NOTE: The screenshot that originally appeared atop this post — which I've now moved to the bottom — was from the game's FMV intro. I've replaced it with an in-game screenshots. I apologize for the confusion.

The Wii isn't the most ideal platform for making the most beautiful graphics," Tsujimoto, producer of the Japanese hit and U.S.-bound Monster Hunter Tri, told me as we sat down for an interview in Capcom's media suite at the 2009 Tokyo Game Show. "You can can [make them] within the limitations, but you need a sense of design."

There would be no technical talk during my chat with Tsujimoto. No discussion of textures and shading. No mention of numbers except for the likely key stats that Tri was developed by a team of more than 100 people over the course of two and a half years.

Instead of talking tech, Tsujimoto wanted to talk about something more ephemeral: Design. He asked me to imagine a cluster of five trees that might appear in the game. Maybe the game can't render all five trees, so you're stuck with having to use four. How do you place them? That's the kind of thing focused on by his team. Their goal, from the start, he told me, was to develop the best looking game on Nintendo's system, focused on.

"We can't say how other companies work," he said. "But as we we talked about it, it's not enough to make a game that looks great technically.... It needs to have good design but good atmosphere."

Capcom's developers have rendered a lot of detailed visuals with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but Tsujimoto declined to question the power of Nintendo's system. "There will always be some limitations no matter which system you are working with," he said. "Oddly, we didn't have anything we were not able to do on the Wii.. even things we thought weren't going to happen somehow the programmers were able to make happen."

Tsujimoto credited "a lot of know-how" as the way his team pulled this off. Not specific enough for you?

"As you can tell, we are a very positive team." Yes, I could tell. From my own experience I can say that I was surprised at how good Monster Hunter Tri looked when I walked into Capcom's media suite and saw it running on flat-screen TVs. It doesn't look as good in screens — and it doesn't come close to the graphical fidelity of the best-looking games on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. But it does look very good. Capcom's marketing slogan for this game might not be far off.

Monster Hunter Tri, which features four-player online and off-line hunting of monsters and is part of one of Japan's most popular game series, ships for the Wii in the U.S. in 2010.

The following screenshot, which originally appeared at the top of this post, is from a pre-rendered video. It is not in-game graphics.

Spyborgs, the impressively-rendered co-op brawler created by Bionic Games for the Wii, gives a good first impression. It looks better than most Wii games and plays well.

The same things could have been said about 2007's puzzle-based treasure-hunting game, Zack & Wiki. It looked great. It played well. It wasn't a hit.

How to avoid that history repeating itself?

Just hours ago, as we wrapped up a two-person co-op run through the same levels Kotaku chief Crecente played in Monte Carlo, the game's senior producer, Daryl Allison told me what lesson Capcom had learned:

The struggle for Zack & Wiki, Allison said, was that "the art style made the game come across as a kids' game, but it played like more of an adult's game." The graphics were silly; the gameplay complex.

Spyborgs is going for a teen market (but I enjoyed it, ok?) and therefore pushing a more all-ages Pixar style.

If this is already more than you're used to reading about graphics for a Wii game, that's no accident. Graphics are important to this Wii game. Allison said the team's philosophy is that: "If we can be compared with the God of Wars and Devil May Crys then we have to look that good. There's no excuses."

Spyborgs will be out for the Wii later this year. And, if all goes well, it will look not just like it plays, but as good as it's supposed to play. That, perhaps, is doing a Wii game right.

The new fix makes things appear shinier and highlights textures on environments so you can actually make out ridges on radroaches or the subtle bumps on irradiated flesh. This makes me happy because now I can pretend that the 360 version really is superior to the PS3 version.

Inside Digital Foundry reports that the new 360 patch slipped the fix in along with prep work for upcoming DLC. The patch hit Xbox Live March 2.

Fallout 360: New Patch Has ‘Secret' Graphics Boost [Inside Digital Foundry]

The dual-client nature of EVE Online in its current form allows players with more modern PC technology to enjoy spectacular graphics, while an older Classic Client allows the game to be played on pretty much any system from 1998 onwards. It's a great system for stubborn PC gamers who haven't seen the inside of an electronics store in 10 years, but not so much for CCP, who have to basically create all graphics twice every time they add something to the game. Not anymore.

Starting with the launch of the next expansion, EVE Online: Apocrypha, CCP will discontinue support for ShaderModel 1, replacing the Classic Client with the new Premium Lite Client, which uses downsampled textures from the Premium Client, allowing the company to cut their graphics work by half.

