The struggling part-time-wannabe-musician was selected out of 2,484 hopeful applicants and got things like one hundred bananas, one hundred passes for a bathhouse and one hundred whoppers. Nothing says “king” like Burger King or one hundred slowly rotting bananas.

椿姫彩菜さんが王冠を授与！ 2,484名の応募者から『王様物語』の王様が決定 [Dengeki Online]

This Target sale is on until August 5.

Hardware
DS Lite (red handheld plus New Super Mario Bros. and Sonic accessories pack) $199
DSi (handheld plus Rhythm Heaven and accessories pack) $299
Wii (console plus Big Beach Sports, Big Family Games and Sonic accessories pack) $389
Xbox 360 (Arcade console plus Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, Halo 3, Lips and Mass Effect) $375
Xbox 360 (60GB console plus Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, Halo 3, Lips and Mass Effect) $475

Software
Age of Empire: Mythologies (DS) $29.95
Animal Crossing: Let’s Go to the City (Wii) $61.95
Animal Crossing: Wild World (DS) $39.95
Burnout Paradise (PS3) $14.95
De Blob (Wii) $39.95
Deadly Creatures (Wii) $39.95
Drawn to Life (DS) $29.95
Drawn to Life: SpongeBob SquarePants (DS) $39.95
Far Cry 2 (360, PS3) $49.95
Halo 3 plus 12-month Live subscription (360) $99
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hour Glass (DS) $39.95
LEGO Batman: The Videogame (360, PS3, Wii) $39.95
LEGO Battles (DS) $39.95
LEGO Star Wars: The Complete Saga (DS) $24.95
Little King’s Story (Wii) $34.95
Metal Gear Solid 4 (PS3) $39.95
Need for Speed: Most Wanted (360) $12.95
Pokémon Platinum (DS) $49.95
Rock Band full bundle (Wii) $145
Sega Mega Drive Ultimate Collection (360, PS3) $34.94/$39.95
SoulCalibur IV (PS3) $39.95
Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (360, Wii) $39.95
Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) $61.95
Super Smash Bros. Brawl (Wii) $61.95
Wii Fit (Wii) $111.95

Shall we thank the people who make us the most creative games, for which there isn’t yet a mold? But in the midst of praising them, what should we say when their game drives us to angered frustration? These are the good and bad versions of that phenomenon of watching a movie and not being able to lose yourself in it — not being able to forget that that is an actor up there playing a role and that a camera captured that beautiful scenery. One wants to forget the human involvement and be swept away into another world, but the best and the worst of the creators’ involvement keeps one from ever completely believing the illusion.

That’s the Little King’s Story experience: the thrill that someone made this for me and the muttering that someone did this to me, a frustration that, on balance, I think I was happy to suffer.

Loved
Pikmin For A King:Little King’s Story is the brainchild of Yoshiro Kimmura (interview about his creative ambitions here<). It’s a role-playing game in the sense that it has an overworld, quests to take, villages full of characters to talk to, items to gather and equip, seven wives to satisfy (T-rated, folks!), bosses to battle and a world to save. But it’s like Nintendo’s Pikmin in that the hero is a king who could be a mouse cursor like Pikmin’s stranded spaceman, Olimar, leading a growing pack of distinctly-enabled creatures to do most of the fighting and collecting for him. He leads a class of varied troops — woodcutters who can clear tree stumps, knights who are good in a scrap, a TV broadcaster who can clear giant TVs from the playing field and about a dozen other minions for players to discover and recdruit.For those of us who believe that Pikmin 2 is among the finest games ever made, this design is a good thing, even if Nintendo’s franchise had controls that more reliably caused each minion to attack and flee more precisely.

Urban Planning:From Sim City to Dark Cloud 2, games — even role-playing games — games have allowed players to construct cities where once dirt lay and grass sprouted. But Little King’s Story offers a superior thrill. Its battlefields are its acres set for urban development. Imagine exploring a world as vast as a Zelda’s and, after clearing out enemies in a given part of that world, setting about building fantastic villages upon it. Where once you were swarmed by angry vegetable men, by mid-game will be a boulevard in a town full of magicians or a mall set off from a farm. This instills a feeling of accomplishment to rival any earning of a master sword or mounting of an epic beast.

