Saturday, May 30, 2009

The Grinder - debut trailer



Really amazing stuff! I'm not really as surprised as I am happy that someone finally took the time to actually do the necessary research and testing to see what the Wii can do. It seems what ATI and Factor 5 (rest in peace) were saying all this time was really true after all. ATI said at E3 2006 that the graphics seen in Super Mario Galaxy were only "the tip of the iceberg" on what the Hollywood graphics chip can do, High Voltage recently mentioned something similar about The Conduit saying that what was shown of the Quantum 3 engine was "just the tip of the iceberg" also. Funny how both said the same thing years apart isn't it?

Since graphics were never the selling point of the Wii in the first place, we can understand why they were never stressed in the beginning. Now that the Wii has been out for 2 and a half years, it's time that developers start "Grinding" into what makes the Wii tick. High Voltage has really taken the first big step that no other developer had been able to do up until now. The Wii has at least 3 times the performance of the Gamecube and The Grinder is the first game to truly show that in full. Some games have had certain effects in place but never going all at once like shown here. I'm most impressed by the amount of detailed enemies on screen at one time, a truly amazing feat with a system that has less than 90 megs of ram dedicated to graphics. I won't get into the specifics but if you've been following my site for the past 3 and a half years you'd know that the Wii uses 1T-SRAM which is all about performance and not raw power, so the number given can be misleading.

The Wii is an amazingly designed piece of hardware that people have really taken for granted. Doing more with less is always more impressive than doing what is expected (360, PS3). Hopefully these games that High Voltage are doing will force the hands of other developers to make their games look just as good. Some companies are really trying but aren't quite at that same level yet. If a small (but growing) developer like High Voltage can crank out graphics and effects like that on the Wii, there is no excuse for others to not be doing the same thing. High Voltage isn't using any magic tricks to get the results they're getting out of the Wii, all they're doing is giving an effort, which is what every game developer should be doing in the first place right?

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Im really hyped!
Metaldave...what a great article!
But i would like to know from anyone...if you had to choose ONE game from:

*The Conduit
*Gladiators A.D
*The Grinder

Then which would you choose? and why? graphics? online multiplayer? gameplay?

Gregory Weagle said...

Again; for a small system like the Wii, I am really impressed by the demo. But again; that was a demo. Again; how will this game play? Will the overall graphics flesh out in the end? Again; we are too early in the process to make a judgement call on this.

Still; I cannot help but be impressed by High Voltage. They are truly showing me that they are trying hard to no longer suck. They have truly made the effort to change. Weither they have truly changed their spots or not remains to be seem when the final sales of The Conduit come out in full bloom.

Anonymous said...

a bit generic again from high voltage but who cares its looking great.... that zombie shooter on x360 i always think wii needs something like that so HIGH VOLTAGE GO AND DO IT GREAT theres over a year of dev time to go and art direction destroys conduit

-HD wii can still compete and with out installs and long loadtimes and exclusive 3d motion and point controls....im liking this a lot

the gladiator game im on the fence dont knpow yet if thats going to be my thing

Anonymous said...

the gekko and Broadway cpus are excellent at high level on screen action and huge amounts of enemy's i think its being proven it annoys mii wen ps3 fans go on about cell and so many enemy's theres a gamecube demo mario 128 and a physics game elibits for wii that both show the true power of these little cpus broadway dedicated to game code is a dam fine cpu if a wii hd comes along sooner than later wii games can have amassing enhancements aswell as 1080p resolutions

i want to see dsi pushed hard

Anonymous said...

The "Imposter" process for 65-100 fully rendered enemies really makes you wonder what we have in store for us! It really seems many developers are putting some "custom" effort into the Wii chipset. I would really like to see what the TEV can do with some savvy programming.
I actually bought "Dead Rising:Chop Til You Drop" and found it fun, but c'mon - we all know the Wii can do so much more. I guess the RE4 engine was ultimately designed for the GC and didn't have the ability to take advantage of the Wii's chipset...or was it just (cough, cough) lazy developing? Perhaps a little bit of both - considering how beautiful RE4 was...?
Anyway, I can't wait for "Grinder" and all these other promising titles!

Anonymous said...

res evil 4 engine has nothing to do with it capcom just cashed in on a cheap port

it actually looks like the res evil ps2 engine to me NOT WII AT ALL OR GAMECUBE

Anonymous said...

I have to wonder...regarding the process that High Voltage Software is calling "the Imposter and Instancing system." - I'm assuming that a similar processing technique/capability was used for the Mario 128 demo? In other words, is this something that only Nintendo new how to do? ...Or did HVS truly discover a new programming trick and now Nintendo engineers are going, "Well, I'll be damned!"
I don't know if even Factor 5 was bragging about the Wii's chipset's ability to render 100 enemies WITH FULL EFFECTS ON. I don't mean to scream, but this is pretty damn exciting! I always knew the wii kicked *ss, but DAMN! Talk about bang for your buck!

Anonymous said...

ELIBITS 500 objects on screen all with physics and fully wimote interactive at 60 frames a second

wii physics TYPE INTO YOU TUBE SEARCH....

BE AMASSED