New Metroid 3 shots. :(

odium

Man, I've been looking forward to this game for ages... But holy hell... These shots are awful:

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/05/22/new-metroid-prime-3-screenshots/

Its really starting to look like "why bother?" now for some of these Wii games. I know the point in the hardware being so low was because it was to keep the price down, but come on, its only a little cheaper than the core 360. Not only that, but the power is about the same as an xbox one, yet these shots prove that even the best franchise on Wii is looking shoddy as hell and could easily run on a Cube if not for the controls...?

Man what a let down... I miss AA

Joao Sapiro

yeah, not a single decent title for the wii after twilight princess...if it wasnt for the gamecube games i never played...last time i trust nintendo.honest.

skankerzero

we have a character artist here that used to be at Retro. Supposedly they still don't use bump or spec on their characters.

odium

Its a waste, a total waste. I would love to see Metroid on 360 all all its HD glory. Why didn't Nintendo make the Wii more powerful...

Joshua Stubbles

"but it's all about the gameplay"

Right, fanboys? Who needs good art, when you have a motion wand! woooo!...

Maddness

that's crazy. i know someone who works at another company that makes mostly Nintendo games, and they don't use bump or spec maps either....

Though I usually dont' judge a game by graphics, that is kind of disappointing.

odium

Well, remember the xbox could only just use bump/spec. Look at Doom 3.

But thats the problem, the Wii could run Doom 3, at least the xbox version. It would shut everybody up saying all the games are ugly.

Instead, Nintendo prove time and time again that the Wii *IS* a game cube.

Looking at those shots, I can only think of one things... "what the **** is going on?". Its so damn blurry and pixelated I cant tell just whats happening...

SuperOstrich

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we have a character artist here that used to be at Retro. Supposedly they still don't use bump or spec on their characters.

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Neither did God of War 2 obviously, and I consider it the best looking game of the year so far on any platform. Not saying that Metroid looks great or anything, but you certainly don't need normal or spec maps in order to have great graphics.

Ghostscape

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Neither did God of War 2 obviously, and I consider it the best looking game of the year so far on any platform. Not saying that Metroid looks great or anything, but you certainly don't need normal or spec maps in order to have great graphics.

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Yeah but they help

As someone who bought into the Wii hype and had a lot of fun with Wii sports and with Zelda, I'm still disappointed by it. Since my brother left in February and then with my move and new job, I haven't even turned it on in two months.

The wiimotes are fun as hell to play with but I really wish they had pushed the graphics power a little bit more. Next to my 360 and it's HD glory, watching Gamecube era graphics dance around is a step back, but not far enough to be "retro cool "

Joao Sapiro

well...ps2 managed to have really nice graphics on it, and its weaker than the gamecube ( mgs 3 , DMC3 , etc)..

ebagg

It looks like the other Metroid Prime games...what'd you all expect?

aesir

it mainly just looks bad because of all the jaggies. No AA

McIlroy

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Its a waste, a total waste. I would love to see Metroid on 360 all all its HD glory. Why didn't Nintendo make the Wii more powerful...

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Im guessing so they can could be the cheapest new console on the market . I must say it's worked out for them pretty well.

SouL

L-O-FRICKIN'-L
Here we go again! Hahahaha

FunkaDelicDass

Those are some terrible screens, mainly because they look like they were taken to explicitly show off some of the Wii controls. Unless there was some kind of exodus at Retro, I have no doubt that this will be a great Metroid game.

sonic

odium: the Xbox could use normals, and so can the Wii. The developers are just lazy and too used to working on Gamecube quality games. They haven't even made anything as nice looking as Resident Evil for the GCN!

Marcus Dublin

Truth be told if you look at the earlier videos on IGN I'd say this game looks better then Halo 3. I'm judging this purely from the Halo 3 beta I've been playing the last couple of days.

Marcus

Artist - Kaos Studios

odium

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Truth be told if you look at the earlier videos on IGN I'd say this game looks better then Halo 3. I'm judging this purely from the Halo 3 beta I've been playing the last couple of days.

Marcus

Artist - Kaos Studios

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Halo 3 may not be a work of art in its BETA stage, but damn, thats a bit of an over reaction isn't it...?

Xenobond

It looks like they must have had one of the designers take the shots. All they show are some of the new/different gameplay aspects: grapple beaming across some kind of cloud city, Robocop-esque interfacing with a wall to make use of the wii-mote, playing Scorpion from MK and then a shot from a cutscene with a couple interesting looking characters.

C'mon. Why do you judge a book by its cover when it's from Nintendo?

Fuse

those screenshots do look pretty awful, but early videos of the game in motion looks pretty sweet.

Looks like someone just took really bad screencaps

danr

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The developers are just lazy and too used to working on Gamecube quality games.

