Love that this topic blew up.
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I think I got 3\4 of the way through Skyward Sword, and then I just lost motivation.
I’d finished Twilight Princess though to the end, and was probably burnt out on that kind of Zelda game.
Recently the kids and I played through the first half and a bit of Wind Waker, and I was surprised at the number of puzzles, temples, and themes I thought were originally from the later games.
The Isle of the Gods area has this ancient, futuristic, lost technology vibe, which was built upon in the following two games.
I spent 70+ hours in TP, and another 50 in SS, and I can barely remember what any of the areas were like, after the first one.
I guess I was feeling like I was playing a new game, with fewer new concepts for me than previous Zelda games, and the story and gameplay tropes didn’t hold my attention.
The Pokemon series got a bit stale for me around the same time.
On motion controls, I didn’t mind the sword-play too much, but having to flap my arms everytime I needed to fly somewhere really got me down.
I had to abandon Okami on the Wii, when I couldn’t master the nunchuck flick move, learnt from the martial arts teacher, and needed to progress. I’ve yet to get back to it, but when I do, it will be on PS2.
Good thread!
When I played this game my friend had given me his wii and I bought the game when it had dropped in price he was a big fan of nintendo and zelda titles and asked me to explain the game to him, After finishing it I said this is Simultaneously one of the BEST games I have played and WORST games I have played.
I love the game world, the hubtown is great, the lore is cool. the townspeople are cool. I love the watercolor look. The dungeons are awesome.
I didn’t even have a big of a problem with the control, just the game needs a lot of refinements to its systems the backtracking in the flying segments gets boring, the crafting is not implemented that well. A lot of little things in the game are a pain in the but, and that all adds up to you not wanting to spend sooo much time looking for it all.
At the same time the worlds you land in are great the outer and inner dungeons are so GOOD. I bet with a lot of quality of life improvements a remake would be incredible. The original feels like it could have used another year in development to refine how all the systems in the gameplay work together. The inventory screen is both cool and ridiculous that its so many pages. take away the amount of sword talking etc.
which TV model out of interest?
i mostly see 42" 852 x 480p plasmas
Mode?
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ha! model
this (nintendo wireless) keyboard sucks
Ohhh!
It’s a Panasonic TX-32F250A I think.
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It was a weird transition period, both in display technologies, and regional divergence. In europe widescreen CRT’s had been pretty popular for a few years, but they did not offer progressive scan input, but did have the higher 576 line count. While in the U.S. these were pretty much non-existent. I’m not exactly clear on the situation in japan at that time, but they had widescreen CRT’s there since the early 90’s, just no idea about their popularity of prevalence.
We had the PALplus standard for a while that offered higher resolution, but it never took off beyond a few satelite test channels and here in the Netherlands, some select programs on the public broadcast channels. I’m not aware of any equipment that could record or output in this format through scart.
Keep in mind that the Wii throughout its lifecycle was strictly outputting analog only, so the exact horizontal pixel count was never really an issue. With the 480p plasma displays at the time, the important thing to get a sharp image was matching up the visible line count to the 480 active lines of the display. Since the image was sampled on a per line basis as an analog waveform, processed, and converter back into a pixel framebuffer for the display anyways, you could vary the signal there without too many issues. Since widescreen content was just squeezed into the established signal frame-time in an anamorph form, developers could decide tot use 800, 840, 856, or however many pixels they deemed necessary or acceptable. 1:1 pixel mapping only became a thing when DVI or later HDMI was used to drive the display.
Long story short, my preferred display would definitly be a good 480p 16:9 plasma display.
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So what’s happening on the Wii U Gamepad for Widescreen Wii games? Presumably, that uses square pixels - so how is it mapped in what looks like native resolution for 16:9 Wii games?
Wouldn’t the fact that Wii is analogue only mean that the pixels are put out as squished in a 4:3 frame buffer, then stretched horizontally to fill a 16:9 display? And if so, doesn’t that mean they’re not square, but rectangle pixels?
And if so, then how does it work with Wii U Gamepad’s screen which probably has square pixels?
(This stuff is so confusing lol)
I found an answer to how it’s done on Wii a few years ago. Wii U I’m not sure about though.
The Wii does a render at a virtual res of 854x480 to an internal res of 640x480, then stretches that to 711x480, scanned out in the same 720x480 box as GC before your TV stretches it again out to the panel.
AKA super blurry no matter what you do, no clean pixels.
Wii u is a different beast altogether. Since it has digital output, it can map pretty much any game 1:1 pixel perfect. The wii u gamepads display is 854x480, and I believe the wiiu’s hdmi set to 480p widescreen outputs to the same resolution. I’m not sure if anyone ever verified that a game that outputs for 838 for example is pillarboxed or stretched.
This is definitely what I’d be looking for if I didn’t have a CRT.
I haven’t noticed any blurriness on my display, but perhaps it’s not as sharp as other 480p systems? I always thought the Wii’s reputation for blurriness was totally overblown. But maybe there is more to it than I realize.
I definitely do think this is game dependent though too. Super Mario Galaxy looks so razor sharp at 4:3 on my display. I cannot imagine it’s being double scaled like this in 4:3 aspect ratio. But I may be wrong about that 
Dreamcast does some funky scaling too. I really think this was an awkward period where nothing was truly standard leading to all this sort of craziness.
My last playthrough of skyward sword was through dolphin on my old fx -6300 rig on a 40" Philips 4k monitor with a VA panel. Higher resolution really does the art more justice.
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Yeah it’s all relative. I don’t find Wii blurry on a native 480p display over VGA, though of course that is already way better than using SCART plus TV processing. And I’m doing the 480p fix which helps a little more. Maybe it’s more noticable on pixel art? I’ll try on RetroArch soon.
The image is of course over-processed through the multiple horizontal stretches but as mentioned above that’s more or less par for the course with any console of this era, moreso when doing 16:9. Maybe the Wii is a little worse, but on the flip side it has native 480p support. The height remains fixed during so at least we’ve got one good axis.
Even wiring direct VGA or HDMI from the device doesn’t remove the sequence of horizontal stretches. The only way you’ll beat that is Dolphin.
Compared to PS2, Wii has better video output in my setup. DC has a outer VGA image but the graphics don’t seem as advanced as Wii. PS2 can be improved a little with GBS-Control which brings it closer to Wii and DC in my setup.
I wish I could’ve gotten in to SS. The graphics are super nice and i bet it is fun. Just wasn’t for me.
Also, I love the information this board manages to bring up. A lot of knowledge here 
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For me it’s the opposite, I think this game looks worse as you increase the resolution. I haven’t played much of it, only tried it for a bit on the Wii U with component cables and the OSSC, output on a 24’’ LG TN monitor. I think I posted it on the scanline screenshot thread before, but the phone camera doesn’t really do it justice as it looks blurry in the photo, just like yours looks a bit faded on the colors side.
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I believe Gravitone meant running it through Dolphin at a massively increased rendering resolution. Like a HD remaster.
Not just running the Wii version on a HD TV.
The painterly depth of field effect in Skyward Sword suits the rendering resolution well, since off-distance landscape wouldn’t be sharp anyway. If they are doing an HD version I wonder if they will keep it.
The HD remaster of Wind Waker did away with a similar effect that was in the original. In SS, it was a very clever way to hide pop-in which is pretty much unnoticeable due to the effect.