Over at the official SRW blog, series producer Takanobu Terada has divulged the fact that ACE:P was developed alongside ACE:R. This isn’t overly surprising in the current climate; as why fund one PS3 game properly when you could siphon some of the funds to make a cut-down PSP game too. What’s more worrying about this though is that ACE:P will share much of the functional setup as seen in its bigger brother ACE:R (hardware changes notwithstanding obviously). This doesn’t really bode well, as much of ACE:R’s consumer based ire was linked to how functionally awkward the series had become (relative to the PS2 versions) – something that has directly and negatively affected the retail price of the game. This sounds like ACE:P will fly very much in the face of that, without any real concessions to appease a disgruntled customer base. Terada also goes on to talk about how the mission progression has changed to allow casual play now, rather than the larger investment of time a scenario mode would have required. Overall though, we were more upbeat about this entry into the ACE series but these new revelations don’t exactly fill us with confidence. We’ll know for sure come January next year though.