Yeah, the PC demo will help you know if the game will run on your machine.
But yeah. Reasons the PC version is the best way to go, from a sheer technical standpoint:
-No file limit means more technical freedom for better graphics and quality audio. I don't have any numbers other than that the Wii version is 40mb while the PC version is 200, the PC version is *probably* losing something.
-The Wii version is $10 per episode. With 5 episode, that's a total of $50. The bundle is $35.
-For that $50, you don't get the DVD at the end of the season that PC users get.
If you aren't so attached to the Steam platform that it doesn't really matter to you, then I'd say right here. I wouldn't pay more for less, as seen above, and I wouldn't pay the same for less, either. People who buy from Telltale's store get a DVD of the season with a lot of bonus features when the season is up, while people who buy from Steam do not. You get 20 activations when you buy from here, and the usual Steam deal when you buy from Steam. These are the differences to consider.
The PC version runs on my computer at the lowest settings and and 640x40 kind of choppy. the wii version runs kind of choppy, with 2 - 3 second load times in the middle of a scene (the game will just freeze), and the audio sounds like it playing in a tin can wraped in a tube sock.
Go for the PC. The Wii version is incredibly bad.
Great analogy there questinghero... the audio does sound like its playing in a tin can wraped in a tube sock.
...the audio sounds like it playing in a tin can wraped in a tube sock.
In some parts of the south that's considered high quality music!
Oh, and go on PC just so you aren't added to the number of people who are complaining about the "bad quality." And buy it from here. Cut out the middle man, and go right to the source.
Get the PC version, the Wii port is unmitigated garbage. God awful audio, terrible frame rate issues and the whole game just looks like mud.
Oh, and the load times are atrocious.
It's sad too, because I like gaming on a console better and I like the setup for Monkey Island on the Wii. The technical issues, however, are just too hard to ignore. I won't be buying another TellTale Wii game. I don't think it's their fault, but after experiencing the issues with the Sam and Max Wii game and now this I'm finished throwing my money away on Nintendo's console.
I hope TT expands into the 360/PS3 area a little more, but I'll stick with the PC version for now.
Aye, this Peepwood guy sold me one of these cages for me piranha poodles he forgot to mention that the cage had a limit of 40 poodles. Now what happened, I stuffed me poodles into the cage, and shipped them off to me customers at Ware Bay, and once arrived, the customers started complaining. They said they were too heavily compressed.
Now I went to this Threepweed guy and complained and all he did was to send me a fat italian plumber who did not fix it, instead he jumped on me poodles until they were flat!
I bought this for the PC, but it has obvious issues. The controls are borderline bad -- I'm assuming because a console is in the mix -- and overall the game looks rushed. This game visually looks like it's from 2002. If not for the Monkey Island theme I would have not bought this, as I've never been too impresseed with their other products as they've always been too streamlined compared to the original and their visuals lack all the charm and refinement of earlier graphic adventures.
Just a ramble; TellTale needs to get their act together when it comes to the Wii development. They need to look around and see that other developers are doing way more with this console. Creating visually much nicer looking games that don't suffer from frame rate issues. Comment's like Yar's only go to show how inexperienced TellTale is with this console, but like any good developer, instead of seeing their own inabilities, it's always easier to blame them on someone, or something else.
Can you please make this a poll so I dont have to hear people complain about the best wii game I have, also the poll could tally better than reading all the votes from every individual post.
Also WII
I bought this for the PC, but it has obvious issues. The controls are borderline bad -- I'm assuming because a console is in the mix -- and overall the game looks rushed. This game visually looks like it's from 2002. If not for the Monkey Island theme I would have not bought this, as I've never been too impresseed with their other products as they've always been too streamlined compared to the original and their visuals lack all the charm and refinement of earlier graphic adventures.
Just a ramble; TellTale needs to get their act together when it comes to the Wii development. They need to look around and see that other developers are doing way more with this console. Creating visually much nicer looking games that don't suffer from frame rate issues. Comment's like Yar's only go to show how inexperienced TellTale is with this console, but like any good developer, instead of seeing their own inabilities, it's always easier to blame them on someone, or something else.
