Can The Conduit be Wii's Halo?

Now the wii has been the butt of many jokes for about a year or two now. Catcalls from xbox and ps3 fanboy groups alike echo the concept of a lack of quality software and a total abandonment of gaming's core audience. One of the main points many bring up is the lack of a real feature packed FPS. Most gamers agree a true test of a consoles power has traditionally been proven by it’s FPS titles.

N64 conquered it’s gen with goldeneye, Turok and perfect dark. Halo brought xbox the cult success it needed to prevent it’s failure and opened the door for doom 3, half-life2 and the like. While PC gaming has always hinged greatly on the FPS to bring sales and to push the limits.

Into this gen we have seen the FPS genre continue to push graphics and gameplay but wii has been missing out since red steel was released. Wii owners have had a few sub-par substitutes for the full FPS genre experience. Corruption gave us great graphics and story but no online. While MoH: Heroes 2 and Call of Duty: WaW offered reasonable online but lacking in story and very strong graphics. Not to mention many are done playing WWII shooters and need something new.

The Conduit promises to change all this. A key focus on graphics and gameplay have made this an incredibly attractive title for wii owners still craving a solid, well-rounded FPS title. What I am noticing however is this title may far exceed what anyone expected from our tiny white box.

Thus far the biggest point of attraction for me personally is the controls. As a person who has played many of the FPS titles for the wii I am convinced that pointing at the screen far surpasses the use of an analog stick for looking and turning. Often the pain of using one stick to look and one stick to move has always slowed me down in an fps. Translating what I want to do to two sticks seems to pull me out of the experience of the game at hand. This is why FPS has always shown better on computers with the keyboard and mouse configuration. Pointing at what you want to shoot just feels more natural and is faster. Guiding a cursor separate from your movements with a stick just feels cumbersome by comparison.

Wii can point and shoot it’s fast paced and quite effective in COD WaW. Wii was made for FPS games. Since the first time any of us picked up a wiimote and nunchuck combo it felt natural to pretend these items were for guns. The ideally placed b button feel likes a trigger at first feel and it felt like a FPS win from day 1. High voltage is totally right. Wii owners deserve and want a good fps for this console. It’s the same reason Red steel was among my and many others first games.

There has been no lack of attention paid to these controls as shown in the following video.



The control customization seems in the conduit to surpass even HD consoles and to some extent even pcs in this video. I dare Killzone2 to include drag and drop hud elements to that extent. So with this the first solid building block to a hugely successful FPS has been laid. Total customization for the player. This  makes playing as a person online uniquely improved. Every button can be changed and switched as well as the deadzone. An idea I have yet to see implemented on wii and one that will make the experience that much better.


The next item on discussion is a big one and one which High voltage is quick to say they have it under control. Namely the graphics. As mentioned earlier  FPS games have a reputation of pushing hardware to it’s limit. Sadly up to this date most fps games for wii have not. Either they were hastily put out or for lack of love form the developer (outside corruption of course). High voltage has actually developed an entirely new graphics engine for the wii to make this package sweet. Even in the earliest versions of this title show something most gamers on N4g like to deny. Namely Wii is far more powerful then an Xbox. The pinnacle of last gens graphics power overtaken by the wii. Don’t believe me? How about the nice comparisons of Halo 2 (one of the pinnacle games of xbox) in dev and what conduit has shown at the same level of development.



It is clear that at the very least this game will surpass every xbox fps to date. The motion is fluid and fast the kissa are quick and concise and the bosses and lighting effects outdo just about everything I have seen on xbox and even outdoes haze as far as I can tell. But haze sucked. Moving on

Now look at the most recent trailer released and compare to the visuals seen even in that previous trailer.



It is Blatantly obvious the conduit is shaping up to be a graphical powerhouse on wii. All it has taken all along is a developer to give a crap on the wii and it can pop out great visuals the same way the other HD consoles do. Just not exactly in HD. My big beef with the whole hd console superiority complex is that the graphics last gen in non-hd were not that bad. Sorry to say but those graphics were very very good. Many games from last gen are still very much playable today and it will not feel outdated. God of war still feels crisp and beautiful and that was pumped out of the least powerful system last gen (look it up).

