So, is basically TOMI for PC an oversized WII port?
So given that on PC:
1) we have few polygons
2) we have midi music
3) we have meshes used multiple times (like characters)
can we say that TOMI on pc is pratically a WII game porting with less compressed texture and audio?
The strange thing is that both versions are not the best on their platform!
On WII there is stuttering and too much sound compression ("Guybruzzzz" :P);
On PC we have multiple-used-meshes and MIDI sound (and they even hired M.Land! I's like to hire Van Gogh and make him paint with a pen!)
It seems that they developed the TOMI in a way that's too much heavy for the WII and tecnically too old for the PC.
I think that TT must cease suppor for WII. It was ok for Sam&Max season 1 but it was 2006! 3 years for a PC is a lot! Now a pc is much more powerful than a WII, and people don't like a 3 years old graphics/sound/feeling. That's why Wallace&Gromit was tecnically a very nice series.
So, to me, develop TOMI for WII is a very bad choice. Do you imagine Hideo Kojima announcing his next project for PS3 and Game boy Advanced and saying "it will be techincally the same version"?
And, at last, I bet that TOMI will be out also for xbox360! So why they don't put it out for PC and XBOX and made an edited porting for wii later???
BTW, TOMI is still a very good product! The script and the "feeling" of the game are great! And, after all, that's important
1) we have few polygons
2) we have midi music
3) we have meshes used multiple times (like characters)
can we say that TOMI on pc is pratically a WII game porting with less compressed texture and audio?
The strange thing is that both versions are not the best on their platform!
On WII there is stuttering and too much sound compression ("Guybruzzzz" :P);
On PC we have multiple-used-meshes and MIDI sound (and they even hired M.Land! I's like to hire Van Gogh and make him paint with a pen!)
It seems that they developed the TOMI in a way that's too much heavy for the WII and tecnically too old for the PC.
I think that TT must cease suppor for WII. It was ok for Sam&Max season 1 but it was 2006! 3 years for a PC is a lot! Now a pc is much more powerful than a WII, and people don't like a 3 years old graphics/sound/feeling. That's why Wallace&Gromit was tecnically a very nice series.
So, to me, develop TOMI for WII is a very bad choice. Do you imagine Hideo Kojima announcing his next project for PS3 and Game boy Advanced and saying "it will be techincally the same version"?
And, at last, I bet that TOMI will be out also for xbox360! So why they don't put it out for PC and XBOX and made an edited porting for wii later???
BTW, TOMI is still a very good product! The script and the "feeling" of the game are great! And, after all, that's important
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Comments
ToMI on the WII is a severely shrunk down and compressed version of the PC version.
That's it.
ToMI is "too old" for PC? Why? It looks fine to me, and some people still can't run it. Not everyone upgrades their pc often and it's almost scary to know what kinds of pc's people still use. And these people could very well be Monkey Island fans.
So, game looks good for all of us and is runnable for a very large userbase.
If you don't like ToMI don't Buy it and stopp bothering anyone else with stuff like this.
I love the game and I think both visual and audio fits perfectly well.
thats the biggest jabroni post ive ever seen
Fixed.
Yes. And people would still buy it.
A Monkey Island without Midiesque Music is wrong. The Music in CMI was great but Monkey Island is midi-sound to me.
Besides: The Music in ToMI is NOT midi on the PC.
I would say the picture would still be awesome.
Wallace & Grommit basically uses the same engine as Sam & Max or ToMI. What ARE you babbeling about?
Wii-owners might think the opposite. Why still supprt the PC? The Wii is made for Adventures.
I feel like someon HAS done that before.
The Simpsons Game was released for a lot of platforms, of which I bought the PS2 and DS versions. They were very similar, the only major difference being 2D for DS and 3D for PS2. Both brilliant and similar yet different due to the limitations of each platform.
I feel if Telltale are going to make both versions great, they should develop the graphics, sound, etc. separately for the PC/XBox 360 and the Wii. Then people will actually welcome a sequel, thus sufficing the extra effort.
