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Microsoft has announced at Tokya Game Show that they will be releasing a special Xbox 360 holiday bundle this month. The Xbox 360 Arcade holiday bundle will come with 6 free games, including SEGA Superstars Tennis and 5 Xbox LIVE Arcade games. Xbox 360 Pro and Xbox 360 Elite will come with New Xbox Experience and will feature two free games; LEGO Indiana Jones and Kung Fu Panda.

New Xbox Experience will be launched on 19th November and in addition to community and real-time chat features, it will also allow user to stream movies from Netflix. Microsoft will also be offering free Netflix trials as stated by xbox360fanboy. Xbox 360 Arcade, Xbox 360 Pro and Xbox 360 Elite will cost $199, $299 and $399 respectively.

This is one of those good news/bad news situations. The good news is that StarCraft II will be a trilogy. The bad news is that StarCraft II kinda won’t be a trilogy. Let me explain — Blizzard has announced that the StarCraft II single-player campaign will be released as three separate products, each containing one of the three races. First up will be Wings of Liberty (Terrans), then Heart of the Swarm (Zerg), and finally Legacy of the Void (Protoss). Meaning if you want to get the full StarCraft II experience, you’ll likely have to cough out three times as much dough as you previously thought.

Blizzard justifies this chopping block treatment by saying that the overall vision of StarCraft II as a whole was simply too huge to fit into a single game. Each release is said to be big enough to be considered a full blown stand-alone title on its own and thanks to treating each of them as such, Blizzard says they’ll be able to deliver more missions and characters in each of the three releases. But three games worth of content or not, Blizzard will be taking some heat for extending three arms instead of one for the races everyone was expecting to be included in one package.

If you’re one of the people terribly saddened by this news, perhaps these fresh gameplay videos from BlizzCon will lighten the mood. Both are three minutes long and show some Protoss vs Terran and Zerg vs Terran action.

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Story: B-

Vesperia takes place in a world where the population has become dependant on magical stones called blastia left by an ancient civilization, and currently engaged in a power struggle between the Empire and the various Guilds.  Yuri, an ex-Knight of the Empire, encounters princess Estelle as she is trying to escape from the castle to find their mutual friend Flynn as they chase a blastia theft across the lands.  As they gain members, the group comes to realize there is a more sinister plot afoot involving the blastia that could lead to the destruction of the world, and only their group can stop it.

The plot is pretty stereotypical as well as the characters, though there are a few nice elements to it, but it does get convoluted.  Story is told by a lot of voiced and some unvoiced cutscenes as well as skits throughout the game, with a handful of anime shorts.  A major nit with the story is that it leads to a false climax; you’re all geared for a final battle but then the story takes a turn that requires another act to complete; not that this is necessarily bad, but the false finale is so strongly implied that to find there’s more after it feels like a cheap add-on to the game.

Gameplay: A

Vesperia’s core gameplay will come as no surprise to anyone already familar with the series or with JRPGs in general.  As the story progresses, you move between towns, passing through the overworld on foot, by boat, or by airship, and then entering various dungeons to find artifacts and other useful information.  There are, of course, monster encounters but they are all visible, and you can also attempt to link two or more monster encounters for a more difficult fight.   The game features a limited day/night and weather system approach, in that the type of monsters may change depending on these factors, at least in the overworld.

Combat continues the Tales series tradition of a real-time combat system, with a handful more features that start to make this act like a beat-em-up game.  You control one character (though the game seems to push you towards Yuri most of the time), and given the monster you’re aiming for, you can move back and forth in a line with it; however, off the bat, you can also hold down a trigger and run anywhere on the field, allowing you to easily evade certain attacks or position yourself better.  Attacks can be standard melee combat or a variety of “artes”, special attacks or magical spells, which deal more damage but also consume your “mana” tracks as TP points.  While TP regenerates during battle by landing regular hits, you’ll find that wasteful use of artes can lead to some close situations.  In addition, once you’ve learned certain skills, you can block, sidestep attacks, recover while flying in mid-air, and a number of other moves that you’d normally expect to see in a game like Street Fighter, and thus may start to appeal to those that play these types of games.  Of course, it does get repetitive, as is the case with JRPGs, so this is likely not going to tip you all the way.  An Overlimit meter fills up with successful hits from your party, and, once full, you can activate it to string a large number of attacks in a row without pausing for a short while, though your TP will still be consumed.  It’s also possible later in the game to coordinate the Overlimit with party members for a limited time.

