Nintendo Wii Fanboy

Sonic and the Secret Rings

I still say it was the first Wii game that could not have graphically been done on the GC

And though it doesn't need said, No More Heroes was a graphical disappointment between the faceless townies and horrid draw distance

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Paper Mario is the best looking game on the Wii and, alongside JSRF, quite possibly the best looking game I've ever seen.

It's so charming. Especially the black marker around each character. It looks just like a picture book.

Harvey Birdman looks good too.

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Sonic & the Secret Rings, Brawl and Mario galaxy are kind of the only three that have impressed me up until tis point.

..well, those plus RE4, which never fails to impress me visually.

I fully expect to add Okami to the list in about 2 weeks, though.

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The only game (really ever) where the graphics has actually made me angry is Guitar Hero III. I felt that the graphics were actually so poor that it actually interfered with game play for me. Obviously the graphics are not the main point of the game, but it was painful to look at (gross character models, cloned audience members all fist-pumping identically...). I am largely pleased with the Wii in terms of graphics and art style, but this made me feel like I was playing an early PS2 game.

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I've been wondering, if:

A. the Wii really is 1.5x as powerful, graphically, as the GameCube, and

B. the GameCube GPU was roughly on par with the original Xbox, despite other specs being inferior, and

C. the Wii is selling like crazy, then

D. why are we seeing games that look like PS2 rips instead of Xbox or better visuals?

Oh yeah, because we're getting PS2 rips.

I think Sonic ATSR, Excite Truck, Super Mario Galaxy, Zack and Wiki, Endless Ocean, Metroid Prime 3, and a few others have all looked just fine.

The rest? Seriously disappointing. The visuals of Madden Wii, for example, should be at least up to par with the original Xbox version rather than the current PS2 version. It's only cost efficiency and developer laziness that result in a Wii-ified PS2 port.

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Dag nabbit, I must be colorblind or something as I still can't figure out WHY Baroque is considered the poster child of crappy Wii graphics. All of the screenshots and movies look decent enough to me.

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Haven't played games on any of the other next gen consoles or on a tweaked out pc so I don't really know how far the distance is between the Wii and other systems. Don't really care either, most of the Wii games I'm interested in (Galaxy, RE4, RE:UC) have graphics that are (more than) good enough. It's the gameplay that really sets them apart from the pack and that's the reason I play them.

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I second that emotion on GHIII. The singer = muppet from hell.

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Since we are on the topic of graphics I need to get this off my chest. I don't think we have seen graphics pushed to the limits yet on the Wii. I have played many Wii games and their are plenty that have poor graphics and lots with just OK graphics. But I have seen in some games how even something small was so well rendered that I know the Wii has more graphical power than what the developers are giving it. Take BWii for instance. The graphics in that game were OK and was in line with what we have came to expect out of our Wii's but if you ever took note at the water graphics in the streams and rivers (not so much the oceans when your on the ships and subs) in the game then you will see amazing water effects that no other Wii game has met yet.

Now take games like Smash, Galaxy, MP3, and Strikers Charged all of which were first party games and all of which had amazing levels of detail to the environments. From the rough edges of a brick wall to the gravel on the ground. I would love to see a developer push the Wii's graphic engine to the limits and spend the time and money to develop a game that did not have that cartoon look but let it have that more mature look that we see all to common on the 360 and PS3. I bet if a developer wanted too they could pull off something that would look pretty close to that of the 360 especially now that we all know that our Wii's can handle a dual layer format disc. Brawl is the only game to use the dual layer, now it is time for developers to follow and use that space for graphics and not just to cram as many mini games in it as they can.

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MP3 has some damn fine graphics.

