WiiGeePeeYou (Hollywood) what IS it ?

Well, it's not like anyone on here has any clue how much it actually costs to manufacture, assemble, advertise, and distribute the thing (citing clearance prices for discontinued parts on Newegg is ridiculous). Given Nintendo's business model of not trying to kill its competitors by slitting its own wrists and drowning them in blood, just by looking at the DS, which debuted at $150 (remember how everyone complained that it was too expensive compared to Sony's financial black hole?), I figured Wii would be ~$230. $250 seems a bit much, but I have no idea how much they've put into the online system, which has turned out to be a bit fancier than I expected, even if it's no Live (which will cost you another $250 over 5 years).

And you figure the money they make on Wii, which they'll be making on Day 1, will go right back into enhancing the Channels, Connect24 service, snagging exclusives from developers, and developing more quality software. The model works. If DS had been a money pit, Nintendo couldn't have sustained it long enough for it to garner 3rd-party support (took long enough).

I just don't expect Nintendo to go for the Sony/MS all-or-nothing strategy of losing a billion dollars in your first year. I think it's a crazy business strategy.

To change the subject, Konami has been tightening up the graphics on Level 3 of Elebits:
Before:

After:


It's no Gears of War, but it no longer causes a stabbing pain in my eyes.

 

ain't it funny what a difference can the actual presence of specularities do?

 

I think the second shot is also using a lower JPEG setting.

 

That's some nasty dithering. What gives?

 

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say someone tried a little too hard to get the file sizes down on both those JPGs.

 

There are some notable improvements, indeed, but there is still much aliasing. BTW, I read a comment (don't remember where, sorry) about Wii games looking much better on HDTV screens than previous gen consoles, is there a possibility that the Wii has some kind of output filter/upscaler that improves the onscreen quality ?

 

Mandatory 480p support, plus wide spread widescreen support should make it look much better on HDTVs than previous consoles. Gamecube also had very good filtering, so any improvement on that would imo make it better looking on hdtvs than xbox or ps2.

 

Can someone spell out what the notable improvements are - I see no improvments in geometry, texture, lighting or filtering, it simply looks like its a photo taken from a washed out projector screen rather than a frame buffer dump?!

 

99 % of the Xbox games already supported 480p and probably around 5 % 720p.

 

They've added light bloom, more lighting, textures, (seemingly) some filtering, and gotten rid of the flat-shading. There are more shots on IGN. If you can't see the difference between the E3 shots and the ones out now, I suggest you see an optometrist.

 

thanks for the heads-up, fearsome.

well, this game seems to be a textbook example of what difference some simple graphic techniques add to something wich originally started out as a 'hello-world' graphics equivalent - a bare-bones flat, diffuse-only dynamic lights. you know, like those color plates sequences in a textbook showing how adding up one after another technique affects the image ; ) the game aleady looks decent - seems like they've already got radiosity diffuse maps and specularity-contributing lights, plus some sort of inobtrusive bloom. i think they'll eventually get it right.

btw, this game in its present look gives me a strong '80s nostalgic feeling.. the days of the early CGI. .. the first music videos with 3D.. ah, those were the days.

 

New Rampage screenshots:

http://static.flickr.com/100/262141793_0376875d15_o.jpg

While the basic content is ported straight from the PS2, seems to be some pretty obvious bump-mapping on the new characters. (Remember, we're talking about the GPU, not whether this pile of trash will be fun.)

 

Don't mind Nintendo fans,they see Nintendo as a religion.They are the same people who were fighting "graphics'wars" during the GC/PS2/Xbox years.They are the same people who were mocking the ps2 version of RE4 cause "it didn't look as good as the GC version",despite having extra content(and not being that worse-looking than the GC version anyway).They are the same people who were arguing how the GC is on par with the xbox and more efficient.They are the same people who were drooling over metroid prime's or F-zero GX graphics.

Millions of posts on the intrnet by Nintendo fans over GC's graphical capabilities.Oh they care about graphics,believe me they do.They just take every PR statement of Nintendo as some sort of gospel.Nintendo used to care about graphics A LOT.I still remember the PR about "mode 7 effects" and "super fx chip" during the Snes years,the immense hype over the "silicon valley,CG-like graphics" of the ultra64(before it even became the N64).

