Mouse Commander IV:  Heart of the Rabbit

I'm very confident of this title since it also sounds like a thinking game as well which is what Warren Spector is usually known for.

The few details known about this game have me interested. This could be the first good Mickey game in years.

If there is a part in it that's anything like Fantasia, I'm in.

You can tell that this game is being made by a Disney fanboy. I am already loving the idea of forgotten characters taking revenge on Mickey and his empire. Color me excited.

It sounds similar to Okami, which could be a very good thing.

Making Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Mickey's Nemesis for this game is a stroke of genius, and it's really sad this is an angle they haven't been able to use till now.  The gameplay sounds very Okami-ish, though.  I'm not sure yet if that's a good or bad thing.

You sound like you've never played Okami. It's a great thing.

No, I played it.  I bought it, in fact, when it came out on Wii.  I never finished it, but I did make it to the end of the game and got so utterly bored by the game (I was doing the bead quests) that I just stopped playing it and sold it off.  I thought it was an extremely over-rated Zelda knockoff with a motion control element that didn't work properly, and the combat was made even more tedious than it already likely was on the PS2 by the implementation of Twilight Princess-esque waggling.  The dungeons were dull and the plot only slightly less so.  It was a gorgeous game, though, with the promise of being an awesome game.  I just don't think it ever got there.

That's why I'm a little wary of this game implementing Okami-style gameplay.

Ok so you didn't like the game. Did you like the puzzle mechanics?

Sometimes.  It was often a question of when they worked properly.  The celestial brush recognition software had a lot of problems recognizing a lot of important shapes.  For instance, I had a lot of problems with the sequence in the game where you had to quickly draw circles around Sakura Tree blossoms during a cutscene to make them bloom.  I'd draw the circles, and the game would just ignore me and then instantly tell me I failed.  I must have had to repeat the sequence over a dozen tedious times.  I had similar problems getting Lillypads to spawn on the water as well.  Then you had stuff like drawing lightning that only ever worked when the game felt like it.

As you can see, it all comes down to how Disney uses the drawing mechanic.  If it works perfectly and the puzzles are clever, more power to them.  But there has to be compelling experience around the motion control as well, something I don't think Okami managed.  Thankfully, that seems to be getting the proper attention in this project so far.

The only problem I had with Okami's drawing mechanic was drawing a straight line when crossing out names in your bounty book.  It wasn't perfect but I didn't have the amount of problems you did broodwars, you really had a problem with lightning?  That seems like i was the easiest it was just connecting a line from the cloud to the other point right? 

No, there was a lightning technique as well that had you actually summoning a lightning bolt by drawing a zig-zag iconic lightning bolt on-screen (you learn it by climbing that huge tower in the main town).  I only ever managed to get the game to recognize that symbol twice, and one of those was to get the spell in the first place.

Can any of you explain, in words, how Okami Wii was reading controller input to register "brush" input?

I get the feeling that's a joke question, but fine I'll answer it seriously: it reads the input fine.  If I do a movement with my hand when the celestial canvas is on-screen, an accurate representation of my hand movement appears on-screen accordingly.  The game just never seemed altogether sure what to do with the shape once I released the button.  Take that circle shape I mentioned earlier, which when performed in-game on dead trees restores them to full bloom.  However, probably 3/5 times I'd get the wind-blowing effect or the bomb effect, both of which also use circular shapes (a loop with two connecting lines for the wind, and a circle with a line sticking out for a bomb).  If I performed this shape with a large portion of sky in the background, I'd sometimes get the "sun" effect, and if water was in the background sometimes I'd get the "Lillypad" effect. Sometimes nothing would happen.  When I'd try to do a zig-zag for the lightning spell, I'd get the "cut" effect or nothing at all.  Stuff like that just plagued my experience with the game.

This is eerily similar to an idea for a videogame that I once had myself. That alone has my interest piqued.

I really like the few details that we have. I bet if this sells well, it could eventually lead to an animated movie.

I admit, I've had the same problems at first. AT FIRST.

By the end of the game, I could do all the techniques in rapid succession and even perform the special attack (needed to get special things...) for each of the enemies who are about to fall.

I got less of an Okami vibe and more of a Crayon Physics vibe from the description.

Okami is the only waggle game I could not make immediate sense of.  RE4, Tenchu, NMH, Zack-Wiki, Cursed Mountain, TP, BWii, Punch Out, Wii Sports, Mario Party, Rune Factory -- all these I understood to the point of cheating the motions, or concluding that attempting to cheat the motions creates epic fail.

So what exactly are you doing to achieve them?  Quick wrist flicks or more exaggerated mid-air drawings by waving your hand?  Or is it IR pointer input (to me this did not seem to be the case)?  Is the software paying attention to your hand speed and directional changes?  Is it working in a similar fashion to SSX Wii, which also earned a bit of controversy over its motion input?

FYI, there's a small typo in the article.

How is that an error? That is the correct spelling. Mickey's nemesis in the comics was the Phantom Blot.

Really?  My bad.  I always thought it was Phantom Blob.

Move along!  Nothing to see here!

Phantom Bob

Mickey's Quest through Epic WalMart