A considerable number of people have been having some issues with the WiiWare release of Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal. Graphical hitches seem to be the biggest complaint, though low audio quality has been cited as a problem also. Over on Telltale’s forums, in a thread regarding the issues, a Telltale employee has stated that the problems are a result of the hardware limitations, claiming that, “an iPhone is much more powerful than a Wii.”
Ouch. Still, there is something to be said for the statement. The Wii only has 88 MB of RAM (as opposed to the iPhone’s 128 MB) and outputs nearly twice the pixels. And Tales of Monkey Island is a bit of a beast compared to other Telltale titles. Hell, I had to reduce the visual quality considerably to get it running smoothly on my admittedly weak PC, so I can’t imagine the hoops they had to jump through for the console release. Then there’s the issue of filesize limitations for WiiWare titles, maxed out at 40 MB to compensate for the tiny amount of storage capacity the console features.
Of course, this won’t stop the screaming of Nintendo fanboys who won’t see the light of reason. Telltale is working on the problem for episode two, though they claim that there’s no “easy way to fix it” with this first release and chose to put the game out there in its current state rather than wait a few more weeks. For the sound of it, Wii players are just going to have to deal with it on this one.
