Here’s how: the storyline for Epic Mickey revolves around a conflict between Mickey and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, an obscure character Walt Disney came up with in the 20s. Anyway, Disney didn’t hold the rights to Oswald’s character; NBC Universal did.

But the character was important to the game, which may play a very important role in a reboot for the ageing character. So in 2006 (the game’s been kicked arond since 2004), NBC and Disney struck a deal: Disney got the rights to Oswald back, while Al Michaels would leave the Disney-owned ESPN and go work for NBC instead.

You ever heard of a stranger video game business deal? We haven’t.

Disney Will Make Over Mickey. Why? To Make Us Like Him. [New York Times]

The official trailer for Disney’s Prince of Persia movie have hit the interwebs, featuring just the right amount of jumping on things and sand. This one could be a winner, folks!

This looks to be the same Prince of Persia trailer that AJ last week, with the two lines from Ben Kingsley, Jake Gyllenhaal leaping about and Gemma Arterton talking up a sandstorm about the Dagger of Time and its effects. Speaking of effects, they look spectacular, but any kids with a computer can make good special effects these days. The plot is what matters here, and we still have no idea how that’s going to play out. Those of you who go to movies just to see men leaping, however, are sure to be pleased.

Instead the reinvention of Disney’s animated world will strive to both entice children and enlighten adult with a meaty, moralistic story, famed game designer Warren Spector told Kotaku today.

In Disney Epic Mickey, gamers take on the role of an edgier Mickey Mouse, using the Wii remote to wield magical paint and thinner to reshape around them. Mickey uses these abilities as he fights his way through a cartoon wasteland in what Disney describes as an “adventure-platforming game with light role-playing elements”.

Spector says that the game won’t support the Wii Remote’s MotionPlus technology because the technology became available to developers too late to the studio.

“We played with it and I think that it would be a great fit for our core mechanic, but the best I can say is that in the future we’d love to do more with it,” he said.

In the game’s fiction Yen Sid, the sorcerer first seen in 1940s Fantasia during The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, creates a Cartoon Wasteland for Disney’s forgotten and retired creations. The first inhabitant of this wasteland is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, Walt Disney’s first cartoon star created in 1927.

As the years pass Oswald starts to resent Mickey’s growing fame. When Disney’s mouse accidentally warps Oswald’s Cartoon Wasteland by spilling paint thinner on it, Mickey is drawn into the warped world.

“Having Warren combine creativity and innovation with one of the world’s most famous characters takes Mickey back to his creative roots and allows fans to deepen their engagement with him as a character — especially in video games,” said Graham Hopper, executive vice president and general manager of Disney Interactive Studios.

Spector says that he was drawn to the idea of working on this tale of Disney fiction both because it was a chance to “mess around with one of the world’s most recognisable icons” and a chance to tell a story that is interesting to both children and adults.

“We are telling a story in this game that is more sophisticated than save the princess or you are the last space marine on Earth,” Spector said. “I think what you will find is that there is some commentary about consumerism and what is truly important in life.”

“If I went much further than that it would be the height of pretension.”

But, Spector admits, there are some allusions in the game to T.S. Elliots’s modernist and deeply influential poem The Waste Land.

In the Waste Land a hero is drawn to a kingdom made sterile by the wounding of its king. To restore the king and the land, the hero must go on a quest. The concept of the poem draws on prevalent proto-themes like the Grail legend.

And while Spector, who started his career as an academic, admits that he’s aware of the potential connection, he doesn’t want people to draw too many connections.

“You have to throw in literary references every once in awhile,” he said.

What seems to have influenced Spector more is a children’s book author who deals with heady ideas like theology, philosophy and John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

“What Philip Pullman does is inspiration in everything I want to do,” he said. “You can make something that appeals to kids but is interesting to adults as well.

In December 2007, Spector wrote on his blog about how much he would love to create a game based on Pullman’s Golden Compass. At the time he was already in the midst of working on Disney Epic Mickey, he said.

“I had my first discussion with Disney in September 2005, then boring business stuff happened and then we did concept art and then we separated for awhile and came back together,” he said.

In September 2007 Disney acquired Spector’s studio, Junction Point Studios, which was well into game concept work.

I asked Spector if creating a game based on such a beloved and widely known character had satisfied the itch he expressed in his blog about Golden Compass.

“To some extent it did,” he said. “But if you ever stop itching it’s time to retire.

“I think getting the opportunity to play in the playground that Disney offers, that is what this opportunity is really about for me.”

“When you say you’re messing with Mickey Mouse people’s eyes really light up.”

While Spector’s vision of Mickey seems to be darker than the character’s most recognisable appearances, there are still lines the game won’t be crossing.