Conduit is pushing great graphics and proving many people wrong about the wii. So in review we add another building block to the fps package crisp, cutting edge graphics and well tuned controls. There is one last block that needs placing... multiplayer.

Multiplayer has been the biggest disadvantage of the wii. Those cursed friend codes have made multiplayer gaming with people other then strangers extremely difficult. lack of a unified system has fractured all games into individual factions and makes it hard to organize good matches with buddies. Though the largest atrocity for the wii has been lack of voice chat. In reality it makes little sense. After all pokemon for ds featured a voice chat function so did prime hunters. It should have been in the cards. After all the wii comes bluetooth enabled but never made the logical decision like the ps3 to support bluetooth headsets. WTF Nintendo. If Nintendo can be chastised for anything it is not making multiplayer more robust. After all we signed an agreement  when starting our wii up saying Nintendo is not responsible for online interaction. So let the puppy loose already Nintendo DAMMIT!

Though I am losing my track. While Nintendo's antiquated multiplayer system is arcane it still works. Mario Kart wii is an extremely enjoyable experience as is brawl. You fight other players and the fact you may be continents apart rarely interferes with the competition. I wish I had more to say on multiplayer for conduit but alas I don’t since details are thin in this department there is no video but details are available.

-16 players possible
-Traditional FPS game modes will be included
-wiispeak functionality confirmed
-Will use friend code system (sigh)

The fact is the conduits success very much hinges on how it performs multiplayer. Will the graphics be toned down for online? How will wiispeak work with this title? Will their be dedicated servers to this title? So many question but few answers. Currently we only have an exclusive in Nintendo Power to look forward to that will hopefully clear this up for me and everyone else eagerly anticipating The Conduit. There is alot of buzz around the multiplayer and an High Voltage Exec said recently that they understand that “multiplayer will be integral to the titles longevity.”

That puts my fears slightly to rest. If High voltage has kicked this much ass on two of the 3 vital ingredients to a great FPS title I doubt  they would neglect this integral piece of perfection.

If EA can pull of good FPS multiplayer action on the wii then I doubt High voltage will have any issues making it perform every bit as well as halo has on xbox if not 1000x better.

Here is where I started thinking. Xbox stayed afloat based almost purely on it’s FPS games . FPS games seem to (as I grudgingly admit) define the “hardcore” gamer experience on any modern game playing system. What if this title is as truly phenomenal as High Voltage claims? If Halo was an unprecedented success on Xbox to the point that it was it’s crutches through hard times. What kind of an success can we expect with a title of a better caliber on the #1 system of this gen? Many claim that this title is a gamble. From what I’ve seen this could be a sure thing. True Gamer owners of the wii (yes, they exist) have been waiting for a title like this since the launch of wii and I guarantee they will clamor to dust off the lil’ white  box to pop this in.

Despite all the pessimism toward the wii from the gaming community wii’s true next-gen controls have always been it’s strong suit. It’s graphics are not HD but their damn good and sometimes all it takes is that one attention getting title to bring people to a console. Wii has not quite produced what we want but with the conduit. A game with a promised story line admittedly miles ahead of Halo in story complexity and work this is the Halo-killer foretold since the inception of the Halo franchise. A story line that mind you has been told by the developer to hold up for many many games.

Conduit seems to take everything that makes FPS games great and brings it sevenfold to the least powered system of this gen. With every bell and whistle the big boys offer then they throw in truly intuitive unique and great controls and it only sweetens the deal.

In conclusion Conduit is the Halo for Nintendo and they don’t even need crutches! Get ready for this one to lay it’s glorious light onto store shelves some time this spring. In the meantime I’m going to go back to World at war to hone up on  my Wii FPS skillz. See you in the deathmatch folks!