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Degausser on 15 January 2011
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RolStoppable said:
Degausser said:

Most of that I agree with - the part is take issue is at the end. I don't believe you can just take a PSP game, put it on Wii and upscale the resolution and volia you have a fine working Wii game. I guess my take is that the art assets used on a handheld game simply wouldn't hold up in 480i, and you'd ultimately have raise the by over 3x to get the Wii version running properly. We've seen PSP ports like MoH:H2 take a good 6 months to churn out, with the developers stating that artwork / graphical stuff is being redone.

"This is really the 'Special Edition'," says Backbone producer James Stanley, who tells us that compared to the PSP game, the Wii version will have more polygons, higher-resolution textures, more voice acting, better pacing, splitscreen play for co-op, and an improved user interface designed to make navigation and weapon selection easier, along with tech-friendly features like 480p and Dolby Pro Logic II support

 There's very little online that explains any of this, or why PSP / DS dev cost is significiently cheaper, so we're really just debating your guesswork of what happens in a PSP / Wii port against my guesswork in one. I still believe your last sentence suggests that it is cheaper to make a Wii game by making a PSP game and then porting it to the Wii, rather then just making a Wii game - which common sense dictates can't possibly be true.

 My take on things is while resolution can just be happily scaled from handheld to 1080p, the actual art assets the game has arn't so easy. The higher the resolution, the more you're spending on producing these art assets, the more the budget. You can't take a game built with PSP's art assets and just stick it on Wii, you'll have to do alot of work to make it acceptable (acceptable not being such that is looks like SMG, but such that it actually passes quality control), and that's where the budget discrpencys come in and why average handheld developement is so much cheaper.

 Again any sort of link or citation would be nice, no matter how much common sense you think it is. From what I'm gathering your logic seems to suggest to me it'd be possible to get these $15m games like Dante's Inferno, Army of Two, Split Second etc up and running in an acceptable, realeasable state on the Wii for just $1m-2m. I know Wii games are typically cheaper to make, but we both know that's unrealistic.

You can take a PSP game and slap it on the Wii, just look up DiRT 2. The Wii even has added splitscreen multiplayer and both versions were released at the same time. Your MoH:H2 example doesn't counter this point, because it's obvious that they decided to put additional work into the Wii version, but that is not required to make a PSP game run on the Wii.

How can that not be true? Do you think the 360 port of Raving Rabbids costed more than an actual from the ground up built game for the 360? Do you believe that the Wii version of FFCC: Echoes of Time was as costly to develop as an actual Wii game?

Once again, DiRT 2 is just that and it passed the quality control.

Who knows how much exactly the PSP versions of these HD games did cost to make, but we don't need to know the exact figure. A PSP game like those is of acceptable quality to be released on the Wii. Of course they aren't as good as the HD counterparts, but that was never what this debate is about. If you can port a game to the PSP, you might as well make it for the Wii at the same time, because the effort it takes is not more than making a HD game a multiplatform release between the 360 and PS3.

 Dirt 2 also isn't a valid point for the very exact same reason you say MoH:H2 isn't - because they did extra work and put split screen multiplayer in, thus they obviously had to put extra people on the port job. The trend I'm finding with all PSP to Wii ports is that they often take a good 5 or 6 months, and require the developers to do alot of work on updating the graphics, as well as adding other features. 

 Unless theres a link or something detailing the PSP / Wii porting process we'll just have to agree to disagree. I don't believe you can get games like Dante's Inferno / Split second up and running on the Wii for a budget of $1m / $2m, when typical Wii exclusive games costs are much higher. (Red Steel, $12m, Deadly Creatures $4m etc).