Nintendo’s had a difficult time trying to explain to the world exactly what the Nintendo Wii U is, and what it’s capable of. It’s been especially sketchy – since day one – about its raw graphical power.
Sometimes honesty is the best policy, though. Especially when lead game developers start blabbing that the console’s engine room lags behind the competition…
Tekken Tag Tournament 2’s lead developer Katsuhiro Harada has revealed the inherent difficulties in making cross platform games now that the Wii U is included in the list: “As far as graphical processing and such, it’s not much of an issue. But as far as the CPU goes, the clock is kinda low.”
Should Nintendo stop making hardware?
Ouch. He went on to say that there are work arounds, but that the problem is caused by Nintendo wanting to keep power use down – Presumably to make sure that the wireless controller stays alive longer than the average in-game movie sequence.
“I guess they’re trying to keep power consumption down so we have to come up with creative ways to get around that and that’s taking a little bit of time,” continued Harada.
“For example on PS3 it was kind of difficult at first, but if you made good use of the different cores, you could split up the processing tasks and you could achieve very good effects. But this is kind of a different issue than that.”
While Nintendo’s confident that the Wii U will be able to provide the same experience as its rival consoles for all multi-platform games, this may well ring investor alarm bells. Having a lead developer at a top-tier studio suggest that making flagship titles run on the machine is a hard task isn’t exactly the kind of ripple you want extending into the rest of the industry.
Via Digital Spy
