Cross-platform gaming: from simple ports to the Gates of Oblivion
Lost Planet: Extreme Condition - Xbox 360 and PCLost Planet is a console game with purebred heritage. A third-person shooter from Japanese giant Capcom - though you can play it from first person perspective if you like - it features cartoony scenes, plot and pacing. A cheesy sci-fi setting, endlessly spawning bad guys and tough boss enemies, console gamers have hacked through the same formula for close to thirty years. Because Lost Planet was developed for the Xbox 360, however, the opportunity to release a Windows port was there and was taken. What's more, Lost Planet was one of the first games to feature a graphics engine that uses Microsoft's newest API DirectX 10. The differentiating feature of DX10 is that it allows more complex operations that would be too time-consuming for older DX9 graphics engines to handle. It also drops backwards compatibility - on more fronts than one. Microsoft decided not to support DX10 in Windows XP and earlier versions of Windows, using it to promote Windows Vista instead. Although Lost Planet supports DX9 as well, it's pretty obvious that Microsoft threw a lot of financial support at Capcom to push the slow-starting DX10 train along.
DirectX 10-exclusive effects include a "high" quality setting for dynamic shadows cast by objects in the game world, which makes them noticeably softer and more realistic. DX10 also allows higher precision in calculating high-dynamic range lighting: HDR allows the game to simulate how the player's eyes get accustomed to differently lit areas, and the blinding brightness of coming from dark indoors to the snowblindness-inducing outside. Other improvements were added in August 2007 with better geometry shaders, which made the fur lining in the characters' jackets really shine and improved the depth of field blurring effect.  DX10 PC version Unfortunately, Lost Planet PC port's budget must have been eaten up by DX10 render path development. Everything else in the game is just directly copied over from the Xbox 360 version, including the interface. You move forward in the game's menus by selecting options with the left mouse button, but if you want to go back - well, you can't! You're stuck, unless you study the manual (in order to move around in the menu? Come on!) or have an Xbox 360 and realize that if the mouse was the controller's button section, the right mouse button is about where the "B" for "back" button on the controller is, and... aha! I discovered this post factum, after repeatedly slamming my forehead on the desk and eventually hitting the right (mouse) button. When the gameplay starts, there's no mistaking that you're in a console game world. Items you can pick up are highlighted with a rotating yellow reticule, you get to mash buttons at a high cadence to complete trivial tasks, and an artificial but boostable time limit pays homage to the hallowed coin-op arcade ancestry. While the latter is crucial for gameplay balance, and fits the storyline somewhat, the first two just don't feel at home in a PC game. The port's game designers would have done well to conform to the PC standard of pressing or holding down the use key to complete tasks, and the graphics team would have achieved much more immersion to the game world by designing a more subdued way to highlight items - now they stick out like a sore thumb - than they ever can with improved fur shading and shine. Based on gameplay testing, we conclude that from a performance and visual standpoint the Xbox 360 gameplay experience is very close to a mid-end gaming PC running in DX9 mode. For reference, the Xbox 360's performance, when compared to the PC port of this particular game, sits somewhere around the Publisher's Recommended System's performance. You can use the Game-o-Meter to easily check if your PC can run the game at this level. So how much will a trip to the Lost Planet set you back on either platform? As long as you have a dual core processor, the game won't be bottlenecked by processor performance. Two gigabytes of memory and a decent mid-range graphics card is a must, so let's tally up the upgrade cost for playing the game on a PC:
The typical upgrade scenario comes up to $250-270 depending on your system; if you have to upgrade your motherboard as well, prepare to cough up another $70. If you're starting from scratch, an entire mid-range gaming PC, including a Windows operating system, costs around $600. For all the DX10 effects you need a high-end gaming PC, which is overkill for this game. As our technical analysis of Lost Planet showed, a mid-range DX10 card isn't sufficient for running the game in the more demanding DX10 mode. The cheapest Xbox 360 Core system costs around $280, slightly more than the price of PC upgrades; the hard disk-equipped models retail for $350 and upwards at the time of writing. Since the game is already in the bargain bin, both the PC and Xbox 360 versions of Lost Planet can be had for around $35. However, for online multiplayer games on the Xbox 360 platform you'll have to subscribe to Xbox Live Gold, which costs $8 a month (or $20 per three months/$50 per year) - on PC, the multiplayer is free. The PC port achieves good performance with reasonably low hardware requirements, and adds a few features not found in the original Xbox 360 version. However, as a PC gamer you might not get what you expect with Lost Planet: Extreme Condition. While it's not a bad game by any means, the game design was left more or less unchanged from the console version, and therefore forgoes some of the established standards in PC shooters. Up next: an example of how games should be ported.
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