N'Gai Croal
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Jun 22, 2007 12:51 AM
When Sega sent out its press release this morning announcing that acclaimed Canadian developer BioWare would be making a role-playing game based on Sonic the Hedgehog for the Nintendo DS, we, like many others, were taken aback. Not by the fact that a Japanese publisher was teaming up with a Western developer; after all, Sega has been the most aggressive of the major Japanese companies in signing up such studios as Monolith Productions (Condemned), Pseudo Interactive (Full Auto), Bizarre Creations (The Club) and Silicon Knights (for an as yet unnamed title) among others, in addition to acquiring Sports Interactive (Championship Manager), Creative Assembly (Medieval II: Total War) and Secret Level (America's Army: Rise of a Soldier.) Nor was it because BioWare, whose heritage lies in computer games and, more recently, console titles, would embrace a portable device, because the company did reveal its plans to get into the handheld space last fall.
No, the head scratching stemmed from this: why would BioWare, one of the world's best developers, voluntarily get involved with a franchise as troubled as Sonic the Hedgehog? To ponder it further only led from head-scratching to head-shaking when we thought of the numerous other franchises that Sega fans would much rather see in the hands of the good doctors/founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk--like Panzer Dragoon, Skies of Arcadia, Golden Axe, Shenmue, heck, even Jet Set Radio--than the increasingly problematic blue furball. Given that Muzyka and Zeschuk are two of the most thoughtful and deliberate game creators that we've met, we asked ourselves again: why?
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