Unexpected Personality:The Don Quixote-inspired supporting characters seen early in the game are an early clue that the personalities in this game have personality. About 10 hours deeper in, the surprise creativity becomes the norm. Mad TV stations and pompous men with beards as long as mountainsides. Angry chickens, angrier enemies riding giant vacuums and giant, spinning compasses from geometry class — they’re all charming menaces. The princesses are less interesting, mere tabulators of various in-game collectathons. And the townspeople are not all that fascinating. But the characters you can fight are increasingly entertaining. As a bonus, the bosses are introduced by some of the best cut-scenes of the year, painted sequences that defy expectation and enable me to say that, sorry, Halo Wars, your cut-scene of Spartans assaulting the Covenant was cool but not as cool as Little King’s Story’s cut-scene of a basket full of food being lifted up a mountain to a bearded tyrant. Seriously. LKS’ scene is tops.

Unexpected Gameplay:The game has not just the entertaining personality of, say, Psychonauts, but has been designed with the same brazen willingness to sample whichever gameplay style makes the next sequence funnier. Boss battles aren’t just Pikmin-style minion-attacks on a giant beast. This game can also riff on Space Invaders, Pinball or set up a trivia contest which penalises wrong answers with the assault of more angry chickens. Little surprises abound, including a subtle wedding mechanic that allows the Little King to marry his minions to each other. The game is full of unexpected elements like these.

Hated
Time-Waster:No game has wasted more hours of my life than Little King’s Story. And by wasted I mean: I finished the game in 23 hours and 10 minutes but probably spent another five or six more hours interspersed among those replaying a lot of that same content. Why? Because the game lacks an auto-save system and is punishing in its restarts. Among other things, it discourages saves by preventing the player from saving their game after major story moments until they manually opt out of interactive and lengthy post-boss-battle village parties. You will forget to save at least once. Guaranteed. Saves can only be made within the King’s base castle. And what’s worse is that the game designers appear to know they could have offered more. Boss battles, at least, offer an immediate re-try when the King is killed, though even that re-try often requires the re-playing of 10-30 minutes of game that can be completed safely before the tricky moments are again reached. This is what had me throwing my controller, the sheer anger of how many times the sometimes-spotty controls and often-atrocious save system forced me to re-play long stretches of the game. Can you have too much of a good thing? Yes. Because a good thing isn’t a good thing when it’s being experienced the fifth time in a row.

Item-Mismanagement:The preceding problem is exacerbated by the game’s disappointing item management system. As the Pikmin do, the Little King’s royal guard will die. And they’ll die a lot in big battles even when they fight 30-strong. These guys will often be resurrected on the next in-game day, but they will return without any of the weapons or armour the player assigned them. The game forces the player to manually re-arm the characters, which can take a good five minutes. Given the amount of times this can be necessary following tough battles of a game that isn’t that easy, all this item management becomes a hateful chore.

It’s hard to harbour too much venom for a game that hides a silly ping-pong mini-game in one corner and has a school building that automatically turns any children in your party (good only for tree-climbing) who you send through its doorway into adults. It’s hard to knock a Wii game bold enough not to use any motion control and bolder enough to make fun of its own depiction of G-rated polygamy. It’s hard to hold much against a development team who are always top-of-mind for any player who, weary of so much video game cliché, keeps finding things that aren’t cliché here.

But it is maddening that games can be made that feel they haven’t been played. Didn’t they know some of this would be so annoying? Didn’t they care? Little King’s Story is a wonderful Wii delight, but it will draw some blood. Be warned. You’ll smile. But it’ll make you mad too.

(Little King’s Story was developed Cing and published by Marvelous Interactive and XSeed for the Wii. It was released in Australia on April 21 and in North America on June 21. Retails for US$49.99/AU$69.95. Unified the kingdom and cleared the game, officially in 23 hours, 10 minutes.)_
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This was a tricky week, as two of our finest, McWhertor and Fahey, were off to Comic-Con and working odd hours because of it. So I wrote more posts and therefore did a little less reporting and left less on the cutting room floor. But still, here are some scraps…

A Rare Studio Visit: You might think that an experienced video game reporter like myself would have visited a lot of game development studios. Unfortunately, I haven’t. Blame my being based in the studio-light New York or not barging into enough development company offices or whatever. When I stepped into the Gameloft studio in New York on Tuesday, where I witnessed games actually being developed, well, that was unusual. (I was there to play Gangstar: West Coast Hustle, a GTA-like iPhone game.) I’ve covered games full-time for a little over four years and my visit to an active game development part of Gameloft adds to a short list that includes a visit at Retro in Austin, Midway’s recently-shuttered Austin studio, the recently-shuttered Gamelab in New York, Yukes in Yokohama, EA in Redwood Shores and Double Fine in San Francisco. That’s it, though I think having Kenta Cho show me stuff on his laptop counts too. I’ve been in meeting-room areas at Rockstar (NYC), Nintendo of America (Redwood Shores), Tecmo (Tokyo), Sony (Tokyo), Sega (San Francisco), Konami (San Francisco), EA (Los Angeles) and probably a few others. But if we’re talking strictly visits to places where people are at computers developing stuff, it’s just that short list.

