Night_Trekker
Member
Uh... well that's a game I never thought I would see on WiiWare.
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MDK 2 on WiiWare May 9th.
- Thread starter geebee
- Start date
Combichristoffersen
Combovers don't work when there is no hair
I could've seen this appearing on XBL, but WiiWare? Certainly unexpected
Alexios
Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Wtf! It has downgrades! From the Dreamcast version! Like those rotating lights before he falls off. And no character shadows! Wtf! Wii is to the left btw, at first I thought that's Dreamcast since it seemed worse, flatter lighting and all, but then the huge green pointer makes it obvious that's the Wii version. Anyway as others said this wasn't exactly a good game so I hope its bound to be poor sales don't make them cancel things like the Descent port, which could be pretty fun (lol if they even downgrade Descent graphically!).Dreamcast2 said:
iamaustrian
Member
wow. no reported framedrops so far. constant high framerate, great wiimote controls and apparently it's really the entire game(which is about 15h long). The only small complains I've found so far are the compressed audio tracks which sound a bit low bitrate and the main character's missing shadow.
pls come out in EU soon
edit:
well, it's a 40MB wiiware game, so some compromises had to be make
pls come out in EU soon
edit:
well, it's a 40MB wiiware game, so some compromises had to be make
Why would you do that?
Member
I think I'm gonna pick this up when I get some money. I remember playing the MDK2 demo and thinking it was awesome. Plus, a full length adventure/platforming game on the Wii sounds great.
I've been so out of the WiiWare/DSiWare loop for so long... I really need to make sure I don't accidentally miss LaMulana and that DSi drawing game/app.
I've been so out of the WiiWare/DSiWare loop for so long... I really need to make sure I don't accidentally miss LaMulana and that DSi drawing game/app.
nincompoop
Banned
Well it would be pretty silly to expect it to not be downgraded in some form, given that they're compressing a game that was a few hundred megabytes down to 40. The missing shadows and low quality audio are a bit disappointing, but the game still looks great, runs at a perfect 60 fps and plays extremely well with the Wiimote + Nunchuk.
Starwolf_UK
Member
They do (optional though). It just they are put up on a completely random basis and removed if it doesn't hlep the games sales enough after 4 weeks (can be extended to 12) if you're in the Us and if you're Europe there are only ever 10 up at any time.geebee said:
sevenchaos
Banned
Bought it. Fond memories of this shit on the Dreamcast. Can't play it until this afternoon though.
Genesis Knight
Member
OnPoint said:
It was a fun (but TOUGH) game back then and still is now.
The DC supported hardware stencil shadows (which were used in a number of games). It seems that they simply did not bother to implement an equivalent effect on Wii and removed them instead.Alextended said:
The audio is downgraded due to the compression.
The framerate is a MASSIVE improvement, though. If it really runs at 60 fps, that's a huge bonus as the Dreamcast version couldn't even hold a solid 30 fps (it dropped below 30 fps regularly).
Santerestil
Banned
The framerate was also VERY smooth on PC: heck, on my old P4 laptop the demo was so fast that is was basically fast forwarding!
Moreover, PC version uses some hard shadows on the protagonists and, if as I think, this is a port from that, they decided to remove them because they were ugly to see and implemented poorly.
Oh, and that green cursor-thing is ugly as sin.
Moreover, PC version uses some hard shadows on the protagonists and, if as I think, this is a port from that, they decided to remove them because they were ugly to see and implemented poorly.
Oh, and that green cursor-thing is ugly as sin.
nincompoop
Banned
I don't suppose the fact that it's running on hardware which is 10x as powerful as the Dreamcast has anything to do with itbigben85 said:
Genesis Knight
Member
dark10x said:
I would hope the Wii is more powerful than the goddamn Dreamcast. It's got a seven year advantage.
Wow thats attrocious! A game that didn't even look that impressive on Dreamcast hardware outside of a few parts gets a port to considerably more powerful hardware and manages to lose things like shadows, decent lighting and other things? These devs make me sick.Dreamcast2 said:
iamaustrian
Member
bigben85 said:
or maybe the wii is simply just much more powerful?
edit: beaten
Genesis Knight
Member
dark10x said:
Hard pressed to think of a different reason.
