EL33TONLINE: News tag archive: disneyepicmickey
Disney Epic Mickey 2 has been ‘a thing’ now for quite some time. Despite what you might have heard, the original game, was quite a success on the Wii, selling over one million units on launch in the US alone and most likely more than that around the world since its release in late 2010.
Critics were mixed, however, but El33tonline thought it was excellent, despite its problems.
Good to hear, then, that head of development studio Junction Point and creative director on Epic Mickey, Warren Spector, is set to make an ‘epic’ announcement very soon.
According to a number of reports doing the rounds, Disney Interactive Studios has begun a company restructuring process and will aim to realign its efforts in the videogame publishing arena by focussing on digital distribution and online games, rather than packaged goods games for retail.
“As part of setting a strategic direction for future success in the digital media space,” read a statement to Variety, “the Disney Interactive Media Group today began a restructuring process.”
This new direction obviously puts major questions over the future of Disney’s current game studios, including Junction Point (Disney Epic Mickey) and Black Rock (Split/Second), and it seems as though some of those questions have already been answered with reports of layoffs across the company.
Disney Epic Mickey had a lot of expectation and promise riding with it before release, as well as a lot of talent and financial support what with game industry luminary Warren Spector heading up the title’s creative vision, and the backing of a multibillion dollar in the Disney Company.
As an adventure game that takes players across several different exotic locations (all based on Disney franchises and areas of the Disney Land/World theme parks) and allows you to meet a vast array of characters from Disney cartoons gone by, Disney Epic Mickey is an extremely rich title, filled with history, detail, care and vibrance.
As an action platform game, however, Disney Epic Mickey has a good amount of issues that make the richness of the title a little difficult to access, and with a fairly serious case of schizophrenia it becomes less and less of a value proposition.
Give it a chance to shine, though, and the game will reward you with its wonderful characters, world, atmosphere and story, and at the very least live up to its promise in bursts, glimmers and glimpses. Despite its problems, Disney Epic Mickey provides one of the most memorable experiences in recent memory, with an addictive quality largely missing from Wii (and even blockbuster) games today.
Continue reading El33tonline’s review of Disney Epic Mickey.
Sales tracking and market research firm NPD recently released sales data for the US videogame industry for the month of December, while also revealing interesting statistics on the state of the market over 2010 as compared to 2009.
Total sales for the US videogame industry during the month of December 2010, (which includes hardware, software and accessories) came to $5.06 billion, down 9% compared to December 2009 when sales reached $5.55 billion.
Junction Point and Disney Interactive Studios’s action adventure game for the Wii, Disney Epic Mickey, isn’t just about setting players loose in a colourful wonderland filled with forgotten characters and amazing attractions.
The game is also about allowing players to make their way through the adventure via methods of their choosing and through decisions of their own, rather than progressing through a linear series of events before arriving at the same ending in the same way as everybody else.
In this latest developer diary for Disney Epic Mickey, Warren Spector and other team members working on the title speak a little about this freedom to choose how you play the game, and the effects of those decisions on the story:
Disney Epic Mickey from Junction Point Studios and Disney Interactive Studios is looking magical indeed, and contains the kind of quality that you would expect from the highest class of Nintendo titles – a grand compliment, I’m sure.
A couple of newly released gameplay videos for Disney Epic Mickey do nothing to shiver the timbers of that assertion, and by the end of November when the game becomes available, Wii owners (and Wii naysayers) should pay careful attention to the Mickey-starring action platformer.
Great balls of fire! Is it true?! Why yes, it is!
Disney Interactive Studios has finally deemed it necessary to announce the release date for Junction Point’s action adventure game starring Mickey Mouse, Disney Epic Mickey!
GDC Europe 2010 kicked off in Cologne, Germany today, and with it came the opening keynote for the European game developers conference delivered by none other than videogame industry luminary, Warren Spector.
Spector would be best known for his work on Deus Ex, but his career extends much further back than that title from 2000, with a legendary list of games on his resume including Ultima Underworld, Thief and System Shock.
In the keynote, entitled “What Videogames Can Learn from Other Media…What We Can’t…And What We Shouldn’t,” Spector used to full effect his extensive experience in the game industry, a college degree in film, and his own personal love for movies, comic books, radio and storytelling to deliver an incredibly interesting talk
The keynote compared the evolution of other media to that of videogames, and Spector gave his thoughts on why it’s not necessarily a bad thing to borrow business and production methods from other media, while there are times when it may be detrimental to (and even stunt) the future success and evolution of the medium of videogames.
It’s recently been revealed that videogame industry luminary Warren Spector will provide the opening keynote for the European Game Developers Conference (GDC) in Cologne, Germany this month, which takes place just ahead of the gamescom event in the city.
Currently the creative director at Junction Point and hard at work on this year’s Disney Epic Mickey for the Wii, Spector’s keynote will be entitled “What Videogames Can Learn from Other Media…What We Can’t…And What We Shouldn’t.”
After the Game Critics Awards nominated its top picks for best showings during E3 2010 in categories including ‘Best of Show,’ ‘Best Console Game’ and ‘Best Hardware,’ the organisation has today announced its award winners in each category.
id Software’s first-person shooter, RAGE, walks away with three awards, Portal 2 gets two, Dance Central also receives two nods, while Nintendo’s 3DS is awarded two final placings as well.
This means that Disney Epic Mickey, despite being nominated for four awards, gets nothing.
Get the full list below:
The judges contributing their thoughts to the Game Critics Awards have announced the nominees for this year’s ‘Best of E3 2010’ awards, revealing what games and technologies present at the show they felt were the most impressive.
Awards are split up into categories such as ‘Best of Show,’ ‘Best Console Game,’ ‘Best Hardware’ and more, and while a few titles are notably absent from the list (Killzone 3 and LittleBigPlanet 2, to name two), heavy hitters such as RAGE, Disney Epic Mickey and Portal 2 were all nominated in a number of categories.
The winners in each category of the E3 2010 Game Critics Awards… awards will be announced on July 6th, but until then you can browse through the full list of nominations below, as well as see a breakdown of the lists:
Game industry veteran Warren Spector may be working on a Wii-exclusive adventure title based on Disney’s epic catalogue of properties in Disney Epic Mickey, but by the sounds of it, he’s really keen to tackle development of a game for Nintendo’s upcoming handheld stereoscopic 3D console, the 3DS.
In a series of blog posts, Spector gave his perspective on the recently concluded E3 2010 event, talking a little (and a lot) about his experiences and activities during the show, but it wasn’t until part four of his E3 round-up that he got to the topic of Nintendo’s 3DS… and how utterly awesome he thinks the console is going to be.
Disney Interactive and Junction Point’s action adventure title starring Mickey Mouse was unveiled to the public for the first time during Nintendo’s E3 2010 press conference, where the unique ‘drawing’ and ‘erasing’ gameplay mechanic was demonstrated to the audience.
While in the world of Disney Epic Mickey, players will be able to use the power of ‘paint’ to draw objects and items into the world to help them proceed, solve puzzles and gain the trust of the world’s inhabitants. Players can also use paint ‘thinner’ to erase objects from the world at will, even being able to erase walls, floors and ceilings to ease progress.
How you use these abilities will determine how the world and its characters react to you, which will in turn affect the way the story plays out.
You can see all of this in action in a couple gameplay videos below, and hear project head Warren Spector talk about Disney Epic Mickey:
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