Driver Parallel Lines Comments by Kristan Reed

I concur on the Handbrake and shooting out the window controls, truly great.

Unfortunately that's ll I've done as the rest of the game is boring, especially the city design.

Worth £7.99 in a bargin bin though.

So it's a great conversion with excellent Wii controls of a mediocre game then?

Forget all these so-so GTA clones, give us Wii owners a port of Okami - now that game would be amazing on the Wii - or better still let's have more new games.

A lot of people who came round and had a go at this thought it was great.

I guess at least it shows people that Wii doesn't just mean golf and bowling.

It's golf, bowling, granny games(brain straining) and lackluster Renderware ports.

Darren, Okami Wii was mentioned C&VG today, but I'm not gonna link, cus I'm like that. :0)

for my sins this really clicked with me on the xbox - though not enough to buy again for the new controls

"So it's a great conversion with excellent Wii controls of a mediocre game then?"

Pretty much, it seems.

I think the Wii has a lot of potential, as evidenced by the fact that the controls and the like manage to make even a mediocre game fun in this way. It's just that games like this are not what the console needs.

"Of course, it's unfair to stab a finger in the direction of a Wii game for not sporting HD resolutions, but it's a factor that's impossible to ignore."

Funny - most people ignored it whilst the pc was doing it all these years. Plus all the people who still have their 360/ps3 hooked up to a non-hd tv: so it's NOT a factor that's impossible to ignore.

Ubisoft in average Wii port shocker!!

Maybe for you, if you've got an old TV, but try and run this stuff on anything vaguely modern and it looks shit. So, yes, for a large portion of the early adopter market who invest heavily in the quality of their gaming set-ups, it is impossible to ignore.

They've already started printing stickers to put on the box:

"Groovy shades? Funky tunes? 10/10! - Eurogamer"

why is it that every EG Wii review keeps mentioning the graphics? we all know it hasn't got the same power as 360 and PS3 so does it really need to be said in every review? It would be different if the developers didn't use all the power and were just being lazy, that would be a fair point.

How about you just review the fucking game? to me it seems that EG are anti-Wii and proved that when they "reviewed" Resident Evil 4, giving it a 7! Just because the reviewer couldnt get to grips with the controls, ALL other reviews have given the game 9 or 95% etc, I think the reviewers need to learn how to use the Wiimote and nunchuck and stop bangin on about graphics then they might just judge a Wii game fairly instead of writing the same shit in every review.

@ryohazuki1983 - shut up.

This is a great review, with a couple of lines re the graphics (which the reviewer says are poor for the Wii, not poor because it's on the Wii) and this reviewer can actually use the wiimote/nunchuck it seems. Thanks for a good, balanced review, and I hope there won't be too many more Wiiing idiots who criticise any negative review of a Wii game.

I'd be interested to hear Kristan's take on RE4Wii, as my experience with the game's controls has been so overwhelmingly different from that of the EG's reviewer.

My comments weren't so much about this particular review but about Wii reviews in general, read through the 200+ comments in the RE4 review and you'll see what i mean.

Edit, If you were to look in the comments threads for Wii reviews you won't find my comments there, I just wanted to express my opinion as its been mentioned too many times about graphics etc.

It's odd that EG never compare PS2 graphics against the Xbox 360 or PS3 (well, I haven't noticed them doing it at any rate) but seem to do so for the Wii in most reviews of mutliformat titles. Yeah, sure, the Wii is a current-gen system but everyone pretty much knows by now that it has more in common with the GameCube, Xbox and PS2 graphically than the 360 or PS3 so why continue to judge it so unfairly? Anyone expecting Xbox 360 quality visuals out of the Wii only has themselves to blame! LOL

Am I wrong or the only decent games Ubisoft released lately are for the Xbox360?
They are totally crap at making conversions!

It's odd that EG never compare PS2 graphics against the Xbox 360 or PS3 (well, I haven't noticed them doing it at any rate) but seem to do so for the Wii in most reviews of mutliformat titles. Yeah, sure, the Wii is a current-gen system but everyone pretty much knows by now that it has more in common with the GameCube, Xbox and PS2 graphically than the 360 or PS3 so why continue to judge it so unfairly? Anyone expecting Xbox 360 quality visuals out of the Wii only has themselves to blame! LOL

I don't think anyone is expecting 360 quality visuals, but the Wii is still more powerful than the previous generation of consoles by a fair margin; I think the estimation is twice as powerful as a GC.

