Spore confirmed for the Wii.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/28703/Spore-confirmed-fo...

What do you mean "only"? The way we interact with the game is everything. In 20 years we won't look back at these consoles and care about how the games looked, we'll care about how they felt.

I guess it's no surprise that I agree with him. :)

Um, go back and read some comments and you'll see that most of these people praised the Wii already back then, but money has a wait-and-see stance, always. It's only now that these people are given green lights from respective company to actually develop for a platform that was a HUGE risk that no business people believed in before.

Will Wright has always been a fan, and I gotta say I agree with a lot of his philosophies. I pretty much hate his games though. :)

Yeah it's not that I don't see your point, and I think he does too. It's just that he doesn't really seem to give two shits about the jump in visual quality. To him, "next gen" is about something different.

I'd agree with you more if I actually felt like the difference in graphics was worth a new generation but I really don't. I have the new systems because that's where the games are coming out, but I certainly didn't "miss" them, nor do I miss the graphics they provide when I'm playing Wii games. In fact, the last boss in Secret Rings gave me more of an "OOOH" feeling than anything on the other systems have. Oh and it's no secret how I feel about Mario Galaxy's visuals.

So yeah, I see your point and understand that you feel that way, but I don't feel like that myself. Neither, it appears, does Will Wright.

Well yeah alot of it is art style, but it's also a "warmth" to the graphics that comes from the slight fussyness. Sonic 360 looks sharp and cold, and it's not really considerably less pretty sometimes.

I have an LCD TV now, but I'm seriously considering getting a lower res plasma alternative because it just makes everything look so much more organic.

I know, I'm weird. :|

Well, different kinds of TVs display stuff differently, and more importantly at different resolutions. Plasma display a lower res picture that also gives it a more fuzzy look. Some think it's just blurrier and "uglier" than LCD, others find it warmer to the eye.

Some Wii games look really great on my LCD set, no doubt about that. Metroid Prime, the gamecube game, looks fantastic even. It's just that they would look even better on a plasma set where it'd have the free AA of a CRT TV, but the benefits of removed scanlines and an all round richer contrast and colour palette.

360 and PS3 games all have these fundamental graphics annoyances like jaggy shadows and STILL no firm policy on AA usage, and that will also improve on a plasma telly because you'll get the natural smoothing of edges with lower res output.

I haven't decided yet though. I'm pretty happy with the way this telly complements both my older consoles and my new ones, so I might stick with it.

You won't get the same result though. An LCD TV is incurably sharp even when it displays low resolution images. A plasma set takes a 720p signal and outputs it in a lower res on screen, a plasma TV is never as sharp as an LCD TV because the screen itself displays fewer pixels.

Sure you can, and you can feed that TV those signals but it won't actually output them at that resolution.

Walk into any TV store and compare the LCDs there to the plasmas and what you'll notice is that the plasmas aren't as sharp as the LCDs even though they're supposedly 1080p sets.

Edit: I keep responding to your first drafts and find myself having to edit how I start my posts. :P

I apologize kenshin, I sort of turned the Wii thread into an HDTV thread.. I dunno how I managed that.

Jolli: well if that's correct then a lot has changed since I was looking into plasma and LCD back in 2005, and I'm frankly a bit lost now then. :D


Anyway, yes, Wii/DS thread. Eurogamer liked Touch Detective 2½. I've sort of been a bit cautious about those two in the past, but I might just have to check them out now. After I finish Ace Attorney 3 of course. Should arrive tomorrow or the day after.

It'll prolly be a different iteration of it yeah. It's been announced for the DS for a while, and I don't think that's expected to mimic the PC version to that extent.

I have to admit I know very little about what kind of strain this kind of game puts on hardware though. I would assume the morphing and stuff is prolly pretty heavy, but if it's all done largely with stats and numbers it could possibly work on a DS. It'd have to be re-imagined though of course.

