PAX Hands-On: D3Publisher

D3Publisher was out in force at PAX to promote their entire portfolio of titles. One of their major themes this year was the “return” of Matt Hazard. Those quotation marks are there because Matt Hazard isn’t a real video game hero. D3Publisher has created an entire franchise and a history of fake video game titles to fill it. This bizarre-yet-awesome viral marketing campaign is intended to drum up interest in the “new” Matt Hazard game to be announced next month.

While we didn’t get to spend any time with Matt Hazard, we did chat up Puzzle Quest: Galactrix and a couple of new Naruto titles with the D3 crew.

Naruto: Clash of Ninja Revolution 2

Revolution 2 is the latest entry in D3′s fighting game series based on the popular Naruto anime. This time around, the development team has set out to differentiate their game from the Naruto titles being developed by Ubisoft and Bandai Namco. One key difference is that the plot of Revolution doesn’t actually come from the popular anime. Instead, a new story was written by the North American team with the American audience in mind.

In addition to that desire to separate themselves from the other Naruto titles, the developers just want to put out a good fighting game. To bring them closer to their goal, they went out and found some of the most talented players of the last game. These players served as a focus group of sorts, and their suggestions were at the center of development. Certain overpowered combos have been tuned down and the characters are more well-balanced. This kind of devotion to bringing the fans what they want should go a long way towards cementing Revolution as the Naruto title to buy.

Players will be able to choose from a total of thirty-five characters and compete in fifteen stages. Each stage has two tiers, and you can go back and forth between both. In addition to the standard fighting game modes, there is a new “tag-team” mode. In tag-team, you choose two characters and swap them out mid-match. This should add an interesting layer of strategy to the mix. To take advantage of the Wii’s unique capabilities, the developers have implemented a motion system where you can perform special attacks by replicating the hand-motions used in the show. If that just isn’t your thing, “SSBB-like” control options are available.

Clash of Ninja Revolution 2 will be released on October 21st. With all of the new additions, it should be a big hit with fans of the show.

Naruto: Path of the Ninja 2

Unlike the Wii fighters, the Path of the Ninja titles are more of an RPG experience. While the original Path of the Ninja was ported up from the GBA to the DS, the sequel was developed completely for the duel-screened handheld. This has allowed the development team to expand pretty dramatically, especially in terms of the graphical effects. Some of the new graphical tweaks include weather effects, zooming, and “comic” effects. Path of the Ninja 2 is a longer game than the first, the average player is expected to take between ten and twelve hours to complete the main storyline.

Like in many RPGs, Path of the Ninja 2 gives you a party of four characters to level up and customize. Over the course of the game, you’ll be able to pick and choose from a total of thirty characters from the anime. Like in Clash of Ninja Revolution 2, the storyline is a completely new one written by their US team. This can only be a good move on their part, it’d be pretty boring if the storyline of a role-playing game followed the anime’s storyline verbatim.

Path of the Ninja 2 also has a pretty extensive wifi multiplayer mode, where you can choose from any of your unlocked characters and go head-to-head against another player. Leaderboards will rank players by a score computed from their wins and losses, and when you beat players from another state, you’ll get a “card” from that state. Truly competitive players will inevitably try to get cards for all fifty states, which should keep the mutiplayer aspect pretty lively. Path of the Ninja 2 will hit stores this October.

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix

I’ve spent a lot of time talking about Puzzle Quest. This addictive melding of Bejewled and role-playing games took away dozens of hours of my life when it it was released last year. I literally bought and played that exact same game on two different systems. Galactrix doesn’t really change the formula that made the first game a hit, but I still stood there glued to that screen when I stopped by D3′s booth.

For those of you who haven’t touched the first, Puzzle Quest follows a simple formula. You have a screen full of jewels, that you want to match up in patterns of three or more. It’s just like any number of identical puzzle games out there. The difference is that, in Puzzle Quest, you have a character that gains experience and becomes more powerful. By matching gems of a certain color, you gain mana of that color to use with magical spells. Matching up skulls deals damage to your enemies, and matching up gold pieces earns you money. To win, you need to get your opponent’s health down to zero. Designing a role-playing game and replacing the battle system with a puzzle game is one of the most brilliant ideas that I’ve ever seen in a game, and the developers pulled it off with style.

How do you improve on that? For Infinite Interactive, the answer was to move it to SPACE. Yep, Galactrix is Puzzle Quest in space. Galactrix remains fairly close to the gameplay of the original. You have a spaceship instead of a fighter or mage, but you still level up and learn new “powers.” Damage tiles now have a number on them, and the amount of damage that you do is equal to the sum of the tiles that you combine. To help counteract damage, your ship has a shield that must be depleted before you can be harmed. The grid is now layed out in a hexagonal pattern rather than the rectangle of the first game. This one alteration completely changes how you’ll approach the “battlefield.” You also have to worry about gravity. Tiles no longer just fall from above, unless you are on the surface of a planet. In space, pieces will fall in from whatever direction that you moved from.

While Galactrix is still fundamentally Puzzle Quest, the changes are enough to make it a completely fresh experience. I can’t wait to dive into it when it hits XBLA, PC, and the DS later on this year.