http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/07/01/news_6128504.html
Itagaki talks Xbox 360

Team Ninja guru also further confirms Microsoft will make a major 
announcement in Japan later this month.
In an interview published in the latest issue of Famitsu Xbox Magazine, 
Tecmo producer and Team Ninja head honcho Tomonobu Itagaki talked more about 
his impressions on the Xbox 360. When asked about the console's triple-core 
IBM PowerPC processor design, Itagaki called it a "buffed-up Sega Saturn," 
as the old console was also multi-processor, coming with two, 32-bit CPUs. 
He said that a single-CPU machine is easier for programming, but multi-core 
structures have become the recent trend.

"The Xbox 360 is said to be a machine that's easy to develop for, but that's 
because it has a good line-up of middleware and infrastructure. So it should 
be easy to create something that's up to a certain level [of quality]. But 
if you try to take advantage of the Xbox 360's full hardware specs, you'll 
find out about the difficulty in programming for a multi-core machine," said 
Itagaki.

"The Xbox 360 has enough power without all the cores going into use. Even if 
just a single core is used for a game, it will still be several more times 
powerful than machines up until now. But we aren't satisfied at that kind of 
a level. Our programmers are having fun playing around with the machine. 
They're swinging around all the cores and making a game that shows the 
powers of the Xbox 360."

Itagaki said that the Xbox 360's 512MB of main memory is more than enough 
for games, but he feels that the machine's media might bring up some 
problems. He said he would have preferred if Microsoft adopted the 
high-capacity HD-DVD format, but said, given the next-gen disc format wars, 
he could live with Microsoft's decision.

"Another reason why [Microsoft] went with the 9GB DVD format (dual-layered 
DVDs can contain up to 9.4 GB) is that American and European developers tend 
to use real-time rendered cutscenes. But Japanese developers use a lot of 
pre-rendered cutscenes, so the DVD format brings a bit of an anxiety. The 
screen resolution for Xbox 360 games will be in high definition, so the 
pre-rendered movies are going to be pretty large. If we encoded the Dead Or 
Alive 4 trailer from E3 in high definition in a quality acceptable to us, it 
will easily be about 2GB. With DOA4, we'll be using the disc's capacity to 
its full extent. We started development on DOA4 pretty early, and we didn't 
know what disc format the Xbox 360 was going to adopt. So when we learned 
about it, we were really knocked out".

Itagaki also revealed that the DOA4 demo trailer shown during E3 was 
actually done with an alpha development kit for Xbox 360. He said that his 
team received Xbox 360 beta kits very recently, and that his staff is having 
fun with it.

The Team Ninja head also further confirmed that Microsoft is planning a 
major announcement in Japan this month. "We're currently thinking of whether 
we should create a new trailer for the upcoming Xbox 360 announcement in 
July, or if we should go straight ahead to work on the completion of the 
game," he said. "We'll play around with the beta kit for a little bit more 
and decide."

When Famitsu Xbox said to Itakagi that fans were afraid that Team Ninja 
could end up abandoning the Xbox 360 after the release of Sony's PlayStation 
3, he commented, "Team Ninja will not disappoint their fans." Itagaki added, 
"To be honest, we're too busy on the development of DOA4 to think about 
anything else."

When asked for his opinion on the PlayStation 3, Itagaki commented that he 
respects the fact Sony is trying to "create a computer that comes from 
Japan." However, he also added that he hopes Sony will make a machine that 
actually runs according to its listed hardware specs. "A machine that 
doesn't run according to its promised CPU frequency is out of the question," 
he said.

By Staff -- GameSpot
POSTED: 07/01/05 10:42 AM PST


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