Gamecubes Are Crap On HDTVs, What About The Wii??
Ξ July 30th, 2006 | → 0 Comments | ∇ |
So, I managed to get some testing of my digital component cable for my Gamecube yesterday on a few HDTVs and a Dell 24″ TFT. To put it bluntly, the experience was not a good one.
First off, I tested it on a Viewsonic 32″ HDTV, which, admittedly was given a very poor review to start with and it then became evident to see why. I had running; Resident Evil 4, because it’s arguably the best looking game on the Gamecube. The experience was unsavoury: colour banding everywhere, poor picture scaling, poor colour representation and seriously heavy aliasing.
I quickly whipped the orange cube out of there and plugged it into a 24″ Dell widescreen TFT, again through the medium of component.
The colours were completely wrong.
The screen is a native 1900×1200 which is a massive stretch from the 480(p?) the GC was outputting via digital, but no matter how much I tried fiddling and making sure the connections were correct, the red was oversaturated and the screen was very dark. In comparison, a normal windows desktop looked perfect in DVI.
Finally I tried a 23″… something-or-other and got the best result. Despite the fact the TV didn’t upscale to fill the whole screen, just leaving big black bars around the edges of a central picture, the colour vibrantly correct but, alas, there was still really awful alising and isotropy problems with objects in the distance.
In all, this experience perturbs my once solid emotions towards the Wii. Since this product is meant to be an evolution of the GC and will not be capable of HD output, what happens in 2/3/4/5 years when more people invest in HDTVs, HD media and also a PS3/Xbox 360 (since the promoters in Nintendo have admitted that they are happy for the Wii to be a second console), and then plug in a Wii to those screens? I really, really hope the Wii has some antialiasing capability and some decent anisotropy included in the extra hardware otherwise it’s going to be graphically dwarfed by the other consoles. I know, I know!! “Graphics don’t make gameplay” and some of the Wii games will also be Cell Shaded which scales better, but still, some wont (like Zelda: Twilight Princess) and to be honest it destroyed any RE4 playability because it looked so bad in HD, because you get used to things looking better from other gaming sources, and I don’t want that to happen to Zelda and future Wii titles.
Audio-Visually, as for Wii outputs, I’m also praying to the deities at Nintendo to include VGA or DVI out and optical or coaxial S/PDIF. I suppose it must include HDMI, which is convertable to DVI, so that’s some saving grace. However, lets be honest: the Gamecube outputs sucked. I hope they will provide better A/V connectivity than composite and a couple of coax cables for audio.
