Ready at Dawn End PSP development, moves onto unknown platform(s)

[DeadlyNinja]

The Okami port got very high ratings. Is this a new thing where if someone who's made a game for Wii announces a game not for Wii, their Wii work immediately gets demoted to crap?

The game could barely maintain 30 fps, and the controls didn't work very well. Let me put it this way -- Nintendo Power recommended people to play the PS2 version instead. That's gotta count for something.

 

[Cornsnake]

Thats strange. I've played both their Daxter and God of War games. These are excellent, they look great, the controls are easy, they almost rival their PS2 counterparts. What could have happened to Okami? The PS2 game was very good.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

That's one reviewer. Metacritic gives Wii Okami 89%. Nintendo Power rated it 75%, the lowest score. Median and Mode averages are 90+%, including 10/10 from the eccentric Eurogamer. It's clearly not a bad conversion, even if a few take issue with it. Unless the whole gaming reviewing world is utterly blinkered.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

I don't see how review scores says anything about a company's knowledge of hardware. My main gripe was that they couldn't get a PS2 game to run very well on the Wii. Whether they develop for the Wii or not is irrelevant. I think they actually farmed it out to a subsidiary to do the port too.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

But there's only one person saying it didn't run well on Wii! Or is that a gross assumption on my part? Are all these 90%+ reviews saying 'the controls aren't great, but otherwise this is a fabulous game and we award excellent/top marks'?

 

[DeadlyNinja]

I don't recall which reviews, but I've heard quite a few people on forums unhappy with the port from a visual stand point. I do recall some reviews knocking the port and it having bad frame rates.

 

[PARANOiA]

But there's only one person saying it didn't run well on Wii! Or is that a gross assumption on my part? Are all these 90%+ reviews saying 'the controls aren't great, but otherwise this is a fabulous game and we award excellent/top marks'?

It got some interesting commentary on 1up Yours, basically saying it looked better on PS2 but the Wii controls are nice.

 

[fearsomepirate]

That still doesn't make it a "sloppy port." Even with a 50% overclock of Gamecube parts, the PS2 would still have more fillrate than the Wii and still has programmable vector units. Code designed specifically to take advantage of those features might not translate so well or so easily to a general-purpose CPU without a vector unit and a fixed-function GPU.

 

[Arwin]

Also the Wii version supports full-screen widescreen, so it has to render more pixels.

 

[assen]

Also the Wii version supports full-screen widescreen, so it has to render more pixels.

Huh, why?
If they render 640x480 for a 4:3 TV, they might render anamorphic 640x480 for widescreen, or 640x360, or something like 720x420 (approximately the same number of pixels as 640x480) - having widescreen as an option doesn't IMHO imply more pixels.

 

[vazel]

That still doesn't make it a "sloppy port." Even with a 50% overclock of Gamecube parts, the PS2 would still have more fillrate than the Wii and still has programmable vector units. Code designed specifically to take advantage of those features might not translate so well or so easily to a general-purpose CPU without a vector unit and a fixed-function GPU.

Yea I've read that as a reason why visually the PS2 version is better. Another reason that probably played just as big a role is RAD talked about the difficulty in no longer having Clover around to chat with about the code.

Huh, why?
If they render 640x480 for a 4:3 TV, they might render anamorphic 640x480 for widescreen, or 640x360, or something like 720x420 (approximately the same number of pixels as 640x480) - having widescreen as an option doesn't IMHO imply more pixels.

Well the standard res for PS2 games is 512x448 while Wii's standard res is 640x448(for both 4:3 and anamorphic 16:9).