Over een paar weken zal de oude Nintendo 64 classic Perfect Dark op Xbox Live Marketplace verschijnen in een High Definition remake. Zo kon je afgelopen week hier op Eigenwereld.nl al een walktrough van de game zien, en vandaag verscheen er een developer interview op de website Worthplaying waar Ken Lobb ons lekker maakt voor deze game.

WP: Can you tell us a little bit about how Perfect Dark came to Xbox Live? What differences or improvements are we going to see? A lot of people have emulators, so if you've got a Nintendo 64 emulator and you're running Perfect Dark in HD on your PC, what's the difference between that and playing Perfect Dark on Xbox Live?

KL: The difference is that if you're doing that, you're running emulation and you're looking at textures from the N64. What we did was take the original code, ported it to the 360, including deep Live integration. We used the same geometry from the original game, but with all-new textures. However, we also recreated the characters, recreated all the weapons, and rebuilt skyboxes so basically; all the art you see is all new.

Of course, anything that you could do in multiplayer in the original game, you can now do on Live. Co-op, counter-op, all the challenges in multiplayer are all playable on Live. You can even play the multiplayer part with eight players online. Do that with your emulator! (laughs)

WP: You talk about porting. Obviously, with the N64 being a MIPS machine, it's a lot different than the core on the Xbox 360. Was this a port from scratch? Did you do some high level emulation for the code? What's involved in the backend?

KL: It's a port from scratch. Partially, that's not our chipset, but it's more because we wanted to integrate Live, and when you want to integrate Live into code that wasn't online in the first place, it's actually easier to start closer to scratch. The geometry came out of the game, the music came out of the game, and the sound effects came out of the game. We had the original, so we have it at a higher bit rate. It's not emulation.