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News: Bangai-O Delayed to Add Multiplayer

Posted on : 07-10-2010 | By : | In : News

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Kotaku reports Bangai-O HD has been delayed in order for the developers to add multiplayer to the title, including competitive and co-operative modes. The new release window is currently Spring 2011.

The addition of multiplayer to Bangai-O HD isn’t an odd choice, considering how much the next generation systems have been pushing multiplayer over traditional single-player modes, but I’m curious as to how they’re going to incorporate these modes into Bangai-O. Bangai-O is very much designed as a single-player experience, with the player given only a tiny sprite to control so that the rest of the player’s view can be swarming with missiles and enemies, and expecting the player to track one single enemy player during the madness that defines Bangai-O will be a tough task. Even more difficult to implement will be the co-op, because the entire gimmick of Bangai-O is that your screen-clearing “bomb” function releases ordnance in direct proportion to how much danger the player character is currently in from the enemies’ own munitions, and it’ll be difficult to balance two (or more!) Bangai-Os attempting to set up efficient combos.

Hopefully pushing back the release date will give the developers time to come up with solutions to these potential difficulties, and as hard as these problems with the addition of multiplayer to Bangai-O’s game mechanics might be to crack, there is also a lot of potential for the game to go wonderfully right. Getting three of your friends together to coordinate a single massive assault of literally thousands of missiles is exactly the kind of experience that can make Bangai-O HD a worthy successor to the cult classic Dreamcast original. Fingers crossed that the multiplayer isn’t just an afterthought to make it more competitive in today’s market.

Those of you with an interest on the origins of Bangai-O’s game mechanics and how it relates to the rule sets of mecha anime series, please feel free to read our in-depth feature on the first two Bangai-O games. For a game that answers the question “how many explosions can we fit on a single screen?” the game’s cultural genesis is a long and interesting one.

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Comments (5)

Bangai-Oh Spirits employed a multiplayer feature on the DS. Though all it did was let two players play the same level simultaneously. So it was like a co-op feature but creative players could get creative and be competitive and turn it into a race or who could score the highest. The only flaw was not being able to play custom stages together though maybe one could edit a level in mid-play to get this effect.

Just saying multiplayer in bangai-oh isn’t that alien of a concept.

It wasn’t a feature that most people were able to use, though, at least out here in the West, where local wireless play isn’t as much of a factor. And while I can’t speak definitively on the subject, it was apparent to me that the game likely wasn’t designed for multiplayer in mind–it’s very much a single player experience, and I can’t even imagine what the game is like when a single player using the bomb function can cause severe slowdown that freezes the gameplay temporarily.

It’s not something I hold against Treasure, because damn if they didn’t wring every last drop of 2D power out of the DS, but the technology wasn’t there to do a multiplayer Bangai-O justice. Hopefully slowdown won’t be an issue on the Xbox 360.

I’m sad to hear that you couldn’t play Custom stages in multiplayer mode with Bangai-O Spirits on the DS, though. Were the stages you could play as the same as the regular single-player mode, or were there a set of specially-designed stages?

It was mostly an experimental type of add on. The stages were the same when played multi. It has been a while since I actually played it with another person but I don’t remember the slow down being much worse than in single. But it was fun batting enemies back and forth to each other and getting into dashing push wars.

This “cult classic Dreamcast original” was in fact a cult classic N64 original.

I think Toll was referring to the fact that the Dreamcast game was the first one released outside of Japan really. As that version is the one that became the “cult classic” most Western gamers would know of.

In any case, the feature covers all of this anyway, so I’m not to worried about giving the wrong information here.

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