It's always good to see some people besides us talking about the excellent game Psychonauts, especially a site that gets a lot of traffic and whatnot. Additionally, since these days, pointing out when other people talk about games we're excited for is pretty much what this website is all about, here's some more of that. C'mon, help us reaffirm our social role!
Erm. Anyway, a few days ago, IGN Xbox (pronounced ih-gehnks-bocks) put up an interesting article called "The Fight for Original Games", in which Psychonauts is discussed and praised to some extent, which occurs somewhere around the middle of the article. There's no real new info on the game, but you should probably check out what gets said, anyway.<:MORENEWS:>
The first part talks about some pretty depressing statistics regarding the number of games that were sequels or games based on established franchises from other media (like the upcoming *gaak* Godfather game) compared to the number of games that were original lisences, and (on the Xbox) the stats came out the latter representing less than thirty percent of currently announced upcoming titles in 2005.
They then examine some original titles slated to come out this year, and Psychonauts is the first game mentioned under their "Star Pupils" heading, which I understood to mean as "Games that will likely be awesome, but that they don't expect these titles to seriously compete with established franchieses". Anyway, in regards to Psychonauts, IGN gave it an originality factor score of 5 (out of 5, apparently) and said, among other things:
The game is a tapestry of surreal and psychotic images that play off every ordinary game idea and then twists them into something strange, wonderful, or weird. As originality goes, this is an obvious winner.So, cool. Again, there's nothing really new about the game, at all, if you've been following our coverage of it for the past few weeks. But the article is pretty interesting all around and might make you irritated and stuff.