One member of Tales of Monkey Island developer Telltale Games is blaming technical issues with the WiiWare version of their game on Nintendo’s hardware, which they claim is much less powerful than even the iPhone.
Reports are coming in that the WiiWare version of Telltale Games’ Tales of Monkey Island‘s first episode is far from perfect. Apparently there are numerous graphical hitches, and the audio is compressed to the point where the quality seriously dips – a big problem in a game as dialogue heavy as an adventure game.
One Telltale developer by the name of Yare is saying that disgruntled gamers shouldn’t be looking at Telltale to lay the blame on, however. “The voices and textures are the way they are because we’re limited to 40 megs for WiiWare titles,” Yare wrote. “The PC versions of our games are usually 150+ megs, and most modern games range anywhere from 1-10 gigabytes or more. Talk to Nintendo about this one.”
Indeed, Yare seems to be extremely unhappy about working on the Wii. “Frame rate issues will probably get sorted out eventually, but keep in mind that the Wii is just not a powerful console,” Yare wrote. “An iPhone is much more powerful than a Wii, even.”
Other Telltale staff echoed Yare’s statements about the limitations of the Wii while arguing that Telltale had to do what they had to do. “So when all was said and done we had to make a choice of either cutting content or compressing the voice more than usual,” a Telltale poster named Will said. “It was a pretty damn hard decision, but the last thing we wanted to do was cut out dialog from the wii version that was in the PC version. In the end I feel we made the right choice.”
Telltale says that these issues aren’t “something we want to happen again,” so they’re “working hard” to make sure the second episode doesn’t suffer the same problems. Whether that means coming up with some new tricks for audio compression or designing the game around the hardware limitations, let’s hope it doesn’t detract from the Tales of Monkey Island experience.