The first Monkey Island game's CD soundtrack was by far the best version of the soundtrack, and the music in TMI is midi, it's just midi recorded into an ogg file.
Just listen to the fantastic MI2 soundtrack for example: http://www.tentakelvilla.de/download/soundtracks/mi2-soundtrack.zip
I agree though that not using real instruments is unused potential which would have made the soundtrack even better.
Nope.
A simple answer to a simple question.
The engine is flexible and W&G are better looking games.
However - thought I don't fully agree with original poster, I think we all have to admit that this game being designed with the Wii in mind has caused the PC version to suffer a bit.
I wish! Then it might actually run on my computer.
I really think it looks great. What if the game was released on XBLA first but looked the same. We cannot know if it would bt I am sure it would.
Now, to create something constructive, i came with this ideas:
first idea is for duplicate characters.
The problem is that, as someone stated, TOMI is created with wii limitation in mind. So they reused the same mesh for different characters in order to save memory - at least is what they say. So, Nipperkin, D'Oro and Van Winslow shares the same meshes.
Now, imagine a scene like the Scumm bar in MI1. Many different pirates, but if it was created in TOMI each one would have been similar to the others. Imagine six Nipperkin one with beard, one with glasses, and different shirt.
Because only a beard will not hide the real character (u recognize Tom Cruise even if he grows his beard, or put mustaches), it would have been a disaster graphically.
Now i got an idea: why don't make a "sims-like" tool to customize caracters?
So, you take the initial Nipperkin model and "tweak" it to have different shapes so you can create infinite models with few changes!!!!
Like this :
Isn't it great??? The game has only to remember some little different values for different model shapes. And you can have taller or smalle charachters, fat or thin... as you want!!!
The other idea is about MIDI music.
Because MIDI music has to be created for wii limitations (again...), TOMI on PC has the same midi music (done with better dxti/vsti plug-ins but always MIDI).
Now i think this developement process:
1) create and project midi for wii. And wii now is ok and ready.
2) once is done u can make it on pc with better dxti/vsti plug-ins
3) Sobstitute critical MIDI instruments for critical sound moments with real live instruments.
For example, the opening music of TOMI is clearly MIDI. But no one could have noticied it if u recorded the flute live. ONLY the flute i mean (or even the percussions). And you don't have to record the whole thing. You have to record only the passages that are necessary. For example, the initial part on the ship is good with MIDI because there's rain, thunders and many sound and you won't recognize it's MIDI; instead in the jungle there's silent and you have mainly only music to listen, so it would have been better to use some real instrument.
These are my two cents.
If I were Mr. Land, I would take offense at being compared to Van Gogh. Besides, having two ears is probably an important part of composing music, which is completely different from painting in almost every respect.
Then again, I've always been the negative one.
And games stopped processing midi in the early 90's, so it's studio midi as audio.
Basically, yo mama is an oversized Wii port! Oh, burn!
Sorry, but that´s a bad idea. Why? Because in my opinion every character has to be developed hand crafted. I don´t want to see random created people in the Game, to be honest.
Model Sharing isn´t great either, but we have to blame the WII for this.
Adventures are on the PC and Mac since Day 1. The WII didn´t even exist back then, it has no roots to Adventures at all. WII Support is nice to have, in case the PC Version wouldnt suffer from it. Looking at the facts as they are today, i hope Telltale stops the WII Support alltogether.
And demanding that Wii support be withdrawn because the graphics and sound quality aren't as nice as you'd like them to be is ridiculous.
Well, my idea is not to having them randomly generated. My idea is that they can create a "basic" model (so there's only one model saved on Disk) and modify "nose lenght", "Cheeck depth", "Weight" and other values to have other characters generated from the first.
BTW, yes, we have to blame the WII for this..
I agree with you... it's a pity to see Tales having this hardware limits.
