#controllers
Custom, third-party controllers can often be a disaster of cheap plastic and tacky design, but these peripherals for upcoming Disney games, manufactured by Performance Designed Products, are an exception to that sorry rule. More »
Multiple retailers are changing their Epic Mickey release date to what you see above. Nothing official just yet, but the new date does make sense with game releases in the states.
Warren Spector is here at E3 this week showing off his Disney Epic Mickey project for the first time, and we got to sit down with the creator of System Shock and Deus Ex to talk about his new gig with the House of Mouse.
After the jump below, Spector answers our questions about why he decided to do a Disney game in the time and place that he did, his favorite Disney properties, and how hard it is to make a platformer game. Read on for more.
I've actually been lucky enough to see Epic Mickey twice now, once at a pre-E3 event a few weeks ago and then again this week at E3. And while my first reaction to the game was twinged with disappointment (which I'll explain in just a minute), after seeing it a second time, and talking with Warren Spector himself, I think the game will turn out to be something really special.
What changed in between then and now? Honestly, I don't think they're showing the right demo. The Epic Mickey you can see on the floor of E3 this week shows a middling-to-above-average platformer, with few simple stages and a paint/thinner mechanic that allows you to draw and erase various walls and platforms. But I am convinced anyway (perhaps wrongly, I'll admit) that there's a lot more to this game than that.
During an E3 chat today, we asked Warren Spector why Epic Mickey lacked voiceovers. The characters do squeak and chitter, Banjo Kazooie-style, but none of the classic Disney voices are featured in the game. Why not?
"There's something about that voice, you know?" Spector said in his best high-pitched Mickey impersonation, before returning to his normal voice. "It's hard to accept that as a really big hero. I wanted people to accept this guy as a hero, and so I kind of made an early decision that we wouldn't have speech in the game."
Plus, one of the main characters in Epic Mickey is the long-forgotten Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, who only appeared in Disney's silent cartoon era. "In a world where Oswald is the ruler," Spector told us, "it seemed appropriate that people don't talk."
As you’ve seen over the past couple days, the LA convention center is filled up with all sorts of game promos. One of those promos happens to be for Epic Mickey. Various banners line the hallways, and each one of them seems to present an interesting look at the game, completely with new [...]
Disney is taking a multimedia approach to Mickey Mouse's return to relevance. The revived mascot won't just feature in Junction Point's Disney Epic Mickey video game; as spotted by NeoGAF's Shiggy, the Disney Epic Mickey universe will expand into a series of books as well. Epic Mickey - It's Your Call #1 (which suggests more on the way) is a Choose Your Own Adventure-style book in which readers battle the Phantom Blot and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. In addition to that, there's a "Junior Novelization" of the game.
According to Amazon, It's Your Call will be released October 12, with the novelization following on November 23. These dates could provide a release window for the game, since we'd imagine Disney would want to use these tie-in materials to help market it.
#disney
The edgier, more epic Mickey Mouse adventure coming to the Wii later this year is also making the leap to print. Don't just play Disney's Epic Mickey project... read it! More »
Gamasutra got a chance to speak with the executive VP and GM of Disney Interactive Studios, Graham Hopper, who says that Disney is swinging for the stands on their future game releases. The games division is learning from "pure" gaming studios and their success, and while Hopper admits that the company hasn't always treated their properties correctly on the gaming side, starting with Disney's Epic Mickey, it wants to "give their projects the time and appropriate resources to be successful." In other words, let them stand on their own as games, rather than squeeze them up against a movie's release date.
And Hopper hopes for quite the payoff, too -- while third-party titles on the Wii have been hit or miss (mostly miss), Hopper expects Epic Mickey's success to go "to Nintendo levels." He does say that they don't want to turn Mickey into Mario by "simply using him as an icon or an avatar in a game," but Disney's goal in the future will be to make sure that each of their properties' appearances are worth it. Hopper says if they port a film to five different gaming platforms, customers should expect "not the same story five times over, but five different stories, each uniquely suited for the platform they're on." A good plan to have, but much easier said than done.
