Industry choosing iphone, abandoning wii?

I think the iPhone makes a difference in the videogame space in a sense where it allows the industry to re-invent itself. Let me explain to you why.

If anything over the past few months stood out to me in terms of news and announcements, then I’d have to go with this trend of big developers and publishers seemingly losing interest in Nintendo’s white box of fun and starting to show their love to Apple’s iPhone. We’ve all seen big name publishers statements, thought mostly informal, with regards to the slow game sales on the Wii. And where some developers switch to PS3/360 development, others turned to the iPhone (or both). EA, Sega, Capcom, Square Enix and others have all started creating iPhone games in one form or the other. Read more

Engine Software: Aliens in the Attic

Seen the movie? Unfortunately, I haven’t either. According to reviews, however, this isn’t necessary for playing the game, as the game itself is actually good! Yes ladies and gentleman, a movie license title which doesn’t completely suck. Read more

Engine Software: Mega Mindy

Those of you from the Netherlands and Belgium should know this title, apparently. I myself was unfamiliar with it as it has only aired in those areas of the world, and never shown in the U.S. where I had spent my childhood. Even so, the game itself looks very nice, and despite being unfamiliar with the franchise, it’s still a game anybody could pick up and understand. Read more

Engine Software: Just Sing!

Just Sing! is Engine Software’s big release right now: a karaoke game on the DS. The idea of singing karaoke using the built-in DS mic is quite strange considering that it’s mostly been used in mini games which only consisted of blowing into the mic or clapping, but never anything as precise as pitch recognition. Engine Software, however, managed to pull it off quite well from what we’ve seen.

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Engine Software at Gamescom

Engine software is a small game development company from a city in the eastern side of the Netherlands called Doetinchem. They pride themselves in being the oldest game development company in the Netherlands, having been founded in 1995.

The company began as a partial developer for other companies and projects, and as they constantly produced quality and performed well, they quickly gained a reputation of being a good, reliable company. Because of this, they were finally able to take on complete projects on their own, rather than only taking part in a piece of the development. This day and age, they are very well established, and are working on getting some new IPs to work on using their own technology. At the moment they’ve worked on over 80-90 commercial titles.

Engine Software is known for making portable console games, and more recently the DS to be precise. They have been known in the past to make many titles based on existing licenses and franchises, such as Spongebob Squarepants, Wolverine and Barbie (talk about diverse..). The in-house development team consists of roughly 25 employees, and they typically work in teams of 5 or 6 on a project, meaning they usually have about 5 different projects running at a time.

Engine Software has developed an interesting platformer engine for the DS, and they have had a lot of practice using it; their platformers on the DS are top-notch.

Though they work mostly in license titles and franchises, from what we saw, they mentioned that they have been trying for quite some time now to have brainstorming sessions twice a month to come up with new IP to develop; so they are planning on getting their own projects and concepts running sometime soon, and considering the level of quality they seem to produce, we look forward to what they come up with. Perhaps an interesting IP to use with their platforming engine?

If you want to know more about the games Engine Software has recently released (or will release soon), feel free to read up on them

Just Sing!

MegaMindy

Aliens in the Attic