Sharpen your weapons: “Swords & Soldiers” is coming!

Ronimo Games announces their studio and the first competitive strategy game for Wii Ware: Swords & Soldiers.

UTRECHT, THE NETHERLANDS – August 15, 2008 – The developers of the original version of “de Blob” announce their new game studio Ronimo Games and their first title: Swords & Soldiers.

Ronimo Games is founded by seven developers in Utrecht, the Netherlands. As students the team was responsible for the original pc game “de Blob”. Being an innovative and fun game, “de Blob” became popular on the internet and was eventually picked up by THQ. The publisher bought the IP and will soon release the new version of “de Blob” for Nintendo Wii.

Fabian Akker, one of the co-founders: “de Blob was the eye opener for us, that we can make cool games and function as a good team. The game definitely gave us the opportunity to start our own company”.

The team is developing a new game for Wii Ware: Swords & Soldiers. Swords & Soldiers is a sidescrolling real time strategy game, in which three distinct factions battle for the powers of the gods. The game will feature a single player campaign and a competitive splitscreen multiplayer mode as well as several other game modes. Three screenshots are included with this press release.
Akker: “We always dreamed of designing an RTS and when Wii Ware came out we immediately figured that this was our chance.”

Swords & Soldiers will be the first competitive strategy game on Wii Ware and is scheduled for European, Australian and American release in Q4 2008.

About Ronimo Games
Ronimo games is a new developer, founded by the original creators of “de Blob” in October 2007. The team focusses on creating innovative games for a broad audience. The studio became a Nintendo licensed developer in spring 2008 and is currently working on their first Wii Ware title: Swords & Soldiers. For more information on Ronimo Games and its products visit www.ronimo-games.com.

About “de Blob”
“de Blob” started as a student game project for the city of Utrecht, in which the player rolls through the city as a giant alien paintball, painting the streets and buildings. THQ bought the IP and is currently working on a new version of the game for Nintendo Wii. For more information and a free download of the original “de Blob” visit binnenstad.hku.nl. For more information on the new THQ version of “de Blob” visit www.deblob.com.

As we've told you in the past, you play as a pretty cute blob. Squishy blobs are in right now - just think of Independent Games Festival buzz-generators World of Goo and Goo!, to name just a couple. In fact, as Crecente reported last year, De Blob is actually the result of a student project from the 2006 Independent Games Festival.

As such, it retains both the simplicity and attractively colorful, offbeat vibe we often associate with promising indies. What are you a blob of? Color, it looks like, a heroic little splat plunked down in Chroma City, an adorable world that's had all of the hues sapped out of it by the evil I.N.K.T. Corporation.

It's super cute and quirky, but how does it play? Details and screens after the jump.

My tendency was actually to be a bit leery of THQ's Wii-heavy strategy. As I've mentioned before, I've got a little bit of "waggle fatigue," and you may recall I was not pleased with Battle of the Bands, where I felt the motion controls seemed a little bit frustrating and redundant.

De Blob, however, controls very simply and tightly judging by the few minutes I had with it - the way you roll your blob around with the nunchuk's thumbstick works particularly well, and put me distinctly in mind of Katamari Damacy. In fact, a lot of De Blob's gameplay seems to take a Katamari cue, from the camera control to the fashion of rolling over Chroma City's poor trapped citizens to set them free.

As Flynn explained, you hold the Z button to lock onto objects you can smash, and swing the Wii Remote down to jump on them. When you hit a paint can, your blob takes on the color you splash through, and colors can blend - if you're red and hit a blue can, for example, you become purple.

And as you roll through Chroma City, you paint it with the colors and patterns you're currently hanging onto, and you earn higher scores for a broad color palette and pattern diversity. The more paint you soak up, the heavier and less agile your blob becomes, and if you roll through two colors that don't blend well, like purple and green, you turn brown. Roll through water to rinse off and become colorless again, taking off some of that weight.

Your blob has to avoid stumbling into ominous-looking black rivers of ink, though - if you get inked, you'll spread depressing blacks and grays all over your colorful handiwork, killing trees and even obliterating your cheerful Chroma City citizens. You can wash off the ink by rinsing in water if you get there in time, though, and an optional onscreen map can point you in the general direction of the nearest water source.

The game features some platforming elements, and you swing the Wii Remote upward to jump, higher if you want more air. Flynn had said he noticed some issues with this - while I've never found motion controls to be ideal for platforming, I found it at least workable here, even if getting the timing and size of the movement just right might take some practice through playtime.

Just rolling the blob around and painting with color is surprisingly engrossing, especially because of the outstanding sound effects and music. The THQ rep told me that the entire soundtrack was done by an Australian local band who plays jazz music, and all of the game's tunes are sprightly and clever. My favorite part was how the music changes depending on what color you are, with the accompanying sound seeming to go with the hue.

Katamari Damacy succeeded through surprising aesthetics and simple gameplay, and it looks possible for De Blob to do the same - my one uncertainty about it is that it's still not clear to me exactly how much structure there is to the missions, or how you obtain the satisfaction of completing a single objective. That's not necessarily a problem - it might still be simple fun as an open-world, color-saturated free-for-all, but personally, I thrive on the joy rush of beating the clock and accomplishing something.