Artes come in a number of types, eight of which you can assign to quick thumbstick flips to make their access easier.  Certain artes, once learned enough, will lead you to learning new artes; some also are learned as you gain levels, after certain plot points, or after learning certain skills.  These artes can then be worked into attack combos that lead to you being able to unleash more devesting artes, including each character’s unique “Mystic Arte”.  Fortunately, if you are a terrible button masher like myself, gaining mastery of manipulating artes, attacks, and blocking is not needed to win the game, but only makes it easier to complete.  It does help, however, to know how artes can be learned, which is one of those constants that are part of the series but not well-spelled out in the general documentation.  Most artes also have a special direction of damage that they do (up, to the side, or down).  Pulling off enough artes attack on an enemy with the same damage will cause that enemy to become susceptible to Fatal Strikes; hit the enemy again and for a brief second a special indicator will flash.  While this is up, if you hit the right trigger and the direction indicated, you will immediately finish any non-boss character, while doing damage to boss ones.  Using Fatal Strikes can significantly up the rewards you get from battle.  It took me a while to get use to the Fatal Strike timing, more often then not calling up the in-battle menu instead of the right attack.  However, it does prove to be a useful tactic for later battles.

You aren’t alone in battle; up to 3 of your party will join you. A detailed strategy table can be used to highly customize their actions in battle, as well as having a number of different strategies saved for quick recall as the situation changes.  But, by default, the AI for the characters perform well, though you many need to turn off weaker artes for them as they learn their more powerful artes.  While you can’t switch out during battle, those that don’t participate are still going to be able to gain experience and other benefits from battle.  As each has an area that they can be better at than others (two, for example, are better against aerial enemies, while one is strong with attack magic), you’ll be able to get your party right for the areas you explore.  The only caveat is that they need to be active battle members to learn new artes, but this is not a significant problem to overcome if you swap out and around every so often.

The “twist” in this Tales game is a skill system which works very much like Final Fantasy IX’s abilities.  Each weapon and certain armor has a set of skills that can be learned by characters that can equip it.  You gain that skill with the weapon equiped, but if you use it long enough in battle to earn enough skill points, you’ll be able to learn that skill without equipping the item.  Thus, much of the game’s management is to continually make sure you collect weapons (including via synthesis) and keeping track when each character learns a skill so that you can swap in a new weapon as to get them to develop new skills.  Of course, the number of skills you can get is large, and you only have a limited number of skill points to allocate to these skills (these grow with level, but it is still a limit).  These skills come in a variety of areas; some increase your attributes, some give you new commands while in battle, others can help modify artes, and so on.  These can get difficult to manage, though if you fail to take steps to manage them on the other characters, they usually default to fair settings.  While the system items is not new, it is a good way of adding a bit of extra customizations to the characters.

The usual cooking aspect is here in the; you can learn recipes to restore party health and TP one time after a battle (you can do it either from the battle completion screen or the menus), providing you have the right ingredients.  The game also adds a synthesis element.  All enemies drop loot that can be combined at stores to make basic goods, armor, or help improve your weapons to advanced versions with new skills to be learned.  There’s also special items, some which are more decorative, but others that are quite useful in battle, such as increasing your Overlimit level.  Fortunately, you’re told what materials you need to make each and where they can be found, so that if you’re itching for a particular weapon or item and lack the resources, you’ll have a way of getting them.  That said, there are a lot of synthesized weapons that can be made in the game, and while the game helps to track which skills you’ve extracted weapons from, this only helps when you have your full party; as the game separates you from the others several times, you can’t see what skills they have learned while synthesizing and thus you’ll either have to wait till they rejoin or make your best guesses on what they lack.

