IGN has the scoop about Dewy’s Adventure, a new Wii game from Konami. It looks like a combination of Elebits and a Kirby platformer. The Elebits comparison is fair since both games share the same illustrator. The game also uses the “Excite Truck” style of holding the Wii Remote, something we’re starting to see more titles use.
Of special note, though, are the graphic effects achieved in this game.
“For Dewy’s Adventure, we spent all lot of time on perfecting our graphics technology. We worked hard on our textures. We are very proud to say that we have implemented normal mapping in Dewy’s Adventure.”
What this comes down to is that Wii’s graphics are at least “as good as” the first Xbox, the only console of the last generation that could do normal mapping. It’s pretty early in Wii’s life-cycle to start pushing the graphical limitations of the machine; this usually starts to happen in end-of-life titles (think Resident Evil 4 on the Cube). This leads me to hope that it’s just the beginning of developers finding ways to add graphical pizazz to Wii games and that in another year, no one will gripe about graphics on Wii. If anything, it’s exciting to see 3rd party companies rolling up their sleeves and digging into their Wii dev kits.
[Thanks, Lino!]