Dark Void Zero announced for DSiWare, PC and Mobiles in January 2010

28 December 2009

1 Comment

Posted by:Josh

Dark Void Zero has been announced for DSi and will be released in January 2010 for 500 Nintendo Points. It will also be released in February for mobile phones and PC.

Coming completely out of leftfield, Dark Void Zero continues Capcom’s love-fest with all-new 8-bit games, although the history behind the release of Dark Void Zero, which is explained here in detail by Capcom.

The story so far…

As the ‘80s were drawing to a close, the developers at Capcom began work on a top secret project that aimed to set new standards for the platformer genre. That game was called “Dark Rift”, and it blended the intense shooting action of Section Z with the latest innovations in platform jumping from Mega Man. In order to properly fulfill the producer’s vision for Dark Rift (later renamed Dark Void), the hardware engineering team at Capcom was enlisted to design and produce an all-new chipset that would be included in every cartridge, enabling huge numbers of sprites and never-before-seen special effects to be displayed on the aging NES platform and the PlayChoice-10 NES arcade cabinet.

Alas, time waits for no man and game developers are no exception. The dawn of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System made the additional hardware requirements for Dark Void redundant. Capcom suspended development on Dark Void as it began to evaluate the SNES. Before long, the game was shelved and drifted into the annals of gaming history. Even the internal tape-based archives were lost due to an unfortunate magnet incident which even today is best left un-discussed. Dark Void became a legendary “lost project” at Capcom…until now.

Nearly twenty years later the next gen version of the game, Dark Void, is back on the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC! But to commemorate the game’s humble origins, Capcom has commissioned this recreation of the original 8-bit classic, now re-titled “Dark Void Zero,” on the DSi platform. You play Rusty, the first human born in the Void, who must take on the Watchers in a quest to stop their domination of Earth. With the aid of Nikola Tesla, and his state-of-the-art rocket pack, Rusty must take down the Watchers and their minions across three intense levels of action and intrigue.

The game looks extremely fun and as described above, Capcom is going all-out with this release in offering a game that is 100% 8-bit in everything from graphics and effects to music to . . . having to blow on the cartridge! How do you blow on a virtual cartridge? Before you can “pop the game in” and start it off, players will be asked to blow into the DSi microphone!

Major kudos to Capcom for this kind of thing. Absolutely awesome.

Here is a video of the game in action.

I have to question a bit the reasons for releasing it on DSiWare and not for Xbox Live Arcade, PlayStation Network and WiiWare. Could it be because they are targeting this as a kind of killer-app for the DSiWare? Hopefully this sure-to-be-great game will also see a release on the above platforms further down the line.

Via Capcom Unity Blog