Wii version disappointments
I played Tales of MI on my computer when it came out and loved it! I have been playing these games since i was a kid. But recently I tried it on the Wii and I must say its bad enough for me to post this.
The audio is so compressed its hard to understand what's being said! on top of that I think the music is MIDI instead of the full wonderful quality of the PC version.
The Game runs really slow, LOTS of pauses and loading screens.
And lastly the video quality is lacking. It doesn't look as nice and clear and the colors aren't as good as on the PC.
Don't get me wrong, the game is great and you should get it... I'm just highly recommending the PC version instead!
The audio is so compressed its hard to understand what's being said! on top of that I think the music is MIDI instead of the full wonderful quality of the PC version.
The Game runs really slow, LOTS of pauses and loading screens.
And lastly the video quality is lacking. It doesn't look as nice and clear and the colors aren't as good as on the PC.
Don't get me wrong, the game is great and you should get it... I'm just highly recommending the PC version instead!
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That said, the only dialogue I thought sounded really bad was Elaine in the intro, and the framerates for most of the game after the intro aren't too bad either, unless you're wildly running around and changing zones every 5 seconds.
It seems the vast majority of disappointed people have at least seen how TOMI runs on the PC and were expecting something a lot closer in terms of quality.
Well i guess the main moaning point would be that wii owners are paying more for an inferior version.
Also, tales was download only on PC aswell...
Thats the nature of the system though. Most Wii owners are aware of the limitations of it, especially on Wiiware. It looks and plays much better than the majority of Wiiware titles that I have seen.
Graphics and textures I had no problem with, aside from the Wii scattershot odd-colored pixel effect. I thought Telltale did a good job there, all things considered. And I think this version of Guybrush is probably the best of the "modern" era.
The PC version plays like a dog on my computer, and the controls I found to be unintuative. The game on the Wii is a little slow and the speech seems to be more noticeably compressed at the start (although perhaps that's just my ears getting used to it), but none of these issues hinder the humour in the way attempting to play it in XP and Vista did for me.
When I downloaded it via WiiWare I was really worried because of some of the negative comments that were being made on the forums but now I am thankful to these people as due to the low expectations they had given me I have been able to be pleasantly surprised by how perfectly playable the game truly is.
All in all I would compare it to playing Monkey Island 2 on an Amiga without a hard drive (see previous post - or rather, essay - here ).
Although I feel the controls work far better on the Wii I still prefer point and click (having gone straight back to Strong Bad after completing Tales).
Another comment I would make (again, one made previously here ) is that if you are going to have speech that some are going to find intolerable - I don't count myself as one of them - then a little time really needs to be spent on getting the subtitles up to scratch. At the start of the game I thought I was going to have trouble hearing the speech, so I turned on the subtitles only to find them near illegible and to appear quicker than it was possible to read them (and despite what Jake thinks, I still believe subtitles/text can be part of the games aesthetic
These are minor niggles though, the game was a joy to play from beginning to end and if your computer can't handle the PC release then Tales of Monkey Island for WiiWare is certainly worthy of purchase!
It's still a good game and I like the controls but you should expect a better polished game for that price. It's AU$15 per episode in Australia, that's AU$75 for the entire game! That's more than some full price games with far better quality.
Someone is lying and/or crazy. I don't know who yet.
No, people aren't crazy, just unrealistic expecting a disc-quality release on the Wiiware service with its 40MB download cap.
Probably the best looking 3D game on Wiiware is Onslaught, with pretty bland textures, repetitive enemies and the most annoying line of dialogue you've ever heard, that is repeated ALL THE TIME.
Probably the best overall game on Wiiware is World of Goo, which is a beautiful 2D puzzler with a nice soundtrack but very little in the way of sound effects and no speech.
Everything else (generalising!) is a 2d block puzzler or a horrid 3D genre game (Minigolf, Bowling, Pokemon Ranch).
While ToMI isn't perfect, it's amazing what Telltale have squeezed into their imposed download limit, and the game is absolutely playable, if not perfect. I've had no issue with the audio myself, but I'm not playing on a high end surround sound system.
If some of the stuttering is being worked on, as Telltale have said, and the font size in enlarged in future episodes, then that's even better.
Presumably your comparing it to Wii games, not WIIWARE games, which is grossly unfair.
Have a look at the other 3D Wiiware games with full speech and then come back and tell us how ToMI comapres.
