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$250 for the Wii? I'd have paid more for HD..
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Boy was he surprised when he wired up some HD channels.
I'm honestly surprised. I don't know anyone who owns one.
And according to this link the average Nintendo fanboy is too blind to find his wiimote.
:P
opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.
- Robert A. Heinlein
I've found that the odds of you owning an HDTV is directly related to your age. As with most tech, old people don't get it.
Seriously though, I think probably 75% of the people I work with have HD. Of course, we're all techy types too.
opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.
- Robert A. Heinlein
Kill yourself.
Go away kid.
Ya' botherin' me.
opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.
- Robert A. Heinlein
I still think of HDTV as being a bit like audiophile stuff. If it's worth it to you to pay the difference for the benefit you perceive, cool. I wouldn't criticise someone for buying a £500 amp, and I won't criticise someone for buying a £500 TV.
I, personally, have the same experience in SD and HD. This does not mean I'm blind. I can see the difference side-by-side. To make a comparison, I can distinguish 192kb/s mp3 from CD audio, but I derive the same enjoyment from listening to music in either.
All things being equal, I'd go for higher quality, but it's the kind of thing I'll leave until it's needed. I had an old Marantz CD player which was pretty good, better CD players existed, but the presence of better CD players on the market didn't cause me to dump my Marantz and buy something else. I only ended up replacing it because it broke. Guess what. It didn't change my enjoyment of my music. I'll buy a new TV when my current set breaks.
I do find it slightly weird when people seem to take this attitude as some kind of personal insult.
Oh-ho-ho!
Jus' sayin'.
:rotate:
But seriously, I can't wait to get a Wii, they look like so, so, so much fun (you can't find them around here for love nor money, all sold out, and probably for weeks to come - Nintendo FTW) but after playing so much pretty HD 360, stepping down to the Wii might be a bit crappy (if it wasn't for the fact I view the thing is mainly just a piss-up party awesome fun machine) I mean, fucking widescreen isn't even a standard! Not to mention PAL is nicer than 480P to begin with. At least the gaming sex that is the VC will not be compromised by HD (unlike the "updated" classics on Live).
But meh, buying one anyway. Just wish it looked nicer.
Every time I pop in Zelda, particularly after just playing some GoW or DOAX2 (shut up, my wife wanted it), the drop in picture quality is a little jarring. After about 5 minutes of play, though, I stop giving a shit, because the game is so much fun. It's hardly so poor looking as to be distracting, and the game really does have many beautiful qualities. And games like Rayman just take good advantage of the system's strengths and weaknesses.
Thing is, Nintendo is rarely the company that takes the most advantage of their own hardware. Ocarina of Time wasn't really a hallmark of N64 beauty. Wind Waker was artistically brilliant, but wasn't a technical masterpiece. Mario Sunshine wasn't really all that hot. Their games are usually visually competent, and fun as hell. That's cool with me.
It seems some people go well out of their way to take offense when someone else points out, quite factually, that HDTV looks better.
But,
Resident Evil 4.
If the the gamecube can do that, then I'm sure the wii will do much better.
Only thing is, it make take a little while to see such stuff.
No, I think it's more that HDTVs are optimized for scaling up film, and are absolutely crap at scaling up anything with lots of detail.
When I look at Zelda on my SDTV beside my parents' HDTV, a lot of the detail is actually lost on the HDTV. This seems the opposite of what should happen, but it's pretty obvious when you compare them. Patterns are stretched and squashed out of proportion, and some details are blurred together. This is using component cables.
Our HDTV has a 720p resolution. The input to it is either 480p (NTSC) or 576i (PAL). To scale this up to the native resolution, the TV can't just double the size of the pixels, so it has to do interpolation. A single-pixel line has to be somehow converted into 1.5 pixels (for 480p) or 1.25 pixels (for 576i). The TV does this by blurring the pixels together, creating a distorted mess. The fine detail in a game like Zelda gets smeared as a result.
This interpolation looks OK on live-action films. It looks fine on cartoons, which have large blocks of colour. It actually looks great on games with simplistic graphics. But games like Zelda or RE4, which have a lot of fine detail in their textures look like crap.
I'll say. It's bizarre.
I mean, I don't have an HDTV and probably won't get one any time in the next three years or more. However I'm not so pigheaded as to refuse to accept that not only can higher resolutions benefit games in the eye-candy department, but also that the greater clarity achieved can improve the gameplay experience in some cases. I'm thinking specifically of games like Burnout here, in which it can be hard to read where the road is going and what obstacles are in the way because of the lack of visual clarity on fine/distant details at 480i.
