The NGP took everyone by surprise last month with its sudden debut and powerful accusations. Not only has this created a brewing excitement in gaming communities, but a core development team for Sony has also applauded Sony’s new approach on the handheld market, stating that they are “much more developer-driven”.
Evolution Studios, the development team behind Motorstorm: Apocalypse, is eager to get their hands dirty with Sony’s Next Gen Portable primarily because it’s what they’ve wanted all along. Matt Southern, Evolution Studios director, explains the difference between Sony’s portable strategy now and then.
Instead of Sony handing hardware to developers and saying, ‘here’s our next device, make something cool’, it set about asking developers what they thought should go into the device, and what they thought would be cool.
Sony gathered a tremendous amount of feedback when in the design phase for the new handheld, and now with the list of developers already pledging their support, we can see where the excitement stems from.
Literally saying, ‘we’re thinking of a rear touch pad, what could you do with that?’ BigBig came up with Little Deviants, which I think is going to be one of the killer apps. So it’s almost kind of weird to be asked what I think of it because I told Sony what I think of it and, as a result, that’s reflected in the hardware. That’s happened right across, Japan, Asia, Europe and America, so in terms of first-party development it’s the machine we all wanted, and I think that’s starting to show in the games. It’s going to be a tremendous console for gamers, whether they’re core or hardcore.
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