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GR: How much work is it to take a last-gen game andupdate and improve it for the current generation,versus just going and creating an entirely newsequel?
YH: It really takes about as long to do a game like this as it would to do an entirely new game. And one thing that I feel strongly about isthat it's not something that (just) anybody can do. If you're not familiar with,and haven't worked on something like Ninja Gaiden before, you couldn't just bringin some brand new guyand say, "Here, remake this, or re-envision this for a new platform." Because they wouldn't have all the expertise, and all of the knowledge and experience that goes into making Ninja Gaiden in the first place.
For us, the process of remastering this game for PS3 has a lot of aspects to it,and one of those is taking the core gameplay of Ninja Gaiden, keeping it the way it was, keeping what makes Ninja Gaidengreat, but also going in andmaking all the necessary improvements and doing a lot of tweaks and making our action engine the best that it can be. We still feel that Ninja Gaiden is relevant, even as a three-year-old game; if you pop it out and play it, it's still fun. But we are not content to keep it that way, and we want to make sure that it continues to be the number-one action game in 2007 as well.
Another element, of course, is the graphics, as you guys saw today. We're putting a whole lot of effort into making sure that those graphics meet the expectations that people have for next-generation, and for PS3, and that's why we have it running at 60 frames a second, solid. And we also have real-timeself-shadows on all characters, which we're the first game to do both simultaneously. And it's things like that that we feel set this title apart, and will make it a benchmark for next-generation action games.
GR: Of all the things that you're able to do inSigma that you couldn't do in the original, what are you most proud of?
YH: There's a lot of things, so many that it's hard to list. If I went into specifics, it wouldn't really make a veryinteresting answer. I think the best thing is to play the games back to back and say...Our goal is to have people say, after they've played Ninja Gaiden Sigma,that there's no way I could go back and play the original one, afterseeing this.As far as I'm concerned, that's a job well done for us.
GR: In how many ways is this going to wipe the floor with Genji: Days of the Blade?
YH: (Laughs.) Things were tough for Genji,because (the developers) were burdened with a task that nobody wants, which is to be kind of the showcase for a brand new system at launch. And as a result of that... my opinion is that they had to emphasize graphics. And in order to get the game out in time, they were forced to use all of their manpower on getting graphics that looked next-gen, and as a result, the action has really suffered. The original Genji on PS2 was running at 60 frames a second, but Genji on PS3 is running at 30, and then you go in and you see that the action itself is not very compelling at all. So, I feel kind of sorry for them for being forced to do that, but as an action game, it's really no comparison.