MotionPlus Calibration Needs Still A Question: Chatting with Nintendo reps in Times Square on Thursday did not help answer one lingering question from my fun time playing Wii Sports Resort on Saturday: Why does the game ask for the controller to be re-calibrated – sometimes by having it placed upside down on a table — before any new mini-game is played? Nintendo’s corporate affairs v.p Denise Kaigler referred me to the company’s product expert Bill Trinen. He said that he believed the designers required that in order to ensure that each of the diverse sports in Wii Sports Resort can be controlled with fine and accurate motions. But I wondered if this signaled a limitation for the MotionPlus. Could it be used without any interruption for re-calibration, in longer, continuous games that might mix up motion styles? It’s a hypothetical question and one Trinen couldn’t address at the moment. He sounded confident in the technology, but, as I suggested to him, it’s something I guess we’ll have to wait and see about, when games that try to do what I’m talking about, come along. Maybe Red Steel 2 will be a test case.

Nutcracker Notes: Finally, I guess it pays to mention in Twitter the games you are playing for review. While I know some reviewers don’t like to read other reviews for fear of being prematurely influenced, I appreciated the e-mail from a reader this week who saw that I was playing Little King’s Story and sent me some information about it. His note expanded my understanding of how the game’s developers were influenced by things like the Nutcracker Suite. I can’t say I caught all that on my own, and I’m a fan of learning this extra stuff to make what I do more informed. That added info may not make it into a post or even my review, but it’s good stuff to know. Makes me feel smarter. That review was supposed to run today, but I haven’t finished the game yet, so it bounces to next week.

That’s all for today. Comic-Con madness subsides next week, I book some trips, some more embargoes lift and I get to check out the full holiday line-ups from Ubisoft and Sony, with some Majesco mixed in. Should be fun. Happy weekend, everyone.

Little King’s Story arrived while I was away and I plan to thoroughly abuse my power as “king of the castle” over the weekend. Initial impressions suggest a good deal of complexity lies behind its twee graphical style, as you lead your kingdom to conquer its neighbours, whipping your citizens into shape, managing various jobs and economic matters, and embarking on a host of adventurous quests. And, yes, part of the appeal is just how utterly adorable it all looks.

I played through the first area of Red Faction: Guerrilla yesterday. You’ll see a small part of this section if you download the single-player demo now up online. It’s no secret I’m a big fan of sandbox gaming, particularly open world environments that provide plenty of space for you to improvise. Any like-minded gamers out there would do well to investigate Volition’s take on the genre. They’ve succeeded in turning a fairly conventional first-person shooter into a sprawling, free-roaming and surprisingly experimental third-person action game. The theme of liberation reaches far beyond the narrative and infects every aspect of the gameplay.

Finally, I’ve got a download code here for Lode Runner on Xbox Live Arcade, which I’ll be sampling this afternoon. What’s especially pleasing about this re-release is the inclusion of the level editor, and better still the ability to exchange creations with friends. My memories of the original puzzler/platformer are happy ones, but I’m hoping there’s enough here to keep me going once the nostalgia subsides.

Harvest Moon creator Yasuhiro Wada says “the games industry worldwide is in danger if we keep making sequels,” just weeks before the 19th installment of Harvest Moon hits PSPs in Japan.

Speaking to Eurogamer Italy, Wada went on to say that consumers are bored by sequels and excited by variety. That may or may not have been the inspiration behind developer Natsume creating Puzzle de Harvest Moon and severing Rune Factory: A Fantasy Harvest Moon from the franchise to stand as its own series.

Either way, his quotes still smack of hypocrisy. Wada’s newest IP – Little King’s Story – is a single player life sim where you take care of townspeople instead of cows with the power of a magic crown instead of a magic tree.

Wada gets a ten out of ten for idealism, though.

“I think new IPs must keep coming, not only to give more variety to the gamer but also to keep the creative people creative,” Wada said.

“What is the point of having creative developers if they are just making existing games better and not thinking of new ideas?”

Hear, hear! Bring me the collective head of Namco-Bandai!

