Ramblings and musings of John Zeitler.
At 12:00pm, I completed the final mission on Insane difficulty in multiplayer for Aegis Wing on the Xbox 360 Live Arcade. This is the eleventh game cleared in 2007. The next game that is closest to completion is Band of Bugs (360), followed by Super Robot Taisen: OG (GBA) and (nothing else started).
I haven’t had much time for gaming in the past three or four days, and while I would love nothing more than to sit on my butt this weekend and blow people away on-screen I actually have stuff I want/need to do. Still, though I had some progress with Metal Rogue last night, I did happen to catch this news story. The gist is that Keiji Inafune, the man responsible for the Mega Man series, claims that a new game in the venerable set would be prohibitively expensive to do, while at the same time stating that the game would play similarly to Lost Planet or Dead Rising.
I didn’t talk too much about Lost Planet, actually, but the vibe I got was that it basically WAS Mega Man Legends (the game Inafune is referring to when he mentions a hypothetical next-gen Mega Man game). Most of the action was simple run-and-gun, and while it definitely was a blast, it just wasn’t anything overly exciting. Now, that said, Inafune’s right– it’s a relatively simple matter to just drop the Mega Man Volnutt models into the LP engine and go from there. Or, overdramatically, is it? Where does this figure of “$15 million dollars” come in?
Take a look at Mega Man Legends and Lost Planet. Then take a wild freakin’ guess. There’s really a significant amount of stylistic work that would need to be done in order to update the series; this is not going to be easy work, especially since there’s always the dichotomy between the realism that Capcom seems to be trending towards in their 3D games and the traditional “Mega Man” style. Then you have musicians, level designers, weapons programmers… The voice acting budget alone is going to be a good chunk of that. Inafune’s not worried about the technical aspect of the game’s development, he’s worried about the aesthetic side and the gameplay side.
Good for him.
I’m as guilty as anyone else is of decrying a game as just being a graphics-fest with no real substance to it. To tell the truth, my big problem with Lost Planet was that, while the gameplay was there, I was not about to sit there and play what I felt was a very pretty but ultimately ‘cheap’ knock-off of Mega Man Legends that didn’t actually star Mega Man. If I’m putting the right words in Inafune’s mouth, he’s more worried that a lackadaisical approach to the game’s non-gameplay-related aspects will turn off sufficient players such that the game might not be a financial success. He’s not worried about the franchise or the initial sales (he knows there’s folks like me, who have been basically starved for the next chapter in the Legends/DASH series, and who will likely line up to pre-order the game as soon as it’s announced), he’s worried about the long haul. The return of the Blue Bomber would be ill-served by cranking out a sequel nobody will buy.
Holy $%@#, is this a Capcom employee we’re talking to?
Anyway, Inafune offered some odd words, saying that the involvement of Rockstar or EA might improve the chances of seeing a new Mega Man game. Presumably (and I really hope that I’m right on this one more than any other) he just means “I’d love to do it but I’m not risking any of Capcom’s cash to do it, and if Rockstar or EA want to pay me without having any input on the game that’s cool with me”. I would have to be naive to believe that Capcom would not ask Rockstar for information on how to make the game sell better in the US; to be completely honest, if Rockstar published a couple more games along the lines of Table Tennis, I would feel downright comfortable with the idea of their partnership on Mega Man. (Though in all honesty, now that I think about it, the capital would probably come from Take Two Interactive and not specifically Rockstar, so that should calm folks down a bit thinking that Roll is suddenly going to be a crack ho.)
Anyway, news like this, teasing me about a new Mega Man Legends game, it comes along every so often. It’s kind of like how movie buffs got strung along for a decade and a half waiting for a new Superman flick. You know it’s coming, you know it’s getting polished up for its big return, but still deep down inside you wonder if it’s really going to be worth the wait. At least it’s not going to be another Turok game.