The Conduit announced for Wii - A Third Party game with effort?

I have been screaming, you have been screaming and all Wii fans have been screaming for a Third Party game developer to put some effort into the graphics capabilities of the Wii. It looks like High Voltage Software is doing just that and building "The Conduit" from the ground up for Wii. Using a new high powered engine called "Quantum3" The Conduit will use special effects not yet seen in most- if not all Wii games released so far. IGN has the exclusive preview on their site and here is some bullet points from that article:

Special Effects The Conduit will feature:

Full 16-TEV stage material pipeline using up to eight texture sources and a host of innovative blend operations.

Dynamic bump-mapping (via tangent space normals or embossing), reflection and refraction (via real-time cube or spherical environmental maps), light / shadow maps, projected texture lights, specular and Fresnel effects, emissive and iridescent materials, advanced alpha blends, light beams / shafts, gloss and detail mapping, seamless resource streaming, projected shadows.

Heat distortion and motion blur, interactive water with dual-wave channels and complex surface effects, animated textures, and more.

High Voltage's Eric Nofsinger, chief creative officer and Kerry Ganofsky, CEO and founder, had a few things to say about other Third Party developer's efforts on the Wii and more about The Conduit:

"We think it's a real shame that publishers and developers aren't taking advantage of the technical possibilities of the Wii platform. Most Wii games don't even look as good as the later day PS2 titles and that's a real slap in the face to consumers," seconds Kerry Ganofsky, CEO and founder, High Voltage Software. "We believe that third-party developers need to step up to the plate and deliver. The Wii platform is capable of a lot more than what consumers have seen so far. We're hoping to raise a new bar."

Nofsinger takes it a step farther. "Most of the games on the Wii look like crap. We want to change that, so we've invested heavily in our Wii tech over the past year. We have real-time normal mapping, reflection and refraction, post process full screen effects, real-time shadows, projected lights and textures, specularity and fresnel effects, emissive and iridescent materials, interactive water, morphing, and much more all running with a rock solid frame rate on the Wii. Our goal is to be the most technically innovative Wii developer on the planet."

"There is this pervasive and cyclical argument that Wii consumers don't want mature titles, when there aren't those types of products available to them. And even more frustrating is the claim that Wii consumers only care about great gameplay. Of course they care about gameplay, but we believe if given the choice, they would want great graphics as well. It's just a cop out," says Nofsinger. "With Conduit, we are trying to make a Wii game that looks like a 360 title."

Below is a tech demo for the "Quantom3" Engine running on the Wii in real-time:



Yes the game is a bit cliche with the Alien FPS gameplay, but really this is what the Wii needs. A hardcore Mature game with a high budget. Third Party Mature games haven't sold very well on the Wii because there isn't very many to choose from and the ones that the Wii does have are usually crappy PS2 ports (excluding RE4 and NMH which are great). Resident Evil 4 was a port and it has sold almost 2 million copies so far. If The Conduit gets a good publisher that can advertise! advertise! advertise! the heck out of it, then you know that the nearly 11 million Wii owners in the United States will be buying this game come this Holiday. For now, be happy that we have a Mature FPS coming to the Wii that has nothing to do with the PS2 - at all. If you look at the forum topics about this game, you will see that people aren't stupid and they can see when effort is being made and demand for The Conduit is already extremely high because of this.