Report: SNK Playmore To Focus On Wii

Talking in an online interview, SNK Playmore USA president Ben Herman has claimed that the Wii will receive the most support of any next generation format from the company, due to its greater suitability to the publisher’s traditional 2D games. According to the interview on Advanced Media Network, SNK Playmore has no plans to release any further titles on the Xbox, and feels 2D games are not suitable for the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360. Sherman also confirms that Sony of America rejected a number of 2D projects from the company for the PlayStation 2 because they did not correspond to the company’s graphical standards, as well as limiting the number of releases that featured two retro titles in one package. SNK Playmore has already announced the compilation Metal Slug Anthology for the Wii, making the surprising announcement that the games would be retrofitted to take advantage of the Wii remote rather than just using the “shell” controller. The company’s plans for the Wii’s virtual console are still unclear, however, with Sherman himself admitting that that he is in talks with Nintendo about older NES and SNES titles, as well as potentially the Neo-Geo AES games for which the company is most famous. However, the greater storage size of titles such as Samurai Shodown, Fatal Fury and The King of Fighters, as well as possible conflicts of interest from selling titles such as Metal Slug in stores, may make this impossible. Indeed, Sherman indicated that that the company’s interest in releasing titles for Xbox Live Arcade had been to a degree limited because of a lack of memory and a need to compress game data onto an Xbox 360 memory unit, in order to support users without a hard drive.