Hands-on with Backbreaker Tegra for the Motorola Xoom
Power of the self-shadows
Nvidia's Tegra 2 chip inside the upcoming Motorola Xoom tablet is rapidly transforming the device from yet another ‘iPad beater’ into a genuine gaming tablet, going by the wide range of stunning-looking games being announced for it.
NaturalMotion and Ideaworks’s Backbreaker Tegra is another example of developers being able to flex their muscles on the dual-core Nvidia chipset, bringing a number of improvements to the iOS original ranging from in-game aesthetics to unique graphical technology deployed for the first time on a mobile device – self-shadows.
Self-shadowing means that sprites can cast shadows on their own bodies, giving the models depth and stylised detail.
It complements the new helmet reflections and standard shadows underneath the characters, which, thanks partially to the 1280 x 1000 resolution, possessed no obvious jaggys (blocky edges).
That's a touchdownThe original Backbreaker juked through our tackles and touched down with a Pocket Gamer Silver award when it was first released in 2009, and the addictive gameplay seems to be just as compulsive going by our short hands-on with the title at Mobile World Congress.
The price is yet to be announced by NaturalMotion, but Adam Whittaker told Pocket Gamer that he expected it to be at a higher price than the iOS version - 99c on iOS - due to its position as a Tegra Zone premium title.
Backbreaker Tegra will launch alongside the Motorola Xoom, so in a couple of weeks for Americans and second quarter for all us Europeans.
[Note: we don't have any screens of this version of the game yet, so we're using some from the original iOS version, until we get some.]
