How successful do you think the Wii U will be ?

[gamevet]

Jack Black as Mario? Fucking brilliant!

And Jay (Silent Bob and Jay) as Link.

[TheSonicRetard]

I'm not sure what special faked effects Cavia pulled out of their ass for Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, but they sure knew what they were doing. It looked almost to good to be a Wii game.

I used to have this extremely long breakdown of all the graphical tricks used in Resident Evil 4 from a gamasutra post, but I've since lost it. It was very in depth, and I wouldn't doubt a lot of the same tricks were used in Darkside chronicles. Suffice to say, though, that much in the same way that graphical tricks used in various Amiga Demos were only possible in very strict, specific circumstances which prevented general use, the tricks in these games were more a product of the game design.

So, for example, the pixel shader-like effects couldn't be pulled off in other games due to lighting, types of textures used, data piping issues, etc. The darkness of the games heavily influenced the type of tricks they were able to perform.

[sheath]

The Wii specs have not been fully revealed, which makes the comparison a lot tougher.
The hardware is an extension of the GC hardware, but how much it's improved is hard to tell. Processor is twice as fast, and it was a little more than twice as much ram. Looking at it from that alone, it's a weak update compared to the evolution of it's peers. The GPU is pretty much kept secret for whatever reason, but so far seems to be just a 50% faster version of the GC GPU with more VRAM. Considering it's still a fixed funtion pipeline GPU (even the original Xbox already supported shaders) the upgrade is in fact pretty pathetic.

A Wii game would not run on the GC though. The differences in memory and speed allow for higher quality textures and higher polygon counts that the GC just can't do.
(Texture quality in particular should be a really big difference)

I haven't played a ton of Wii games, but I was happy enough with the Dreamcast, Gamecube and Xbox's graphics last generation. More than that I would have loved a Naomi 2 based Dreamcast successor and since I consider the Gamecube little more than a Dreamcast with more RAM it is kind of cool to see the Wii do that. Now that the original Wii is getting pretty danged cheap at less than $70 I might need to pick one up, but since I managed to snag a Gamecube component cable last year I don't have as much of a reason to pick up a Wii. How many games let you play with Gamecube controllers on the Wii anyway?

[Televator]

How many games let you play with Gamecube controllers on the Wii anyway?

Not too many unfortunately. I really wanted to try out the new Donkey Kong game, but you MUST play that game with the Wii-mote -- waggle and all.

~--o0o--~

Well it seems to me like there is one side of the argument that is actually bringing facts to their side of the table and another side only sanctimoniously pretending to be about the facts. I think it's pretty apparent to anyone with a sound enough mind.

It boils down to: "The Wii is a Gamecube." "The The Wii is not much more capable than a Gamecube." The Wii is a Gamecube with added X and Y."

That was some serious derailment though. Weren't we talking about the Wii U here? Well I think the Wii U might at least do some good in that original titles being developed for it might end up on the PS Vita. I can't wait to get one of those! Hey....actually. I'm gonna go lookup some specs. How much more powerful is the Wii U Vs. Vita?

[TheSonicRetard]

Not too many unfortunately. I really wanted to try out the new Donkey Kong game, but you MUST play that game with the Wii-mote -- waggle and all.

mod your wii, install the gecko usbloader, rip the game to a flash drive, install the patch, and bam - donkey kong country returns playable with a classic controller, without waggle, with no load times.

[Televator]

mod your wii, install the gecko usbloader, rip the game to a flash drive, install the patch, and bam - donkey kong country returns playable with a classic controller, without waggle, with no load times.

I didn't know there was a patch for it. Thanks! I'll probably run it on Dolphin though.

[TheSonicRetard]

I didn't know there was a patch for it. Thanks! I'll probably run it on Dolphin though.

It runs fantastically in dolphin, looks great too. however, with dolphin, there's no need to patch, really, because you can just map your controls to an existing controller. I played dkcr under dolphin using an snes controller... it's a lot of fun.

[Televator]

It runs fantastically in dolphin, looks great too. however, with dolphin, there's no need to patch, really, because you can just map your controls to an existing controller. I played dkcr under dolphin using an snes controller... it's a lot of fun.

[NeoVamp]

mod your wii, install the gecko usbloader, rip the game to a flash drive, install the patch, and bam - donkey kong country returns playable with a classic controller, without waggle, with no load times.

HA HA Awesome, gotta look into that.

[magicalsoundshower]

I know Epic Mickey for Wii uses Havok, it's also quite good-looking but has frame rate problems on occasion.

[The Jackal]

Hmm, does that mean ANY Wii game can be patched to use a Classic controller instead of the Wii-mote? How about using a GC pad?

[Pulstar]

I know Epic Mickey for Wii uses Havok, it's also quite good-looking but has frame rate problems on occasion.

Wikipedia mentions nothing of the sort, but could it be using a modified Havok since it was originally intended for more powerful platforms?

[magicalsoundshower]

I swear I remember it saying so in the credits prior to the title screen, I might check once I'm done with this piece of work I've been procrastinating finishing.

[TVC 15]

I'm sure theres some doc's on the net that suggest the Wii can handle HAVOK in hardware, there are some small refinements to the WII's GPU that make it a little bit more different from the GC GPU but its still mostly fixed function hardware.

There are also the TEV shader-like units in the GPU, that have there own trade-offs and pluses in comparison to industry-standard SHADER/VERTEX units to perform shader like effects, but there fairly non-standard.

[Pulstar]

All this is moot since most Wii games look like aliased poop.