WIIWARE or not, ToMI is a AU$75 game. I highly doubt the animation judders because of the lowrez audio. Also the small font has nothing to do with the capacity limit. The particle sprites emitted from Guybrush's hand really show they had no quality control at all. Every 10th sprite or so has no transparency.
I hope you arent talking about sbcg4ap.
Also, it's time for gman5852's famous Monkey Island wiiware rocks speech:p, whats wrong with people:mad:, I found more problems in the PC demo than the wiiware version etc... I pretty much have to say this every wiiware version sucks forum here:mad:, and I still stand by it:).
1. The PC version is better.
2. The Wii version is compromised because of inherent download limitations, and of-course time and cost.
Not pointing a finger at Telltale or anything like that, but just seem to be the facts of life.
Here's hoping that that was just a Telltale teething problem, and that The Siege of Spinner Cay runs a little better...
I don't understand why some PC gamers think the Wii version is somehow "affecting" the PC version. It's a pat little theory with no evidence to back it up, like the birther conspiracy notions.
Just what sort of features are missing on the PC version of Tales that you believe are the Wii's fault? Vertical platform treasure hunting? The 256 player online version of MIG (Massive Insult-Swordfighting Game)?
And the only one platform theory doesn't seem to hold up...as all their games have been PC and one console at most.
And what more do folks want in TMI?
That's not to say there's not due consideration for the Wiiware limitations during the design process, but dropping planned stuff from future PC episodes due to Wiiware limitations sounds like it's unlikely to occur.
The sound quality of the voices is a bit low, though (for some characters it was a bit hard to distinguish what they actually said) which wouldn't be such a problem if the subtitles were bigger. One thing that may be surprising is the music : it is plain MIDI, so the music is a bit different compared to the PC version, but that didn't bothered me : it reminded me of the "good old days", and how MI2 (for instance) sounded way differently depending on if you had a sound blaster sound card or a roland MT-32
All in all, it was fun to play, and I'm actually pretty impressed they managed to put all of this in "only" 40 meg
Actually except for the Telltale games I have yet to encounter a single Wiiware game using speech extensively at all. Speech is one of the areas which is usually entirely cut or to some big degree due to Wiiware limitations.
The other area usually is textures where they either use Guroud shading heavily or try to limit the textures or go entirely for 2d instead.
I agree 100%, I have seen much better looking Wii games, Punch Out rings a bell (no pun intended), Resident Evil 4 (which is an older game!) So, I see absolutely no reason for it to have turned out the way it did. No reason. I should have just purchased it on the PC.
What other Wiiware content have you downloaded? Perhaps if Monkey Island is your first Wiiware title, I can understand. You may have had nothing similar to compare it to.
Because, I wasn't aware that there were such strong limits with wiiware, I whole-heartly apologize.
I was unaware of them before TMI
Honestly: I can't find it anymore. It was along the lines of "The Wii version didn't hold us back, but of course certain decisions may have been different if we hadn't known about the impending Wii port".
I'm just saying: there are other factors that affect the development of a game far more than this.
Even if true, the emphasis needs to be put on "The Wii version doesn't hold us back." Some people have chosen to focus only on the second part of that statement, and run with it to some pretty unsubstantiated conclusions.
The thing is: Software development is full of compromises... you never get to make anything that is perfect for everybody. If you can't make compromises, your game won't ever see the light of day. (insert general 3DRealms reference here)
He said it here. It's pretty obvious if you think about it. A 40MB restriction on the size of one version of a game will have repercussions on the design of the game as a whole. It will therefore affect other versions of the same game. My personal opinion is that TTG should avoid WiiWare as a release platform until they increase the size limitations. 40MB is really not enough space to make quality new games.
Strong Bad ran at a decent fps and had good quality audio. None of the technical aspects of Strong Bad detracted from the game-playing experience, unlike ToMI ep 1, which is a technical mess.
WiiWare isn't the problem here at all. The same technical problems seen in ToMI can also be seen in the Wii port of Sam & Max season 1. For such a simple looking game (not saying that in a negative way at all), it ran horribly on the Wii. Framerate chugging all over the place and audio not sounding that great.
The problem is that Telltale seems to be having a lot of trouble in porting their PC games to the Wii, and the proof is in the pudding. Sam&Max was technically mediocre, Strong Bad was fine, and ToMI is unplayable.
Put more effort into your ports.
Both Sam&Max and ToMI are at a pretty different level. More detailed and bigger environments for one.
The PC version is affecting the version in my imagination!