Battlestations: Midway Preview

Action Trip: Are you worried that these huge online conflicts could perhaps create certain difficulties for gamers with low bandwidth?

Eidos: If you are not hosting but simply playing, even the biggest maps won't give you much trouble, bandwidth wise. On the other hand, if you are hosting, you have control over the selected map, and we made sure some maps are less demanding on your bandwidth. Therefore, players with lower bandwidths can choose the maps that suit them best.

Just pick a target and go with it!

I'm going to sink this bastard!

Bottom line: a wider connection will be an advantage when hosting, but you should be fine joining any game as a player.

Action Trip: In terms of content, does the PC version of Battlestations: Midway differ in any way from the Xbox 360 version?

Eidos: The 360 is a great piece of hardware, delivering similar speed and resolution to the best current PCs (in some cases better, but you can't do a straightforward comparison due to architectural differences). That lets us give you nearly the same game on the two systems. Controls differ, of course, and on the 360 you have the Guide functionality with Live, whereas on PC you have IGN GameSpy. I think Midway turned out excellently on the platforms, and it's really up to the user which version they prefer to play. My choice is to always have a Hi-Def widescreen to bring the scale of the battles right to you, and I like the 360 controller (actually, I use one of the old Xbox controllers :)) which you can plug into your PC if you want to. I also kind of like the various dual analogue pads (by Logitech or Saitek), but the game is set up for mouse and keyboard as well.

Oh, and we have some tasty download content that we think will be appearing on 360 after the game's launch...

Action Trip: In your experience, what's the most challenging thing about making a game for the Xbox 360?

Eidos: The most challenging thing for 360 is using the multiple cores. I think most teams are still getting their heads around multithreading, and I honestly think Microsoft's platform has lasting potential.

Action Trip: The game has been in development for more than a year now. Are you guys putting the final pieces together?

Eidos: Yup, we're just about done with a few translations, some demos, and some post-launch extra content (can't say much about that). We are almost ready to go!