TGS: Factor 5's Eggebrecht On Motion Control, Downloadable Turrican

Author: by Brandon Sheffield, Tokyo

During the Tokyo Game Show, Gamasutra caught up with Factor 5 head Julian Eggebrecht, who was on hand to promote Lair (Rise from Lair in Japan). This short Q&A discusses the company’s future interest in motion control games, Eggebrecht’s impressions of the recently announced Dual Shock controller, and the possibility of a high-res Turrican on XBLA and PSN. Would you consider using motion control in any downloadable games you may be working on? Julian Eggebrecht: It totally depends on the game. On the one hand, I think that especially motion controlled stuff works better in smaller quirkier games, so that certainly would make a lot of sense, to try it in there. On the other hand, if we tried another huge subject that would warrant motion control, we’d use it again. Right now, to be quite honest, all the projects I’m involved with either have no motion control or have nothing planned for it, but never say never. It’s not like we’re the motion control addicts or anything. What do you think of the new Dual Shock controller? JE: I think it rocks – I’d love to do a patch for Lair, to get the rumble in there. It just about didn’t work out for us for Lair, because this is basically one OS past the one that we shipped with, which I think is a shame, because it’s a natural fit, especially when you’re ramming into other characters. Also the fighting feedback is awesome. So if Sony gives us a chance to do a patch, we’ll offer it. We prepared Lair for things like (patching), and it all comes down to whether Sony offers it. I think it would be fantastic if all the current titles could offer rumble support. But they gave out a list of the original run-down of titles, where it lists a number of titles that will be patched. And Lair, if we do it, would be in the same category. When were you shown the rumble capabilities? JE: It’s been around for a few months at least. For us, the one tricky thing is we were quite worried how heavy it would get with the rumble, but in the end it really came down to the OS revision we were shipping with. That’s why I think all these titles up to Uncharted will have to be patched. Would you be interested in releasing a high-res version of Turrican for downloadable platforms? Yeah absolutely, both for XBLA and PSN, it’d be fantastic. I think that probably a high-res Turrican more based on the Amiga Turricans would be great on those platforms. We obviously have the Virtual Console out there on the Nintendo side, and that’d obviously work well for the Genesis and Super Nintendo Turricans. So yeah, we’re talking!