From the standpoint of the overall game, it’s decently structured; the first third of the game, you’re pretty much fixed on a linear path with a few small side quests; in the second third you gain a ship and then shortly thereafter an airship, and your freedom to explore the world opens up a lot more sidequests.  Mind you, there is a period in the third third where you are stripped of your airship for a brief while, but the fact you get to taste what it feels like and knowing you’ll get back to it helps.   While this is typical of most JRPGs with the same world structure, the game feels like it opens up earlier than others.  That said, one of the more annoying parts of the game is that there are several points where your party of 7 will be missing one or more members due to the story line.  Normally, not a big problem, but one of these extended periods includes your primary healer; by this point you do have two other characters that can heal via artes, but their effects are not as strong as the healer, and this can make the boss fights during this period rather difficult.  Fortunately, you have the ability to alter the game difficulty before battle for less reward.  However, the number of times characters switched in and out did get a bit frustrating.

Value/Replayability: A-

The game clocked in for me at 45 hours - mostly playing the main story.  My only nit here was that when I was approaching the 40 hr mark with the characters preparing for the “final battle”, there was a twist in the plot that added another 5 hrs of play to it, making it feel like a sluggish ending.  As with most Tales games, throughout the game you earn Grade from battles, and thus when you start a new game after completing one, you have the opportunity to spend Grade prior to the game to unlock “cheats”, such as the ability to retain items, money, skills, artes, etc to the next playthrough, or to earn experience or Grade faster, and several other cheat-like type approaches.  Normally, this can make the next playthrough more interesting, but as the game is intergrated with the Xbox Live, there are now achievements to be earned, some which you get through the normal story line, but most requiring a couple playthroughs to earn.  Of course, as you get more Grade, your playthroughs can start to become incredibly shorter since your characters start more powerful and can wipe out monsters without too much problem.  This seems like a nice combination of the Tales approach and Achievements and thus gives some good replay incentive to the game.

Graphics: A

On the 360, Vesperia’s graphics shine nicely.  The game is given an anime cel-shading approach, similar to Crackdown’s comic book style, and they flow well on the console.  There’s still issues with characters mouths not lip-syncing as well with the text, but we’re getting closer to that.  The background environments are beautifully done, and there’s a grand sense of scale in many areas.  The battle screen is nicely compact to allow you to focus on the battle while still having key HUD elements in view.

Audio: B

Music and voice acting-wise, Vesperia is just fine: the music is of the same mood as past games, maybe not as sweeping as Final Fantasy but still a good element, and all the voice actors are pretty good for their roles (despite the poor lines they’re given).  Skits are finally fully voiced, which helps to make them more interesting to play through.  But, and this is where my grade comes from, a number of in-game conversations are not voiced fully.  Certainly interactions with NPCs are reasonable to not provide this, but there were several scenes, only between the main group of characters, where the previous scene was voiced, the scene following was voiced, but the middle scene, just as important to the plot as either its neighbors, was not.  This inconsistency was rather annoying.  I understand the need to avoid something like Oblivion where having every character voiced ends up making the game seem like only three voice actors are behind it, but Vesperia is nowhere close to this point, and could have used with more fully-voiced scenes.

Overall: A-

Fans of the Tales series will well appreciate the fact that Vesperia is a fine continuation of the series onto the next generation of consoles.  The core elements of the series are still there, with appreciable new gameplay elements to make it still a fresh approach, and the graphical boost from the new hardware helps a lot.  There is a bit of triteness with the stereotypical story and characters, but that’s an aspect to come to expect from the Tales games.  If you haven’t had the opportunity to try one of the games from this series and you lack an aversion to JRPGs, you will do yourself good to pick this title up.

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Following yesterday’s announcement at BlizzCon that “StarCraft II” will be split into a trilogy — three different products released separately — I spoke with lead producer Chris Sigaty about the decision and what we can expect.

Here are the basics:

• Each product is a full-scale title that contains between 26-30 single-player missions per game.
• The timing of the releases could be a year between each game — or longer.
• Though each game will make references to the others, it’s not necessary to own all three to enjoy the single-player experience.
• However, if you want particular units for the multiplayer portion, you’ll need to buy the product that has those units.
• Sigaty maintained the decision wasn’t made to make more money or due to pressure from the Activision merger; the decision was made at the end of last year.

