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 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.
Many moons ago, or last September, Disgaea 2 made the move over to the PSP, at which time I had every intention of reviewing the game. I remember being in a state I’ll call endless rush review mode, which I wouldn’t recommend not only because it stretches the limits of one’s sanity, but also because it opens a dark dimension where every game can be condensed into a few paragraphs of cohesion and then be done with – not a fun place to be for the writer, the reader, and more importantly for the gamer.
As it turns out that review never came together anyway, mostly because trying to take it all in and sum the experience up with some clever lines made me cry. And though that sounds like a bad thing, it really has been good for me and my relationship with the game.
Given the number of times I’ve thrown words to Bayonetta during the game’s development, I fully expected to have joined the conversation she’s stirred about sex, audience reactions, sex, female identity, and more sex by now. The reason I haven’t is straightforward enough, and provides a chance for you to say I’m biased.
If I am indeed biased, it’s because I love videogames, and Bayonetta loves being a videogame – enough that we’re a good match and someone should go book the chapel by the time I write a proper review.
As for avoiding the extensive conversations going around the net, my problem is simple – talking extensively about any of those aspects would mean that I’d have to stop playing the game long enough to do so.
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