I'm quite content to continue gaming at my lowly 480i for some time, but every time I come across someone who argues that higher resolutions look no better, I can't help but think that those grapes must be sourer than a rancid lemon.
It works both ways. There are some people who seem to take offence at the idea that not everyone is so nauseated by SD resolutions that they'll junk a perfectly good TV and buy a new one.
Unless you don't have one because you just can't afford one but really want one. That sucks.
There's definitely truth in this too. I guess people will be people.
My point is that SD content can actually look much worse on a HDTV than it does on an equally-sized SDTV.
And I don't just mean more pixellated because of the crisper resolution of the HDTV. I mean it looks worse because of scaler and interpolation issues that mess up the graphics.
If you play a PC game at a non-native resolution on an LCD display, you will see the same issues... although the problems actually seem to be worse on a lot of LCD TVs.
Do i wish the graphics were better? Fuck yeah, I think it would make the experience even more enjoyable.
Do I like it any less because doesn't? Fuck no, the damn thing is fun as hell.
I think it comes down to the art styles the use in games. For certain types of titles, its absolutely perfect. For others not.
I don't see how the animation in Wario Ware could look any better. It looks shit hot on my 42" plasma. I really don't see how it could look any sharper.
Madden on the other hand, I would much rather play in HD, or probably any game that relies on "realistic" graphics.
Wii needs to stick to cartoony graphics (and I by no means think cartoony equates to kiddy).
aka Grillaface
Also, with the argument about the size of an HDTV, I use a 22" monitor with component inputs and it looks loads better than standard def. Obviously I'd prefer a larger screen but you can already see a large improvement.
aka Grillaface
The 360 is an order of magnitude more powerful than the Xbox, and there were several launch titles that looked barely better than current Xbox games. Partly it was laziness, and partly it was a lack of familiarity with the system getting in the way of good optimization of code.
The optimization tricks that made RE4 look wonderful probably don't work anymore. And whereas early 360 games could just brute-force their way into looking decent, the Wii doesn't have that kind of horsepower. And so developers may just not know how to make the Wii games look better than GC games at this point, or even as good, even though the hardware is twice as powerful.
Just a guess.
Good points, but also add to the fact that a lot of devs were rushed for launch, that a lot of stuff was ported (directly from GCN assets), and that some of Ubi's stuff was ported from the PS2.
What we will start seeing sooner or later is devs building games for the Wii with its hardware 'in mind' and with newer devkits. The Sonic game, the DQ Swords game, Mario Galaxy, Smash Bros Brawl, the Pokemon game.. I suspect that they will all look noticeably better than Gamecube games, and anything out for the Wii now.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Nothing's forgotten, nothing is ever forgotten
1.) Price advantage is crucial, especially with something so different. People are willing to take a risk on a 250 dollar machine, wheras they might not be if it were 400 or 600 dollars.
2.) Development costs. Developing HD games is expensive, with an SD approach developing a Wii exlusive is much more tempting than it would be if a developer had to spend just as much money as they would on a 360 or PS3 title.
3.) It forces developers to focus on gameplay to succeed. You can't really wow someone with Wii graphics and have a crappy game underneath, people are going to notice because the graphics aren't going to sell the game anymore.
This is not to say I wouldn't have liked the Wii to have better graphics, but I understand some of the decisions they made for the Wii.
0087-5796-7152 (Jeremy, Heliord)
Do HD CRTs have this problem? I've been thinking about getting one, and I know CRT computer monitors don't have a native resolution (since it's an electron gun that can be tuned to pretty much whatever res is nessessary, quibbles about h-moire aside). I wouldn't mind bulkiness if it was cheap and did 480i/p as well as 1080i in actual native resolutions.
CRTs don't have a native resolution because they don't work that way. That's why I was asking for people that owned them on their opinions:
background information: LCDs have actual liquid crystals; one (well, 3) for each pixel. CRTs have an electron gun that scans horizontal lines, and can be changed as nessessary. This is why LCD monitors have a native resolution but CRTs do not.
However, according to a sticky at AVS Forum, they say: Assuming that is accurate then things should look better than a non-CRT solution, unless the CRT in question only has one native resolution.
I mean, at least onthe 360 the annual EA shovelware is at least up to a certain standard, that is that the visuals are actually pretty good even if the gameplay isnt.
Whereas on the Wii because it is Gamecube 1.5 I would assume developers are more inclined to shovel Wii controls on a pretty hastily assembled and shoddy game, because in this day and age of game devloping, most 360 game pre alphas are better looking than Wii games.
Once they stop having new Xbox/PS2 games to port from, I imagine they will get off their asses and develop games for the actual console.
EA has actually been one of the best in utilizing the power of the console in addition to the controls, look at SSX, its one of the best looking games out there for the Wii.