Having previously established that I have zero objectivity and nothing but enthusiastic gibberish to share about Deathsmiles finally coming to North American 360 owners, it seemed like the only thing left to do was jump up and down on Aksys’ desk about the announcement.
For the sake of dignity I squeezed a few questions in along the way, which Aksys Games’ PR Specialist Cherie Baker was good enough to answer – while leaving me with a cliffhanger to wonder about.
Catch it all after the break.
Between the mass-media attention given to the announcement of a new Ubisoft Studio, and the critical success of new titles from Capybara Games (as well as many other happenings I’ll surely be in trouble for neglecting to mention here), it’s safe to say that 2009 was an important year for recognizing Toronto’s growing role in the videogame industry.
It was also the year that indie game developer Little Guy Games opened for business, founded by former Capybara Games President Tom Frencel.
The studio’s first game, the shooter/fighter mix Battle Blasters released earlier this month for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and Tom was good enough to take time out to answer a few questions on two of my favorite topics – game development and my home city.
For all the noise I’ve attempted to make about The Sky Crawlers’ arrival on North American shelves, the game surrenders itself to a level of obscurity not only by nature of its genre, but because it is a quiet and subtle title.
In an attempt at taking an early stance against undue hype, I’ll stress that neither my interest in the game nor my time with it has revealed a religious experience. Rather, the game leaves an impression as subtle as its arrival and presentation – something small and nagging to chew on after the flight is over.
My first exposure to Phantasy Star came during University when I stumbled out of my room from an essay filled stupor, only to be pulled in by roommates who were huddled around a GameCube. Even though we were playing after the online access had been discontinued, the game still offered a memorable co-op experience that quickly became a ritual.
The single player campaign left more to be desired, and it feels like the challenge for Phantasy Star is finding a balance between a fleshed out single-player game that also offers the co-op experience I found so addicting.
My enthusiasm for Dark Void during the long march toward a retail release owes entirely to a conceptual proposition that represents everything I wanted from a game when I was ten. Admittedly I had no idea at that time that trying to merge two distinctly different styles of play inherently invites disaster – or at least it seems that way given how much trouble many designers have delivering on a single style successfully.
My thought at the time would have been that flying and shooting robots is cool, and running and shooting robots is cool, so that merging the two into a single title should reasonably create the greatest game of all time.
Maybe I wasn’t the brightest kid on the block, but let’s move on.
While it’s unfortunate that studios have to replace covers for Japanese games with severely bland and more descriptive imagery to suit the market here, I do understand the motivation. The Sky Crawlers‘ North American box art conveys the idea of “Hi, I’m a game about planes on the Wii” immediately enough.
The bright side about XSEED is that they anticipated what a snob I am about such details and did something other publishers have occasionally done, but many more could stand to do more often.
Having traveled to the center of hell and battled fiendish register monkeys, I will now demonstrate first hand how easy it is to beautify a copy of The Sky Crawlers in two quick and easy steps, after the break.
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