OK, I'm done griping.
Actually you have two different things regarding wii development. The normal CD based games and the virtual console, and we are talking virtual console here with its artificially imposed 40 meg limit.
The main issue here is that doing something like TMI in virtual console is close to impossible. If you check out the virtual console games either they are simplistic or dont have speed or only limited speech or both.
Telltale hat to cope with a full hour or two of spoken dialog a full 3d environment and a load of textures and had to press it into the virtual console.
I would not say people like Yare are inexperienced, speaking as a programmer myself I can see the situation and only can say that it is close to impossible and almost a miracle that TTG could pull that off at all.
I probably would not even have tried, given the state of the current codecs and that you are also limited in this area by the powerpc and ram.
I personally think TMI would have been better off on a DVD instead of the Virtual console, the WII itself would be powerful enough to run it, but with the limitations of the VC you have to start to compress heavily somewhere to reach even double the size.
But in the end it is not to the programmers to decided whether they have to support one system or not, usually the upper management decides!
As for other developers doing way more, I have seen a lot of the VC games, the developers did not really do more, they also were fighting with the limits. Lost winds simply cut out speech and stayed on the cell shaded cartoony island, Strong Bad basically was tailored against the VC using cell shading and guroud shading left and right, NyxQuest is recycling the same 10 elements over and over and also does not have any speech you can see a scheme here.
Most games first drop the speech and then try to limit themselves to a handful of elements or introduce a lot of guroud shading to cut down on textures!
But if telltale would have cut out the speech entirely the outcry would even have been worse.
Aye, this Peepwood guy sold me one of these cages for me piranha poodles he forgot to mention that the cage had a limit of 40 poodles. Now what happened, I stuffed me poodles into the cage, and shipped them off to me customers at Ware Bay, and once arrived, the customers started complaining. They said they were too heavily compressed.
Now I went to this Threepweed guy and complained and all he did was to send me a fat italian plumber who did not fix it, instead he jumped on me poodles until they were flat!
Is that your "Accuse Guybrush of Wrong Doing" entry for the week? It's good, I'd vote for it.
If 'Broken Sword' can go from a 2 cd game to GBA cart, anything is possible!
The long version:
Back in the early '90s there was a prolific adventure game company called Lucasarts that made some of the best PC games of all time.
However PCs were expensive and relatively few people (especially in Europe) owned them. There was however a popular but less powerful machine called the Amiga.
Both 'Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge' and 'Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis' were ported to the Amiga (11 disks per game) and both were faithful to the PC releases. However one was fun and playable and the other was slow and glitchy. These games were ported in slightly different ways.
'LeChuck's Revenge' on the Amiga, like its predecessor had a fantastic score, arguably sounding better than the original PC version. The downside was that iMuse was not really implemented; music didn't run through the game, rather it played at certain times such as Largo appearing or visiting the graveyard. *On the other hand the music in 'Fate of Atlantis' did use the iMuse system which seemed to have a detrimental effect on the gameplay. The audio itself would occasionally hang and the graphics would slow or freeze up while the new music cue loaded.
One issue both games suffered from was disc swapping. As previously mentioned both these epic games came on 11 discs and didn't always seem to be optimised for this. There were occasional frustrations in 'Monkey Island', such as having to swap discs to see the animation of Largo's spit, but these were few and far between and barely noticeable if you were lucky enough to own a second disc drive. Sadly this issue became more prominent in 'Indiana Jones' even if you owned a second disc drive you would be swapping discs even before you started playing.
While playing 'Revenge' was enjoyable, 'Atlantis' was a chore. The sprites were slow moving and the mouse didn't always match up with what you were clicking on.
A year or two later Sierra had stated the Amiga would receive no more of their (even sloppier) ports. At this point Revolution Software stepped in and produced a phenomenal port of Roberta Williams’ ‘King’s Quest VI’. This version took all the elements from the original and optimised them for the system. It had a cleaner user interface, smooth animation created by cutting down on the frames of animation for the sprites and creating new ones where needed to make it flow and fast loading due to the fact the game was intelligently laid out on its 10 discs, so locations that linked together would tend to be on the same floppy disc.