Read on for the full explanation and more details from Sigaty.

MTV Multiplayer: Why split the game up into three products?

Sigaty: We were running up against basically having a huge story with big scope. And we do this with all our games, where we start out probably too big and then carve back; we do it with the design, how many races we want, all these things. This is from the story front, so we were quickly heading down this path of cut, cut, cut, cut. And it didn’t feel like the other options were really viable to do what we wanted to do, which was tell a story from a new perspective. So a player can explore as much or as little as they want, but have the ability to talk a little bit about the motivations of the characters and why they’re doing what they’re doing and what universe that they’re in — just let the player really get up close and personal with it.

So as we started heading down that path, we were realizing that it would be much better to be able to give the player that. And we realize that there are players out there that love a particular race and really want that story first, but knowing that you’re going to get them all, be able to experiment in each and have your own story — we thought it was worth doing it with the scope that we originally intended. And because it wouldn’t affect multiplayer at all, and that each product would have upgrades to multiplayer — expanding and improving upon multiplayer — we thought it was a positive move.

MTV Multiplayer: What’s the story line for each game — “Terrans: Wings of Liberty,” “Zerg: Heart of the Swarm” and “Protoss: Legacy of the Void”?

Sigaty: I can’t really go into what’s happening with ["Zerg" and "Protoss"]. The first one ["Terrans"] is focused on Jim Raynor and the Terran struggle, basically. It picks up about four years after where we left off in “Brood War” [expansion]. There, you’re going to be focused on purchasing Terran technology to help Jim Raynor and you have a star map where you pick what planets you go to. The second one ["Zerg"], we want to focus a lot more on Kerrigan herself and making her more powerful. We’re still talking about what that means exactly.

And then the third one is Protoss-focused, and the intention there is currently we’re talking about diplomacy. And this may be the most hardcore of [the trilogy], in that we can cut off what happens to the player by either not helping a particular faction or helping a particular faction, and not having another side not be happy about it — that sort of thing. We’re still ironing out the specifics, but that’s the basics. And then storywise, I mean as you saw from the video, there is a greater threat out there that the final video eluded to. But you can see with the movies themselves that we were really focusing on Jim Raynor and his side of things.

MTV Multiplayer: What’s the timing for the releases? How long do we have to wait for each one?

Sigaty: We don’t know for sure, because with story mode, the whole thing that we’re doing right now is new to us. It’s definitely a new medium for us. The in-game cinematics take a considerable amount of time. It’s not as long as pre-rendered, but it does take some time to get that done so we’re exploring that right now. With “Warcraft III,” we hit a year for the expansion. We’d love to hit that [for "Starcraft II"], but honestly, with how story mode goes and with the pre-rendered and in-game cinematics, I don’t know how long it’s going to take, so it’s hard to answer that question. We want to hit the shortest amount of time possible.

The fact that we already know where we’re headed with them, and we kind of know the over-arching story and how it’s going to be, that’s a great first start. Our intention is — as we’re finishing up the first product “Wings of Liberty” — to actually begin working on the next one, but we’ll see how well we’re able to execute with regards to those plans.

MTV Multiplayer: So you’re saying it could be a year or more between each one?

Sigaty: Yes, it could be. But let’s spin that in a positive light! [laughs]

MTV Multiplayer: You could say it will be worth the wait…

Sigaty: [laughs] Well, “Frozen Throne” ["Warcraft III" expansion] is an example of a year between expansions, and each one of our “World of Warcraft” expansions, they’re big in scope and they add a lot. So we’re definitely not going to skimp on that.

MTV Multiplayer: And to be clear, the order that the games were presented, is the order that they’ll be released?

Sigaty: Yeah, well right now that’s it. With us, [the games] always working titles and working intentions, but right now that feels pretty solid.

MTV Multiplayer: Will these be full-priced products?

Sigaty: You know, we haven’t even talked about that yet. I don’t know. They’re definitely full-sized games. I mean, the scope will be big; it’s going to be 26 to 30 missions in the first one, and we intend to have at least that much in the next after that. By the end, I’d say up to 90 missions. Definitely full-scale. And again, multiplayer will be upgraded the same way we have with other expansion-like products.

