Ready at Dawn on difficulties of porting Okami to Wii

We often see Nintendo Wii games come with PS2 versions, but make no mistake: porting from one console to another is no cakewalk. That’s what we learned after Ready at Dawn discussed about the difficulties of porting Konami and Clover Studio‘s Okami to the Wii. You’ll understand why by reading the full article.

All signs say Okami‘s port to the Nintendo Wii is ready to ship on its scheduled March 25 release date. The wait may be getting unbearable for fans, but according to Ready at Dawn who handled the port of Capcom‘s colorful classic which was originally developed by the now defunct Clover Studio, making the PS2 game run on the white hot console wasn’t exactly easy.

When asked by IGN about the difficulties of porting Okami, Ready at Dawn replied:

Well, first and foremost you have to learn the specificities of the console itself, learn what makes it tick. Then you have to get the code to even compile on the new platform, different processors and different compilers make this a fairly difficult task.

Beyond that it was fairly easy to get the barebones of the game engine running and then just add more and more things to get all the game ported over.

We were previously told that Okami on the Wii is identical to its original version. However, Ready at Dawn admitted that some changes were made. “There were a couple of effects that we simply couldn’t reproduce exactly on the Wii because the rendering pipelines of both platforms are completely different,” said the company behind development of Daxter and God of War: Chains of Olympus.

Ready at Dawn continued, “We adapted those to look as closely as possible like their PS2 counterparts but they’re not exactly the same per say.” Fortunately, aside from giving Okami a 480p and 16:9 widescreen treatment, its reincarnation on the Wii has other positives. Talking about actual gameplay, Ready at Dawn said, “It’s just so much more fluid and intuitive on the Wii.”

For the full interview with IGN, click on the “via” link below.