The truth is Nintendo can't compete anymore on the next gen front and have made something else entirely.It is their right but having nintendo fans acting like prosecutors when somebody says something bad about the Wii's graphics or proclaiming "gameplay>>graphics",such a cliche, is ridiculous.

Games like Oblivion,Assasin's Creed,Mass effect,White knights(that level-5 Rpg) and more ARE the next generation of videogaming..

 

Well I was comparing the two shots posted above - not sure if that's what you meant. Anyway, I'm not blind but I guess I don't know what I'm looking for. Can you correct me on these points:

I can see specular highlights on some surfaces but I don't think that's bloom, is it? I can see a halo around the streak of light on the right, but isn't that just straight alpha blended texturing?

I'm also unsure about better lighting: I can still see only a single light source behind the camera and the streak of light on the right isn't illuminating anything - where is the lighting improvement?

From an art direction point of view, the choice of colors is clearly better but which textures are more complex?

Finally I'm not sure there's any additional filtering in there not explainable by different JPEG compression settings - can you point out a particular instance of improved filtering in the bottom image versus the top one?

 

As I said, there are numerous shots on IGN. It's your responsibility to look at them, not my responsibility to enumerate every single difference. For one thing, I don't have enough technological knowledge about the implementation of various effects and lighting techniques to even describe accurately what is going on. However, if you can't even see that recent shots and the E3 shots look significantly different, then there's no helping you. From your remarks, it's pretty clear that you haven't even been following Elebits, so I'm not going to spend 30 minutes trying to describe to you what you could see for yourself if you went here:

http://media.wii.ign.com/media/824/824989/imgs_1.html

The lighting looks loads better in the new shots. Like I said, if you can't see the difference, I don't know what to say.

 

looks-better != more-horsepower

 

jeek, we're not dicussing this game in the context of horsepower at all - all comments everybody has made on it have been regaring the progress this title has made in its looks. it started very, very.. erm.. humbly. now it looks playable (and for those of us with early years CGI sentiments it even has its special charm). that's all.

 

OK. Sorry - I agree it looks a hell of a lot better now than it did, I just misread the discussion, in the context of this thread, as this improvement being evidence for a certain standard of performance from the Wii.

 

Wow. A little narrow sighted are we?

From my perspective of playing games for roughly a gazillion yrs I'd say graphics importance is overblown. Once the initial hype and frothing quickly subsides, after release of the game, what's left is whether the game is fun or not. How many repeats of history do we need before this clicks in certain brains?

IMO, Oblivion was a huge disappointment. It doesn't even look very good and it doesn't run very well at all. It doesn't even do well as an RPG with all it's fake level scaling nonsense. I don't know much about those others you've listed except that they haven't proven anything yet. If you think otherwise, you yourself have fallen for hype.

Mass Effect at least looks neat. I'll grant you that almost all of the new games look neat. Doesn't mean all that much though. This forum is filled with technology enthusiasts though, not people necessarily looking for gameplay.

What's special about Wii? Well it has a new playing style that obviously comes from their experience and research of successes with new types of game control. All those drum pads and dance mats rocked the gaming world and N decided to try something really new with motion sensing. Wii is set to win all the price wars against the supposedly "next-gen" consoles. I can't wait to see how it all turns out. But you better believe that, come Xmas, parents will take note of a $250 price vs. a $400-$600 one. And, no, parents really aren't going to care about graphics. My father, definitely an old-school gamer, doesn't look at a Xbox game and go wow! He goes, "Zelda was better". Funny thing is he means Zelda 1, 2, and Link to the Past, cuz he hated what N did with N64. It got too cute and the control was too complicated. Actually I don't think he's played a game since I brought home Goldeneye 10 yrs back lol.

I don't really care if the Wii's graphics aren't in Sony and MS's bullshit "next-gen" marketing category. They will be good enough. And, if you really are a PS2 fan you shouldn't care much about graphics anyway. Hell, obviously consumers don't if DS is annihilating PSP. Actually I like PSP a lot more. Why? Cuz I can hack it and play SNES and LucasArts games on it.

 

You can also play them with the DS, and the scummvm is better implemented, it uses the stylus as mouse.