After that, CCP is looking at possibly discontinuing support of ShaderModel 2 with the Winter 2009 expansion.

So how many people will be affected by these changes?

We know this will affect some players out there. What we don't know is exactly how many. We estimate that about 95% of all subscribers currently have hardware that is SM2 compatible. We further predict that in q4 this year over 97% of subscribers will have SM3 capable hardware. This means that an estimate of anywhere from 3%-5% of current subscribers would have to update their computers or graphics cards to be able to continue playing.

Seriously? 3-5% of EVE Online players are running on computer systems from the previous century? Maybe we should start a video card drive for these poor unfortunate souls.

i can totally run that on my amiga [EVE Online via 1UP]

"I’ve had confirmation that the filter can indeed be switched off...And the games will display at whatever ratio your console is set at – 4:3 or 16:9. If playing in 16:9 the game will fit and not have black borders at the side."

It just keeps getting better and better, doesn't it? Yesterday I was "Oh look, another Sega compilation." Now I am leaning heavily towards "Gimme."

Mega Drive Collection filter can be turned off, say Sega [RPG Site - Thanks Alexander!]

With any console, it takes developers a while to learn how the thing really ticks so they can start exploiting its potential in ways even the designers may not have envisaged. Now that the 360 has been around for a couple of years, Fergusson thinks that Epic may be reaching the limits of that potential, but that consumers will still see improvements through to 2010.

"I'm not the technical guy," The Gears 2 producer told Gamasutra, "all I know is that with the two to three more years of optimization that we've had, we're much further along than I think, three years ago, we thought we were going to get."

He may be right — and Epic certainly know a thing or two about good-looking Xbox games — but you only have to look at the PS2 to see how a console can live some way beyond people's expectations.

Epic's Fergusson: Xbox 360 'Approaching Upper End' Of Visual Potential [Gamasutra]

The demo showed animation running 30 frames per second at 1,920 x 1,080. Nvidia cranked the demo up to 2,560 x 1,600 but would not reveal the frame rate. This could have huge implications for in-game graphics, although as the system currently requires 4 parallel Quadro GPUs with 1GB memory apiece, costing around $10,000 a pop it may be a couple of years before this hits even the most hardcore PC gamer's desktop.

Quoth Nvidia, "the ray tracer shows linear scaling rendering of a highly complex, two-million polygon, anti-aliased automotive styling application." Which certainly sounds impressive. What this appears to mean is "Look! A shiny car that we can move around real quick!" and, you know, that may well be enough.

Nvidia demos real-time GPU ray tracing at 1,920 x 1,080 [CustomPC]

We keep in touch with companies all over the world - I dare say that in two to three years time we will see something. There already are some individual approaches, especially in the science sector, which show that Raytracing algorithms are scaling very well with the numbers of cores. But the migration to a new programming technology takes years; Raytracing is still in an early stage

We've already seen crude attempts at raytracing Quake 4, with pretty spectacular results. Those of you wondering where graphics could go from here now have your answer.

Raytraced games in 2 to 3 years, says Intel [PCGH]

Tale of Tales has an interesting little interview up with Takayoshi Sato, who was responsible for the art and CGI direction of Silent Hill and Silent Hill 2; after relocating to the US, Sato did art for some big titles, then made the switch to 'serious games.' On making the switch, he has this to say:

I feel that games are being standardized into only a few formats lately: FPS, RTS, MMO, 3rd Person Action and Sports. There’s a tendency to create the same games over and over with only a visual upgrade. And the only thing artists are supposed to do is “be professional” and gift wrap the same game elements with a pretty new skin.

Then I encountered serious games. Despite of the downsides -small budgets, clients to satisfy, etc- serious games allow us to convey social messages, for instance. There hasn’t been an opportunity for deep story telling yet. But even making a game about behavior changes in the context of social problems, seems a little more creative than just making more and more weapon concepts. I find it hard to like games that only provide a “kill kill kill” experience. Since serious games are in their infancy, I thought it might be a great place to seek future possibilities. I hope that very interesting things will happen down the road.

It's brief, but has some good thoughts on art in games and where Sato's headed next. On the serious games front, he sounds like a man after Ian Bogost et al's hearts.

