Jason Vandenberghe - Creative Director of Red Steel 2

Wiitalia: In wich ways Retro Studios has been involved in Red Steel 2 Development?

Jason Vandenberghe: There’s some confusion about that. What happened was that at the early phases of the development of Red Steel 2 we had the opportunity to work with the Nintendo Producers of Metroid Prime. The Nintendo Group was helping out with resource and interface stuff. Those guys gave us a lot of informations about what works and what doesn’t work with the Wii MotionPlus. But no, we never worked with Retro, they were never involved with the project.

Wiitalia: some people are wondering if the game is designed also for left handed players.

JV: We had the ambition to create a left handed reverse mode where we just flip the screen around, like Zelda Twilight Princess. But the time constraints in the tecnology prevented us for being able to do that, but what we have found is that it actually works really well for left handed players.

There is a weird thing, and it’s that if you’re holding the Wiimote in your left hand, you’ll see the character using his right hand, but the moves are exactly the same: you slash lefto to right, the character slashes left to right.

There’s one exception: there is ony move in the game, the dragoon, wich is done holding A + B buttons to charge your move and then your throw it out like a freesbee. That move must be done left to right, you can’t do it right to left. Except for that, everything works fine.

Jason Vandenberghe - Red Steel 2 Creative Director

Wiitalia: The game looks very good, I think this is partly due to the fact that everything runs 60fps. Did you have to drop something to get these results?

JV: The game runs at 60fps but sometimes it is even more. (laugh) What often happens is a bad thing in games development: if you’ve built a game and then try to make it fit in 60fps, you have to take all that beautiful things that you’ve built and downsize them.

We have decided at the beginning to make the game run at 60fps. We knew from the very beginning of the project that the game needed it cause it’s a first person shooter.

It was a trade off. If we had decided to run at 30fps we would get twice as many polygons on the screen but the cost would have been too high. 60fps makes a game looks better, it’s more important than polycount in my opinion.

Wiitalia: what about the leak of a multiplayer mode?

JV: I really wanted a multiplayer mode for the game, I had many ideas concerning it. One of my favourite weapon in a multiplayer FPS was the Type-1 sword in Halo, it was so satisfying… I would have loved to make that kind of game.

We didn’t leave multiplayer off because it couldn’t be done, I think it could have been done. We had not enough time or resources to make a multiplayer mode. The choice we had to make was to make either a good single-player or an average crappy single & multiplayer game, and the good games are always the right choice.

If we will have a chance to make a sequel I would love to work on a multiplayer mode.