Slowdown? Impossible

Recently, a topic popped up on the official PSU forums asking players what they would like to see Sega fix in the game.

Not surprisingly, it seems that many players are hoping that Sega might address the slowdown that plagues the Xbox 360 version of the game. Unfortunately for these players, Sega will probably never fix the graphical slowdown problem, and this is one of the many reasons I lamented the shutdown of the PC/PS2 servers back in April.

As everyone knows, the Xbox 360 version of PSU is the only one you can play online in English (for now). Ever since the game's release, the Xbox 360 version suffered from a serious slowdown problem that affected many graphical areas of the game, the most infamous of which was the "robot lag" slowdown. The PS2 version also suffered from many of the same problems, though some PS3 owners have reported that PSU runs very well on that console with few of the slowdown problems that the game has on PS2. (I've never tried this so I can't confirm it.)

The Xbox 360 version of PSU seems to be the most poorly optimized of all three versions of the game. Fixing the game's graphical problems at this stage would likely require a lot of additional debugging and coding, followed by a large patch to release the changes. With the game coming up on its fourth anniversary in a few months, I personally don't think Sega will want to bother making any large-scale changes to the game such as this. That means that Xbox 360 players will most likely have to deal with the slowdown for the remainder of the game's lifetime. Nevertheless, debate in the forum has gone on for almost 100 posts, with the majority asking Sega to examine the issue and come up with a fix.

These kinds of discussions come up every once in a while on the official forums, and every time I see them I end up asking myself how the Xbox 360 version of PSU became the most popular. The PS2 version performs about on par with (and in some cases, better than) the Xbox 360 version, and the PC version of PSU has none of these issues! So forgive me if I still fail to understand why players chose the technically and graphically inferior Xbox 360 game over the PC/PS2 one.

I suppose I never will figure that out.