sabarasa
Latest
Lucha Libre delayed, new release date pinned down in October
Originally set for release on August 9, Slang's Lucha Libre AAA: Heroes of the Ring has been delayed until October 12, 2010 on PS3, Xbox, Wii and DSiWare, with the PSP version launching at an unspecified later date. While additional development time was cited as one reason for the delay, the announcement primarily frames the release bump as a marketing strategy. "Based on the positive feedback we received at the 2010 Electronic Entertainment Expo we decided to push the launch of Lucha Libre AAA: Heroes del Ring closer to the upcoming holiday shopping season," Slang president Abraham Batista said. "The additional time provides us with several key benefits, including the ability to market to a larger audience, build greater street buzz with consumers and continue the development cycle." Of course, given the October release date, we believe the "holiday shopping season" to which Batista refers is Halloween. What better time for a game about masked men? %Gallery-90096%
Jason Rohrer Anthology gravitating to DSiWare [update]
Diamond Trust of London, the strategy title about the diamond trade, isn't the only game from Sleep is Death designer Jason Rohrer headed to the Nintendo DS. The ESRB lists an "Alt-Play: Jason Rohrer Anthology" featuring three of Rohrer's previous games, published by Sabarasa Entertainment. Included in the set are Gravitation, the two-player Between, and Rohrer's best-known game Passage, which is also available on iPhone. This DS collection, then, will be another option for those who want to feel terrible about their mortality on the go. Sabarasa's recent press releases list the Alt-Play collection as an "upcoming project," and confirm that it's being made for the DSiWare platform. It certainly makes sense as a download: it may be three games, but those are three very brief games. [Update: Sabarasa press releases also mention that Rohrer's puzzle game Primrose will be released separately on DSiWare.]
Protothea might not be terrible
Earlier this week, we shared with you videos from Ubisoft newly announced WiiWare title, Protöthea, and the game looked, at best, boring, at worst, awful. Seeing this trailer for the original 2005 PC game which the WiiWare release will be a remake of, however, has given us a new hope. This looks about a hojillion times more exciting than the clips IGN trotted out for us to preview!Further improving our opinion of Protöthea, the original PC game was Cartoon Network's Project Goldmaster winner at the 2005 Independent Games Festival, rewarding developer Digital Builders an opportunity to create a game based on a Cartoon Network license. Knowing all this, maybe the screenshots in the gallery we've included below will seem more interesting to you.Protöthea was supposed to launch with WiiWare, according to IGN, but we didn't see the title on the list posted earlier today, so who knows when the shmup will be thrown onto Nintendo's download service. While we wait around for someone to announce a release date, spend a moment to leave us a comment on whether or not this trailer has changed your opinion on the game. %Gallery-22560%[Via GoNintendo]
Yawn: Ubisoft bringing Protthea to WiiWare
With so many proposed WiiWare titles crossing Nintendo's gold-lined desk, you might think that the company would be interested in picking the best and brightest to release alongside its upcoming online service on May 12. And you'd be right, if by best and brightest, you meant old and uninspired, two terms that are well suited to describe Protöthea, the latest launch game confirmed for WiiWare, and the first from Ubisoft.If the game's name sounds familiar, that may be because the top-down shooter is actually a port of a nearly three year old PC title, and judging from the above video Protöthea feels antiquated even by those standards. The game will include newfangled controls care of the Wii remote and nunchuck, as well as a number of other additions being introduced by the developers at Sabarasa and Digital Builders, but with Protöthea sharing download space with more interesting shooters like Star Soldier R and Gyrostarr, we can't help but wonder what the point is.[Via Wii Fanboy]
MehWare: Ubisoft reveals Protothea
Ubisoft has finally announced its first contribution to Nintendo's forthcoming WiiWare service, and it's a remake of 2005 PC shooter Protöthea. Supposedly, there are a lot of additions, but whatever Argentine developers Sabarasa (Mazes of Fate) and Digital Builders added, it hasn't made the game interesting.It's not just the laggard enemies and humdrum soundtrack that have us yawning -- even the heads-up display is enough to put SHMUP fans to sleep. But that's alright, as the last thing we needed was more must-buy WiiWare games.Protöthea is scheduled to debut with WiiWare's launch on May 12th alongside (more interesting) shooters Star Soldier R and Gyrostarr. Ubisoft will be asking 1,000 Wii Points for the game. Bring a pillow and blanky past the break for another Protöthea video and a list of new features for the remake.
Mazes of Fate maps out route to Europe
Signature Devices has picked up the rights to publish dungeon-crawler Mazes of Fate in Europe at some point this summer, with the game still to be released in the U.S. Regular readers may recall us recoiling in horror upon first seeing the title in "action" earlier this year, but later impressions, combined with some above-average review scores, revealed our initial pessimism may have been misplaced. And that's pretty fortunate, because Europe remains thoroughly neglected by publishers when it comes to portable dungeon crawling, with Orcs & Elves the only current option.Update: Looks like we got ahead of ourselves a little there -- as our commenters correctly pointed out, the U.S. is still waiting also!%Gallery-14561%
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%
Get lost in this Mazes of Fate footage
The last time we witnessed Mazes of Fate in motion, the results were not pleasant; even positive preview coverage of the title wasn't enough to convince us.Thankfully, this new footage -- presumably of the finished product, as it launches in the U.S. on February 26th -- has eased our fears. Though somewhat more visually dour than other recent DS dungeon-crawlers such as Etrian Odyssey II or Orcs & Elves, at least we now know the game has something resembling a frame rate. It's a start.%Gallery-14561%[Via Go Nintendo]
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%
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]
Mazes of Fate getting ported from GBA
We're pretty inured to this kind of thing on the Wii, although we still enjoy getting outraged about it now and then. But now we're starting to see last-gen ports on the DS! Sure, we have the Phoenix Wright games already, but they totally get a pass since the ports are new to the US and Europe. RPGLand reports that Mazes of Fate, the first-person dungeon crawler developed by Argentina's Sabarasa Entertainment, is being prepared for a DS release by publisher Signature Devices and their in-house developer Graffiti Entertainment. Unlike Phoenix Wright, the GBA version of Mazes of Fate did come out in the US-- in December of last year. The DS is a good system for dungeon games, with its map-displaying second screen, and Graffiti is adding new dungeons, characters, and some touch-screen stuff. If you don't already have the game, this is the one to get. Or if you have a DS Lite and you get really embarrassed about the GBA protuberance.
