I actually like the visuals and design of Mickey. Looks pretty good to me.

gamingeek said:

Completely different? I didn't know this. Really? How were they different?

It has the same storyline, but levels have completely different layouts. Its has more exploration, puzzle solving, and secrets to find. It also has a slightly less dark and foreboding atmosphere. You  can't carry apples in your inventory; instead, you have to pick up blocks or honey barrels to throw at enemies or to solve puzzles. I actually prefer it over the Genesis version.

http://gameinformer.com/b/features/archive/2009/10/19/Inside-the-Game_3A00_-An-In_2D00_Depth-Look-at-Epic-Mickey_1920_s-Art-and-Animation.aspx

Has this been posted? It shows the animation!

Holy mother of God!

The animations

travo said:

gamingeek said:

That's pretty nice looking.

Wish they would go cel-shaded though.

No, they're nice enough as is.  I don't want every game on the Wii to be cel shaded.

Neither do I, but Mickey looks awkwardly rendered here. Reminds me of the new Sam and Max character models. It's like comparing a 3-D mickey mouse movie with a 2-D animated one. The authentic one is the 2-D animated.

http://gameinformer.com/games/disney_epic_mickey/b/wii/archive/2009/10/24/An-Interview-With-Warren-Spector.aspx

6 page interview

I’m out there pitching an epic fantasy roleplaying game – a game that’s sort of Deus Ex like, but with a more militaristic spin, and really dark and really, really edgy and stuff – and of course they weren’t interested, you know? But I see all these guys – all the Disney execs are sitting around the table, and they’ve got their Blackberrys out and they’re checking their mail and stuff. And so I thought, “Oh, I’ve lost them. I’m going to kill Seamus when I get out of here, because I told him this was going to happen.”

And so I was like, “Yeah! Give me Uncle Scrooge! Give me Duck Tales! Come on!”

GI: Why the Wii?

WS: Well, think about it. Would you really want to tackle convincing Halo or Grand Theft Auto players that they want to be Mickey Mouse? Would you really want to do that? In terms of finding a congenial audience, let’s go for a platform that’s known for Mario and Link and now Sonic. Come on. Honestly, with the unit sales on the hardware, it was kind of a lucky happenstance. We made the call to go to the Wii long before it was clear that the Wii was going to be, at least for now, the best-selling platform.

It was about going where the audience is and going somewhere where they’re going to accept a visual style that is more cartoony than people are used to seeing and where we don’t feel obliged to throw in every shader on the planet. “Look at the normal maps and shaders.” We don’t have to do that kind of stuff. It’s the right platform for this project, for sure.

So we’ve created this secondary system, this sketch system where you can create objects from blueprints. They modify NPC behavior. They modify the simulation. They modify things as opposed to create and destroy or draw and erase as very binary, very black and white. These offer a different kind of interaction with the world and the environment and the characters. I think the combination of those things is going to result in unexpected events.

That’s another core value. I really believe in the value of emergent situations, things that are not planned. When you get simple systems that interact with a simulation that is just deep enough to support unexpected behaviors, when you start getting things happening that the developers didn’t know could happen, that’s when you start to win. That’s the big win, because then players discover solutions to problems that we didn’t even know existed.

It happened all of the time in Deus Ex, it happened in System Shock, it happened in the Ultima games. I saw it happen in Ultima VI by accident, where we had simulated something just deeply enough that something that was not planned happened and worked in the solution of the problem. As soon as I saw that accident, I said I’m doing that on purpose next time. Here we are 20 years later, and I’m doing it on purpose every chance I get. These sketches offer us some real emergent situations when you use those in combination with your core abilities.

Much more at the link.