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Dancing Eyes and the death of a Generation
Welcome to Living in the Past, a weekly column about what's new in old games. Now get off our lawn. The Namco Generations series brought us cool reimaginings of Namco's ubiquitous arcade games, including Pac-Man Championship Edition DX and Galaga Legions DX. It can also be assumed to retroactively include games like Pac-Man Championship Edition that came out before the series was named.Namco Generations appears to have come to an end now – at least Namco's been quiet about it – and that likely end came before two of the announced Generations games could make it to release. For some reason, Namco planned updates for relatively obscure arcade games Metro-Cross and Dancing Eyes alongside the Pac-Man and Galaga flagships.Above, you can see what the company had in mind for the PS3 update of Dancing Eyes (embedded from a third-party Youtube channel since Namco made its own video private). The PS3 game is sort of like Qix, except instead of surrounding rectangular spaces in a flat, stark vector retroscape, you're a monkey cutting pieces off a girl's clothes. The surprise isn't that it was canceled this year; rather, the surprise is that someone at Namco thought this was a viable game concept on two separate occasions.
Dancing Eyes: the Namco Generations revival nobody asked for
Namco's Generations series started off with Pac-Man Championship Edition DX. Pac-Man seemed like a good starting point for the retro revival series. Then it expanded into Galaga Legions DX, and then Pac-Man and Galaga Dimensions. Things got a little weird when Namco announced that it would remake the semi-obscure running game Metro-Cross as Aero Cross. The series' slow turn into weirdness just accelerated into a powerslide with the next announcement: a PS3 remake of the virtually unknown 1996 arcade game Dancing Eyes. It's a sort of 3D Qix game about a monkey cutting rectangular routes around idols' clothing. The new version will feature PlayStation Move compatibility, so you can guide that pervert monkey with motion. After the break, you'll find a trailer showing some gameplay and a very sad monkey. Dancing Eyes currently has a "TBA" release date in Japan; we wouldn't be surprised if this were the one Namco Generations game not to be announced elsewhere.
