Tomonobu Itagaki, leader of Team ninja, had some interesting things to say about the Xbox 360 in the latest publication of Famitsu, the Japanese gaming magazine, calling it a “buffed-up Sega Saturn” - making an obvious reference to the original multi-processor console. While he said that the standard single core processors are much easier to program for (which I can attest to), the multi-core structures have become the new trend in technology.

“The Xbox 360 is said to be a machine that’s easy to develop for,” he said, “but that’s because it has a good line-up of middleware and infrastructure. So it should be easy to create something that’s up to a certain level [of quality]. But if you try to take advantage of the Xbox 360’s full hardware specs, you’ll find out about the difficulty in programming for a multi-core machine. [The Xbox 360] has enough power without all the cores going into use. Even if just a single core is used for a game, it will still be several more times powerful than machines up until now. But we aren’t satisfied at that kind of a level. Our programmers are having fun playing around with the machine. They’re swinging around all the cores and making a game that shows the powers of the Xbox 360.”

Itagaki did have some reservations about Microsoft not using a next-generation DVD format, such as HD-DVD, because of the capacity limitation, saying that if the footage that they used at E3 of Dead or Alive 4 was prerendered, it could easily take up 2 GB of space.

The exciting news is that Itagaki let slip some evidence that Microsoft is going to announce something big in Japan later this month: “We’re currently thinking of whether we should create a new trailer for the upcoming Xbox 360 announcement in July, or if we should go straight ahead to work on the completion of the game.”

We’ll have to wait and see what this announcement is, but it sounds as though it’s going to be exciting … at least for gamers in Japan.

Provided by Geekstreak