The technical capabilities of game consoles is a topic that I've found absolutely fascinating for several years, as it's always a spectacle to see a developer push a system to its utter limits without breaking it. There are numerous cases which do a fine job, from Capcom's filter and polygon-happy Okami to Sony's Shadow of the Colossus (a PS2 game which dared to impliment HDR lighting, among numerous other things) and these games are thought to be examples of ones which only their respective consoles could "pull off." But what if one tried putting these technologically superior games on older hardware? Would it be possible to do without having a game lose its metaphorical soul? The proposition itself is interesting and, because I'm always interested in what the true limits of a platform are, I'm going to outline how I would handle some odd "porting" jobs if I was ever asked to handle them. A lot of these may be more or less remakes, but the goal here is to get these games to work on inferior systems in a way such that they are still recognizeable. I realize that the terminology can get somewhat complex, so feel free to ask for any additional explanations.

Ikaruga

Porting Platform: TI-83 Plus Graphing Calculator

Those of you who have been in the standard high school-level math class within approximately the past decade already know that the iconic Texas Instruments calculator is perfectly capable of playing games. (If not, refer to my TI montage I have lying around in my video collection on this site.) Although most of the popular games are either puzzlers or shooters, games of other genres have popped up as well, from RTS to FPS, as well as oddballs like life simulators a la Animal Crossing. Hence, the idea of putting a game like Ikaruga on such a graphing calculator may not be too terribly far-fetched, although it presents some interesting challenges.

Ikaruga, for those who don't know, is a seminal space shooter from Gunstar Heroes developer Treasure. In it, the player's ship can be one of two colors and it can absorb bullets which are the same color as the ship. (Conversely, touching bullets of the opposite color destroys the ship.) The color coding allows for some interesting strategies to crop up, as more damage is done to the enemies if they're hit with a bullet that isn't the same color is themselves. But, because of bullet patterns and other such issues, it's also strategically feasible to stay the same color as an enemy ship to make things a tad easier. There are other nuances to the game, but all of this covers the game's basic premise fine.

As a bullet hell game, Ikaruga presents a unique problem when trying to bring it to the TI-83 Plus: maintaining a playable frame rate. There can be a very large number of bullets of both colors on the screen at any given time on the screen and, if the game isn't programmed properly to handle it, the calculator is going to suffer as result. Having said that, if I were to head the project, the best course of action for Ikaruga would be to program it in TI-Assembly rather than TI-BASIC. TI-Assembly allows one to work with the calculator's NES processor as close as possible (well, without going into binary), meaning that things can be more intimately manipulated. It's far more delicate than TI-BASIC, but when considering that the calculator can compile the code written in Assembly much faster than in BASIC, it's not that bad of a trade-off. From there, optimizing the game so it wouldn't bog down terribly in bullet-heavy situations would be "easier" to do. It would be manageable in TI-Assembly.

The graphical capabilities of the TI-83 Plus also present another interesting dilema. While the calculator has a pallete large enough to render the bullets in two different colors, the bigger concern would be in how well it could render other things, namely the ships in the game, as well as other obstacles. The resolution of the screen isn't exactly generous, so a one-to-one copy and paste job with the sprites wouldn't suffice. Tweaks would have to be made here and there so that everything still resembled what's found in the original game without taking an enormous amount of real estate on the screen. This would be especially true of the bosses, as they can be especially large in the original game. (The background imagery which Ikaruga is probably famous for is out of the question here; the pallete is still too small to provide enough detail. There just aren't enough benefits to replicate it. Animation would also be a huge pain.)

Music is possible on the TI-83 Plus (believe it or not), but not enough space would be left over to preserve the remainder of the game, so it wouldn't be wise to focus on something like that. Having said that, the storage capacity of the TI-83 Plus is still another hurdle in bringing Ikaruga over to the calculator. Although it may not be as big of a worry on derivative platforms such as the 83 Silver and 84, storage on the 83 Plus would make it hard to store the original game's levels into a very tight space. The best way to go, in my opinion, would be to simply make the TI-83 Plus version of the game a compilation of boss fights, as I imagine it would be possible to have them replicated accurately withing the space constraints inherent to the platform. It might still take up a lot of room, but the fact that it could somehow fit in any way is what matters more.

Gears of War

Porting Platform: SNES

Gears of War is an interesting title to bring over to something such as the SNES, as there are a couple of ways one could go about bringing it over to Nintendo's venerable system. The N64 would be a more ideal system for it, if one were to pick any "retro" system for the job, but the SNES is the subject at hand because its cartridges can be quite creative in making seemingly impossible games function on the system. This is because the SNES' games are famous for housing what one could call "helper chips" which gave a boost to the system's technologies by expanding upon what's already present. Having said that, which path that would be taken in the game's development depends on what would be determined to be more important in the Xbox360's original version: the graphics or the gameplay. For the purpose of balance, we'll examine the implications of both paths.

If it was found that the game's prettiness mattered more, then the way to go would be to house an S-DD1 chip in the game's cartridge. This essentially allows the game to compress a very large amount of graphical data into a small amount and decompress it on the fly. Although it's designed for sprites and not polygons, what's more important is the fact that this would probably allow the game to not have frame rate issues despite the graphics (even if they are excellently retooled sprites). Why? Because the chip has a function which allows the SNES to access data from other parts of the cartridge without interfering with the graphics decompression, thusly preventing it from slowing down due to doing a lot of things simultaneously. The drawback to using this chip, however, would be that the game's three-dimensional depth would probably be limited to that of something like Doom. The shooting action would still be intact, but z-axis motion (up and down) would probably be gone, which would affect in what ways the game's guns could be aimed.

However, if one wanted to preserve the depth of the aiming, as well as the gameplay in general, then a Super FX GSU-2 is the chip I would recommend to use for the game. An older version of the Super FX chip is famous for making Star Fox possible on the SNES, as it was the driving force behind the game taking place in three dimensions, especially with respect to polygon rendering. This in turn would allow Gears of War on the SNES to have environments more similar to the original in terms of interactivity, as well as allowing for greater three-dimensional control of the characters. (Weapons would therefore actually be able to move up and down when aiming.) The game wouldn't necessarily look nearly as gritty as the original (at least if it didn't rely on sprites), but the gameplay would still in theory be preserved. Controls would also be a con in using this method, as translating a game which relied on two control sticks to one directional pad and a bunch of buttons would be sure to induce headaches.

Hey You, Pikachu!

Porting Platform: Famicom

No. Let's not go down this road.

Seeing how far a developer can go in pushing a system without making explode is always quite a sight a see, as it's always evidence that there are people out there who know how to work with seemingly old hardware to make it beck to their every whim.
Ikaruga and Gears of War are just two examples of how I would try to achieve the same feat on old hardware if I absolutely have to. They may come out somewhat different than their original versions, but hopefully my writings have shown it's possible to get them on other platforms in one form or another. Whether or not they're games you'd then want to play is another matter, but to even think that there are some high-tech games which could run on older hardware with some revisions is extremely profound. Such, however, is the nature of gaming.