Sload Soap wrote:So, I think I'm close to getting a Wii U. It has a small handful of games I want and it's getting quite affordable in the second hand market. I just have one question: Is Wind Waker HD worth trading in my Gamecube version of the game for? Is it enough of an improvement?
Absolutely. It's like night and day. It was gorgeous on the Gamecube, but everything is just feels brighter and more alive on Wii U. They really did a bang up job with remastering that, as Xeogred said.
Like he also mentioned, Twilight Princess also DEFINITELY benefitted from the HD treatment, and IMO, I think it benefitted more than Wind Waker. Wind Waker definitely had MUCH more effort put into it - textures and lighting effects were all completely redone. Twilight Princess, on the other hand, is - for the most part - little more than a straight upscale, but because it used a more realistic artstyle rather than the cel shading that Wind Waker used, it looks almost like a completely different game even though nothing except the resolution was changed (to the best of my knowledge). I've compared them side by side on the same TV by switching between inputs running the Gamecube version through composite and the Wii U version through HDMI, and you wouldn't believe the difference (especially since the Wii U version of Twilight Princess supports 16:9).
Twilight Princess HD definitely had more updates than just a resolution bump. Here is a digital foundry comparison below.
That said, I think it's the artstyle, like you mention, that makes some people not realize all of the upgrades that were done. Tantalus definitely put plenty of love into TPHD though.
I didn't know about the other improvements. Thanks for sharing that. I still hold that the resolution is the only difference that the average player will notice, but I was, indeed, selling it short when I said that it was just an upscale.
Tanooki wrote:Seems the WiiU has an odd frame rate issue that link points out for Twilight Princess which is sad yet strange.
Not factored since it's not real hardware, but I do wonder what if you tossed that game up against the Gamecube vs DOLPHIN running that at 1080p.
If you just loaded it up without an HD Texture Pack mod then the Wii U HD version would still be better, IMO. The textures really add a lot of detail to the game.
I hadn't done that, just ran it stock with it popped up to 1080p which was fairly impressive looking at Rogue Squadron 2 and a couple others I gave a few minutes on. For some reason I just felt like downloading the 20 odd GC ISOs for discs I have the other day after seeing Dolphin got a core partial re-write and it's impressive.
All you do is download an ISO, they all appear to fall into the 950MB to 1.3GB (most appear around 1.1 I've noticed) range roughly. You throw them in a directory, and you're done.
Just have Dolphin search that by default, it'll pop up on a nice vertical list with a teeny image pulled from the game itself of the title screen (like the boot box image on the GC itself where it says press start.) As long as you have setup your controller and a/v options to your liking, you're done. (Or if you want config bluetooth, etc junk for the Wiimote too)
Point, double click, use game pad -- might as well be a real gamecube given there isn't some small bugs involved with the title of your choice. Boot and function compatibility appear to be 100% or damn near it, some games still exhibit some problems with graphics or whatever but not game breaking, annoying at best. Defender on the movies have like 2 bands that glitch horizontally from what I tried so far (I've got around 20 games I've kept.)