MTV Multiplayer: Have you discussed how the games will connect with each other? Let’s say for some reason I want the Protoss game but I don’t want the Zerg…

Sigaty: Well, more than likely — and this is not in stone yet — for the multiplayer portion of the game, if you want the things that get introduced in the second one, the Zerg portion, you’re not going to be able to have… Let’s say we introduce a couple of new units per side in the second one. You would need to buy the expansion ot have those units, that’s the whole point of the expansion or the second part. But as for single-player, we expect a person that’s only interested in the Kerrigan focus could pick up and start plaing from her perspective. We would probably reference things that happened in the first campaign, but you wouldn’t be required to play through that to go on and play this.

MTV Multiplayer: Has it been challenging to balance the games?

Sigaty: It definitely is. It’s definitely coming up with things that are fun that are new mechanics. I mean we try the first product and make sure we have the complete answer right there. So then we think we have it, and we come up with the expansion and we go “Okay, now what things are missing here?” And making sure we’re not going to overwhelm the players who have become used to and love this, but enhanced it to make it even more enjoyable. So it’s definitely a huge challenge, that’s from the multiplayer aspect. From the story aspect, our single-player aspect, it’s definitely challenging as well, but I feel a little better because I know where we’re headed with it. We haven’t actually figured out definitively what we’re going to do from a multiplayer angle on the second or the third product, but we have with the story for the most part.

MTV Multiplayer: What do you say to critics who think this decision was made because of Activision, or that it’s just a way to make more money?

Sigaty: Already? Well, I can assure you from being on the inside, this decision actually happened before we even knew the Activision thing was there. This was something that took us a lot of time. We were seeing the danger signs at the end of last year. We were like, “You know what, the scope is so big and if we continue done this path and don’t make a decision, we’re going to end up cutting it back so much that it’s not going to be a good thing.” We were not even going to be able to do this more up-close-and-personal examination of Jim Raynor or Kerrigan and all the chracters involved.

So from our perspective, this is not a money decision anyway. We definitely intended to do expansions for this project, one or two. Now we’ve just said we’re definitely doing it, basically. And then what happens within the story mode, we’re not cutting the scope with the story mode, we’re just changing the perspective. Which I mean, if people would be angry it would be the people that love Zerg so much that they want to play the Zerg story element now. Well, you can’t and we’re really sorry about that. But we feel like we’re giving huge scope there, and we’re not changing anything with regards to multiplayer.

Even the number of missions and that sort of thing within the story mode. In fact, for the Zerg player, they’re now going to have that 30 missions all kind of together. And we’re still trying to add some — it just didn’t make a lot of sense for us to have the story from Jim Raynor’s perspective and have you play as Zerg. But we have thrown some Protoss missions into there. So the straight answer to your question is: this was not a monetary decision. This was a lot more about what we could continue to provide from this new angle of storytelling, which is the story mode.

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de Blob, developed by Blue Tongue and distributed by THQ, is an interesting title - there’s similarities to Katamari Damacy throughout, but though it is not as quirky as that title, there’s still little touchs that remind me of why I enjoyed that game.  de Blob is a very good effort for a third party Wii game; it’s fun though can be tedious near the end, but does have a lot of collection items that will interest those types of games.  The presentation is very well done, particularly in the sound department.  It’s definitely the type of game that will appeal to those that like ones that go off the beaten path.

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Story: A-

The game is based on a world of color, Raydia, that has been taken over by Comrade Black and his INKT forces, draining all the color and forcing the Raydian residents into a monocolor servitude.  A small resistance force in Chroma City oppose the forces but are unable to combat them enough to take them down until Blob shows up with the ability to absorb the stolen paint from the INKT forces and use it against them to repaint the city, gradually freeing the Raydians and recoloring their world.  The story is primarily told from between-level pantomime cutscenes which are nicely done and are able to craft the story just by gestures alone.  You also gain insight on the city as you get instructions for missions, brief little snippets but shows some depth to what the developers saw.  It is a bit on the childish side, but that’s reasonable given that it’s rated for all players.