I think it's scale will be more of an issue. You're dealing with very large areas in Spore. I can't wait to play it on PC, but I imagine Maxis may have something really cool planned for DS/Wii as well.

There, I finished Metroid Prime (the first one) about.. five minutes ago, and it is without a doubt the best game I have ever played. Puzzles, action, platforming, backtracking, exploration. Seemingly effortlessly this game has managed to weave a canvas so incredibly well thought out using all those components that I can only bow in awe.

So what was it that made me finish it? A gripping twist? A complex, alluring narrative? No. There's a reason in here, there's that much story - to give a reason to why things are the way they are and a reason why Samus is doing what she does, but it's so secondary to gameplay you could easily just forget about it.

This game is so pure in its balance of emotions - facing obstacles and overcoming them - that it sits firmly alongside the most basic games in the history of videogames and looks on in utter disbelief as other games lose themselves and become slaves to their storytelling and attempts at coherency. There is a sense of presence here, and the game never feels disjointed, but the way ideas are assembled couldn't have been achieved with today's general mindset.

This also means that while this is the best game I'VE played, it isn't for everyone. There is a relentless truth in that Metroid is a game. If you go into it expecting to be dragged along by intrigue and character development, you will be deeply disappointed. If you enjoy gaming in its purest form, then Metroid Prime will be pretty obvious as a pinnacle of game design.

That's not to say that there isn't room for all kinds of games, as I too enjoy "cinematic experiences". But as I find myself continuing playing after a save point at 3am without the motivation of narration, I can't help but feel that this is closer to what games are essentially about.

It's weird that it's taken me so long to play this game properly, as it's been out for about four years now, but it was also crucial to me personally to play this after things like Halo 1-3, Half Life 2, Sands of Time, or any other game that brushes that "bestest ever" quality, because if I hadn't then I might've doubted my own feelings about it. It's just as important that I played it after this "new generation" has had its fair chance to blow me away and alter how I look at graphics, which is usually how once-pretty games become disappointingly old and crummy. On the contrary though, when I emerged from Magmoor Caverns and walked out into the snow at Phendrana Drifts it was a tear jerking experience even now. The contrast to Magmoor's lava and red rocks - this sharp, clear sky, soft snowflakes hitting my/Samus visor and melting, and the change in music to this subtle silent tune - was simply stunning.

So yeah, more than a review this is an ode to Metroid Prime - undoubtedly my favourite game ever.


Sitting on my shelf in sexy plastic wrapping, Metroid Prime 2: Echoes beckons. My hopes is that before the end of the year I will have played Corruption, but I wanna do it properly, as an end to a trilogy. I was gonna launch at Echoes like some kind of fierce animal once I was done with the first, but I'm gonna let it sink in for a bit and play all these other cool games that have sort of sat by rolling their thumbs.

*deep inhale*
*exhale*

Well that's all I think. I had to sort of.. let it out. :)

edit: I said five minutes at the top there, but that's not quite true after I was done with the post. :D

Wait.. did you JUST finish it for the first time? I thought you had already stated previously that it was the best game ever? That's pretty wild, considering how passionate you seem about the game.. but then again you think the new Mario is game of the year based on a few videos ;P

I've thought pretty highly of things I haven't finished it the past as well.. I've never thought anything was the best game ever without seeing it through though. Personally I think it's easier to judge something for its negative qualities (like, PDZ) from briefly playing them than it is to fairly judge their best qualities without playing through the game--since you've drilled me for hating PDZ in the past while barely playing it, I can see this is another issue we don't agree on. The way I see it, if a game is so compelling that you love it, you've got more of a reason to see it though. If you hate it, why would you give it that much attention, with all the great games out there.

Sounds good though, maybe I'll play it some day if I've got a console to run it on. Gameplay always takes precedence over story for me, when it comes to playing a videogame, which is good.. since I find most of the best game stories to be pretty poorly told, or pretty wildly overrated. There are of course a few exceptions, mostly WRPG's.