Alleged Telltale Games staff member opens extraordinary criticisms on forum
An interface developer at US dev Telltale Games has publicly claimed he believes the iPhone to be more powerful than Nintendo’s Wii.
Telltale Games has finished developing new Monkey Island episodic content for both the PC and Wii, sold via digital platforms Steam and Wii Ware. The group was not responsible for the iPhone remake of the original Monkey Island game, which was released contemporaneously.
Nevertheless, a developer on the official TellTale forums claims that “the Wii and DS are extremely underpowered and their popularity doesn't remove the hardware limitations."
Contained within the same thread are a number of complaints surrounding apparent framerate and quality issues on the Wii Monkey Island game.
"The voices and textures are the way they are because we're limited to 40 megs for WiiWare titles. The PC versions of our games are usually 150+ megs, and most modern games range anywhere from one to ten gigabytes or more. Talk to Nintendo about this one.”
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The developer, given the pseudonym Yare, said that the “frame rate issues will probably get sorted out eventually, but keep in mind that the Wii is just not a powerful console. An iPhone is much more powerful than a Wii, even."
Yare introduced himself to the forums back in March as “the engineer responsible for the controls” on Telltale’s Wallace and Gromit episodic games.
Elsewhere in the thread he defended his comments, claiming that it wasn't his intent to “blame” the platform for its technical performance.
“I just thought some people might be interested in an explanation of how game development works, why the Wii version has lower quality voice, higher compression, and so on,” he said.
Image: Hoster
The Wii can run things like Zelda, Mad World and Metroid... but when it is faced with a point and click adventure, it has frame rate issues?!?
And this is nothing to do with incompetent developers how exactly?
Why can't these people just have the b*lls to stand up and say "hey, we're cr*p devs when it comes to the Wii" instead of trying to hide behind anonymity, and blaming more than capable hardware for their own deficiencies.
No wonder this guy uses a pseudonym, he'd probably never get another job if people knew who he really was.
Hopefully, Nintendo gets word of this and takes their Nintendo developer status off them, and gives it to some competent devs instead.
I have just read through the post in question and am amazed that they are blaming poor frame rates on a 40MB game size limit. Since when did the amount of memory a game takes up, dictate the performance?
I seem to remember XBLA games having a 50MB limit at the start, which is only 10MB more than a Wiiware title. Oddly, I don't remember any of them having frame rate issues because the game had to fit in 50MB.
I'll have to remember when I write my next game, to make it really big, so it runs faster.
I think Telltale certainly has an appropriate name for itself... although Tell-tall-tale would probably be better.
Man...that guy has put his company in a heap of witch-hunting pain. What a pity - to remake such a classic and (cynically) par for the course for remakes, to spoil what could have been great over something so fundamental. As for the comparison...seems kind of pointless to me. Do iPhone games mate and steer clear of what you are obviously struggling with.
iPhone much more powerful than a wii? Haha, don't make me laugh.
Normally I don't respond to trolls of any sort, but it is ridiculous that some idiot can make a wild claim, and then get a headline like this.
Methinks the old saying is apt: A good craftsman never blames his tools!
You'd think if the assets were much, much smaller everything would run much, much quicker ???
This reminds me of when crytek were showing off saying they maxed out the 360/PS3 :D
Did you guys read the developers response regarding the Wii's memory architecture and problems decompressing resources of a digitally distributed game with the systems limited grunt?
If the Wii has less RAM than the iPhone AND developers are forced to highly compress resources for WiiWare titles (in comparison to the iPhone) then, of course, this rather odd scenario where a phone out performs a home console can realistically occur... But I think Develop are slightly sensationalizing the comment to get a headline.
But it seems the desired effect has occurred: Some one linked to this article in a post in some Nintendo forum, some where... and some angry fans have turned up for a rant.
To be fair it is quite a comical,and obviously inflammatory headline and I'd probably have done the same myself ;)
