Oddworld vs. PlayStation Vita

February 23rd, 2013, 22:59 Posted By: wraggster

At Digital Foundry, we're on record as being rather partial to the PlayStation Vita and while we've looked at major titles such as Uncharted: Golden Abyss and WipEout 2048, coverage opportunities have been limited - something we're acutely aware of and aiming to address in a series of upcoming pieces that delve deeply into the character and capabilities of the hardware.
Our first stop is Just Add Water and Oddworld Inhabitants, who've recently released a fully featured PlayStation Vita version of the Stranger's Wrath HD remake, the original PS3 release having garnered an impressive 9/10 Eurogamer review score. It's an interesting initial port of call: it's no secret that Sony's handheld device lacks some degree of horsepower compared to the current-gen consoles, and some might say it occupies something of a middle ground between the capabilities of the PS2 and the PS3. With that in mind, a visually enhanced version of a last-gen game seems like an ideal fit for PS Vita and a good place to begin our revisitation of the hardware.
In this tech-skewed developer interview, the game makers talk us through the process of developing for Vita, revealing some new insights on how the hardware is utilised and some of the tricks of the trade in squeezing more performance out of the mobile chipset. Backing up the coverage is another first - Digital Foundry articles rely heavily upon video assets for judging aspects such as graphical features and performance and, thanks to some customised hardware, we can finally acquire direct-feed Vita visuals to pore over at our leisure and share with you.
But first, it's over to Just Add Water programmer Peter Memmott and JAW CEO/Oddworld development director Stewart Gilray to get some idea of what actually happens when a new piece of gaming technology arrives on the doorstep...
Digital Foundry: New hardware arrives in the office with a bunch of tools and docs. So how do you go about assessing the capabilities of a platform as different and unique as PlayStation Vita?
Peter Memmott: A good place to start is with the docs themselves and also the many code samples that are provided. These give you a hint as to what the hardware might be capable of and whether it will meet the demands of your project. One concern that we had at the beginning was how we would fully utilise the quad-core processor. For us it turned out that this was one of the keys to unlocking the full capabilities of the Vita.
Digital Foundry: Criterion Games told us that the development tools for Vita were in a different world compared to the other consoles they had worked with - which we assume is all of them. What's your assessment of Sony's offerings in this regard?
Peter Memmott: I would agree with that in general. I think the only real similarity to the PlayStation 3 are the online libraries, otherwise everything else is quite new. This isn't necessarily a bad thing as you need to get as close as you can to the hardware and this ultimately means having to cope with significant differences developing between different platforms.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...aystation-vita

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