A heroic tale of redemption and discovery, Disney Epic Mickey is an adventure-platforming game with light role-playing elements for the Nintendo Wii, featuring an iconic and retro Mickey Mouse inspired by cartoons of the 1920s and 1930s. In the game’s fiction, a sorcerer named Yen Sid creates a beautiful, whimsically-twisted world where Disney’s forgotten and [...]
Back when first details of Epic Mickey came in, we told you about an issue with the rights to the Oswald character. Disney no longer owned Oswald when movement on the game first started up. With Oswald being hugely important to the game idea, Disney knew they had to get the character back…and [...]
When Mickey Mouse makes his triumphant return to the world stage in Disney Epic Mickey, he'll do so without his trademark squeaky voice. The mouse will still speak in the game, but all speech will be rendered as text bubbles. And it's not a technical limitation, but an artistic one.
"I made the creative decision that characters wouldn't talk in the Cartoon Wasteland," Warren Spector explained to The Cut Scene. "It was entirely a creative decision because [he begins speaking in a high-pitched Mickey voice] As soon as I start doing this, I've lost most of my potential audience. [resumes natural voice] If I'm trying to re-introduce this character to an audience, there are certain connotations with that voice that I'm going to have a hard time overcoming." When he does speak in a future game, he'll probably be an affable Everyman voiced by Nolan North (our guess).
Oswald, Spector said, won't need much consideration, due not only to his relative unfamiliarity to modern audiences, but also due to the properties of the character itself. "If you watch the existing cartoons," Spector said, "he's such a special character. In many ways, he's a funnier, more cartoon-y, more modern guy than Mickey is."
In the ongoing media blitz that Disney Epic Mickey (yes, it's really still named that) has been receiving over the past few weeks, the game's creative head Warren Spector has been decidedly candid. First, he spoke about the difference between the game's concept art and in-game graphics, then he discussed its roots on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, and just this week, in a talk with 1UP, he confirmed his hope that the game would spawn two more adventures. One hitch - those games have yet to be approved by his new overlords at Disney. "In my head, I've got two more planned ... those games have not approved and who knows if we'll ever see them," he said. "I had three games planned for Deus Ex and you see where that got me." As far as other titles that Spector's Junction Point Studios were working on before being acquired over two years ago, Spector confirmed that Disney has officially dropped the lot of them. Wait, even Ninja Gold?! Yes, even Ninja Gold.
If you're anything like us, you may have felt a bit ... underwhelmed by the recently released screenshots of Warren Spector-lead project Disney Epic Mickey, especially when compared to the magic-filled concept art leaked so many weeks ago. Speaking to 1UP in a recent interview, Spector says he works on creating concept art that will find the metaphorical "line" by "pushing past it." For him, it is a question of finding the boundaries for not just himself and his development team, but also Disney. "I know where my lines are, but I don't know where Disney's are."He additionally teases, "Some of what you saw was beyond the line ... some of it was early design ideas that are no longer relevant ... some of it is stuff that's still in the game, and I'm not saying what." If the recent steady stream of information on Disney Epic Mickey continues, we'll likely see at least a few of those original concepts in their current form at a point in the not-too-distant future.
“Mickey is an adventurous and rambunctious mouse. I want to bring his personality to the forefront, place him in a daunting world and connect his spirited character with video game players worldwide. Ultimately, each player decides for him or herself what makes Mickey cool.” - Warren Spector
I can’t remember the last time I saw [...]
While the family-friendly Wii seems like the starting point for a Mickey Mouse relaunch, the decision to make Disney Epic Mickey a Wii exclusive wasn't automatic. In fact, it wasn't even the original plan. "The reality is that we started Wii development in 2008," Warren Spector told Official Nintendo Magazine, "but before that we were a PC, PS3, and 360 title."When the issue of a Wii port was raised, Spector told Disney that it wasn't going to work. "It needs to be its own game. A lot of the design ideas just won't work on the Wii, we need to give the Wii its dues." In response, Disney Interactive's Graham Hopper suggested that the game simply be a Wii exclusive, thus solving the problem of a subpar Wii port and addressing Spector's desire to focus on a single platform. That single platform just happened to be none of the ones for which the game was initially planned!
