Ease of development *does* matter:

[Guest]

The GameCube hasn't even been released yet and already major publishers are realizing the potentional. In these two instances, GCN ports of PS2 titles are receiving visual upgrades. Sure, the PS2 might technically be capable of displaying better visuals, but these reports show that developers can achieve similiar visuals on the GCN with much less work.

http://cube.ign.com/news/36592.html

http://cube.ign.com/news/36488.html

 

[Guest]

>The GameCube hasn't even been released
>yet and already major publishers
>are realizing the potentional.
>In these two instances, GCN
>ports of PS2 titles are
>receiving visual upgrades. Sure,
>the PS2 might technically be
>capable of displaying better visuals,
>but these reports show that
>developers can achieve similiar visuals
>on the GCN with much
>less work.

Ease of programming is relative. The PS2 is actually pretty easy to work with if you're merely using the emotion engine. That's why so many Dreamcast, etc. games we so easily ported over to the PS2. Sure they didn't take advantage of the all-powerful vector unit the PS2 used, but they still looked just as good as what was out at the time.

The API is so easy to work with that one developer was able to port various emulators, including an N64 emulator and the arcade emulator MAME to the PS2 (http://www.otakunozoku.com/ps2/).

>http://cube.ign.com/news/36592.html
>http://cube.ign.com/news/36488.html

Oh wow, graphical improvements on games that will be three months by the time they come out on the GC.

-Xotor-

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[Guest]

It's like you yourself said: the Emotion Engine is no where near the entire processing power of the PS2. It someone decided to work only with the Emotion Engine they might have a simple time, but the graphics would flat out suck compared to other consoles or even other PS2 games. The GCN allows for much better graphics with the same, or possibly greater, ease of development that working with the Emotion Engine offers. Of course, if someone decided to dig into the microcode of the system and make custom particle or lighting systems, the GCN would allow them to do that, too.

"Oh wow, graphical improvements on games that will be three months by the time they come out on the GC."

I assume you mean "games that will be out for three months". In any case, my point was that you were arguing earlier that PS2 graphics would be better because developers would have more time to work with the system. I supplied these links to show that that isn't the case.