Albeit I do remember seeing graphics being mentioned in the increasingly rare cases when a 360 game (say GUN or Lego Star Wars) was a PS2 port.

I love the controls in this game!!! Best GTA like I've ever played.

Its soo great being able to aim where you want and drive at the same time.

@aldo_14 - Well criticising an Xbox 360 game for being a graphically weak PS2 port is fair enough but we're talking about the Wii here, a machine that has certainly not shown any indication that it is twice as powerful as the GameCube to date... not in the games I've played anyway.

Sure games like Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Super Mario Galaxy and Metroid Prime 3 look excellent visually but twice as good, hmmmm I don't think so, they show the kind of improvements you might expect had the games been released on the GameCube in my opinion.

At best, I'd say the Wii is perhaps a little more powerful than a GameCube but less so than the original Xbox but that's only a guess. I know it has more memory but I believe the CPU and GPU aren't that much more powerful and it is those that handle the graphics. Therefore I wouldn't expect any multiformat ports from the PS2 or GameCube to look any better on the Wii and that's certainly been true of all such games so far. Zelda: Twilight Princess was a launch game for the Wii, a showcase title from Nintendo themselves, but it looked graphically identical to the GameCube version albeit mirrored and with widescreen support; it certainly didn't look twice as good. When Kameo was shifted from the Xbox to the 360, Rare massively overhauled the visuals so if the Wii was capable of delivering improved graphics, don't you think Nintendo would have done it for Zelda? They certainly had plenty of time to do it as the game was constantly delayed... ;)

It's 1.5x better graphically.

Personally, I thought Ressie 4 Wii was fine, but then I'd already reviewed it twice and played the game to death. The controls worked as well as you could expect, and made the process of aiming much slicker - but I had absolutely no interest in playing it yet again. If I hadn't have been in that position, then, yeah, sure, it's a must have really.

Holy ugly screens batman!

@ ryuhazuki

You bring shame on the legendary name, that is of the main character of the greatest game.

For Shame.

Edit@ Hey, I'm a poet.

OMG!

How can this pile of rubbish be worth a 6 if Resident Evil 4 is only a 7.

Either give Resi the score EVERYONE else knows it deserves, or continue to lack credibility Eurogamer.

>It's 1.5x better graphically.

Oh FFS.. Im sick to fucking death of reading bullshit like this. If any of you had a slightest clue what you were talking about then you'd know that you cant judge graphical power of one thing against another on pure numbers.

One card may be able to push more polys, but have a crappier fill rate, or not support shaders, or is slower at running user shaders, etc etc. You cant judge it like that.

But there's more to games than just the graphical side of things anyhow. The cpu inside of the wii is considerably more powerful than the xbox for example.

Like it or lump it, the wii is more capable than most dev's are trying to do. Only a moron would look at mario galaxy and think it was possible on the last gen.

Devs are just "testing the water" still not prepared to put proper budgets behind games for the wii as they're still not sure that:

a) it wont do a cube
and
b) what types of games are going to sell on the machine (no point spending millions on a fps game if wii owners will rather play cooking mamma now is it?)

Now if i read any more threads like these full of posts from moron fanboys.. I swear i'll fecking scream!

A wii review on EG done by someone who can use the controller - I'm so happy I might have to change my underwear.

"A wii review on EG done by someone who can use the controller - I'm so happy I might have to change my underwear."

Hmm.. but wasnt the controller supposed to be so easy everyone can use it?

> or continue to lack credibility

I think they'd lack credibility if they changed a reviewer's opinion of a game based on 200+ whinging posts by people who have no argument beyond "me & lots of other people like it so you're wrong".

@Smelly

Indeed but the EG reviewers have been holding joypads so long their hands have turned into strange lobster claw like appendages and they can no longer handle anything else - you should see them trying to open beer cans.
Now, back to the happy pants.

"As with Scarface, it works very intuitively"

Did the Scarface Wii review really say that it was intuitive?

Already bought this, been disappointed and traded it.

How come the review was so late in coming?

