Did Wiiware gimp this game?

Alucard

I just saw a comment from one of the telltale members that said

"Unfortunately the game has to fit under 40mb for the WiiWare service, so more background music is probably not feasible."

Many people have been talking about the audio quality as well as many areas feeling well empty. Are we getting a watered down game simply to serve the needs of Nintendo? I would hope that the big N would hurry up and come up with some mass storage device and pop the cap on the size of these titles.

Jake

I think that every episode we want to do is going to come in at basically exactly the 40 meg limit because that's just how we do it, I guess, but we haven't had to cut content out of either episode one or two (the two which we've built so far to the degree where we have to assess size), and we don't forsee having to cut content from any future episode either. So, nope, I wouldn't say the episodes are "gimped."

Nobody would complain if Nintendo upped the storage size for games, either, of course. Not speaking for Telltale here, just for myself -- I'd happily buy a huge SD card and buy a lot more stuff if I could actually run games off of the SD card instead of swapping apps on and off. Sadly the Wii firmware doesn't yet support it, but I can dream.

Emily

Alucard wrote:

Many people have been talking about the audio quality as well as many areas feeling well empty.

We have always compressed audio to keep download sizes small, so the audio quality is nothing new. As far as emptiness in environments, have you seen a Homestarrunner.com cartoon lately? Our environments are modeled after theirs, and I think any perceived "emptiness" is a stylistic choice.

Mark addressed this question in a recent interview with MyWii:

MyWii interview wrote:

With WiiWare you don't quite have the same freedom for download size that you do on PC, have you had to make any design decisions for that?

Mark: We kept the small file size in mind when designing, but fortunately it didn't end up having much of an impact on our original concept! The simple shapes and textures of the established Homestar universe aided in keeping the file size small and allowed us to maintain all of the gameplay elements and content that we wanted. We thought that voice files were going to be a major problem and that we might have to cut content because of it, but in the end our technical wizards were able to perform some compression magic and we were able to keep everything from the design, and even added some details (like the Awesomeness Ranking image of Strong Bad that changes as you level up).

Weeblerjake

Yeah, it's not blank, it's Homestar-ian!



Bleh... that was horrible.

Alucard

Thanks for the informed and quick responses from the team.

GaryCXJk

I don't know about WiiWare gimping SBCG4AP, but SBCG4AP did gimp my WiiWare, or at least it gave me the awesome download speed of one bit per minute.

16_BIT_MARIO1

The only thing I saw that was really different from the two versions was that Strong Bad's face was a bit pixelated and the PC version shows a tiny bit more on the screen. There may be more, but I only played the demo of the PC version so I could see the differences.

Strong Max

You have a fairness paranoia... I like that.