3

5 Minutes With: Tom Crago from Straight Right on Mass Effect Wii U

Advertisement

Our newest writer Scott Walters, has been busy of late, following news articles all over the place and writing up news to keep all our readers as well informed as possible.

During his galavanting around the internet, he managed to get in touch with Tom Crago, CEO of Straight Right, and ask him a few questions. Straight Right is the Australia-based studio working to bring Mass Effect 3 to the Wii U and was recently rumored to be bringing a AAA Square-Enix title to the Wii U.

Vooks:  “Hey hows it going. I’m a huge fan of all things Nintendo and WiiU, and as an Australian its fantastic to see an Aussie developer porting Mass Effect 3. Firstly I’d like to know how the Wii U has been to work with?[pullquote_right]It’s a powerful, versatile machine and fairly painless to code for. [/pullquote_right]

Tom: We’ve really enjoyed working on the Wii U. It’s a powerful, versatile machine and fairly painless to code for. From an architecture standpoint it’s straightforward and really just allows developers to get down to the business of making games. Certainly it’s different by design to the PS3 and 360 but pound for pound it compares very favorably.

Vooks: Does it feel like a powerful machine with a lot of potential and has their been any hurdles in porting Mass Effect 3? Do you know of any plans in the pipeline to consider porting the newly announced Mass Effect Trilogy?

Tom: Working on Mass Effect 3 has been a huge pleasure for us. There was obviously a significant technical challenge in bringing the original code base across to Wii U but once we got on top of that we were able to focus on the fun stuff, which was figuring out how we could enhance the overall experience by utilising the GamePad. We’re really happy with the extra functionality we’ve added, including interactive maps and an interactive power wheel. We were also able to sneak in a sweet new weapon.

We feel as though the game plays faster and more intuitively by virtue of the GamePad, and hope that fans of the series will check it out for that reason. Of course we’d love to bring the whole trilogy to the Wii U, but there are no plans in place for that right now.

Advertisement

Vooks: Will the WiiU port of Mass Effect 3 will be running at 1080p native, or will it be upscaled at all?

Tom: Mass Effect 3 will run at 720p, hardware upscaled to 1080p. It’s the same resolution as the original versions on PS3 and 360.

We also asked briefly about the recent rumor that Straight Right is porting a AAA Square-Enix title to the WiiU, but the question remains unanswered as Straight Right obviously isn’t ready to talk about that yet.

Thanks to Tom for spending the time to have a chat with us.

Advertisement

What's your reaction?
Awesome
0%
Oh wow!
0%
Great
0%
Fresh
0%
Hmm
0%
Disappointing!
0%
Grrrr
0%
About The Author
Scott Walters
3 Comments
  • Hero of Legend
    October 21, 2012 at 3:28 am

    Are they going to try and polish up the graphics? Maybe remove any slowdown and whatnot that might’ve been in the PS360 version?

    And what about the rest of the DLC like Leviathan? I guess that’s EA’s call, the game already includes all of the free DLC?

  • Elmer
    October 21, 2012 at 4:54 am

    Nice interview and great work by Straight Right, but EA obviously don’t care and/or are actively trying to sabotage efforts on the Wii U and Nintendo platforms in general. Sounds cynical, but more competent companies have done more corrupt things to justify less stupid long term positioning to their investors. In reactions to opinions like this people often respond with: “you don’t know the full situation”, “they’re a big company, they know what they’re doing” and that old classic, “No serious businessman would leave that potential business at the table if were available”. To that I say look at EA’s balance: $5 billion to $2.5 billion in one generation. In one quarter they lost $200 million dollars and blamed it on poor Wii game sales. That would only make sense if they spent > $200 million on Wii games (equivalent to 10 of the highest budget games on the Wii ever released being made by one company within the space of 3 months) and sold 0 copies. The sad reality is that corporations and the individuals that run them have repeatedly proven themselves just that incompetent, corrupt, petty and worse.

  • Jabjabs
    October 22, 2012 at 2:47 am

    Yeah pretty much, when the trilogy was announced for everything but the WiiU, EA basically threw Straight right under a bus.

You must log in to post a comment