Interview with Takayoshi Sato [Tale of Tales via GameSetWatch]

While some people argue that what games need is more monotony, at least in terms of black and white games, plenty of people are dissatisfied with the current trend of drabness in developers' color palettes. Of course, there are plenty of brightly colored games that are and will continue to be released, but plenty of people miss color. Bright color. I myself am rather fond of candy-colored palettes, preferring them to drab medieval "realism." One blogger thinks he has the answer to who stole the color from games:

... I think that publishers have convinced developers that the game buying public is composed almost entirely of teenage boys.

If the binder doodles, film and music consuption habits of my friends in junior high is any indication, adolescence is as much about proving that you’re not into “kids stuff” anymore, as it is about anything else. Remember when Nintendo made Wind Waker more cartoony? Remember how sales spiked when Prince of Persia went from this to this? Remember what the monsters of Doom 3 look like?

This is the legacy of teenage boys that continues to shape our industry. We sell to our audience, our audience thinks that they want “mature” titles and someone told them that mature meant dark, dank and bloody. Dystopian novels English curriculum, I am looking in your direction.

I can appreciate muted palettes as much as anyone, but it's nice to step into games that are so far removed from reality that the grass is always emerald and the sky is always some slightly unnatural color of blue. Are teenage boys to blame? I don't know about that, but there's nothing wrong with prettily painted games. And you can be muted without being drab.

Who Stole All the Colours? [Quiet Babylon via GameSetWatch]

Imagine the person who sits and reads a book, looks up in horror, and shouts, "This word 'tree' looks nothing like a tree! It looks like some letters on a piece of paper!" and throws the book at the wall, disgusted. He's either a fool or reading a Dan Brown novel. We simply don't work that way. The semiotic power of a word is enough for our beautiful minds to conjure the very best tree imaginable. Literally. We have excellent brains that will always be capable of better graphics than the most exceptional technology ....

Graphics are hugely significant to many people - that can't be ignored. Find the review of a crappy game that doesn't give it a good kick in the pixels. Bad graphics do tend to be a sign of a lack of care in production. But I challenge you to find the review that says, "This game would be excellent and worth your time, if only the graphics were better. But since they're so poor, don't bother." It doesn't happen. If every other factor of a "good" game is present, the poverty of the pictures will be forgiven, although perhaps mentioned. We don't need them - we've already got them fixed upstairs.

There isn't any reason great narratives and superb graphics shouldn't go hand in hand — there are many films out there that illustrate that wonderful pictures on a screen can enhance a strong narrative and vice versa. One of my favorite movies of all time, a 2002 Korean release called Chihwaseon, remains on the top of my movie list because it brings together an engaging narrative, spectacular cinematography, and even sound to a wonderful effect — the visual, mental, and aural converge for an absolutely mesmerizing and immersive movie experience. Remove the narrative, and you have some spectacular cinematography with no substance; remove the fabulous cinematography, and you have a great narrative that deserves a better visual companion.

Is a word worth a thousand pictures? Good words can be. But there's more to games than narrative, and even games devoid of a narrative can be great fun. Still, there's always room for a few more great games, and giving narrative design attention equal to the worrying put in over pixels would stand more than a few developers in good stead.

A Word Is Worth A Thousand Pictures [Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

"The FPS genre has long dominated the race to better graphics but with this major update from Turbine, The Lord of the Rings Online players can enjoy graphics as good as or even better than many FPS games. This is an outstanding achievement and the whole Turbine team should be rightly proud of what they have produced," said Roy Taylor, Vice President of Content Relations at NVIDIA

Update: Turbine sent me a lovely comparison shot, seen above, that really highlights the differences between the two versions. Thanks!

THE LORD OF THE RINGS ONLINE™ IS FIRST MMORPG TO SUPPORT MICROSOFT'S DIRECTX 10 GRAPHICS AND NVIDIA GEFORCE GRAPHICS PROCESSORS

Award-Winning Online Game Now Features Industry-Leading Graphics

WESTWOOD, MA - January 7, 2008 - Turbine, Inc. announced today that The Lord of the Rings Online™: Shadows of Angmar™ has become the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) to support the Microsoft DirectX® 10 API and NVIDIA GeForce graphics processors for stunningly realistic imagery. The Lord of the Rings Online, named the 2007 PC Game of the Year 2007, now offers gamers with DirectX 10 graphics cards the most immersive online experience available today.

