WP: Who has the honor to speak with us? State your name, rank and occupation!
I'm Matt Morton, and I'm a producer at Sony Computer Entertainment America.
WP: Fat Princess: Fistful of Cake is another PSN title that's making the jump from PS3 to PSPgo. What are some of the enhancements that we're going to see in the portable title?
MM: Actually, "Fistful of Cake" was added on to the title because there's significantly more content to this. They're adding 50 percent more, so that means more maps, more game modes, extending out the single-player story line to it. We realize it's going to be on a portable system so not everybody is going to be in a Wi-Fi hotspot or in an ad-hoc scenario, but this title does support both.
WP: How many players are we talking about when you're doing multiplayer?
MM: We couldn't actually get the 32 players that the PS3 can do, but we do have 16, which basically constitutes eight AI and eight human, so you can have matches with up to eight human players, and it will flesh out eight AI to make it a full 16-player match.
WP: Tell us a little bit about the art style. Obviously on the PS3, you have a large 1080p screen to go with it, and on the PSPgo, it's a much lower resolution. What did you do to make it work on the lower-resolution screen?
MM: Well, the developer who's handling Fistful of Cake is SuperVillain Studios out of Orange County, or Irvine, and they're awesome. They're wizards with their technology, and they've been able to actually bring all of the characteristics, the feel, the color and the style. They're just faithfully representing everything from the Fat Princess IP. Also, Titan Studios, the creator of the PS3 version, has been consulting with them since day one, so it was going to always be a very faithful representation. The screen on the PSPgo is very, very sharp and very, very clear, and it allows us to really show everything off. The colors pop. Everything is really nice and crisp. You still get the characteristics and the feeling of the game.
WP: You mentioned that there's more content here. Can you tell us a little bit about the later levels that we're going to see?
MM: Yeah, actually, on the single-player side, since we realize that not everybody is going to be in an Internet access area when you're going to have this along with you, we wanted to flesh out the story line a little bit. Even from chapter one, it immediately starts to deviate from the PS3 story line. We actually have 15 different chapters in this, compared to the nine or 10 from the PS3 version. Also, we've got new map types, new game modes, like Dilapidated, where the hat machines are not functional at the beginning. You only have access to the worker hats, so you have to gather the resources to repair the hat machines before they'll even spit out hats, so you're immediately forced into a one-class scenario.
WP: Would you say that this is more of an enhanced remake of Fat Princess or a sequel?
MM: Not really a sequel. It's kind of more like a sidestep or a tangent. It's just kind of an addition to the Fat Princess universe and IP. We didn't want to do just a port from the PS3. We wanted to give the PSP owners a good chance to experience the Fat Princess IP, and if they have it on the PS3, we didn't want them to feel like they're doubling up on the same purchase. We want to give them more for the value of their purchase. SuperVillain is doing an absolutely great job of making that happen.More articles about Fat Princess: Fistful of Cake