“There are lines, lines you don’t want to cross,” he said. “When you talk about Mickey Mouse, people are like ‘Give him a gun, give him a knife,’” he said. “I don’t want to do that. Why would you want to do that?

“There are lines you don’t cross. I discovered there are lines that (Mickey Mouse) used to cross that are now uncrossable. He did some pretty crazy stuff, but nowadays times have changed.”

What Mickey will be doing in the game is allowing gamers to make moral decisions about how to change the world around them with paint and thinner. Those decisions will have consequences that affect the environment, interactions with other characters, and even Mickey’s appearance and abilities.

“The core of this game is the idea of choice and consequence, and how that defines both the character and the player,” Spector wrote in a prepared statement. “By putting the mischievous Mickey in an unfamiliar place and asking him to make choices—to help other cartoon characters or choose his own path—the game forces players to deal with the consequences of their actions. Ultimately, players must ask themselves, ‘What kind of hero am I?’ Each player will come up with a different answer.”

The initial concept for the Wii-exclusive game was born at Disney Interactive Studios’ Think Tank, Spector told Kotaku.

“The idea of a wasteland with lost characters, Oswald’s return, the Phantom Blog — that stuff existed, that core was there when they pitched it to me,” Spector said. “They were all sitting there showing me this stuff in Power Point saying ‘You don’t have to do all of this, you can ignore it’ and I thought ‘Why would I ignore this, it’s fantastic.’”

While the heart of the idea came from the Think Tank, the way the game and its look evolved is all Spector and his team.

The team spent huge amounts of time in Disney’s many vast archives, pulling concept art and files.

“I’m a research junkie,” Spector said. “I started out as an academic and film historian so I had shelves and shelves and shelves of books and articles. I came into this with a good background. But Disney has amazing resources. I spent a bunch of time out there digging through files.”

During one of his earliest visits Spector was shocked to have one of the archivists apologise for having only scanned 90,000 images so far.

“Honestly, you could spend days digging through the stuff we dug out of the archives.”

One thing that surprisingly didn’t inspire Disney Epic Mickey was Square-Enix’ hugely popular role-playing game Kingdom Hearts.

“I played the Kingdom Hearts games, but they weren’t much of an inspiration,” Spector said. “They treated the Disney characters much more conventionally than I wanted to.

“They are not reintroducing or reimagining as much as they are offering these characters as folks you are going to interact with in a new medium.”

Spector was coy about how much inspiration the game developers are drawing from the Disney theme parks.

“You might sort of, kind of recognise some scenes,” he said. “I don’t want to give too much away.”

The designer, best known for making games like Deus Ex and Thief, said that he wasn’t worried about moving from typically adult-themed games to one that may be viewed as being more for children or families.

“When this opportunity arose I had to decide, do I want to keep working on this original stuff I’ve been doing or do I want to mess around with one of the world’s most recognisable icons,” he said. “The opportunity to work with something this recognisable and profound comes around once in a lifetime. The decision was pretty straight forward.

“I’m not making a game for kids, I’m making a game gamers will be happy with.”

If you want to see it for yourself, sit tight — it runs with the premiere of 2012 on November 13. Also I’m sure it’ll hit the interwebs well before then. If you want to know how I felt about what I saw, read on. But know that I still haven’t forgiven Ben Kingsley for BloodRayne.

Now I realise that once you’ve played Gandhi on the silver screen (and won an Oscar for it), everything else must pale in comparison. But seriously, Sir Kingsley, would it have killed you to show up for fencing lessons in preparation for filming BloodRayne? Just because the director sucks doesn’t mean you have to.

As it turns out, Sir Kingsley only has two lines in the trailer (which is still twice as much as what comic relief character Alfred Molina gets) — so I can’t judge his performance based entirely on that. The majority of the trailer is Jake Gyllenhaal leaping off of things while Gemma Arterton narrates in a quasi-mystical voice about the Dagger of Time and its powers.

Like all action trailers, there’s a lot of quick cutting between unrelated sequences. Someone opens a door, the Prince looks around like he’s confused and the Princess—called Tamina, not Farah—walks around looking pretty and exchanges PG-rated flirts with the Prince. Some dudes in black robes show up, looking like they just walked off the set of The Scorpion King and there’s a lot of sand and gold stuff.

An interesting scene I noticed being repeated was a glowing fiery vortex within the Dagger of Time. You can see it in the trailer when the Prince activates it during a fight to rewind time. You see it again at the end of the trailer only somehow the Prince and some other person appear to be inside the Dagger, swirling around the vortex. Seems like a climactic boss fight to me. Also a temple-looking place collapses — it’s all very Indiana Jones.

