Nano Assault Neo

Recently, we reported that Martin Sauter of Shin'en Multimedia — the studio responsible for the Nano Assault and Jett Rocket series — had made very positive comments regarding the Wii U.

Now it's the turn of Shin'en's Manfred Linzner to make encouraging noises about the platform. Speaking to HD Warriors, Linzner said:

We only know you need to treat the Wii U differently then those consoles because of a very different and in our view more accessible architecture. There is a lot power to unleash in the Wii U. Enough power for many years to come, at least from our point of view.

We know many people see us as Wii U experts. That is because we got a lot of technical praise for Nano Assault Neo but it’s not well deserved. Only very tiny bits of Nano Assault Neo took advantage of the Wii U architecture. We had the game from start in 720p at 60fps. We drew the complete game world twice for TV and GamePad. We had tons of overlays, special effects and even camera streaming and still had no GPU or CPU problems. So we simply had no reason to dig deep into the architecture. We didn’t expected to be seen as the spearhead of Wii U graphics as it undeserved, when looking at what the Wii U can truly achieve.

He also mentioned the system's GPU, which he claims is much more powerful than the tech seen in the Xbox 360 and PS3:

The Wii U GPU is several generations ahead of the current gen. It allows many things that were not possible on consoles before. If you develop for Wii U you have to take advantage of these possibilities, otherwise your performance is of course limited. Also your engine layout needs to be different. You need to take advantage of the large shared memory of the Wii U, the huge and very fast EDRAM section and the big CPU caches in the cores. Especially the workings of the CPU caches are very important to master. Otherwise you can lose a magnitude of power for cache relevant parts of your code. In the end the Wii U specs fit perfectly together and make a very efficient console when used right.

It's always nice to hear developers speak so glowingly about Nintendo hardware — do Linzner's comments fill you with a bit more confidence for the Wii U's future? Or are you already positive regarding the system's long-term chances? Post a comment to tell us your thoughts.

[source hdwarriors.com, via gonintendo.com]