First suspiciously nice screens of Wii Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands released

I think it's because one of them is 1024x576 and the most the Wii can output at is 480p.

I was going to ask the same thing, since they don't look bad on their own, but then realized it was the resolution they meant. My guess would be these are probably just from their game engine, so the end result will be similar, just not at the same resolution.

Actually, the Wii CAN output a PAL signal (576i). So the resolution alone doesn't make this impossible.

im not saying it is a lie but the fact that they are higher resolution than the Wii can put out leads me to strongly believe the game will not look this good when you actually play the game. but even at standard definition it should still look pretty good

>Just because it has good graphics on the Wii makes it suspicious?

Yes, that's exactly what they're saying.

This is a Wii game.

That is a movie tie-in.

From Ubisoft.



SOMETHING. IS. WRONG.

These pictures do look slightly better than most Wii games (let alone GC or PSP) even without the resolution. I'm sure it's using the same textures and models they intend to use for the real thing, but when this has been done previously (other Ubisoft high-res anti-aliased screenshots), these 'target renders' were not quite matched by the eventual in-game graphics. In other words, Joystiq are right to be suspicious, resolution aside.

yeah, jokings from the editors aside I don't see any reason a Wii game can't look this good by now. There's shitloads more of the Wii console out there than anything else this gen, and stuff like this should have come out a few years ago.

"I don't see any reason a Wii game can't look this good by now."

I do. Nintendo are lazy hacks who've been resting on their laurels since 2006; and 3rd party devs don't want to bother putting the effort in since they know their games will sell worse than a bacon sandwich at a mosque.

Read what Shockz said above you Kojo. This IS a Wii resolution.

Except the horizontal resolution is too high. Just being capable of a vertical resolution of 576 is only half the picture. Maybe the Wii can output that much resolution, but that would certainly be news to me.

480p>576i

RGB 576i is 50 fields per second of 720x288 pixels = 10.4 million pixels per second.

Component 480p is 60 fields per second of 720x480 pixels = 20.7 million pixels per second.

It's a shame they don't support 576p for extra resolution, but at 50Hz it would be jerkier than 480p and still output 20.7 million pixels per second.

480p over component will provide the best picture quality output with the fastest refresh rate out of Nintendo Wii, it's got twice the visual information of 576i over RGB.

http://www.avforums.com/forums/wii/439689-pal-wii-576i-vs-480p.html

Seeing you mention Tomb Raider reminded me of Uncharted 2 and more specifically the complaints about FF13 being too linear. Sometimes linearity is a beautiful thing that only makes a game that much more enjoyable to certain people.

Even if it is just multiple paths to get to the same end result, I like knowing I don't have to worry about back tracking other paths just to get some obscure chest with a valuable item in it. You want me to find optional chests then put them as side rooms that fork off the main path, but not on an entirely different path.

You do realize TR1 was as acclaimed as it was -because- it was not a dumb on-rails press-forward-for-five-hours game with some simon-says elements? It was a real actual adventure, and people loved it exactly because of that. Prince of Persia games, and the later Tomb Raider games, just have you stuck to a rail, and you have to press the right button combination sometimes to make your character move a bit further along it.

People who love that kind of thing are better off watching a movie. Pressing the "play" button on the DVD remote after returning from a bathroom break is about the same level of interaction as those games offer, anyway.

@bm,

And I know a hardcore Tomb Raider fan who's loved almost every entry in the series, especially games like Legends/Anniversary and even Underground. To him it (it = series, not specifically TR:U) was still as great as it always had been, if not better in many ways.

Nah... even Tic-tac-toe is too "open world" for me...

I'm kidding... I do enjoy choice and what not (Love Fallout 3 etc), but just not for this. I like there to be a right and wrong way. Choose the wrong way and you die (and maybe I wouldn't mind keeping that rewind-time thing, but only usable to a limited extent like in Sands of Time.)

Saying that I should just watch a move is totally absurd. There is gratification for finding the right way. I'm not saying that they should make it super obvious with blinking neon arrows, or anything. In fact, the challenge IS finding the right way out of a couple wrong ways and is FAR more gratifying than "choosing" one of several right ways (to me.)

I could just as easily say: if you need open world that bad, go outside... See? it works both ways. Or, if you feel so "trapped" by the designer's choices and want it all to be up to you, then you'll probably be better off just designing your own games and never even playing someone else's creation.

Giving, say 2, alternate paths is still only giving you the choice between 3 linear paths. There's typically just more area to cover with little-to-no more payoff... when the payoff is reaching the desination or next challenge.

sonicspike: that's a nice anecdote, but kind of useless.

J: see I always find it kind of silly how some people seem to portray games that aren't stuck to a single rail. You seem to be looking at games with a more open level design as the same narrow tracks with the only difference that they offer a split in the road every once in a while. That is so very different from, well let's take TR1 as an example again, where you had areas that were more like an arena, or a village, with ways to climb all over them and points of interest all around. In some of the levels you'd get multiple rooms with different obstacles which each contained a part of the puzzle you needed to open the way out of the level.

None of this makes you feel like you're "backtracking" (oh how I hate that overused and misused term) but it doesn't make you feel imprisoned in a narrow one-dimensional tube either. Which is, frustratingly, what games are almost exclusively becoming these days. That, or they're big empty procedurally generated sandboxes with no real structure or significance to anything, which is the other extreme that proponents of linear games sometimes seem to use as a kind of strawman.

bm,

I think we're touching on exactly what a lot of developers have to keep in mind... The ultimate goal with games like this may be to mask linearity with the appearance of choice. There are effective and non-effective ways to accomplish this.

What you describe in TR1 is not what my complaints are with Warrior Within, where there were literally multiple paths to reach the same destination with no real benefit to choosing one over the other. It seemed like an arbitrary choice as an abitrary addition to the game.

What you describe is another path to take with another piece of the puzzle as the pay-off. This doesn't sound like what I think they're getting at w/ the "alternate paths," if the past few of PoP's are anything to go by, where it's literally just another way to get to the same place.

I disagree that games are becoming exclusively more linear. I think there are appropriately more choices within games and of games now, more than ever... and the balance between the two is being found more frequently (i.e. Assassin's Creed 2.)

Wii HD would be ruinous to Nintendo. Who would they sell it to? The core already either have a Wii or are determined not to buy one at all, and those that have wouldn't be willing to upgrade (and i'm putting myself in that category too), and the mass Wii market apparently has no particular desire for HD. It would be PSP Go all over again, in that it would be a device that they aren't really marketing to anyone, and is more expensive than the actual product

They would be better off launching a new console altogether, which they don't need to do yet.

Nothing is going to happen at that media summit next week. If NCL/Nintendo Japan isn't holding a conference, then they aren't announcing anything of note.
It'll basically just be reiterating and announcing what was said during Nintendo quarterly earnings presentation thingy a few weeks ago.

While I found the 2008 PoP enjoyable, I dislike how minimal it was in comparison to the old series. Barely any monsters to fight, and a LOT of backtracking to collect those damn seeds.

That's what I was thinking, these shots could easily be from a copy running on a development PC.

Hey! use a different TMNT character for your avatar!

FINE!

Ralphs my favorite anyway :P

honestly, at a quick glance i was like "Oh lookie, new screen shots of PoP for 360/PswwhhhAAA?