Stop relying on sequels – Yasuhiro Wada [Eurogamer]

For those of you with a low tolerance for hit points, the dynamic duo will also be showing off XSEED’s first DS games, Populous DS based on the classic PC game, KORG DS-10, a music creation program, and Retro Game Challenge, a mini-game title based on the Japanese Game Centre CX TV series. Perhaps these three non-RPG titles will calm me enough to keep the Rune Factory fan in me from dry-humping their booth.

Marvelous Entertainment USA and XSEED Games

Join Forces to Announce E3 2008 Line Up

Independent Game Publishers to Showcase Stellar Portfolio of Titles on Wii™ and Popular Handheld Systems

Torrance, Calif., (July 11, 2008) – Marvelous Entertainment USA and XSEED Games today announced its E3 plans which include a stellar line up of games for both Nintendo platforms, the Nintendo DS and Wii, as well as the PSP® (PlayStation®Portable) system. Both companies will display their portfolio of upcoming titles at E3 2008 which will be held at the Los Angeles Convention Centre from July 15th – 17th. E3 attendees are invited to visit the Marvelous Entertainment USA and XSEED Games booth located at Concourse Hall Pavilion #427.

“We’re very pleased to be able to give the North American audience a sneak peak at our upcoming lineup,” stated Yasuhiro Wada, Managing Director of Marvelous Entertainment. “This is just the beginning of some of the great games that we’ll be releasing in the US under our Marvelous Entertainment USA banner.”

“It’s been an amazing year for us, and we feel that we’re well positioned going into E3,” said Jun Iwasaki, President of XSEED Games. “We’ve got a fantastic partnership with Marvelous Entertainment which we greatly appreciate, and the overall line up of titles we’re showcasing is strong and diverse, which we’re exceptionally excited about.”

Games being shown under the Marvelous and XSEED Games partnership are:

Avalon Code DS

From the creative minds behind Rune Factory and Harvest Moon with the development studio responsible for the Final Fantasy III and Final Fantasy IV DS remakes comes Avalon Code, an action RPG boasting incredible graphics, a deep and engrossing story, and innovative game play mechanics. Using the main character’s ‘Book of Prophecy’, players can modify the rules of engagement during battle as well as weapon and monster attributes. The player even has control over the story as it changes depending on which gender the player chooses to play as, enhancing the ability to immerse themselves into the story. Avalon Code DS is scheduled for release Q1 2009. The game will be published in Europe by Rising Star Games*, a subsidiary of Marvelous Entertainment.

Rune Factory: Frontier Wii

From the creators of Harvest Moon and Rune Factory for the DS comes the first installment of Rune Factory for a home console. Developed exclusively for Wii, Rune Factory: Frontier features stunning graphics and takes full advantage of the Wii’s unique controls to fully immerse players in the Rune Factory universe. Rune Factory: Frontier incorporates an open-ended structure that allows players to choose the type of game they wish to experience. Whether it’s growing crops, expanding the town, fighting (or befriending) monsters or even falling in love, the experience is unique to each player. Rune Factory: Frontier Wii is scheduled for release Q1 2009. The game will be published in Europe by Rising Star Games*, a subsidiary of Marvelous Entertainment.

LITTLE KING’S STORY Wii

Little King’s Story has an art style that is very ’story-book’ in look and a magical fairy tale quality that will intrigue and delight gamers. The storyline, visual look, and lyrical music of Little King’s Story, work in concert to transport players to an interactive, enchanting, fairy tale world. By combining gameplay elements from life-simulation, real-time strategy, and adventure genres, the many aspects of creating a vast kingdom come to life! As King, players will manage and involve their townspeople in the goals of creating this new territory; enlisting them to dig for treasure, build new buildings and otherwise better their community. Of course, leadership is a two-way street, so as King, players will try to conquer rival nations to create a single unified kingdom, while also granting the requests of townspeople at whim. The game transforms the Wii Remote™ to a royal scepter and offers players the chance to be the best king in the world! Little King’s Story Wii is scheduled for release Winter 2008. The game will be published in Europe by Rising Star Games*, a subsidiary of Marvelous Entertainment.

VALHALLA KNIGHTS 2 PSP system

Sequel to the popular Valhalla Knights, Valhalla Knights 2 promises to give fans of the original game a vast and expansive world to explore, and the customisation tools to create the ultimate battle party. This action RPG (Role Playing Game) sequel adds new races, job classes, weapons, magic spells, foes, armour and more to the Valhalla Knights universe, all within an engrossing story arc. Controlling and choosing character aspects such as skills, race and appearance, players engage in real-time 6 on 6 battles, reliant on tactical combat strategies to achieve success. Supporting 2 player ad hoc network play, gamers can engage in Co-op and Versus modes with friends, or simply trade items and weapons. Valhalla Knights 2 PSP system is scheduled for release Fall 2008.

