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.

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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.

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:

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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.

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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!

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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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After the first reveal of Disney and Junction Point’s Epic Mickey in Game Informer, the news has officially been announced – Disney Epic Mickey, a platform adventure game featuring the adventures of a reinvented Mickey Mouse, will be releasing on the Wii in the Fall of 2010.

Disney Epic Mickey tells the tale of Yen Sid’s Cartoon Wasteland, a world created by the powerful sorcerer Yin Sid, where Disney’s forgotten and retired creations to live, and continue to live and flourish. Walt Disney’s ultimate forgotten creation, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (created in 1927 and Walt Disney’s first cartoon star) becomes this world’s first resident after the creation of Mickey Mouse.

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A time-lapse video featuring one of the Epic Mickey concept artists has been released, showing him sketching out one of the enemies (presumably) to be found in what seems like a wonderful world fantasy world, if the released art is anything to go by.

Epic Mickey has been confirmed to be a Wii exclusive, despite a bunch of rumours to the contrary, and is currently being helmed by Warren Spector, Junction Point and Disney Interactive. Epic Mickey is looking (and sounding) mightily exciting!

Watch an Epic Mickey enemy appear on a page as though from thin air, below:

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It’s officially official – game industry legend Warren Spector and Disney have revealed their joint-venture game to be the much-rumoured, Mickey Mouse-starring game by the name of Epic Mickey, and you’ll be able to read all about it in the next issue of Game Informer when subscribers get their hands on the magazine on October 12th.

Warren Spector is the founder of the (relatively) new game development studio Junction Point, which joined Disney Interactive Studios in July of 2007, at which time Spector and his team got their mitts on Disney’s considerable catalogue of characters and universes, to play with as they wished.

The result is Epic Mickey, a Wii-exclusive game about which not much is known, although according to Game Informer, they’ll be releasing new information about the game over the next few weeks for gamers to feast upon.

In the meantime though, you can cast your eyes on the official, beautiful Epic Mickey Game Informer cover below, and watch a video interview with Warren Spector himself as he talks about his history with Disney (as a fan), as well as the Epic Mickey project itself.

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In a post on his ‘official’ blog, Junction Point, veteran game developer Warren Spector reveals that he has been involved in the industry for 25 years! That’s longer than a lot of gamers have been alive!

Warren Spector, who has had a hand in such seminal gaming experiences as the Wing Commander series, the Ultima series, System Shock, the Thief series and Deus Ex, now working at the Disney-owned Junction Point Studios, first got his start working at Steve Jackson Games, as Spector recounts his interview with Jackson:

“Anyway, I remember marching up to Steve’s house for an interview that felt like a fun conversation with a gaming buddy, and I remember him offering me a minimum wage job as an Assistant Editor, and I remember leaving feeling like the happiest guy on Earth.”

Go have a read over his thank-you list, recalling all the people who have aided his career throughout the years. It reads like a veritable “who’s who” of game industry legends.