The thing is, most here don't give a crap about how "bad" the graphics of a game are. I at least don't. Because, isn't what matters the most the fun? I know, it's hard to explain what "fun" is to those who never experienced it, but at least try to guess what "fun" is. Thing is, there were a lot of people actually complaining about the fact that it was too graphics-intensive. There are enough people who still only have Windows XP running on their PC, and some could only barely run the game on quality setting 1.
And, to be quite honest, Wallace and Gromit looks great, but graphically basically the same as ToMI. In fact, they both have the same system requirements.
While this does not represent the actual quality of the game models, you can still assume that the detail on each model does not differ all that much.
The thing that makes Wallace and Gromit visually more attractive however is not the quality of the models or whatever, it's the way the models are spread. It's the detail given not by the model quality, but by the way these models are placed. SBCG4AP had high detail models, yet it's not as detailed as a Secret of Monkey Island, a 2D game.
Runs acceptable on my old (rather antique
Me? This isn´t just about me. If you check this board, you will see a lot people who feel the same way. And it´s not even the GFX Quality that disturbes the people, it´s simply the fact that Telltale can´t use their full potential due to the hardware limit of some wannabe computer (aka Wii).
Its not just the limitations of the wii though. In terms of more islands / rooms / characters etc its also the TTGs extremley tight development schedules for episodic games. It would take longer and cost more to produce.
Civilization Revolution?
Yeah. To me it's great. Who cares if it isn't high quality this and that, so high quality that you have to buy a whole new computer just to play it. I think someone has gotten used to the way game companies (Nintendo, Sony, Microsoft) do this. X-BOX look crappy? Have no fear! You can buy the new 360 for the low, low price of $700!
I agree the game overall is great and I'm very happy with it... but those similar models because of the Wii kind of sucks.
"Your game is rubbish and filled with problems, you are essentially a failure.
"I don't get that your company is very small and doing amazing work with a shoestring budget, essentially revolutionizing the industry. I'm just going to hold you to the same standards I would a faceless mega-corp's games.
"I just raped and murdered your entire family, whats for dinner?
Can't stand it.
There, I've vented.
Oh come on, how can you stay mad at somebody with that smiley? The only thing that really makes it all better is an XD smiley.
I choosed to end the post like this because from what i've written it could seems that i don't like the game. Instead I like the game very much! I think that's very close to MI3, and it could became a masterpiece along the first two . And it will be one of the greatest modern adventures, if they continues like this! But i think that wii coud force them to "fly low" because of its limits. I noticied the Midi music the first time i played. I noticied also the clone-characters the first time i played. So, limits are there!!!! And maybe that they CUT OFF some parts of the game to make it fit inside that damn 40 mb of wii!!! That's a pity!!!!
Also, have you seen this concept art?
http://news.filefront.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/monkeyisland_pirates.jpg
They will be using the clones again and again. I feel that my 2 solution I gave before about music and character-model-modifier tool would be great.
BTW I'm sorry, I didn't mean to offend anyone.
The Telltale tool does not even allow for MIDI, only OGG Vorbis at the moment. This was one of the "gripes" of SBCG4AP, not having actual MIDI music. So again, this does not have to do with the Wii restriction.
So far all games are around 200 or 300 MB, about the same size as the Wallace and Gromit games.
Unless you're talking about the WiiWare versions, in which they're 200 to 300-ish "blocks", and a block is roughly 150Kb-ish. Don't know about the Live Arcade versions.
Cutting off parts of the game? It's an episodic game, they could just quietly announce episode six and bump the content down the episode order (especially considering, according to Wikipedia, this series is one story over the five [for now] episodes).
You could argue, of course, that ToMI on Wii is an undersized PC port?
I think you are right on this. After i thought about it's like u said - clone characters are still separate character models, and have little to do with the Wii restriction. (Polygonal model are usually coordinates of vertex - the biggest memory consumer is the texture mapping).
For the music the problem exist, because Telltale recorded MIDI from wii version (made with slight better dxti/vsti plug-ins). Wii uses midi to fit in 40 mb.
Btw Wallace and Gromit ep.4 is 500mb, and TOMI is 200. But you can0t measure fun in MB.