It's in widescreen, but it's in fake widescreen. It's quite like the old "letterbox" method a lot of N64 games ran in when playing in "hi-res".

MadWorld doesn't run in true 16/9 anamorphic widescreen like every other Wii game.

I/my company is a Wii developer. I have a Wii devkit sitting in my office...

(hint - see my sig...)

honestly 480p dosnt look that much better anyways. IMO we should not be compalining about something so small as that. Besides the point of the wii is motion controls not Graphics remember.

Just play the game its amazing

I see alot of bitching, but can anyone give a reason for this??? It seems ridiculous to do extra coding to make a game look worse.  Or have I simplified it too much?  I just can't fathom a reason any company would do this.  I thought alot of T.V.'s over there ran at 50-55 Hz? Could this be a cause?

They didn't do extra coding to make it look worse. Apparently what they did was simply use the NTSC rendering code in the PAL version, using black bars in the extra resolution lines that PAL has over NTSC. And of course they made it run slower at 50 Hz, meaning that the game is using less of the Wii's power (same resolution, lower framerate).

So what we're really seeing here is a lazy "conversion" which is bested by even a lot of shovelware games for the Wii.

No Test in europe implied that is runs not in full widescreen. But they say that 480p is not supported. The

If the widescreen mode in Pal versions is cropped I think it is because the vertikal resolution of Wiis in PAL mode 576i is obviously higher than 480i and so the game, optimised for 480, would run to slowly in full 576i.

You're forgetting that PAL is 50 Hz and NTSC is 60 Hz. So while PAL has higher resolution, the lower framerate compensates and allows the game to run correctly with no slowdown:

60 Hz / 50 Hz = 20% overhead for NTSC in terms of framerate

576i / 480i = 20% overhead for PAL in terms of resolution

In the end it all balances out. Not to mention that they could easily have supported 480i/60 Hz by using the same code they have in the NTSC version, since many PAL TVs support this mode. In fact most Wii games do this.

....Wow, that sucks.  Hopefully won't affect sales much, but shame on Sega for corner cutting.

Don't you mean Platinum Games?

I just bought the PAL Madworld and I cannot play it correctly. It is like watching TV and there is a bad reception so the TV staggers continuously with many frames. The screen is blinking through many frames and I am really disappointed. Is there anyway to fix this?