Speaking of which, someone pointed out to me the irony in having Alfred Molina play a comic relief character in an Indiana Jones-esque film. I’d completely forgotten that he’s the guy in Raiders of the Lost Ark with the famous line, “Throw me idol, I’ll throw you the whip.” How about that.

After the screening of the trailer, we were given a little bit of Q&A time with Jordan Mechner, but you’ll have to sit tight for that as well.

Be honest — how many of you are going to go see the film 2012 just so you can watch the Prince of Persia trailer on the big screen? I totally did that with Scooby-Doo for a Harry Potter trailer and again with some other terrible film for a Two Towers trailer.

Image Cred
Image Cred

We’ve already been told that this Wii exclusive game will be all about Mickey painting in parts of his environment to get through levels (a la Okami, perhaps). But something I hadn’t heard until today was that how you problem-solve your way through the game directly affects how your Mickey looks.

“How you decide to play the game should make a difference. You get to determine what kind of hero you are. Everybody solves the problem. Everybody saves the day. Everybody gets to save the world and gets the girl,” Warren Spector tells us, in regards to the shifting spectrum of play styles that change the appearance of Mickey throughout the game.

“But how you do it, and how you end up looking is up to you. What abilities you have is up to you. Who likes you is up to you. What missions you hear about or not is up to you.”

Each version of Mickey has a distinct look crafted by the character artists at Mickey, from the crouching and feral scrapper to the stalwart hero.

Each of the Mickeys and all of their movements, though, are drawn directly from classic Mickey inspiration. Get a look at the render videos in Game Informer’s piece and see if you can recognise motions from old school Mickey Mouse cartoons, like The Brave Little Taylor.

Inside the Game: Epic Mickey [Game Informer]

Apparently there’s a board game-type of mode in Birth By Sleep that breaks up the hack ‘n’ slash monotony many non-KH fans complain about. The first I’ve heard of it appears in this magazine scan dug up by fans. According the amatuer translation, the board game mode is called Command Mode and playing the mode rewards you with power ups for your Command attacks in regular gameplay. I can’t tell if it’s optional like a lot of Final Fantasy grind-reducing mechanisms, or mandatory like the $#&%ing Gummi Ships.

The fan translation goes on to suggest that Board Points control movement on the Command Board and you get them by rolling dice. Landing on event spaces triggers chance cards and special characters will somehow help you during the board game by jacking Board Points from your opponent.

Hm. Didn’t Devil May Cry 4 have something like this…?

Oh, also, there’s a new character that appears in the scanned page. His name is something like “Master Eraqus” in English and the scuttlebutt is that this is supposed to be “Square” backwards. You know, like Disney’s “Yen Sid” character.

New Scan Shows off Apprentice’s Master, Land of Departure, Command Board [Kingdom Hearts Insider]

The sketch was done by a character artist at developer Junction Point and shows the first good look at an in-game enemy — the robotic Beetleworx. Mickey also makes an appearance.

There’s a three minute time lapse video of the sketch if you are into time lapsing.

Sketching Mickey: The Time-Lapse Video – Features [GameInformer via Dtoid]

358/2 Days tells the tale of Sora’s Nobody Roxas from the time he first came into being up until he finds himself among friends at the beginning of the second PlayStation 2 Kingdom Hearts title. Roxas is a member of organisation XIII, undergoing missions to help the group restore Kingdom Hearts. Soon he begins learning more about himself and his friends, leading him to question the motives of the organisation and ultimately guiding him on a path to becoming the boy we meet at the beginning of Kingdom Hearts II.

It’s the first Kingdom Hearts title for the Nintendo DS, and the first Kingdom Hearts title with multiplayer, but is it a game worthy of the name?

Loved
Behind The Scenes: A major factor in the success any prequel, or in this case, interquel, is how much it enhances the original titles. 358/2 Days takes a character with a large yet brief part in Kingdom Hearts II and fleshes him out in a way that gives you an entirely new appreciation for Kingdom Hearts II. Sure, the story doesn’t always make perfect sense, and there are a few contradictions within the twisting plot, but the character development alone is enough to change the way you experience the second game in the series. I have to admit: I cried when Sora returned in KHII. After playing through this game, I can easily imagine my tiny black heart breaking.

The Panel Puzzle: I am completely in love with Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days’ panel customisation system. Basically you have a grid, and on that grid you can slot powers, abilities, items, weapons — everything you need to power up your character. If you need to level up, you slot a level up panel. Need to level up more? Slot an oddly-shaped level multiplier onto the board and your +1 level panels suddenly become +2 level panels. Every aspect of your character’s skills are handled in this manner, and different missions call for different powers and abilities. Once you get several odd-shaped panel frames in your inventory it almost becomes a puzzle where you see what powers you can fit together for the highest level of effectiveness. This is exactly the sort of micro-management I love in an RPG.

