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Can mobile truly catch up with and surpass last-gen console performance? A couple of weeks ago we reviewed the Xiaomi MiPad featuring Nvidia's Tegra K1 - a processor that features, theoretically at least, more GPU power than the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Our conclusions? There were hints of the chip's capabilities but no real demonstration of its power. Well, this week, our Nvidia Shield Tablet arrived for review, pre-loaded with Frozenbyte's Trine 2 - a modern PC and console title that miraculously looks and plays closely to the existing console and PC versions of the game.We're still a long way from an era where modern console titles will appear en masse on tablets (and eventually smartphones) but this is an important step forward in many ways. By our reckoning, Trine 2 just falls a little short of matching the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions, but it gets very, very close - certainly the fun factor of the game is undiminished and in some ways it can even be considered better than the last-gen console versions. Put into perspective, this is a watershed moment in mobile gaming. We reached out to developer Frozenbyte to talk about this achievement, who were quick to point out that while the tablet version has graphical differences with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions, we shouldn't forget the issue of content either - an element that introduces its own technological challenges.
"Trine 2: Complete Story on Android/K1 is more extensive than the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of Trine 2, since those don't have the Goblin Menace expansion levels released. The reason why we never released those is that we'd have to a great deal of specific optimisations for the platforms, and possibly even touch the levels themselves (to make them less demanding), and we weren't very enthusiastic about it, so it kind of fell on the wayside when new things came along," the developer says.
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