‘Monkey Island 2’ was a fun, if occasionally slow running port that played well enough to open to glowing reviews. No one complained about the 32 colour palette as it was competently handled and although the scenery was comparatively static as opposed to the PC original it did not hamper the games enjoyment. Some did comment on the lack of a real iMuse implementation, however it seemed to have such a detrimental effect on ‘Indy’ that, while it had far more of the content seen in the PC version it was far less playable for that reason and although it could be seen as a technical accomplishment it came at the cost of an enjoyable experience, especially on the lower end machines.
This can be seen in the review scores, with ‘LeChuck’ scoring between 87% and 98% where as ‘Fate’ struck out at 92% with a score that went as low as 72% due to the games poor implementation.
The moral of the story:
Create games for the system you are designing for. People understand technical limitations, especially when they are for the sake of gameplay. No matter how many features you manage to squeeze into a port it all falls down if the game doesn’t flow the way it should.
-The Wii version is $10 per episode. With 5 episode, that's a total of $50. The bundle is $35.
And if you are European, it's probably even worse: 35$ paid online to TTG are more or less 25€, while I suppose the wiiware version would be 10€ each... It's the double!
Comments
PC!!!
PC!!!!
But yeah. Reasons the PC version is the best way to go, from a sheer technical standpoint:
-No file limit means more technical freedom for better graphics and quality audio. I don't have any numbers other than that the Wii version is 40mb while the PC version is 200, the PC version is *probably* losing something.
-The Wii version is $10 per episode. With 5 episode, that's a total of $50. The bundle is $35.
-For that $50, you don't get the DVD at the end of the season that PC users get.
If you aren't so attached to the Steam platform that it doesn't really matter to you, then I'd say right here. I wouldn't pay more for less, as seen above, and I wouldn't pay the same for less, either. People who buy from Telltale's store get a DVD of the season with a lot of bonus features when the season is up, while people who buy from Steam do not. You get 20 activations when you buy from here, and the usual Steam deal when you buy from Steam. These are the differences to consider.
*$50
Get the PC version, it's cheaper, better (assuming you have a good PC) and includes better access to some of the bonus things like Treasure Hunt.
Great analogy there questinghero... the audio does sound like its playing in a tin can wraped in a tube sock.
In some parts of the south that's considered high quality music!
Oh, and go on PC just so you aren't added to the number of people who are complaining about the "bad quality." And buy it from here. Cut out the middle man, and go right to the source.
Oh, and the load times are atrocious.
It's sad too, because I like gaming on a console better and I like the setup for Monkey Island on the Wii. The technical issues, however, are just too hard to ignore. I won't be buying another TellTale Wii game. I don't think it's their fault, but after experiencing the issues with the Sam and Max Wii game and now this I'm finished throwing my money away on Nintendo's console.
I hope TT expands into the 360/PS3 area a little more, but I'll stick with the PC version for now.
Now I went to this Threepweed guy and complained and all he did was to send me a fat italian plumber who did not fix it, instead he jumped on me poodles until they were flat!
Just a ramble; TellTale needs to get their act together when it comes to the Wii development. They need to look around and see that other developers are doing way more with this console. Creating visually much nicer looking games that don't suffer from frame rate issues. Comment's like Yar's only go to show how inexperienced TellTale is with this console, but like any good developer, instead of seeing their own inabilities, it's always easier to blame them on someone, or something else.
OK, I'm done griping.
Also
WII
Actually you have two different things regarding wii development. The normal CD based games and the virtual console, and we are talking virtual console here with its artificially imposed 40 meg limit.
The main issue here is that doing something like TMI in virtual console is close to impossible. If you check out the virtual console games either they are simplistic or dont have speed or only limited speech or both.
Telltale hat to cope with a full hour or two of spoken dialog a full 3d environment and a load of textures and had to press it into the virtual console.
I would not say people like Yare are inexperienced, speaking as a programmer myself I can see the situation and only can say that it is close to impossible and almost a miracle that TTG could pull that off at all.
I probably would not even have tried, given the state of the current codecs and that you are also limited in this area by the powerpc and ram.