Gameplay: A-

de Blob may bear some passing resemblance to Katamari Damacy at first - the concept of rolling around, working your way to new areas may read like Katamari Damacy but as you start to play it, you realize it’s different… but then come around to the realization that more of the general design approaches used in Katamari Damacy are present here.  It’s not the quirk title that Katamari was, but it sure has the right touches to make it a good game.

You control Blob with expected controls schemes on the Wii; nunchuck to move around, waggle the Wiimote to jump, and a few other buttons. Control-wise the game is quick to get into.  Initially on each level, you face a black and white world.  By running into Paintbots, Blob will adsorb their color.  Once infused with paint, any surface that Blob touches becomes that color; this includes buildings, plants, the residents of the city, you name it.  However, the amount of paint you have is limited so you have to keep finding Paintbots to refill your paint to keep up the process.  Everything you paint is scored; you get more points for painting an object the first time, and if you can paint multiple objects without touching the ground, you can get a score multiplier.  When you get enough points, you have the ability to unlock a gate into the next section of the level, with each level having about 3 or 4 of these.

The paintbots come in the three primary colors: red, yellow and blue.  If Blob is already one of these colors and hits a different color, then he’ll become the mix (orange, green, and purple); if each primary color is hit once, then Blob becomes brown.  Hitting a primary color again after becoming one of these colors resets Blob back to the primary color.  If needed, you can run Blob into any water source to return him to paint-less state until he hits another bot.  Additionally, if Blob is hit by the INKT forces, he needs to be run through a water source to wash off the ink before all his paint is drained, otherwise you will have to restart the level.

Throughout this, you’re fighting a countdown meter, but you can gain time by a number of means.  Most commonly is to take up challenges issued by your fellow revolutionaries in art.  There are four types of challenges that are available; converting INKT buildings back into the colorful forms they were before, facing off against INKT forces, painting buildings to specific colors, and racing via checkpoints through the cities.  Each of these has a time limit and a difficulty rating, though most are pretty easy to complete.  By far, the most difficult ones that may require some planning are the building painting ones.  The early ones of these ask you to color buildings a specific color, which is not a problem, but as you get into the later stages, you’ll have to painting buildings multiple colors, often a mix of primary and secondary colors.  This can be made more difficult by having buildings that need to be painted one color only accessible by jumping from a building that has to be painted a different color.  Since you can’t avoiding painting when you touch a surface, these means you’ll need to backtrack to repaint the launch-point building after you’ve dealt with the more difficult one to access.  These challenges get trickier with game progression, but failure does not reset the world, but instead simply leaves what you have already filled in alone, making it easy to finish off multiple times.  You get the same reward for finishing it (another minute on the clock), but the wasted time of failing the first time can loom on that countdown timer.  In addition to challenges, additional time can be found scattered about the level or by both painting a complete city block and painting the citizens as they come out after you freed them.  I found myself never without a time crunch in the game, but this may be a problem for less experienced gamers.  The game is not hard, but neither a cake walk; there are some challenges that are tricky but challenges are mostly optional; the more difficult ones do feel rewarding to complete.

The INKT enemies come in several forms that require different tactics to approach, and can only by smooshed out with a set amount of paint.  You’ll also encounter INKT forces that can only be harmed when Blob is one specific color, thus making it difficult to progress if you haven’t gotten the hang of the color system yet.  The foes aren’t super intelligent, they are merely deterrents and reminders that you need to keep abreast of your paint levels and where you are in the level, and where the nearest source of water is.  The game does provide a nice one-touch interface that shows where the nearest water source is, as well as paint bots, challenge starting points, and objectives as part of a challenge so that you don’t get lost.  There is one final boss to the game, but it incorporates all the concepts learned previously in the levels, and is not very difficult.

Where the game becomes more Katamari-like is that it is set up for those that are completionists and perfectionists.  Each level does have a fixed number of items to paint, and one possible goal is to achieve that completion.  But even if you don’t go for that, you can aim to paint all of the billboards or plants, rescue all the citizens, collect all the paint styles on a level, and many more mini-objectives.  Of course, there’s also scoring aspects to consider, and using paint-combos to build up a good score can help there.  When you complete a level, besides opening the next level, you’ll gain access to bonus content as well as two additional timed challenges for that level.

