.

If Nintendo really did cheap out that much with the Wii, it's a shame they couldn't make it powerful and well-featured enough to at least handle xbox 1 ports easily.

I don't believe for one second that Gamecube was left "untapped" in any way. IMO that's just marketing talk. The companies will obviously never say that their machine is maxed out. That would be suicide. Xbox GPU was definitely a generation ahead in some ways, but equal in many too. And the Celermine in Xbox was generally faster than Gecko (G3 vs. P3 never was pretty).

G3 and P3 were about equal on a per mhz parity, though P3 clocked much higher, but gamecube was supposed to have much lower memory latency, which could have added 10% to 20% to its cpu performance.
As far as 'untapped' goes, well it really only had 1 generation of games using features more advanced that what could be done on dx7 level gpus, so I'm sure there was a good amount of room for refinement.
And I'd say Rebel Strike on cube looked better than the xbox version of doom 3 (taking into account the higher framerate, rebel strike had a lot of framerate drops but did run at 60fps), but I think halo 2 looks better than doom 3, as does splinter cell chaos theory by a large margin.

Oh, Nintendo also marketed the Cube (and now the Wii) as being easy to develop for. While likely easier than the PS2, I somehow doubt that Nintendo was able to compete with MS's software muscle, I'm sure the development tools coming out of microsoft were much more advanced and full featured than Nintendo's. Even Burger King has made decent looking Xbox 1 games that would probably fall visually slightly above the middle for gamecube games. The fact that major developers can't accomplish the same on the Wii should say something.

 

[Deepak]

IGN Review

But just as Far Cry initially set a new graphic high on PC, so does it set a new graphic low on Wii, with visuals so blurry, smeary, sluggish and ugly that you'll question whether the title could realistically run on Nintendo 64.

However, the Wii version begins with a jarringly compressed and blurry cinematic that should be running in real-time, but isn't. The first time we laid eyes on it, we thought that our test television had malfunctioned and we checked the settings, but alas, it's a software shortcoming. Sadly, the in-engine visuals don't look much better, if at all, which is Vengeance's biggest disappointment.

Easily the biggest offender is the visual presentation, which we only touched upon earlier in the review. The awful graphics unfortunately do not stop with the cut sequences. Upon booting Vengeance, one truth becomes immediately visible: this game was rushed. Wii is theoretically more powerful than Xbox, but it doesn't have the pixel shading benefits of Microsoft's first generation hardware. Despite the fact that it has released more than a year after Instincts, Vengeance doesn't even look half as good -- and we're not exaggerating.

There is much more in the review....

 

[swaaye]

It just screams "horribly limited shader hardware". Some seriously pathetic developer effort too. Damn... a 4/10. That's the worst Far Cry showing yet by far. This show of such half ass development effort on several games from the same publisher is not a good sign for Wii, IMO.

 

[Nesh]

It just screams "horribly limited shader hardware". Some seriously pathetic developer effort too. Damn... a 4/10. That's the worst Far Cry showing yet by far. This show of such half ass development effort on several games from the same publisher is not a good sign for Wii, IMO.

They made a horrible job with this yet they have a problem using the Crysis engine in next gen consoles pfffft