Nagoshi loves his Sony products. The Yakuza series has been exclusive to Sony, so it isn’t that big of a surprise to see him praise the ‘Next Generation Portable’ (NGP) that was announced last month. According to Nagoshi, 3G is a big deal.
“This is a big deal, Wi-Fi has gotten more accessible in Japan compared to before, but you could hardly call it enough yet. When it comes to Japan, if you want to be able to connect to the net no matter where you are, your mobile phone’s how you’re going to do it. Going with 3G allows the system to be on the same playing field as every phone out there in terms of connectivity, and I think that says a lot about Sony’s drive to make the NGP a success.”– Toshihiro Nagoshi
Some of the issues that Sony had with the Playstation 3 were the difficult and high cost of development, something they might have actually learned from. According to Nagoshi, porting titles is simple and cost effective. Nagoshi’s own team ported over a cutscene from Yakuza of the End running in real time on the NGP hardware for Sony’s Playstation Meeting last month.
“When I call it a movie, though, it wasn’t just a video created in another environment, but a realtime presentation on NGP hardware using data from the real game. We had an extremely short window of time between the presentation and the request for a demo, but we made it. It was hard, but it also demonstrated how quickly we could port this high-end engine and full shader set to the NGP. That’s something really worthy of attention. Of course, we would’ve liked more time to implement more functionality and up the resolution — that’s something I’m annoyed with in hindsight.” – Toshihiro Nagoshi
Sounds good. Now announce a game for the system!
[Source: 1up]
Ad:
It would be silly for the next Yakuza games NOT to be ported to the NGP in the future. Same goes for future Valkyria Chronicles, build on PS3, port to NGP.
Phantasy Star Online 2 as well…