Gaming Death Jr. DS... How did they mess it up? :S

[Kouen Hasuki]

OK, I started on the PSP here now my usage of the DS hasn't been so bad I understand its no where near as powerful but this game made my jaw drop...

How did the Developers make the DS Death Jr game so bad? It's graphics (While not everything but is interesting to my next point) would make the PS1 embarrassed and it has severe Frame Rate issues some fights it feels it drops to 10 FPS!

Going into this game I wasn't expecting great graphics but I was expecting it to be playable...

Here is an image comparison between Death JR DS and Death JR 2 for PSP (Didn't have Death JR 1 to hand)

Given what the PSP one looks like I would have expected the slowdown to be on that platform.
I would love to speculate with other tempers on what went wrong!

 

[Hadrian]

Basically a different development team handled this game, which was clearly only done because the DS was doing well so. Backbone Entertainment was always cited as the developer and they have various studios around North America (most used to be part of Digital Eclipse). Backbone Emeryville is one of the studios and that team came up with Death Jr in the first place and therefore they did the "core" games in the series which were for PSP and later Wii.

Backbone Vancover did the DS game, now I would have thought that this could have been a good platformer (even though I thought the PSP games were mediocre at best) as they handled the isometric Spyro GBA games, which were pretty good and while not as good as the PSX versions still were very good translations of the series. However at the same time as developing Death Jr DS, they were working on the crappy Sonic Rivals 2 for PSP, the excellent Bombeman Live & Space Invaders Extreme for XBLA. They were also halfway through developing the pretty good Monster Lab for Wii, this is a game that the developers actually talked about and showcased a lot at various gaming shows so I get the impression that this game was their main priority. As well as that they were also porting 14 arcade titles to XBLA as well...so resources were very stretched.

Now look at the workload that Backbone Emeryville had when doing the first Death Jr...they've just finished doing GTA Advance. That was it. For the 2nd game, they only had NBA Ballers in development so no surprise that the studio that came up with the series and had more of a investment in it who also had a lot less workload did better than a team that was technically were just doing it as a "work for hire" job while at the same time handling other titles that were either part of very well known franchises or in Monster Lab's case, something that they seemed to be their main priority.

 

[Kouen Hasuki]

Still a shame they didn't take any pride in the work they did on DJ: DS and actually hold it back a bit to at least optimise the code