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Are we still arguing about this? It's not the palette that matters, but what the artist does with it. Take NMH for example. By any objective standard, the graphics were fairly unsophisticated. Nonetheless, it looked great. Why? Style. Galaxy looks great. Brawl looks great. Metroid looks great. But who cares? I just picked up House of the Dead 2 and 3 Return and an arcade classic over a decade old can be just as fun as anything brand new and ten times a shiny. So long as we keep seeing, fun, innovative, stylish games, I still be a happy customer. The Wii's got enough horsepower for the games I want to play. I'd say Nintendo made the right call. Now online on the other hand...

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I can't really comment on graphics, as I'm still running an old 4:3 standard def TV. Even still, as long as the graphics are not horrible, I don't really notice too much. The shiny graphics novelty wears off, and gameplay takes center stage.
If the graphics are so bad that they hamper gameplay, then I have a problem.

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Metroid Prime 3 Corruption takes the cake for me. Does it matter that it's the ONLY Wii game I own besides Wii Sports?

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Dewy's Adventure has some very good textures, special effects, tons of enemies on screen and sometimes the camera zooms out and shows the whole stage (Groovy Grassland 2 for example).
It's also worth mentioning that the game runs at a constant 60FPS with no slowdown ever. The game also has to handle 3 full sets of textures for every stages (cold, normal, hot temperature) and switch between them on the fly.
Only Mario Galaxy looks slightly better, due to even higher texture detail and usually less objects on screen, but the game had twice the development time (dunno) 10 times the budget.

Need proof on how good Dew looks?
http://youtube.com/watch?v=J-ALITFTYxk&feature=related

The new NiGHTS woud be another a contender for the throne. Most stages and boss battles look very good (Wizeman battle!), but the character models and platform stages slightly disappoint.

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nights looked like a polished nintendo 64 game and i agree with the gh3 comments, the graphics are awful. Im looking foward to what factor 5 can push out on the wii. It's frustrating when 2 of the best looking wii games are gamecube ports, twilight princess and re4.

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I think the biggest problem with the "look" of the Wii has less to do with graphics and more to do with the resolution of the output. I bought my Wii about 6 weeks ago after playing Wii Sports/Galaxy at a friends house on a large CRT television (on which the Wii looked pretty good).

I just recently bought a large LCD television and was severely disappointed with how the Wii looked on it (even with component cables). Not only are the graphics jaggy, but also pixelated due to the scaling. I bought the Vdigi VGA cable for the Wii, and tried it on my 22" lcd monitor, and it's just as bad, if not worse.

In my opinion, if the Wii was able to output at higher resolutions (similar to the orginal Xbox), I would actually be quite pleased with its graphical capabilities.

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I found Super Mario Galaxy to be very impressive. Sure there are plenty of jaggies, but the game is brilliant and well executed. What else do you really need?

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MP3's graphics are definitely the best. Brawl is second best, but still a bit behind MP3. The worst: GT Pro Series. Makes me want to cry.

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Twiligth Princess - Amazing Graphics, even better than the GC one, and PS2 wouldn't support such beauty

No More Heroes - They majoring wasn't the graphics, they decided that the graphics should be like this cuz they focused on giving the Sadistic Assasin POV

Mario Galaxy - This one proves of the Wii's Capabilities

Metroid Prime 3 - Planning on getting it, heard pretty good reviews

Brawl - AWESOME!!!!!

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I know these are more the fault of the developer's "vision" of the game than hardware limitations, but I found No More Heroes and Wario Smooth moves unplayable due to their poor graphics.

SMG is probably my favorite, and Sonic is up there, too. Zelda TP would be higher if it didn't have white lines showing through at so many polygon intersections. I also rate F-Zero GX as some of the best graphics on the wii despite being a gamecube game.

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The best looking games for Wii that I've played are probably Metroid Prime 3 (great graphics coupled with sublime art direction) and Super Paper Mario -- the latter makes me wish that more 2-D games were produced for consoles.

But my favorite looking game is, hands down, No More Heroes. The way that game looks was a breathe of fresh air to me. The style and art direction, for me, make the fact that it is technically lacking completely irrelevant. The game looks GREAT.

To me, a lot of these "realistic" games are all starting to look the same to me.

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