Wolfenstein

Germany has a long story of bans related to games. Censorship is higher there when it comes to blood or violence, and there's a rumor that the Government is considering a ban on all action games.
Recently Raven Software has published a game called Wolfenstein, which is the sequel of the famous Wolfenstein 3D which was retired from the market in 1994 due to its nazi references. Ah, I forgot to mention this: nazi references are banned from Germany altogether.
In fact during the localization process the guys tried to remove all references to nazism, SS, Hitler and such.
But they failed: they missed some minor textures and the publisher, Activision Blizzard, made the decision to pull the game from the German market due to this small portion of 'offending' images.

Here's a confrontation of the European version vs. the German one. Just to show how many symbols they removed, and how much damage they made to the game.

It's crazy.

The Conduit

I just tried The Conduit for the Wii and I just can't believe how bad it is, from a graphical point of view. For months the developers bragged about the engine behind the game, and still from what I could see on the internet I wasn't convinced.
Now that I saw it first hand I see nothing but cool (?) effects, blur, bloom lights, some bump, depth of field blur and the like. But taken together they don't do a pretty picture, they are misused and pumped to the extreme just to show that they're in the game.
It's like the first movies that use 3D glasses, they are constructed so you really NOTICE that there's a 3D effect... (I'm referring to Coraline, which anyway is a good movie by itself)
For The Conduit... it just doesn't work. I didn't play it to the end, actually I just spend a few minutes with it. But the developers filled the first part with all the graphical tricks to show off, and it wasn't enough. I'm sorry but the bad art direction shines through instead. Plus, the bloom effect and blur are overused, and the bump mapping shows the different texture planes that float on each other, when seen at a close range.

This is really disappointing for them, because The Conduit's selling point was the graphics (and the controls, which work) and a bad sign for the Wii, which gets another marred exclusive.
I hope they don't fall into the same errors for their two upcoming games, The Grinder and Gladiator AD, but I think they'll just do the same.