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Posts with tag sabarasa

Mazes of Fate maps out route to Europe

Signature Devices has picked up the rights to publish dungeon-crawler Mazes of Fate in Europe at some point this summer, with the game still to be released in the U.S.

Regular readers may recall us recoiling in horror upon first seeing the title in "action" earlier this year, but later impressions, combined with some above-average review scores, revealed our initial pessimism may have been misplaced. And that's pretty fortunate, because Europe remains thoroughly neglected by publishers when it comes to portable dungeon crawling, with Orcs & Elves the only current option.

Update: Looks like we got ahead of ourselves a little there -- as our commenters correctly pointed out, the U.S. is still waiting also!

Gallery: Mazes of Fate

Mazes of Update

The latest screens of Mazes of Fate DS show some quite nice 2D work in the outdoor areas. Being 2D fans, we were already quite enamored with the hand-drawn graphics of the GBA version and the similar style found in the non-fateful-maze areas of the DS game. But put in contrast with the 3D mazes, which are admittedly looking better and better, the 2D is vibrant and detailed. Maybe we're just old-school.

Then again, this is a dungeon crawler. Old-school is the appropriate mindset. Our gallery is flush with crisp new images for you to check out! Get out your graph paper and dive into the labyrinth of image files.

Gallery: Mazes of Fate

Get lost in this Mazes of Fate footage



The last time we witnessed Mazes of Fate in motion, the results were not pleasant; even positive preview coverage of the title wasn't enough to convince us.

Thankfully, this new footage -- presumably of the finished product, as it launches in the U.S. on February 26th -- has eased our fears. Though somewhat more visually dour than other recent DS dungeon-crawlers such as Etrian Odyssey II or Orcs & Elves, at least we now know the game has something resembling a frame rate. It's a start.

Gallery: Mazes of Fate


[Via Go Nintendo]

Mazes of Fate: Impressions of Game

Just the fact that RPGamer's play session of the DS version of Mazes of Fate didn't end in a system crash is promising. The version we saw in video was troublingly incomplete and unplayable-looking. But this latest preview of Sabarasa Entertainment's GBA remake makes no mention of crippling framerate issues.

In fact, the game Michael Cunningham describes sounds pretty good: a competent 3D update of the original game with touchscreen-based inventory management and a combat system that involves looking around with the stylus and tapping enemies to attack. Of course, the DS version also contains that eternally useful DS game feature, the automap. As much flak as early DS games got for having one screen devoted to maps, it makes a ton of sense in a dungeon game.

We still question the necessity of making a pretty 2D game into a not-so-pretty 3D game, but the interface upgrades sound pretty great. Mazes of Fate DS will be out on the 26th, unless Amazon's right and it's out now.

Gallery: Mazes of Fate

More like Mazes of Shame [update]

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]

Mazes of Fate getting ported from GBA

We're pretty inured to this kind of thing on the Wii, although we still enjoy getting outraged about it now and then. But now we're starting to see last-gen ports on the DS! Sure, we have the Phoenix Wright games already, but they totally get a pass since the ports are new to the US and Europe.

RPGLand reports that Mazes of Fate, the first-person dungeon crawler developed by Argentina's Sabarasa Entertainment, is being prepared for a DS release by publisher Signature Devices and their in-house developer Graffiti Entertainment. Unlike Phoenix Wright, the GBA version of Mazes of Fate did come out in the US-- in December of last year. The DS is a good system for dungeon games, with its map-displaying second screen, and Graffiti is adding new dungeons, characters, and some touch-screen stuff. If you don't already have the game, this is the one to get. Or if you have a DS Lite and you get really embarrassed about the GBA protuberance.

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