Are you serious? It's simply a poor port job. The Wii is very weak by 2011 standards, but it's significantly faster than the Dreamcast. The Gamecube was already a massive leap beyond the Dreamcast and the Wii goes even further. At least it runs much much faster, as it should.Genesis Knight said:
Maybe it's not fair to claim it's a bad port, though. How can so many ignore the fact that they basically crammed a game that was originally upwards of 800mb into 40mb is beyond me. That's a pretty significant challenge.
Genesis Knight
Member
dark10x said:
I misunderstood you. I thought you were saying you couldn't attribute 60v30fps to the hardware upgrade. I see you were saying that the shadows missing is due to developer fail instead of hardware incompatibility.
Incidentally, I would think that compressing the game down is just a matter of art and sound, especially since I think MDK2 originally had CD quality audio or whatever. Game code isn't going to take up much space so ideally the game should run better and have the same features.
sixteen-bit
Member
If the game is only 40MB how is the music handled? Programmed instrumentation?
nincompoop
Banned
Is there any reason that implementing shadows would have caused the file size to increase by more than a negligible amount? If not then removing the shadows isn't really excusable. But aside from that the port is solid, and the missing shadows don't really affect the gameplay either.
Genesis Knight
Member
Glix said:
Looks stretched from 4:3 to widescreen.
The DC version used stencil shadows, which the hardware was quite good at. I would assume that the Wii hardware doesn't support stencil shadows properly (they are not commonly used any more) and the developers removed them completely rather than retooling them for use on the Wii hardware. They basically took the easy way out.nincompoop said:
nincompoop
Banned
I'm sure the Wii must have some form of real time shadowing built into the devkits though, so it doesn't make sense that they wouldn't just use that instead of removing shadows altogether.dark10x said:
Santerestil
Banned
Glix said:
They were too lazy implement shadows, let's figure 16:9...
About the size of the game: my PC version is only 200 MB, which more 80 are in music files. A good chunk of the porting work was probably used to better recompress all the data to fit in the wiiware executable.
Got it today, fun game overall, decent challenge and variety, the dog mission are enough to purchase this game, the Wiimote pointer makes you can play it in a smooth and fast paced fashion, it help alot in the sniper mode. It´s a straight port, don´t expect any visual improvement, good addition to WiiWare, never had the chance to play the original one... really quirk game...
SabinFigaro
Member
http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/mdk_2m0ngo said:I was gutted when the disc of my Dreamcast copy borked back in the day, never got a chance to finish it.I guess this isn't coming to xbla or psn?
Genesis Knight
Member
It's also supposedly getting an HD PC rerelease.
It does, but it may not have been easy to implement them in this particular engine.nincompoop said:
Same reason why Okami Wii was missing a number of visual effects from the PS2 version.
The original already works at higher resolutions. I suppose putting it out there on Steam or something would make it easier to access, though.Genesis Knight said:
nincompoop
Banned
MDK2 is already on Steam. The "HD" version is going to have an overhauled graphic engine, it looks like.
http://www.beamdog.com/forum/forums/general-discussion/topics/mdk2-for-wiiwareguy who works at Beamdog said:
sixteen-bit
Member
Nice, that's good to hear. I'm eagerly anticipating media.nincompoop said:
The Dreamcast shadows aren't stencil shadows. They are a PowerVR2 exclusive feature called "modifier volumes", which are very different:dark10x said:
A stencil shadow volume is drawn after the scene. It interacts with the Z-buffer to "mark" pixels which are inside the volume in the stencil buffer. Then, the render can do blending only against the marked (or unmarked) pixels.
The modifier volume relied on the PowerVR2 unique tiled deferred rendering. It didn't use a z-buffer nor stencil buffer: it could determine, per pixel, if a polygon was inside or outside a modifier volume (via ray-triangle tests) and use a different material if so. This "material" could be darker, brighter or even use a different texture (but this was rarely used).
It was much easier to use than stencil shadows: set "modified" material, enable a flag, draw the shadow volumes. Reproducing it on the Wii is not trivial for someone not experienced with the hardware, specially on a game that was probably ported on a tiny budget with a programmer or two.
Genesis Knight
Member
Played this today, doesn't feel too bad with motion controls. Kind of weird they're bringing back M.D.K. in general though; I thought it was sort of a forgotten game/series.