Could Resistance have been created on
uh, Gameboy?
The first topic is whether or not I was blowing smoke when I said It would have been very, very difficult to create Resistance on any other platform. What I should have said was, It would have been very, very difficult to create Resistance as designed on any other platform. You make your design choices based on what you have available and the PS3 and Xbox360 are very different machines with different strengths. We designed Resistance with the PS3s strengths in mind. In several other interviews and presentations Ive elaborated on what we think those strengths are and why we think the machine is pretty damn amazing.
But as many of the IGN posters have correctly pointed out, with enough redesign and enough time almost any game could be made to run on any platform. This has been proved in the past and is being proved right now by other franchises purportedly being created for PS3, PC and Xbox360 simultaneously. (And Ill bet there are PSP and DS versions in the works for plenty of those games as well.) Certainly there will be differences between all of those SKUs differences that will be analyzed as thoroughly as they were for SKUs on previous generations of hardware.
Just for fun, Ill elaborate a bit more on the initial choice we made. Even though we as a company havent released a game on a non-Sony platform, there are plenty of people at Insomniac who have. So when it came to making a choice between PS3 and Xbox360, we didnt go in blind. Certainly our experience working with Sony on PS1 and PS2 helped, but being independent we had to do what we thought was best for our games. And we had to choose one system because our current philosophy is to create technology specialized for one platform - enabling us to get the most out of it. We chose the PS3 because we believe that it has the best long-term potential of any next gen platform. The amount of raw processing power that it offers and the fact that we can get down to the metal on the platform fits our programming style. We like the fact that right out of the box, using the SPUs allows you to do some incredible things. But what we like even better is that as we refine our technology technology weve designed specifically for the types of games we make, well be able to see bigger and bigger wins using the Cell.
The question at the heart of the debate is whether or not the PS3 is more powerful than the Xbox360 and there is no way I will get sucked into that one. Sure, I and others here at Insomniac have our own opinions (and are admittedly biased) but no matter what I say and no matter what people see at launch, the debate will continue long after the PS3 has been released. And since different games focus on different things it may be very hard to make true "apples to apples" comparisons. To all of us at Insomniac the most important question has always been, is the game fun?
