8 1/2 wrote:And on Muramasa, high rez artwork does not increase the cost of animation. It would only require more intial artist time to create the assets, but that's likely very minimal compared to what you get back, and most artists would prefer to get as close to perfect as they can.
Sadly, most producers/publishers' patience has its limitations.
8 1/2 wrote:No one likely really WANTS to do lower-rez on the art side, and for a company like Vanillaware it would seem like terribly diminishing returns to focus on lower quality art as a cost-saving measure when that's the key selling feature of their titles. As we've seen with Cave, they create most of their more recent 2D art in high-rez, and then down-rez it for the arcade, not the reverse.
You sure Cave don't retouch their graphics in low resolutions? Vanillaware graphics don't really have pixel art looks (they are filtered to hell and back), but why Cave kept working with low resolutions, how do you think? As for "no one wanting to do lower-rez on art side", I beg to differ. Do you think we would get pixel art masterpieces such as
this and
that if the artists had to work with high resolutions?
8 1/2 wrote:I would suspect that releasing on the Wii was likely driven by the low cost to get licensed by Nintendo these days. For such a small title, you don't want to have to face off against Sony or Microsoft's approval process and licensing fees. With the Wii you get it on the shelves for much cheaper and with very little hassle from the more hands-off Nintendo. This is why so much shovelware can survive on the Wii, and why you don't see it as much on the other consoles. This is not to say that Muramasa is shovelware, just that it survives by squeaking through the same loopholes.
More likely there is much shovelware on the Wii because Wii is such a popular console (certainly not the other way round). The most popular platform gets the most shovelware; it's always the same.