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]
_thumbnail.jpg "Spiderwick Chronicles DS")
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
1-17-2008 @ 4:24PM
TheCoats said...
It looks all homebrewed!....not cool........and im not saying homebrew is not cool....im saying homebrews do it for nothing.....these people get paid and it appears that they have done a rather bad job.....but might be worth a try if it turns out to be better then the videos
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1-17-2008 @ 4:40PM
rbelmont000 said...
Hey, I think that, unless it's an official video, that's running on an emulator. And there are NO good DS emulators right now.
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1-17-2008 @ 4:57PM
raindog said...
Having worked on a project where the client wanted something really cutting-edge and technically impressive, where early demos and POCs looked great and everyone was totally committed, only to have more and more feature requests piled on and reach a point in development where it became very apparent the hardware in use wasn't up to the task, and then get told we had to make it work anyway because we were past the point of no return.....
I feel these guys' pain.
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1-17-2008 @ 5:14PM
Fran said...
Uhm, I don't believe the game actually looks like that on the DS. Looking at the videos you can see debug info (free mem, time etc) on the top screen.
I have faith that on release that ugly performance bug will be solved.
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1-17-2008 @ 5:44PM
Joshua Clifton said...
I actually think it looks like an OK game if it didn't take such a hit in dungeons. This coming from a man who likes Orcs and Elves, loves first person RPGs in general and still gets a hard on thinking about Morrowind.
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1-17-2008 @ 6:33PM
Tim said...
It's clearly running on an emulator, which is likely a major cause for the slowdown. I'd wait to see it on real DS hardware before dismissing it.
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