5 Minutes With: Tom Crago from Straight Right on Mass Effect Wii U

Our newest writer Scott Walters, has been busy of late, following news articles all over the place and writing up news to keep all our readers as well informed as possible.

During his galavanting around the internet, he managed to get in touch with Tom Crago, CEO of Straight Right, and ask him a few questions. Straight Right is the Australia-based studio working to bring Mass Effect 3 to the Wii U and was recently rumored to be bringing a AAA Square-Enix title to the Wii U.

Vooks:  “Hey hows it going. I’m a huge fan of all things Nintendo and WiiU, and as an Australian its fantastic to see an Aussie developer porting Mass Effect 3. Firstly I’d like to know how the Wii U has been to work with?[pullquote_right]It’s a powerful, versatile machine and fairly painless to code for. [/pullquote_right]

Tom: We’ve really enjoyed working on the Wii U. It’s a powerful, versatile machine and fairly painless to code for. From an architecture standpoint it’s straightforward and really just allows developers to get down to the business of making games. Certainly it’s different by design to the PS3 and 360 but pound for pound it compares very favorably.

Vooks: Does it feel like a powerful machine with a lot of potential and has their been any hurdles in porting Mass Effect 3? Do you know of any plans in the pipeline to consider porting the newly announced Mass Effect Trilogy?

Tom: Working on Mass Effect 3 has been a huge pleasure for us. There was obviously a significant technical challenge in bringing the original code base across to Wii U but once we got on top of that we were able to focus on the fun stuff, which was figuring out how we could enhance the overall experience by utilising the GamePad. We’re really happy with the extra functionality we’ve added, including interactive maps and an interactive power wheel. We were also able to sneak in a sweet new weapon.

We feel as though the game plays faster and more intuitively by virtue of the GamePad, and hope that fans of the series will check it out for that reason. Of course we’d love to bring the whole trilogy to the Wii U, but there are no plans in place for that right now.

Vooks: Will the WiiU port of Mass Effect 3 will be running at 1080p native, or will it be upscaled at all?

Tom: Mass Effect 3 will run at 720p, hardware upscaled to 1080p. It’s the same resolution as the original versions on PS3 and 360.

We also asked briefly about the recent rumor that Straight Right is porting a AAA Square-Enix title to the WiiU, but the question remains unanswered as Straight Right obviously isn’t ready to talk about that yet.

Thanks to Tom for spending the time to have a chat with us.