Nintendo Cafe

Rayman’s Creator: Nintendo Wii U Is Surprisingly Powerful!

“What surprises me with Wii U is that we don’t have many technical problems. It’s really running very well, in fact. We’re not obliged to constantly optimize things. Even on the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of Rayman Origins, we had some fill-rate issues and things like that.

The Nintendo Wii U is quite powerful. Surprisingly powerful. And there’ a lot of memory. You can really have huge textures, and it’s crazy because sometimes the graphic artist – we built our textures in very high-definition. They could be used in a movie. Then we compress them, but sometimes they forget to do the compression and it still works!”

We can push what the console can do; push it to its limits. And of course, we have a new lighting engine. In fact, the game engine for Origins was mostly just classic sprites in HD, but now we can light them and add shadows and all these things. So there is some technical innovation with the engine itself.” said Michel Ancel, the creator of Rayman.