Players can now experience Middle-earth™ like never before with major improvements to The Lord of the Rings Online's graphics, including upgraded shaders for water, particle effects and lighting for distant terrain. Players will also be treated to new levels of immersion with the new DirectX 10 exclusive dynamic shadowing features which render realistic real-time shadows in the vast outdoor environments of The Lord of the Rings Online.

"Turbine has a history of pushing the graphics envelope so we can deliver state-of-the art immersive virtual worlds," said Fernando Paiz, Director of Game Technology at Turbine, Inc. "We began working with NVIDIA very early in the development cycle so that we could fully leverage DirectX 10 technology to achieve our goal of creating the most complete and authentic recreation of Middle-earth. The results speak for themselves as The Lord of the Rings Online has set the bar for what persistent online worlds can be."

"The FPS genre has long dominated the race to better graphics but with this major update from Turbine, The Lord of the Rings Online players can enjoy graphics as good as or even better than many FPS games. This is an outstanding achievement and the whole Turbine team should be rightly proud of what they have produced," said Roy Taylor, Vice President of Content Relations at NVIDIA. "This deserves the attention of the entire video games industry and all MMORPG players everywhere. It points to a future where we will see increasing blending of genres and deeper, more immersive PC gaming experiences. We are delighted to have been able to support this work."

The Lord of the Rings Online delivers an interactive experience brimming with life and filled with the familiar people, places and monsters from the most beloved fantasy adventure of all time. From the quaint surroundings of the Shire to Angmar, the vile kingdom of the Witch-king, players will experience the world of Middle-earth as never before. The Lord of the Rings Online is available for purchase at major retailers across North America. For more information, or to download a free trial, visit www.lotro.com.

There are thousands of game graphics out there on the web. Admittedly, they have problems:

They may not be the most attractive. "Dude, these free graphics are totally sucky compared to StarCraft."
They may not fit your exact mental vision. "No, the Xenli Sorcesses has four silver spikes on her bosom armor, not two. It is completely wrong!"
They may not be complete: "I really need a female knight and and they only supplied a male knight! The end is nigh!"
Other people might be using them in their games. "Argh, now my RPG looks just like the one done by that guy in Australia. *sigh* Now I will never be l33t."

My heartfelt recommendation is that you get over it.

Of course, not being a jerk, he goes on to offer suggestions on how to make free graphics work for you, not against you. I thought it was an interesting little piece, and that's as someone who will never, ever design a game or wind up scratching my head over how to make my game look good. Danc himself offers a set of prototyping tiles, among other things.

How to bootstrap your indie art needs [Lost Garden]

Teenage boys (of all ages and genders) need not worry that mindless games will become obsolete. We will always love action movies, and Hollywood blockbusters will always be more popular than quiet, character-driven films. But gamers have a right to expect more than what the medium now has to offer.

Video games are still emerging from their infancy. The first 35 years of motion pictures, from 1895 to 1930, yielded a handful of films that are considered masterpieces for their technical innovations, but the following decade was when cinema first became the art form that we know today. As cinema matured, films developed the power to transform as well as to entertain. Video games are poised to enter a similar golden age. But the first step isn't Halo 3.

I think Radosh makes some good points, and there's little doubt in my mind that narrative design in games needs some serious tweaking. But the point about gaming really being in its infancy - especially compared to film, the medium most frequently held up in compare-and-contrast discussions - is one that bears repeating. Discussions from the '20s and '30s in regards to the art of film making frequently resemble the same things we yammer on about in regards to gaming - and there's hope yet. Just maybe not in the form of Halo.

The Play's The Thing [NYT via GrandTextAuto, photo credit NYT/Ulises Farinas]

If you connect you can get a lot of shader effects which would've been on the 360 or the PS3...it's got so much more power compared to the GameCube. If even with the extremely similar shader hardware, the system clockrate is so much higher, you can do so much more advanced things.

Hmmm I don't know, the hardware is very, very easy to understand. Now the problem might be -and it just might be- is that some studios -or some publishers specifically- are discarding the graphical capabilities automatically simply because it is a Wii title and they're basically telling the developers "look, we won't pay for any advanced graphics."

Factor 5's Julian Eggebrecht on Wii Graphics [flamewaradvance]

Ageia just sent me one of their PhysX graphics cards to check out. Unfortunately, there's not much in the way of games to play using it. They did include a copy of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 and a PhysX-supported level called Ageia Island.

