Get ready to be home "sick" for a while this June

Just looking at screens of the upcoming Wii shooter The Conduit will have your trigger finger itching. It looks like it could be pushing the limits of the Wii. A recent interview with lead designer Rob Nicholls gives us a little more detail about how things are going with this amazing new title and what we might see in June, its expected release window.

Speaking to Hdwarriors.com, Nicholls had this to say:

Gameplay-wise that’s where I think we have our shot at competing against big titles like that, (Empire Total War, and Killzone 2)… we really take advantage of the Wii’s motion control system, which we’ve maintained throughout this development is just begging for a First Person Shooter game. Somebody to get it done right…The Conduit is fun, it’s easy to use, it’s customizable moreso than those other titles.”

He also addressed the lack of split-screen local multiplayer due to loss of graphics quality in favour of online multiplayer. He says they’ve milked the system for all they can in terms of dynamic shaders, real time shadows and bump mapping. “We’ve basically proved that you don’t have to do the stylized graphics, you don’t have to do the cartoony graphics.”

High Voltage/Sega has a press event April 15 that will offer, in Nicholls' words, “…multiplayer play, multiplayer etc., here it is. We’re not planning on hiding anything.”

He also speaks in defence of Nintendo’s rigid online restrictions, saying that:

1. They’re very concerned about the people playing their console, because many Wii gamers tend to be much younger than 360 and PS3 gamers.

2. Is that I think the online component of the Wii has caught them off guard a little bit and they didn’t expect consumers to want to use it as extensively as, for example, we intend to make our system. So we’ve noticed in our development that their servers seem to work much better for small numbers of people, but when you start getting up there in higher numbers, things become more problematic.”

Sega's official website also claims that the game will use the Wii Speak peripheral during online play, though there is no mention of this in the interview. If true, it seems like a large unknown at this late stage considering the restrictive environment that Nintendo has fostered, so it’ll be interesting to learn more details after the upcoming press event.

Check out this great interview at the link below for what looks like may be one of the best Wii shooters yet, and we'll be back with more details when the dust settles after the event.

[source hdwarriors.com]