Joystiq impressions: Mushroom Men
Mushroom Men is still many moons away from being done and what we saw was mostly still concept art. There was some in-game footage to show the game is real, but it was a video and not a demo. The thing is that developers Red Fly are on a path at the moment, but where that path leads is anyone's guess. Mushroom Men will release as a 3D platformer on the Wii in the fall of 2008 and as a 2D platformer on DS in spring of 2008 (there were no images of the DS version). The concept of Mushroom Men is that a comet has passed over the planet and the dust left behind has given consciousness to the fungus. The Mushroom Men evolved and are now at war with other fungus, all of this isn't noticed by the humans.
One of the interesting concepts that we couldn't see implemented is the "Scav" system, short for scavenger. You'll collect trash and put it together to form weaponry. For the Wii version they're still working on eight different control schemes and attempting at all costs to have players do battle without feeling like they are doing battle through "waggle." There is a chance for an Xbox and/or PS3 version of the game if it does well on the Wii. The high-res models they showed of the characters in their video clearly can not be done on the Wii and will need to be scaled back. In an interesting aside, the reason the game is being designed for Wii and DS is due to the install base and the fact that it costs half as much as if they were developing it for the more powerful systems. This reasoning may rear its head by many independent developers who just can't afford the $20 million price tags surrounding full featured Xbox and PS3 games.
There's really not much we can say about Mushroom Men. Conceptually it sounds fine, beyond that there wasn't much to show of the game. From the artist concept drawings though we hope the game does do well so we can see the beauty of this title come through on the Xbox 360 and PS3. We also look forward to seeing how the game comes across on the Nintendo DS soon, especially considering spring is only 9 months away -- start incubating those spores now!
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