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Fractured Soul finds an American publisher
Last year, we reported that Endgame Studios was looking for a publisher for its DS title Fractured Soul, a side-scrolling action game in which your character can freely jump between two different worlds, one on each screen. Today, Graffiti Entertainment, the small publisher behind Black Sigil and Mazes of Fate, announced that it will publish Fractured Soul in North America, presumably as a personal favor to us. It plans to release the game in Q4 of this year, which is a bit late for a DS game, but infinitely preferable to never. [Thanks, Spart!]
Black Sigil's meandering trailers
Now that Graffiti Entertainment has given Black Sigil its (presumably) final name, they've decided to start promoting the 16-bit-esque RPG for real. These two gameplay trailers follow hero Kairu as he, uh, walks around a house, reads some books, talks to his friends, and watches some knights eat dinner. It actually seems like a pretty lazy afternoon. Well, except that the house is a giant mansion and Kairu has to do a lot of walking. Light low-impact exercise will probably help him when he's fighting or walking up a bunch of stairs.There is combat in other parts of the game, as seen in the last trailer. These trailers just happen to focus on the talky bits.
Graffiti sees a Project Exile and wants it painted Black
Graffiti Entertainment doesn't yet have a release date set for Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled, formerly known as Project Exile, but the publisher has put out a new trailer and over two dozen new screenshots for the retitled game. Originally intended as a GBA game, Black Sigil's art direction still bears an uncanny resemblance to SquareSoft's SNES-era RPGs just as much as it did when developer Studio Archcraft first revealed the game in 2006.The trailer boasts an "active-time tactical combat" system which we don't quite understand yet, and the top screen looks bare during battles -- hopefully we'll hear more specifics and see more features as Black Sigil's release approaches. With a retro-styled game boasting "30+ hours of game play with tons of side-quests," our expectations are high. %Gallery-22074%
Mazes of Update
The latest screens of Mazes of Fate DS show some quite nice 2D work in the outdoor areas. Being 2D fans, we were already quite enamored with the hand-drawn graphics of the GBA version and the similar style found in the non-fateful-maze areas of the DS game. But put in contrast with the 3D mazes, which are admittedly looking better and better, the 2D is vibrant and detailed. Maybe we're just old-school.Then again, this is a dungeon crawler. Old-school is the appropriate mindset. Our gallery is flush with crisp new images for you to check out! Get out your graph paper and dive into the labyrinth of image files.%Gallery-14561%
Mazes of Fate: Impressions of Game
Just the fact that RPGamer's play session of the DS version of Mazes of Fate didn't end in a system crash is promising. The version we saw in video was troublingly incomplete and unplayable-looking. But this latest preview of Sabarasa Entertainment's GBA remake makes no mention of crippling framerate issues. In fact, the game Michael Cunningham describes sounds pretty good: a competent 3D update of the original game with touchscreen-based inventory management and a combat system that involves looking around with the stylus and tapping enemies to attack. Of course, the DS version also contains that eternally useful DS game feature, the automap. As much flak as early DS games got for having one screen devoted to maps, it makes a ton of sense in a dungeon game.We still question the necessity of making a pretty 2D game into a not-so-pretty 3D game, but the interface upgrades sound pretty great. Mazes of Fate DS will be out on the 26th, unless Amazon's right and it's out now.%Gallery-14561%
Mazes of Fate: new and improved?
After the recent video debacle, we were a little concerned about Mazes of Fate. The fact that the new videos that were promised never showed up, either, is certainly something that makes us think hard about how things are going for the redone GBA title. It didn't show up on our list of official releases this week, but it was scheduled, and Amazon shows the title as available. Any fans of the GBA game pick it up? We ask because the screenshots on the website, and those we came across today (located in our gallery for your convenience) look better than those videos, but we burn for more information.%Gallery-14561%
More like Mazes of Shame [update]
Mazes of Fate had kind of a hard time finding an audience. It came out just too late to be marketable. Graffiti Entertainment is correcting the original error (being a GBA cartridge) by releasing a version of the game on DS. When we first heard about it, we were lazily outraged about the idea of a year-old game being ported to the DS. However, our outrage was misdirected, because Mazes of Fate on the DS is more than a port.Having looked at these videos, it should have been a port. They've remade the dungeon portions of the game in 3D, with ... a minor performance hit. Keep in mind that when the video and sound slow down to a crawl, that's not your Internet connection, or YouTube at work. That's the game. That's the video they chose to upload to show off the game. We wouldn't be so concerned if this were extremely early footage, but ... the game is supposed to come out next week.The videos aren't embedded, because you have to push the little rectangle button on the real YouTube player to get them to display in the correct resolution. They're at least marginally better that way. Seriously, though, we wish Graffiti had been lazier and just given us the GBA game with a map on the top screen. [Update: the videos have been removed from YouTube. New videos should be available soon at Graffiti Entertainment's website.][Via NeoGAF]
Markdown of Fate
Mazes of Fate has some impressive graphics for a GBA release, and it also has the distinction of being the first Latin American-developed game for a Nintendo console. So, why did no one pick it up? Three reasons: As a handheld first-person RPG -- think Eye of the Beholder -- it has no mainstream appeal It's a GBA title that didn't come out until late 2006, long after most people stopped paying attention to GBA games It has virtually no presence in brick and mortar locations; the official site suggests you purchase Mazes of Fate on eBay Seeing as none of those issues relate to the actual quality of the game, we think you should still pick up Mazes of Fate if you're interested in it at all, especially since Toys "R" US has the dungeon crawler on sale for only $9.99! Move forward and past the break to watch the four-minute trailer publisher Graffiti Entertainment put out for the game. See also: Mazes of Fate getting ported from GBA
Project Exile finds publisher for early 2008 release
We thought that Project Exile was abandoned, left to rust in an unused barn with the other RPGs from indie studios that we haven't heard much from in months (e.g. Western Lords), but that wasn't the case! Signature Devices and Graffiti Entertainment announced that they've teamed up with Montreal-based developer Studio Archcraft to publish Project Exile, predicting a release for the 1st quarter of 2008.If this is your first time hearing about the title, Project Exile is a "Japanese-style RPG" that follows the traditions of classic SNES RPGs with both its graphics and game design. In fact, its similarities to games like Chrono Trigger, the Seiken Densetsu series, and Final Fantasy 6 are so pronounced, there was a bit of controversy over whether or not the developer was using altered sprites ripped from its forefathers.Though we're weary over what functionality the team might've shoehorned in during the game's mid-development move from the GBA to the DS, if Studio Archcraft manages to fulfill its promise of "eight fully developed playable characters armed with over 100 different abilities, skills, and combos," we'll definitely be at the front of the line when Project Exile hits shops.[Via Joystiq]
