EA hard at work on Madden Wii, Wii day almost here

"IGN Wii: Let's talk about graphics. Right or wrong, Madden for Wii is undoubtedly going to be compared to the GameCube build. Meanwhile, we've been playing a lot of the 360 version. In terms of visuals, where does the Wii incarnation fit in?

Jason Armenise: We get the graphics question all the time. Every time we talk about the game we get the graphics question. A lot of people - even passionate Nintendo fans - are kind of dismissing the graphics, saying, "We know it's going to be third, yadda, yadda, yadda." We didn't take that attitude. Right from the beginning, we said, "You know what? We need to make this game look better than Xbox at the very minimum. And if possible, we need to challenge the Xbox 360 version." That was our goal from the first day.

So we've done a whole host of things that put the game far in advance of the GameCube and we think better than the Xbox. And in some cases, we're challenging the Xbox 360 on graphics. First of all, the game is HD compliant. You can play 480p and 16:9 widescreen. That means everybody who has a HDTV can play the game with their component outputs and play in 480p and 16:9 widescreen while running at 60 frames per second, which is awesome. Additionally we've upped the texture quality on players. Textures are a higher quality. In many cases, they are higher than the Xbox version. We've added a whole host of features like depth of field. We've added a feature we call cinematic lens effect, which is like when you look through an actual television camera and straight lines get a little bit bowed in real life. We've increased the shadows. The shadows are better. We have something called contact shadows so that if two players get close to each other you'll see the shadow of one bleed onto the shadow of another. We've increased the grass. Our grass looks like it has more depth to it. It looks more lush than GameCube. It's definitely a much better looking game than on GameCube and we think that it really is challenging Xbox 360 in some places."



Full interview here

It's nice to see yet another developer not satisfied with just making this game look just like the current generation model. The list of features that EA is including in just the graphics alone is really encouraging. If you read the entire 7 page interview with IGN Wii you will see how crazy this game plays too. Everything is revealed except for online play, which seems EA knows about but will not comment on anything that has to do with it just yet; that may be a good thing.



Wii DAY

If you live in the United States and the West Coast AND know how to speak Japanese, tomorrow the 13th at 5pm PST/8pm EST. You will be able to follow the Nintendo Wii conference being held in Japan.

It starts at 5pm and ends at 11pm, again at Pacific Standard Time. It is 8pm-2am Eastern Standard Time. Too bad for me since I don't speak Japanese but live in San Diego, California! I'm hoping for some leaked video tomorrw from the show, it may be late in the night before we get to see anything but it will be worth it since Nintendo is planning another surprise for this show. If we can't get the info tomorrow, then Thursday will be THE day for sure.

Starting Thursday, September 14th at: 7am Pacific and 10am Eastern Standard Time in New York, Wii day begins.