According to the company, the PlayStation 2 is the source of some technological issues in porting Capcom's masterpiece.

In the latest issue of the Japanese magazine CG World, Capcom spoke out on the GameCube-to-PlayStation 2 port of its popular Resident Evil 4 title. According to CG World, Capcom has run into some technological problems while trying to adapt RE4 to the PlayStation 2 architecture.

One of the most problematic issues in porting the title has come down to memory size. The GameCube features primarily 24 bits of memory, whereas PlayStation 2 only produces 4 to 8 bits of memory.

Further, Capcom blames Sony’s hardware yet again when dealing with polygons. The GameCube version of Resident Evil 4’s main star, Leon S. Kennedy, pushes approximately 10,000 polygons, while the PlayStation 2 version currently renders 5,000. Capcom went on to say that the character model of Snake from Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater on PlayStation 2 features 4,000 polygons, and that that was roughly the same amount of polygons that its villagers (which RE4 often features handfuls of on the screen simultaneously) are made up of.

That said, Capcom said that the PlayStation 2 does have at least one aspect to its hardware that could come in helpfully: the ability to make use of more textures at a time. Still, the publisher said that there must be a balance between the number of textures and the quality of them.

Currently, the PlayStation 2 version of Resident Evil 4 is scheduled to release sometime in late 2005, presumably as a holiday title for Sony’s console. Meanwhile, the GameCube incarnation has been on retail shelves since January 11, 2005.

http://gc.advancedmn.com/article.php?artid=4247