I personally think TMI would have been better off on a DVD instead of the Virtual console, the WII itself would be powerful enough to run it, but with the limitations of the VC you have to start to compress heavily somewhere to reach even double the size.
But in the end it is not to the programmers to decided whether they have to support one system or not, usually the upper management decides!
As for other developers doing way more, I have seen a lot of the VC games, the developers did not really do more, they also were fighting with the limits. Lost winds simply cut out speech and stayed on the cell shaded cartoony island, Strong Bad basically was tailored against the VC using cell shading and guroud shading left and right, NyxQuest is recycling the same 10 elements over and over and also does not have any speech you can see a scheme here.
Most games first drop the speech and then try to limit themselves to a handful of elements or introduce a lot of guroud shading to cut down on textures!
But if telltale would have cut out the speech entirely the outcry would even have been worse.
Is that your "Accuse Guybrush of Wrong Doing" entry for the week? It's good, I'd vote for it.
Are you really? I somehow don't believe that...
The short version:
If 'Broken Sword' can go from a 2 cd game to GBA cart, anything is possible!
The long version:
Back in the early '90s there was a prolific adventure game company called Lucasarts that made some of the best PC games of all time.
However PCs were expensive and relatively few people (especially in Europe) owned them. There was however a popular but less powerful machine called the Amiga.
Both 'Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge' and 'Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis' were ported to the Amiga (11 disks per game) and both were faithful to the PC releases. However one was fun and playable and the other was slow and glitchy. These games were ported in slightly different ways.
'LeChuck's Revenge' on the Amiga, like its predecessor had a fantastic score, arguably sounding better than the original PC version. The downside was that iMuse was not really implemented; music didn't run through the game, rather it played at certain times such as Largo appearing or visiting the graveyard. *On the other hand the music in 'Fate of Atlantis' did use the iMuse system which seemed to have a detrimental effect on the gameplay. The audio itself would occasionally hang and the graphics would slow or freeze up while the new music cue loaded.
One issue both games suffered from was disc swapping. As previously mentioned both these epic games came on 11 discs and didn't always seem to be optimised for this. There were occasional frustrations in 'Monkey Island', such as having to swap discs to see the animation of Largo's spit, but these were few and far between and barely noticeable if you were lucky enough to own a second disc drive. Sadly this issue became more prominent in 'Indiana Jones' even if you owned a second disc drive you would be swapping discs even before you started playing.
While playing 'Revenge' was enjoyable, 'Atlantis' was a chore. The sprites were slow moving and the mouse didn't always match up with what you were clicking on.
A year or two later Sierra had stated the Amiga would receive no more of their (even sloppier) ports. At this point Revolution Software stepped in and produced a phenomenal port of Roberta Williams’ ‘King’s Quest VI’. This version took all the elements from the original and optimised them for the system. It had a cleaner user interface, smooth animation created by cutting down on the frames of animation for the sprites and creating new ones where needed to make it flow and fast loading due to the fact the game was intelligently laid out on its 10 discs, so locations that linked together would tend to be on the same floppy disc.
‘Monkey Island 2’ was a fun, if occasionally slow running port that played well enough to open to glowing reviews. No one complained about the 32 colour palette as it was competently handled and although the scenery was comparatively static as opposed to the PC original it did not hamper the games enjoyment. Some did comment on the lack of a real iMuse implementation, however it seemed to have such a detrimental effect on ‘Indy’ that, while it had far more of the content seen in the PC version it was far less playable for that reason and although it could be seen as a technical accomplishment it came at the cost of an enjoyable experience, especially on the lower end machines.
This can be seen in the review scores, with ‘LeChuck’ scoring between 87% and 98% where as ‘Fate’ struck out at 92% with a score that went as low as 72% due to the games poor implementation.
The moral of the story:
Create games for the system you are designing for. People understand technical limitations, especially when they are for the sake of gameplay. No matter how many features you manage to squeeze into a port it all falls down if the game doesn’t flow the way it should.
Accuse Guybrush? Done.
http://talesofmi.com/contest/entry/4439
PC!!
And if you are European, it's probably even worse: 35$ paid online to TTG are more or less 25€, while I suppose the wiiware version would be 10€ each... It's the double!