Separately, XSEED Games will unveil the company’s first official support of the Nintendo DS with three titles:

Populous™ DS

Based on the original Populous PC classic from Electronic Arts, Populous DS brings a re-imagination of the classic game, which pioneered the God simulation genre. Featuring touch-screen controls that utilise the dual-screens, players manipulate 5 elementally-imbued gods, each with their own unique miracles, within an extensive single-player campaign. Within the multiplayer wireless mode, up to 4 players can unleash earthquakes, tidal waves and raging volcanoes onto rival players’ lands. Populous DS is scheduled for release Fall 2008. The game will be published in Europe by Rising Star Games*, a subsidiary of Marvelous Entertainment.

KORG DS-10

Designed after the famous KORG MS-10 music synthesiser, KORG DS-10 is a music-creation program for professional and aspiring musicians alike. The sound sources in the KORG DS-10 come from KORG, one of the world’s top musical instrument producers, and no effort was spared in the replication of creating high-quality sounds. The Nintendo DS’s touch-screen controls are utilized to the fullest to provide an authentic feel and operability across a dual-screen layout that is unsurpassed in portable music creation. A 6-track/16-step sequencer enables precise control and provides a wide range of musical possibilities, and up to eight DS units can be linked via wireless connection to play together or to exchange sounds and songs. KORG DS-10 is scheduled for release Fall 2008.

Retro Game Challenge

An original game based on the popular Japanese GAME CENTRE CX TV series, Retro Game Challenge reinvents how classic games are played. Featuring a story-driven progression, players complete short challenges in a wide-variety of fictional re
tro-games. Specific challenges in shooting, racing, action and even an epic role-playing game are integrated into the story, while the in-game magazines offer cheat codes as well as fake 80’s news stories paying tribute to the rich history of the gaming industry. Released to raving reviews as Game Centre CX: Arino’s Challenge in Japan, the game received a Gold Award from Famitsu with a 33/40 review score. Retro Game Challenge is scheduled for release Winter 2008.

Pre-E3 2008: Little King’s Story [IGN]

Wait, there’s more: The all-star team behind the game includes Yasuhiro Wada (Harvest Moon), Yoshiro Kimura (HM & Chulip), Youichi Kawaguchi (Dragon Quest VIII) AND Hideo Minaba, art director for FFXII.

I got to see an early demo of the kingmaking of little Corobo, the shy boy who the player must nurture into a wise and strong ruler.

The first thing that jumped out at me was the beautiful watercolour-pencil style of the cute, humorous cutscenes (we published the trailers a while back) – and how well they transitioned immediately into the brightly-coloured game world. I watched as a wacky looking old knight came riding up on a cute, bulbous cow (yes, it was the much-revered Harvest Moon cow) in his search for the true king.

Corobo then discovers a crown, suddenly prompting his friends to prostrate in homage. Next thing you know, you’re in a throne room, and as you start the game as a level one “rookie” king, your mailbox soon fills up with all sorts of mundane requests, like getting rid of a red mushroom that’s annoying the townsfolk, or filling in a mysterious hole behind someone’s house.

In the scene I watched, the charming, fancily-mustachioed Bull Knight explained to Corobo that the neighbouring lands are under siege by Oni devils and under the rulership of false kings, which, of course, it falls to you to rally your folk to deal with. Any time you want to know the state of your kingdom or what needs doing, you return to your throne.

But, of course, you’re the King, so you don’t have to do this dirty work yourself. Waving your sceptre at townspeople will recruit them to your aid – you can have a few or up to a throng of fifty following you from place to place, ready to do your bidding. Many townsfolk will have different specialties; for example, a team of carpenters will build something when instructed much faster and more efficiently than a group of regular individuals.

You can often earn respect by completing these quests; the more renowned you are as a ruler, the more people will obey you. And your obedient subjects are not just faceless nobodies. They’ve got HP and attack points, can gain in abilities, and will even show their relationship status – given enough time, your townspeople will marry and propagate. If you don’t treat them well, though, if you battle too recklessly or work them too hard, they can permanently die, and as their King, you’ll have to attend their funerals. That could be very interesting.

What I saw was mostly exposition and early stages of play, but this is a title I’ll personally watch with enthusiasm, because life-sim/adventure hybrids rate pretty high up among my favourite genres.