Well EA is leaving money on the table when it comes to wii games and sales, the only thing that it really annoys me its that they are blaming it on Nintendo and the players, not on themselves. What are they going to say now that the sales of NBA Jam suck more on the HD systems than on the Wii, that its also Nintendo's fault?

I just want to point out that the system they tested on has 512MB of RAM and a flash memory architecture for storage which lowers latency considerably whereas the Wii only has 144MB of RAM and relies upon a spinning disc. If you're looking at just the textures which most people do, even though the resolution is higher on the iPhone 4 IIRC the overall quantity of memory available is considerable higher. This means they can and will use the same textures and potentially the same level design as the DX9 consoles even though the performance characteristics are markedly different. It is possible for a handheld to be considerably better than a lower power, lower spec console even from a few years ago in at least some aspects.

Um, have you actually determined that is what they look at, or just assume? I've seen discussions about graphics, but texture resolution seems to be one of the least discussed (or at least the actual resolution over what they think it is).

Don't know if someone said before...but Dead Space Extraction was "a test for Wii owners"; and guess what? They failed! So they won't have a proper game from EA ever.

But someone pointed out EA had already given up on the Wii, so it wasn't a test. It was a show trial.

Most people when they comment on the visuals of a game are effectively commenting on the textures whether they realise this or not. This isn't a technical discussion at all, they are simply saying how good or not good the textures look. Most people aren't sophisticated enough to discuss shading, lighting, shadows, polygon counts etc.

Okay, although I also see that more effects tend to please them.

But regardless, the overall look, not just the textures, shows deliberately inferior work, since the Wii could handle the racers from last generation, and this is Dreamcast level at best.

It is quite probable that the Wii games are being CPU limited and therefore the GPU subsystem is spending considerable time waiting for the CPU to render a frame. So instead of getting N time to render it probably only recieved N-X where X is the time the GPU spent waiting to recieve the required information. A previous generation game or a game built from the ground up for the Wii would probably give the maximum quantity of time to the Wii graphics processor. However given more advanced AI etc this isn't possible on the Wii.

Furthermore it is also quite likely that many current generation effects are either impossible or inprobable on the Wii or simply don't mesh well with the architecture. So you'll see that they are either missing entirely or done badly without a previous generation technique used as a replacement which would have looked considerably better on the Wii. This is the reason why the Wii suffers most of all out of all the current generation systems from ports.

That does not apply here. We aren't asking for a carbon copy of the other versions. We're asking for solmething better than this that the Wii can handle, which is not what that game is doing. Black Ops was kind of a port in that it was squeezed from the main versions, but they still tried to get everything in there that they could. They actually tried, and the sales are even faster than any CoD game on the Wii.

The thing is though without knowing the details of development and the various tradeoffs they had to make given they had the performance numbers, budget and time, which we don't know anything about, it is hard to pass judgement that they infact didn't try.