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i didn't know you worked there

oh, that sort of thing really winds me up. Really. Putting down an entire dev team, when i can almost guarantee they can supply you with a list of irrefutable reasons why they haven't done what you're so certain they should have.

sonic

After watching the ingame videos, it looks much nicer in game than it does in those screenshots. Odium: Halo 3 is no further in development than Metroid 3 :-/

bounchfx

the videos and seeing it in person looked great..

however these "new" shots are god awful

nintendo please upgrade to HD

ebagg

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odium: the Xbox could use normals, and so can the Wii. The developers are just lazy and too used to working on Gamecube quality games. They haven't even made anything as nice looking as Resident Evil for the GCN!

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Wow. Guess all those devs who are making games for PSP or DS are lazy too huh? Somehow I'm guessing this game, much like Zelda, is based on tech for the Gamecube. I haven't seen anything for the Wii where you can truly say they're taking full advantage of the graphical capabilities.

FightingChance

I've read about the Wii manufacturing process, they actually are Gamecube guts at about a 20% faster clock rate and a dye shrink to 90mm (from probably 130mm?)

Business mumbo jumbo link: http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/20213.wss

I thought Prime did have specular, like the shine on Samus's gun arm? Or is that an environment reflection map? Either way that gun arm bothers me most about the graphics, which in every other way are actually quite satisfactory in my opinion. When you switch to light beam/dark beam and the gun splits apart, you see that ugly animated .gif style texture and the low poly count pretty plainly. Visor views/filters are great - the ATI/ArtX graphics chip is very capable of effects, if not raw power like the Xbox's GeForce 3 derivative.

I wish I applied myself more when I had the chance to intern at Retro...

Edit: The more I look at the screens, the more it seems that they captured them from a display that is connected to a Wii with composite cables, which exaggerate color bleed and the stair step effect.

HonkyPunch

God dammit, nintendo.
Your magic motion wand cannot make up for this

Penzer

I know its been mentioned, but it needs AA so bad. Not having AA looks even worse when moving than in screenshots. This game is really important to Nintendo, it needs to be able to prove that the wiimote works for shooters. It has to succeed where red steel failed.

Joao Sapiro

red steel didnt fail...it had horrible graphics and the sword was crap but weapons etc is pretty fun !

Marcus Dublin

Take it easy guys I’m sure once the game ships it’ll be very polished and aesthetically beautiful. If you enjoyed the visuals to the prior two titles then I’d expect more of the same but at a higher res. As for Retro not using normal maps, well maybe there art director or whoever figured that it wasn’t necessary to pull off the art assets they were creating for the game. I guess having normal maps wasn’t worth the memory hit and they could use the extra resources elsewhere. About the Halo 3 comment I made earlier well when most games hit beta that means there art assets are pretty much final with the exception of a few things here or there and based on the beta that I played it looks like Halo 3’s graphics aren’t far and away better than Metroid Corruption. All in all this is just my two cent’s and I could easily eat my words when Halo 3 ships and the graphics somehow exceed my initial impressions.

Marcus

Artist – Kaos Studios

ironbearxl

These screen shots look good to me, maybe it's the kool-aid i'm drinking?

hawken

no worse looking than the demo of armoured core, minus the haychdee!

moose

cant wait to see what the ui looks like!!!

Illusions

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"but it's all about the gameplay"

Right, fanboys? Who needs good art, when you have a motion wand! woooo!...

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Depends really. Good gameplay is good gameplay. Good art on top of good gameplay is icing on the cake. I've been having a lot of fun playing Super Paper Mario and Wii Sports, along with Gears of War...and the graphics for Mario and Wii Sports is vastly different than Gears.

This is just an example of rehashed gameplay, and laziness on the graphics. Plus we probably haven't seen the best the Wii can do yet. Just compare Perfect Dark Zero to Gears of War.

Steve Schulze

This is just what happened with the DS. When it was first released everyone just assumed it couldn't do much more than a GBA and so developers just didn't try. It took quite some time for us to get a handle of the fact that you can do some pretty decent 3d visuals with the little hand-held, as long as you're sensible about it. The same goes for the Wii.

It shouldn't be too much longer before we start getting into some second generation Wii games that are as pretty as they can be.

Peris

I'd love to see what square would get out of the wii, they are doing amazing stuff with the ds

[MILES]

I read elsewhere that these same screens aren't as new as we are lead to believe and that Retro has commented that they have done a relatively recent overhaul on the graphics. I don't know if the source is correct, but until I see some current video of the game...I'm not going to worry about it too much. Nintendo always delivers. It's the third parties that I'm usually more skeptical about. Right now everyone is trying to get a piece of the Wii's success...and this is resulting in a flood of poorly ported games from third parties.