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Nintendo: Porting Classic Games To 3DS Is Hard Work
Nintendo is slowly but surely working to bring retooled versions of some classic old-school games to the 3DS, complete with new-school 3D visuals. So far, only two – Excitebike and Xevious (Japan only so far) – have been released. While the company recently announced that it would be bringing the game everybody nobody had been waiting for a 3D version of, Urban Champions, to the 3DS, I think a lot of us are hoping for some more high profile titles to the system. According to Nintendo, the reason for the slow trickle of 3DS classic is that porting old games into three dimensions is a much more difficult process than you'd expect.
In a recent edition of Nintendo's "Iwata Asks" web feature, company head Satoru Iwata spoke with some of the men responsible for the 3D Classics series: Kazuto Nakaya, Daiji Imai, Kenta Tanaka, and Takao Nakano.
The men spoke about some of the design difficulties that arise when porting a game that was designed to be two-dimensional to 3D.
Speaking of their port of the shooter Xevious, Nakano commented, "In the original version, the game unfolds on a flat surface. The moment we made Solvalou [the ship you pilot in the game – Ed.] float in midair, all sorts of discrepancies arose. For example, when an enemy on the ground fired at Solvalou in the original, everything was on the same plane, so it didn't seem unusual if the bomb appeared at the same altitude as Solvalou the moment it was fired and then hit Solvalou right away. But with the Nintendo 3DS system, Solvalou is floating in midair. If the bomb suddenly appears – zing! – at the same altitude as Solvalou… We were like, "Huh? Something doesn't feel right!" [Laughs] Everything was off!"
In fact, one 3D Classics project – a recreation of the classic NES game Tennis – had to be abandoned altogether.
"A programming problem arose after changing the collision detection for the ball and racket from a plane to a 3D field," revealed Nakano. "It took as much work as making a tennis game from scratch. If there would be the surprise of seeing it become 3D, we might want to make it, but we had to conclude that the resultant value would not be worth our hard work, so we scrapped it."
Let's hope the team is learning how to overcome these challenges, as I think all 3DS owners are hungry for more of the 3D Classics series.
[via Gamasutra]
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