God damn. It’s incredible.
Really impressive. Still waiting for the catch, but you can’t deny the power on display here. That Death guy is cute too.
It’s like an N64 in your pants!
Holy crap.
Ok, they can get 300$ for that. I wonder if the ngage folks are finally packing up their desks now, hehe.
Holy Crap! Lions!
Er…sorry…
That was amazing. I might be sold if they can put some games on it with depth. If there’s the equivalent of Advance Wars, Mario Golf, or Tactics Orge on this thing, they’ll have my cash.
Very impressive. That Death Jr. game looks pretty stylish, too. I like the part where he’s skipping through a field of daisies, and the daisies wilt and die all around him. Funny. I didn’t realize that death traditionally carries a rocket launcher, though.
They couldn’t get a vintage sickle past the ratings board.
It looks good but if this thing kills off 2D console gaming I’m going to be very unhappy.
–Dave
I’m starting to think it’s just an inevitability. Doesn’t seem to be much point in laying the blame anywhere in particular.
NB: This is running under emulation – there is no actual hardware available yet. (Mentioned in one of their other GDC presentations.)
Also, they are stretching the truth when they say the PSP is more powerful than the PS2. The PSP lacks programmable vector processors…
Well, it’s hard to tell from the one game by a rookie developer, but it certainly doesn’t look PS2 level. More like a N64 with more polys and improved texturing, though I admit that I haven’t played a N64 game in a while.
‘an N64’ sounds so much better in my mind.
It may happen one day, but I doubt the PSP will do it. No $300 handheld–even one that looks that good–is going to supplant the Gameboy’s market. If Sony handles this right, I’m sure the PSP will do well, but I doubt it will come close to doing GBA numbers.
You should go back and play one. This is much better.
You should go back and play one. This is much better.[/quote]
I am steady in my resolve. It’s about Banjo-Kazooie/Rayman 2 level. Looking at the video again, I will say that the particle effects are much, much, much better than the N64 could do. Overall the PSP looks somewhere between N64 and Dreamcast.
I was kinda wondering why several sections of their demo were very low framerate, but I guess it was the amount of particle effects they had flying around everywhere (several repeats of the same scene with green things flying around with trails, while Death Jr. stands on a ledge swinging his scythe around). Game looks like it has a distinctive vibe about it, so hopefully it’ll be decent in terms of gameplay and mechanics.
Quote of the month!
I think you’d better get ready to deal with it…
Very nifty graphics. I want one.
No, it’s not live emulation either. The software emulation is not running in real-time. They just stitch together the emulator output into a movie that would presumably be running at the same frame rate as the actual game. (They did this for the tech demos as well.)
Also, Backbone is apparently the merger of Digital Eclipse and another company whose name I forget, so they’re not a rookie developer either.
Does anyone know what the VRam is supposed to be for this thing?
The video memory for PS products is always ridiculously small, and it seems to me if you overclocked PS1 with say 16meg VRam you’d be able to make a game that looked about this good.
-Drew
The rumor going around was that RAM was an issue in the spec. One reason that was rumored for it being pushed back to next year was the RAM. The amount initially given to developers was ridiculously small.
–Dave