I picked up Mario Galaxy last night and have been enjoying it, both as a game, and also picking it apart technically. The level design really stands out in how it consistently surprises you with creative platforming gameplay.

But what’s more interesting is how Nintendo is using the modest Wii hardware to achieve its graphical effects.

I could never quite tell from the YouTube previews, but it appears Mario’s using something like stencil shadow volumes to handle all its shadows– which are always projected in gravity’s direction. Unfortunately this technique means unsmoothed edges and a uniform brightness for all shaded areas. Side effects include moving platforms whose shadows suddenly blink onto surfaces when they approach, and suddenly disappear as they pass.

An element that Galaxy uses all over the place to great effect is something like a fake rim lighting shader. From what I understand, the Wii isn’t fragment shader capable, so maybe they’re faking it by setting an independent directional light aimed reverse relative to camera for each rimlit object? I’ve read a few things about the Wii’s Register Combiners and TEVs, and I wonder if they’re using them for pixel shadery purposes.

It’s all that lighting around the silhouettes of objects that helps give the characters and environments that signature plastic pop.

The fur shading is fairly nice as well, and I wonder how they’re doing it on the Wii hardware, whether it’s an actual shader, or they’re doing tricks rendering a multilayered shell of increasingly translucent polygons like in Shadow of the Colossus

Anyway, I am really enjoying the game so far, and the art direction is top notch. It’s also great to play Mario along to a live orchestral score — too bad Nintendo didn’t make the switch in time for Twilight Princess.

The shadows are the only real graphical let-down. It seems like they could be doing something more clever with the alleged crazy fill-rate on the Wii. Blurred textured shadow maps for near geometry or something? Also, multisampling would be nice, but playing on a standard def tv is forgiving.

I’d love to hear other people’s insights into the graphics behind the game. The rim lighting shading is something that could be easily applied to indie games looking for some eye candy punch…

“We think that Pippin represents the Next Generation of a lot of the things you’ll be seeing from Apple”.

That is eerily prophetic, as the parallels are clear between the Pippin and the Apple TV, and more so with the more widespread contemporary trend of the set-top media box.

And from a developer’s standpoint, this promotional video highlights a lot of the the same things that Steve Jobs extolled during the iPhone introduction — It’s running the full version of Mac OS! Development is easy!

However the parallels between the Pippin and the 3DO are also easy to draw, and it’s easy to see why the system failed.

A third party, Bandai, manufactured and marketed the device. It was developed in the pre-NeXT acquisition mid 1990s, a grim time for Apple. To start the device, you had to insert a system disc into the 4x CD-ROM drive and wait for a streamlined version of Mac OS System 7 to boot. The graphics were all done in a PowerPC native version of QuickDraw, a graphics API that in its more than 20 years of existence, never supported more than a 1-bit alpha channel!

So many nightmares.

But the kernel of the idea was good. And it’s especially ironic today as the Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and Wii are all running on PowerPC architecture. The Pippin’s PowerPC 603e is the forebear of these consoles’ brains.

Watch carefully, and you will see the Pippin port of Bungie’s Marathon in the video — a game which you can now play on XBox Live Arcade. Here’s a full list of Pippin software releases. And more information including full hardware specs is available on the Pippin’s Wikipedia entry.

Kyle Wilson has written an insightful article called The Flow of Intentional Gameplay, where he picks apart survivalism and goals in videogames. He makes the case that good gameplay hinges on the player having readily identifiable goals at all times, and that games like Half-Life 2, and consoles like the Wii are successful because they are good at doing this.

Very interesting read. [via GameSetWatch]

Dan Labriet has released his latest masterwork into the indie Mac game scene. It’s a highly polished 3d mini golf game, with a number of cool features.

My favorite is its iSight integration, which allows you to snap a photo to be used on your golfer’s avatar. The game also takes “polaroids” of significant events in your golfing exploits and saves them to a gallery for later viewing.

You can select these photos to e-mail, print, or upload to an online gallery on Dan’s site– all from within the game.

Wacky uses Newton Game Dynamics to handle physics, and it’s fun in and of itself to figure out what obscure corners of objects you can hit to send your ball flying in a preposterous path.

Graphically, the game sports a fur shader, depth of field, reflective water, and flowing lava with bloom lighting The player models are skeletally animated using Cal3D. But what’s most impressive is that Dan did all of the art and programming solo.

If only he’d used my story concept: You versus a cargo cult of mini golf worshipping cannibals..