Graphics play a role no matter how people want to say it doesn't and that includes the Wii. No one expects PS3 or 360 type of graphics but we do expect the graphics to be at least better than the Xbox. Even the games coming out from Nintendo like Metroid and Mario do not look like something that could not be done on the Xbox but they do look very good. Anyway its all good because the graphics are good enough.

The thing I wonder about is why people who champion the Wii continue to get mad when people say that the machine is not showing any signs of outpacing last Gen consoles like the PS and Xbox. You can forget about specs because the only thing we can go on is how much developers can squeeze out of the respective hardware.

Lets take the whole RE debacle. The Wii version does not look better than the PS2 but when it is stated all the Wii supporters get in a tizzy and start to bitch. EG slapped Capcom for just a basic port and all hell breaks lose. Next thing you here the fans state is that EG doesn't like the Wii but if that’s the case I guess they do not like the 360 or PS3 because they have dished out harsh reviews for those systems as well. The funny thing is when you see all the opposite fanboys come in a thread and state how fair the harsh review is when it's not the console of their choice but when they are dealt the same hand, suddenly EG is biased.

"Even the games coming out from Nintendo like Metroid and Mario do not look like something that could not be done on the Xbox "


Then you are blind.

And that proves everyone else's points (which i may or may not agree with) that graphics dont matter. As it's obvious that if you cant tell when you are seeing impressive graphical tech and when you're not (i.e. by thinking the mario couldve been done on the xbox) - then maybe it doesnt matter.

All that matters is how much of a blinkered fanboy you are - because even if the wii pulled out a biblical miracle and produced a game which pissed all over everything on the 360 and ps3 graphically - the 360 fangirls would still turn around and say it looked no better than a ps2 game.

Which i guess proves the point. Quality of graphics is totally down to how blind you are from overly masturbating over your console purchase.


"The Wii version does not look better than the PS2"

And that totally proves my point above. The wii version is near identically graphically to the cube version (albeit with widescreen/progressive scan support). And the cube version pissed all over the ps2 version graphically from a great height.



But why you're judging a console on a crap game is beyond me. Remember the ps2 (Which sold shit loads) had bugger all decent games on it's first year in the shops.

This is a good conversion of a shit game, which hasnt had it's graphics improved to match the hardware its running on (i.e. it's done on the cheap). That does not in any way show the graphical power of said machine any more than a cheap (crap) ps2 port to the xbox did.


EDIT : Sometimes i read these forum threads from "hardcore" gaming nerds - and understand totally why nintendo are prefering the "casual" market nowadays. The hardcore market does nothing but moan about stuff they know f-all about.

Well it would seem that the extra processing power the Wii offers over the GameCube is needed to drive the 3D controls because if the Wii was really capable of rendering graphics far superior to those of its predecessor I would have thought we'd have seen them by now. Super Mario Galaxy, for example, looks stunning artistically and the cartoon style perfectly suits the Wii but I'd have imagined it would have looked identical had it been developed for the GameCube except it might have lacked widescreen/progressive scan support perhaps. In fact, I wouldn't be at all surprised to discover that Super Mario Galaxy was originally being developed for the GameCube before shifting onto the Wii as was the case with Super Paper Mario and Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Not that any of it matters to me, I didn't buy the Wii for fancy graphics, I bought it so I could play Nintendo's games which usually have beautiful artwork that makes the most of the limited hardware. For example, I still think Zelda: The Wind Waker looks beautiful and timeless graphically, it hasn't aged one bit since its release in 2003.

STFU smelly you nob... 1.5x more graphical was a joke / sarcasm but it was lost on you as your such a cock.

that smelly's a twat isn't he?

... but it was lost on you as your such a cock.

That actually made me LOL. \o/

You guys dont take criticism well do you?

Fuck off. The Wii is 1.63562 times better than the gamecube.
Which in turn 1.23443 times better than the PS2.

This means, if you are comparing the PS2 and Wii: the wii is .67346 more powerful than Smelly.

Why doesn't anyone argue about 'bits' anymore. At least the numbers were manageable.

(In the town where I grew up, 'smelly' was the nickname of a proper hardcase nearby. Even though I know it's not the same bloke I get a shudder when someone gives him abuse. Deserved or not)

lol