Skate It: This is how you talk your way out of Wii’s graphical limitations
Friday, May 30th, 2008 at 2:52pm by BlakeVery clever story, and an excellent way to preserve Skate’s awesome open-world game play on the underpowered Wii, all while deflecting the “realism” issue. Nice form, Electronic Arts. Other developers, please take note.
May 30th, 2008 at 3:24 pm
I’m perfectly ok with the explanation being that it’s a video game, but this works too.
May 30th, 2008 at 3:47 pm
Yeah, nice, except games like Jet Set Radio were able to provide cityscape playgrounds you could skate all over, filled with pedestrians, police, artistry and complex shading effects on a Dreamcast, using software libraries from 8 years ago, with less than 1/4 the RAM, less than 1/8th the disc space and less than 1/10th the overall processing power.
May 30th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
to be fair, elmer, the observation was that the explanation used was a clever in-game explanation to the hardware limitations, not whether such limitations are warranted in the first place.
personally, the crayon-drawn artist representations are the best part of the video.
May 30th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
Best part of the video: The Specials!
I really hope their music is part of the game, too.
May 30th, 2008 at 5:15 pm
gnarly
May 30th, 2008 at 5:40 pm
Yeah, I know, but the money they spent on producing the FMV probably could have been used to freelance an ex-SEGA software engineer for a few months to make the engine do what we should be expecting.
EA’s painting the picture that it’s OK to not be capable “on the underpowered Wii” so long as it’s still fun and cool, which would be fine except it’s a lie. This is clever misdirection, but misdirection none-the-less. It just says to me that EA would rather spend on marketing than making a modern engine on Wii.
May 30th, 2008 at 7:33 pm
@Elmer
yeah but with the extra power left they can do stuff like beef up graphics and animation.
May 30th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
BTW the ghosttown song is kick-ass heard it first time in the beginning of Shaun Of the Dead.
May 30th, 2008 at 10:12 pm
This reminds me of those stick figure skating movies on Newgrounds. No matter how cool and ‘realistic’ you make it look, the fact is still the same: Those aren’t real people doing the stunts, so it’s not impressive at all.
May 30th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Um. “Realism”? If you say so.
(Damn straight about the Specials, Dave.)
May 31st, 2008 at 1:22 am
@ Elmer:
I agree with you. Both of your comments, in fact.
May 31st, 2008 at 8:20 am
@elmer
About the engine..yup totally agree. But really who needs npc in a skating game.
May 31st, 2008 at 11:28 am
maybe this is the ‘it’ they are referring to…
May 31st, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Funny, a few years back EA was the hated behemoth in gaming and now you just can’t help but like and even applaud most of their new efforts. Let’s hope this game controls nicely.
June 2nd, 2008 at 6:24 am
I hope you were being sarcastic because there is no reason why the game shouldn’t have pedestrians. It’s utter laziness on EA’s part and no one should buy this game.
If Tony Hawk can have tons of pedestrians on PS2 then I think we can have the same on Wii.