Randy Pitchford: the Wii U GamePad is “perfect” for Colonial Marines
Mark Seymour November 1, 2012 - 7:57 pmNews: Gearbox president Randy Pitchford has described the WiiPad as “perfect” for its upcoming first-person shooter Aliens: Colonial Marines and reckons it’s the best pad Nintendo has ever designed for ‘hardcore gaming’.
Stifle those cynical guffaws, Gearbox know a thing or two about shooting men in the head. Not literally, of course, but the studio exemplified its knack for making cracking first-person shooters with the recent Borderlands 2, so it’s worth paying studio president Randy Pitchford some heed when he describes the Wii U GamePad as “the best controller Nintendo has ever given us for playing hardcore games.”
Speaking to Joystiq, the Gearbox man also hailed the Wii U Pad as “perfect for Aliens”.
The uses Gearbox have conjured up for the controller’s auxiliary screen may invite cynicism, mind. The developer has spoken previously about how it plans to use the screen as a map as well as a motion tracker akin to those Ripley and co. relied on during some of the second film’s very best scenes. In terms of in-game functionality that makes it a map and then another map, albeit one that bleeps and bloops and ideally instills no small amount of primal fear.
According to Joystiq, Pitchford mentioned that either of the Playstation Vita or a SmartGlass supporting device could be put to simular use, although he reckons neither the Vita nor Microsoft’s newfangled SmartGlass tech can truly rival Nintendo’s controller.
“Conceivably there’s things you can do on all three without negative impact but because of Nintendo’s commitment to it there are some things that could work there that just wouldn’t work as well with SmartGlass or with the crossplay between PS3 and Vita,” he noted.
Aliens: Colonial Marines is due out in February on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC. The Wii U version is pencilled in for release during the console’s launch window, which stretches greedily into 2013.