There’s also a handful of multiplayer modes for 2 to 4 local players, with modes similar to various Tony Hawk multiplayer matches.  A paint match has you all vying to paint the area with your color before time is up; a king-of-the-hill type mode has only one player that can paint, the others trying to take that away from him before he paints up too much.  A third type is a race to paint specific targets first when they show up on the match.

There is, unfortunately, a small bug that can be reproduced that is annoying, in that you can get stuck between two objects while the game thinks you are falling; you’ll become unable to move at all and the only way out is to restart the level, which means up to a good 30 minutes could be wasted.  I’ve had this happen twice, and while it’s not overall detrimental to the experience, it is surprising to see it there.

Value/Replayability: A-

There are about 10 total levels in the game; if you sit down and pound through them, you could be done in 5 hours, but de Blob is not about rushing through but enjoying what they’ve put forth.  It does get a bit repetative, and I felt there was a point in diminishing returns on the number of levels, but it’s just barely past that point - it’s not too long to become too boring.  But like the original Katamari, its length is just off from what one would consider “perfect”. Of course, having all the completeness goals available does give incentive to replay the game.

Graphics: A

This is a very clean looking game for the Wii, the only nit being that the camera just sometimes doesn’t track fast enough in tight busy streets.  The way the game transitions color as you move from an area devoid of it to one bursting with color is nice, and there is a nice sense of wonder as you watch your efforts pay off.  There are some obvious short drawing distance pop-up effects that are clearly shown, but it really doesn’t ruin the game’s experience.  Even with the city in its default white palette, it’s easy to make out all the different features in the game.

Audio: A+

I love the approach this game took to the soundtrack.  When you start a level, you select a general ambiance mood music out of about 10 different choices (most unlock with level completion), nice little jazzy numbers that fit the game’s theme well.  As you start, the music is very subtle and laid back but as you color in the city, the music gains depth and becomes more pronounced.  Furthermore, the color that Blob has influences this, adding record-scratches when brown, orchestra hits when red, and the like.  When you paint objects, these even add to the music score, again based on color.  It is ultimately very pleasant to listen to and completely suits the mood of this game.  Voice work uses made up noises, but it sounds similar to how speech was done on Okami, in that real voice actors provides voices, then these were heavily computerized to mask the speech; they’re not as annoying as the high-pitched ones in Okami, and help with the personality of the characters.

Overall: A

de Blob is likely not going to be the next Katamari Damacy in terms of cult titles, but there are definitely elements that both games share in their appeal.  The game itself is well put together with great graphics and an outstanding soundtrack, and though the gameplay can get a bit long and tedious, it does allow you to take in as much or as little as you want, with lots of appeal to the completionist.  I can see this game gaining further titles in the series with some additional new features without changing the core gameplay completely.  It may be a renter if you’re curious, but if you do like unconventional games, de Blob fits that bill.

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Chris Delay writes at length on the Introversion forum about Multiwinia’s release:

Multiwinia has the highest conversion rate we’ve ever seen. What this means is that every time somebody plays the demo version, there is a percentage chance that they will go on to buy the game, and that percentage is higher than any of our other games. This is excellent news, and generally lines up with our belief that Multiwinia is the most accessible of all our collection, the most immediately satisfying, and the most visceral and intense of our games. We can infer from his high conversion rate that people enjoy our game immediately, and that makes us very happy. By comparison, Darwinia had a very low conversion rate, at least initially, because we royally messed up the launch demo. The kinds of conversion rates we are seeing with Multiwinia are in fact excellent by any standards, and we should be very happy about this.

Unfortunately, a high percentage of zero is still zero. Nobody is playing the demo of Multiwinia.

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Read the rest of Introversion Speak Out: Play Our Bloody Demo (1,127 words)

Posted by KieronGillen. | No comments | Donate or subscribe to RPS | Post tags: demo, free, Introversion, multiwinia
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