I love how the tech demonstrated here isn't even on par with certain XBOX and Gamecube launch titles.
HOLY FUCK IT HAS BUMP MAPPING
BUMP MAPPING
it's like they retrofitted a Voodoo2 in there, awesome
To be fair, the Voodoo2 most certainly couldn't do what you see in that video (and featured even worse image quality).
Things like depth of field didn't start appearing on the PC until the GeForce3 and beyond.
I think this is mostly just a third-party developer trying to show that they're willing to push a wii past gamecube level effects.
They are failing, though. Rogue Squadron 2 and (a year later) Star Fox Adventures were both doing everything you see here AND MORE at 60 fps in 16:9.
Hey, thanks for the history lesson young 'un. For your information, I owned a Voodoo 2 when they were the price of a PS3.
Young 'un? Come now, that implies that you don't believe I have any experience with this stuff. I've owned a LOT of graphics cards over the years including stuff all the way back to the Matrox Mystique, Power VR PCX2, Voodoo 1, etc. I remember when nVidia shipped their first chipset (the NV1) on the Diamond Edge 3D that included ports of Sega games. I remember when Matrox first showed off its very first 3D card in 1994 (It didn't even have support for texture maps!) and even stranger stuff like the 3DO Blaster expansion card (how crazy was THAT?) I also ran two STB branded 12mb Voodoo 2 cards in SLI mode (so that I could reach 1024x768 in Unreal!). I know the Voodoo 2 and the software around its time very well.
I became a huge fan of post processing effects like depth of field and motion blur when they started showing up in PS2 games. You won't even find any Dreamcast games with depth of field let alone anything on the PC running on older Voodoo cards. Do you remember the T-Buffer 3DFX included with their failed Voodoo 5 cards that was designed to produce such effects? The Voodoo 2 was incapable of producing such fillrate demanding effects and there were absolutely NO games that used it. You wouldn't find it on the PC until the GeForce3 generation and it wasn't common at first.
The Voodoo does support bumpmapping to a very limited degree, but it's nothing more than a low quality type of single pass emboss bumpmapping. The type of bumpmapping possible with the Wii is quite a bit more advanced than what you could do with the Voodoo cards (though still barely equivalent to DX8-class hardware). I recall the first series of graphics card that started to produce decent looking bumpmaps was the Matrox G400 and its environment mapped bumpmapping (Expendable was a showcase for this).
I'm not an expert on any of this, as I'm sure you can tell, but I'm very familiar with the type of software that was available for these cards and what types of effects the games were capable of. I'm not suggesting that you're unfamiliar with older generation hardware either, mind you. Just that your comment about Voodoo 2 (which was a joke, I know) was a bit off base. The Wii is a piece of shit in 2008, but its graphics chip is generations ahead of the Voodoo series. Brings back good memories just thinking about it, though. Don't mind my crazy ramblings...