THQ president and CEO Brian Farrell said that most of its struggles were due to a crowded and competitive market for kids' games, as well as key franchises — Juiced, Stuntman and Conan that ultimately "were simply not competitive."

"Insufficient game quality led to inadequate sellthrough, resulting in markdowns at retail," Farrell said.

Farrell said the company spent heavily to promote Juiced and Stuntman, and had to take a loss when those titles fail to perform. What growth THQ did see, Farrell credited to Frontlines: Fuel of War, MX vs. ATV Untamed and WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2008, all of which exceeded expectations.

Farrell also said the kids' market, in which THQ has several franchises, was the most competitive in years, and that the company's currently struggling to compete with music games and Nintendo first-party titles.

Nonetheless, THQ appears to have placed its faith in the Wii, concentrating much of its upcoming original IP there. Although Saints Row 2 and Red Faction Guerrilla are still the "anchors" of its lineup, Darksiders, De Blob, Deadly Creatures, Big Beach Sports and All Star Cheer look likely to be slated for Wii along with other unannounced projects, though the company did not announce specific platforms.

New installments in existing franchises for fiscal 2009 include WWE SmackDown vs. Raw 2009, Disney/Pixar's Wall-E film tie-in, and its previously-revealed Nickelodeon portfolio. The company will publish a game based on DreamWorks' Animation's unannounced 2010 fall film, and has slated WWE: Legends of Wrestlemania for 2009.

Notably, the company seems to have an eye on the free-to-play, microtransactions-driven online gaming market in Asia, highlighting the co-publishing agreement it's signed with Shanda Interactive to bring Company of Heroes Online to China in 2009.

THQ is more confident about the year to come, with three new initiatives in place: "We are rolling out a stronger slate of products. We have put in place and are executing against initiatives to improve our product quality and competitiveness. We are also realigning our cost structure to generate significant operating leverage in fiscal 2009. We believe these initiatives will restore profitable growth and improve value for shareholders," said Farrell.

"We faced a number of challenges, but I believe we have the right strategy to overcome these challenges and achieve significant growth."

Each area of town you go to has a different challenge. Some require you to paint everything the same color, while others have you using as many different colors as possible. Large green areas denote side quests that can be taken on and there are many spread out in the game's large levels. There are also quite a few time challenges that have you trying to paint a certain area of town or group of buildings in the allotted time. Multiplayer will support up to four players, but unfortunately, online play will not be available.

De Blob was developed for the Wii and, as you can imagine, it makes much use of the Wii remote's motion sensors and the nunchuck. Flicking the remote will cause your colorful little blob to jump up in the air and with the right movements you can get quite the speed going. Soon you will be bouncing off of buildings and into the sides of other buildings, splashing paint all over the place as you go.

Of all the Wii titles shown at the event, this was my personal favorite and I found myself inadvertently standing there playing, while the lines formed behind me. Finally, after some rather cranky fellow journalists started grumbling I decided it might be best to move on.

If you haven't yet checked out De Blob and you are a fan of quirky games, do yourself a favor and at least peruse the small gallery of screenshots below. This will definitely be a Wii title well worth picking up.

Corporate sadness and apologetic execs at the official release.

THQ Updates Fiscal 2008 Outlook [Yahoo! Finance]

In the game you play as a colorless blob that can take on the colors of the critters it crushes. Once your blob has absorbed a color it can slap into a building to paint it. From what I saw of the game, it looks like it features both elements of free-roaming and missions. The missions typically include getting you to paint buildings different colors or racing around sections of the monochromatic city before a timer runs out.

While I love the look of the game and like the fact that there seems to be a deeper meaning lurking just below the game's mechanics, the thing that really sells this game to me is the fact that it's designed for the Wii and relies heavily on the console's motion controls.

To roll around the city you use the nunchuck's thumbstick, but if you want to crush an enemy, and absorb its color, you need to lift up and then swing down the remote as if swinging a hammer. To jump into the side of a building to color it you flick your remote in the correct direction.

I played around with the multiplayer for a bit and found the controls fairly intuitive and certainly something that added to the fun of the game. It was a bit tricky to get your blob to make bigger, rather than smaller jumps, but not so difficult as to be off-putting.

The one thing I didn't enjoy about the game was the seemingly endless and sorta pointless multiplayer. In the version we played, we roamed aimlessly around a city coloring the buildings in an attempt to get the high score. But the lack of a time limit and the fact that someone could follow behind you changing your buildings to their colors made the game a bit of a bore. While I wasn't told this, I suspect that the multiplayer was very, very much incomplete, so I'm not too worried.

The game looks like a perfect fit for the Wii's motion controls and its vibrant colors would look quite nice on the Nintendo console, I bet. I was, in fact, planning on including De Blob, which you can pick up here, as a contender in the Game Club.

THQ Wii exclusive - De Blob [Go Nintendo]