Recent Posts

  • 404 Not Found

    404 Not Found

    The resource requested could not be found on this server!
    Powered By LiteSpeed Web Server
    LiteSpeed Technologies is not responsible for administration and contents of this web site!
  • Arial

Translation

Tag clouds

Disney Epic Mickey – Video Game Review

Disney Interactive

A scene from Disney Epic Mickey, a new video game featuring the company’s signature character.

I have a serious question for Robert A. Iger, the president and chief executive of the Walt Disney Company: Did you get both hands on a Nintendo Wii controller and personally play through several hours of Disney Epic Mickey?

If so, perhaps you think that each day game players have a lot more patience and a much higher tolerance for frustration than they do. And that is because Disney Epic Mickey is one of those enticing yet deeply flawed games that is a lot more fun to watch than to play.

In its storytelling and overall design, Epic Mickey is an ambitious and often impressive re-imagination of the world’s first animated star, Mickey Mouse. But as an entertainment experience for the person who has to control all of the jumping and running and spinning involved, it breaks down and fails in bafflingly basic ways. I suspect that many families are going to purchase this game, get through a fraction of what ought to be a roughly 15-hour story and put it down forever in frustration at their inability to make Mickey survive.

In other words, Disney Epic Mickey is a brilliant and sophisticated concept that isn’t very fun to play.

Disney Epic Mickey is a platforming game: if you miss the jumps to the platforms, bad things happen, like having to begin over. This may sound mundane, but it seems obvious that if you can’t see where you’re going in a game like this, nothing else matters. Not the clever characters. Not the endearing soundtrack. Not even the intriguing plot lines. Nope. If you fall into pits and die dozens and dozens of times simply because the game won’t properly maneuver the player’s eye-in-the-sky perspective, the fun disappears.

This is basic technical and mechanical stuff that most of the game industry seemed to figure out a decade ago, but Disney hasn’t with Epic Mickey.

How this could happen reveals a lot about why large international media companies like Disney generally continue to struggle to make great games. I believe it comes down to the fact that senior executive leadership at these companies generally has not had the inclination or the capability to engage with the creative reality of the product — actually to play the games. And that means they can’t make the final call on big-budget games with the same confidence they show in traditional media.

Mickey Mouse, after all, is the embodiment of Disney. And yet here is a corporate symbol that has mostly been absent from popular entertainment for several decades. Epic Mickey, with such a grandiloquent name and its high profile on today’s most popular console, the Wii, is supposed to be part of Mickey’s reintroduction to a new generation of fans.

So if this game were a major Disney film or a large new series on the company’s ABC network, can you imagine how personally involved Mr. Iger and the rest of the Disney brass would be? How many screeners and rough cuts they would have watched? How much guidance would they have felt not only justified but also obligated to deliver? Perhaps Mr. Iger would even have solicited the personal reactions of the members of the company’s board of directors.

That’s their job. At the end of the day, the top executive of a major media company is responsible for watching the motion picture or tv pilot or listening to the album or reading the book and making the final call on whether it’s good enough. Not with every single product, of course, but certainly when the brand involved (Mickey Mouse) is synonymous with the entire company and when the game represents the company’s most important investment in that brand in one of the world’s most important forms of new media (video games).

To make Epic Mickey, Disney acquired the services — and the entire development studio — of one of gaming’s most respected designers, Warren Spector. Personally, I’m a large fan. Mr. Spector’s System Shock and Thief games essentially defined the early generation of first-person stealth shooters. (System Shock and its sequel are science-fiction horror classics that are among the scariest games ever made.) Deus Ex, another Spector game, is one of the ideal cyberpunk games yet.

What do these games have in common? They are all set in the first person. (You’re looking out from your character’s perspective.) In tone, they are all distinctly aimed at adults. And they were all originally made for PCs and mouse-and-keyboard controls.

Now let’s look at Disney Epic Mickey. It is set nearly entirely in the third person, with you looking down at your character. It has to appeal directly to children. (It is rated E for Everyone.) And it is made exclusively for a living-room console with limited silicon horsepower and a unique control system, the Wii. Moreover, the game revolves around a long-established system, platforming, that hardly appeared in Mr. Spector’s previous games.

How could this possibly go wrong?

The sad part is that Disney Epic Mickey gets all of the high-concept stuff right. The story involves Mickey’s journey to a dystopian version of the Magic Kingdom, where forgotten Disney creations of the past, led by Walt Disney’s original Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, languish in obscurity. Oswald is jealous of Mickey’s rise to fame, but the two eventually make common cause against the evil Shadow Blot. Mr. Spector’s storytelling influence is seen clearly in the fact that seemingly minor choices made early in the game can have vast, unexpected consequences later.

Befitting a cartoon empire, your main weapons here are paint and thinner, which you can use to fill in and erase parts of the world around you. When everything is working properly, the game feels like the innovative smash hit it should have been.

But along the way, I found myself becoming more irritated, not less, with the sloppy controls and camera. I came to feel as if I were fighting the game instead of enjoying the experience.

If Mr. Iger actually played Disney Epic Mickey, he obviously didn’t make Mr. Spector’s team fix its glaring interface problems. If he didn’t actually play, that should tell you something about why Disney doesn’t make great games, and why Epic Mickey isn’t more, well, epic.

source : www.nytimes.com

Related News:


Details :
Submited at Monday, December 13th, 2010 at 6:00 pm on Uncategorized by admin
Comment RSS 2.0 - leave a comment - trackback
Leave Comment Here...
Name (required)
Email (required)
Website / Url