While the return of the Monkey Island franchise has been widely celebrated, some fans have complained that the WiiWare version of the game reportedly suffers from certain issues like framerate hiccups and lower quality sound samples. Speaking on Telltale Games Forums [thanks Gamezine], a programer named Yare talked about the limitations of the Wii and WiiWare platform.
"The voices and textures are the way they are because we're limited to 40 megs for WiiWare titles. 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," posted Yare. "The extra RAM is really what makes the difference. Of the Wii's 88 MB of RAM, a not insignificant chunk of that is always being used by the OS and is unavailable to developers. The Wii's RAM is also split into two separate banks, each of which has different read/write metrics and you can't really spill from one to another if you need to."
"The Wii and DS are extremely underpowered and their popularity doesn't remove the hardware limitations," he added. "Frame rate issues will probably get sorted out eventually, but keep in mind that the Wii is just not a powerful console. An iPhone is much more powerful than a Wii, even."
Certain posters responded with other complaints about the Tales of Monkey Island release on Wii or PC and the issues therein, but Yare reminded everyone that, "Companies have to strike a balance between their ideal product, and dealing with the fact that they're businesses and need to turn a profit to stay afloat."
"I should probably shut up about this since the golden rule in the game industry is to not tell anybody anything because they'll just find something new to complain about anyway," he added.
Reading some of the complaints about Tales of Monkey Island was painful for us: the Wii has hardware limitations, it's a fact and people should just accept it. If the limitations of WiiWare crimp your style, buy it on PC or don't buy it at all.