There are a few other games out there that support it, but really not that many. I'm intrigued with the concept because I sort of liken in to sound cards for the PC back in the day. There was a time, I kid you not, when sound was not a given in games. In fact it was unusual. Well real sound, you got plenty of bleeps and bloops, but I'm talking speech and honest to goodness sound effects.

I still remember the day I ponied up for a sound card. It was for Wing Commander Privateer. Before that game released a speech pack I saw absolutely no reason to spend my money on sound. How absurd, I thought, why would I want to do that. But then the voice pack hit and I was at the store buying both a sound card and the pack.

That's what Ageia needs, I suspect, a game that opens peoples eyes to the need for such a think as a PhysX card. Of course, I don't know yet if we actually do need a separate physics card. I hope to figure that out this weekend.

In the same vein as yesterday's "prototyping for fun and profit" (and their wonderfully low-fi, "we're game designers not artists" graphics), Danc over at Lost Garden has tossed up some tools for those of you who are good at designing game mechanics, but not so great at the whole "graphics" thing. The theory is use these building blocks, spending less time trying to make your game prototype attractive, more time making the game play fun. The set is in the same vein as the graphic set for his prototyping challenge, SpaceCute, so it's, well, cute. Painfully so, perhaps.

He outlines a couple of problems he sees with the way indie developers frequently deal with prototype graphics, including "MS Paint, in all its heavenly glory," mangling free graphics sets, sets that are hard to use, so he's put together a set based on "building blocks, not tile sets." He claims that if you can snap together Legos, you can manage to work with his PlanetCute prototyping tiles. Having met plenty of people who I'm not sure could snap together more complex Lego sets, I'm not so sure this is true, but one would hope they would not be designing games. Maggie Greene

Danc's Miraculously Flexible Game Prototyping Tiles [Lost Garden]

The graphics industry evolves extremely quickly and it is quite an achievement when you can leapfrog your own performance milestones in succession like we have done with these GeForce 8 Series GPUs.

But seriously, $1000 for a video card? My entire PC cost $1000 and I can run Vanguard with all settings maxxed as silky smooth as Vanguard can get at 1920x1080. I cannot imagine anything much faster than that. Don't get me wrong...I want one, but I am pretty sure I don't need one right now. Hit the jump for some facts and figures. Michael Fahey

New NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra Enables World's Fastest Gaming Platform

May 2, 2007

News Facts:

* Today NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA) introduced the world's fastest graphics processing unit (GPU), the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra.
* The NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra performs an average of between 10 and 15% faster[i] than the GeForce 8800 GTX GPU, previously considered the fastest GPU on the planet,[ii] across a wide range of top games and applications.
* NVIDIA nForce 680i SLI-based motherboards for Intel processors provide the fastest and most feature-rich platform for the GeForce 8800 Ultra. NVIDIA refers to these systems as the "definitive gaming platform".
* Consumers will be able to experience high-resolution, visually rich gaming and high-definition video playback with support for Blu-ray and HD DVD content.
* Definitive gaming platforms built with any nForce 600 Series motherboard are forward compatible with the new Intel processors with support for 1333FSB technology.

Product Facts:

* Graphics cards equipped with the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra GPU and 768MB of video memory will be available at e-tailers and retailers worldwide by May 15th. NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra graphics card launch partners include Asus, BFG, EVGA, Gainward, Galaxy, Gigabyte, Innovision, Leadtek, MSI, PNY, Point of View, Sparkle and XFX.
* Prices around 699 inc. tax
* GeForce 8 Series GPUs are the first shipping DirectX 10 GPUs and are the reference GPUs for Microsoft DirectX 10 API development.
* GeForce 8800 GPUs are the developer's platform of choice for this year's top DirectX 10 titles, including Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, Crysis, Age of Conan, Hellgate: London, Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts, World in Conflict, BioShock, PT Boats, and Cryostasis.
* Developers creating next-generation OpenGL titles, such as Enemy Territory: Quake Wars are also using GeForce 8 Series as their development platform of choice.
* GeForce 8 Series GPUs include all required hardware functionality defined in the Microsoft Direct3D 10 specification, with full support for the DirectX 10 unified shader instruction set and Shader Model 4 capabilities.
* DirectX 10 is included with Microsoft Windows Vista and delivers unparalleled levels of graphics realism and film-quality effects for games, all rendered in real-time on a GeForce 8 Series DirectX 10-capable GPU.

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