Diggs Nightcrawler, otherwise known as the second ever game for the PS3 Wonderbook, has a release date. Here's the interesting part: while it comes out next month (May) in Europe, you won't see it in North America until “this holiday”. Unless Christmas in the states has moved up so it can happen when it's warmer, that means a gap of several months, which is pretty dramatic even for this industry. We're used to seeing huge delays between releases in Japan and the West, but not so much between the UK and US. Even the recent Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time came out in the EU only seven weeks after it came out in North America.
Accompanying the announcement, Sony has a developer video for us. It's true, we're kind of saturated with developer videos these days, but this one is interesting because developing for the Wonderbook is obviously different from developing a standard PS3 game. Also, they have to put a disclaimer informing viewers that what they see is not real and only exists on the TV screen, which is pretty funny.
“The less qualified we are, the more excited we are to take on something,” says William Joyce, the founder of Moonbot Studios.
Adam Volker, Creative Director on the game, says that regardless of the format – book, film, game, Wonderbook game – the team wants to tell a good story. Concept art demonstrates how they tried to get fairytale characters like Mother Goose fitting into a Film Noire theme, and the video has a few glimpses of the game in action too.
Do you have a Wonderbook? Does Diggs Nightcrawler tempt you more than J.K. Rowling's Book of Spells?