Ready, Fight!: Combat in 258/2 Days took me by surprise. I was expecting something like a simplified version of the console games’ fighting engine or a clumsy facsimile, but I was delighted to find a system that manages to give you all the functionality of those titles while being tailored specifically to take advantage of the Nintendo DS control scheme. Once you get the hang of assigning shortcuts, switching between magic, items, and abilities feels like a little less of a hassle than it did with its PlayStation 2 cousins. The addition of Limit Breaks you can unleash when your health gets too low is also very much appreciated.

So Much To Do: Between story missions, optional missions, challenge missions, and the Mission Mode itself, there is plenty to do in Kingdom Hearts 358/2. There are treasure chests to collect, high scores to beat, time attacks — just a whole slew of content. The mission-based format of the game also suits the Nintendo DS rather well, making this a perfect game to pick up when you have a spare moment, run through a few missions, and then put back down again. Between the content and the portability, this is easily a title I could see myself playing for weeks if not months…if I didn’t have to review it.

Mission Mode: While I sadly did not have the opportunity to play through the Mission Mode with friends, it’s easy to see how it would be a hell of a lot of fun just by playing through the missions in single-player mode. Mission Mode starts you off with your choice of organisation XIII members, allowing you to experience first-hand some of the unique weapons and abilities they possess. Up to four players can link up and play together, competing for points, or you can play through it on your own as I was forced to. Playing as key villains from Kingdom Hearts II is guilty pleasure enough to recommend the mode, and once you start unlocking old friends it gets even better.

One Fine-Looking DS Title: Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days features some of the best 3D graphics I’ve seen on the Nintendo DS. To the hardcore graphics whore it might not look like much, but the fluid movement of the characters and the amount of detail Square Enix managed to maintain without the game slowing down noticeably is quite impressive.

Hated
Camera Concerns: I spent far too much time being trapped in corners while being attacked by enemies that were off screen then I generally like to while playing through Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days. I suppose it’s the sort of issue you’re bound to run into when you’ve got so many functions to map and so few buttons. To their credit, the developers did include a secondary control method that allows you to map the camera to the left and right shoulder buttons, but that method means you have to hit both shoulders to fire off shortcuts, which can lead to some confusion.

Recycled Assets: Maybe you have to be a big Kingdom Hearts fan for it to matter, but I was supremely disappointed when I fired up the game and heard Hikaru Utada’s “Sanctuary” (”Passion” in Japan) was the opening theme. It set the tone for a game that recycles a great deal of the music and art from the console titles. It’s not that the music and art are bad — I just would have liked a little more new material in the game.

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days is effectively the Kingdom Hearts version of Final Fantasy VII’s Crisis Core. It features the same sort of mission-based gameplay, perfect for pick up and put down portable play; a protagonist that is relatively similar to the series’ main character; and it tells a side story that, while not entirely necessary, serves to give players a more complete look at the story behind the games. Like Crisis Core, the game does take some gambles when it comes to core gameplay mechanics, but on the whole those gambles pay off, creating an experience that is at once fresh and familiar.

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days presents a lost chapter in the Kingdom Hearts saga in a way that will leave Nintendo DS owners feeling completely satisfied, save the sudden craving for sea-salt ice cream.

Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days was developed by Square Enix and h.a.n.d. and published by Square Enix for the Nintendo DS on September 29th. Retails for $US39.99. A copy of the game was given to us by the publisher for reviewing purposes. Played through single-player story on default difficulty. Tried each of the available characters in Mission Mode single-player.

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Game Informer, as part of their epic Epic Mickey coverage, reconfirm that the game is a Wii “exclusive”. Given that the game appears to feature a mechanic that’s reliant on motion control, rumoured to let Mickey Mouse paint and erase the environment, how could it possibly come to anything else?

Epic Mickey Coming Exclusively To Wii [Game Informer]

Disney’s Epic Mickey is also the subject of the latest issue of GameInformer magazine, which should appear in subscribers’ mailboxes starting next week.

The Wii game, said to be a Mickey Mouse platformer that involves the painting and erasing of levels, a struggle by Disney’s lower caste of characters to dethrone the mouse.

Based on the cover art from the latest GI, it looks that, if anything, Spector and crew have managed to create something visually intriguing, with the rumoured gameplay mechanics only slightly less interesting.

GI also has a video interview with Spector up, in which he talks about his love for things Mickey Mouse. It’s light on actual Epic Mickey game details, but heavy on Spector face time.

Warren Spector & Mickey Mouse [GameInformer]