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Dan Adelman on Axiom Verge's path to Wii U, why it's the best version

by rawmeatcowboy
24 August 2016
GN Version 5.0

A portion of an NWR interview with Dan Adelman...

NWR: It has been quite a journey to bring the game to the Wii U - what were some of the roadblocks and how did you overcome them?

DA: So the biggest challenge was that when Tom started working on this game, and at this point it was six, nearly seven years ago, he started working in something called XNA which is actually a Xbox technology. It was a development framework, and Microsoft abandoned that. In its place, someone created something called Monogame, which is essentially an open-source version of XNA. Originally it was very easy to release it on say, the PC, and it's also available on the PS4 because PS4 got support for the Monogame framework on their console. But for the Wii U, since Monogame wasn't natively supported, we basically had to take the game and port the entire game engine to C++. We worked with a company called BlitWorks who specializes in those porting services and they were able to get the game up and running on the Wii U very effectively.

NWR: What makes the Wii U version special, and why should it be picked up on that platform specifically?

DA: In my opinion, it's the best version, and there's a couple of things that stand out about it. First of all, it's the only console version that has a leaderboard functionality for speedrunners. There's a dedicated speedrun mode in all of the versions of the game, but if you get a good time you basically have to record it yourself somewhere. On Wii U, you can compare yourself to the global leaderboard which is very nice for Nintendo fans. The other primary benefit of the Wii U version is that you can always see the map on the GamePad. The whole theme of the game is exploration, so this game compared to a lot of other modern Metroidvania games does not lead you by the hand and tell you where to go next. There's no arrows that point like "Next, go here!", you constantly have to be checking the map to see what have I explored, what have I not explored yet, and so having that always on the GamePad makes it very easy to keep playing without disrupting the action. And of course, the last one is that you have the ability to play off the TV, so if somebody else is using the TV and you still want to play, you can play in off TV mode.

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