I don’t see it happen often; nonetheless, I do get a little excited when 2D gameplay gets mixed in a 3D world. I’m not really talking about when 3D models are only moving exclusively on two axes, like in Street Fighter IV, but rather when 2D flat sprites on a billboard or plane are moving around in a 3D world. One of the biggest games to use this kind of design and technology would be Super Paper Mario on the Nintendo Wii. It was an alright game but felt like it didn’t have an impact. I beat it over a year ago and I don’t remember much from the game so it clearly didn’t leave much of a lasting impression on me.

Last year at the Independent Games Festival, Fez won the Design Innovation award and the Excellence in Visual Art award and showed off how switching 2.5D perspectives could be ingeniously used for puzzle-solving. It wasn’t as polished as Super Paper Mario, but it did show a promise of depth in its gameplay. The game has since then been handled by Polytron Corporation and is slated to come out in 2009. I really hope that happens but that is not why I posted.

I was looking through Capcom Unity’s website because I wanted more Capcom-specific information from E3 this week and found a couple of gems I wanted to show:

Now that is some pretty good stuff to get my classic Mega Man fanboy blood pumping! It doesn’t really show off too much other than a remixed Metal Man’s stage and have given Mega Man more directions to travel in. I do like the affect they have on the background music when Mega Man uses Flash Man’s time-freezing weapon. This next video shows even greater potential:

The first part of the video begins to show the potential of what classic Mega Man can play like in 2.5D with little things like the perspective changes of his battle with Mecha Dragon showing off some interesting attack patterns from the boss of the ladder scene where the camera looks up to show that lasers are coming down and ready to obliterate Mega Man, letting the player know that it’s time to move!

But then a new mode for this fan game is shown when Proto Man teams up with Mega Man to travel through stages designed for cooperative play. There’s quite a few interesting things here. Protoman has to step on a switch that will lower deadly spikes so that Mega Man can get an extra life, and then later they take turns doing this so that they can advance through the level. I also like it when the view zooms in and out based on the distance between Mega Man and Proto Man, making it easy to go off in their own areas to fight enemies or solve puzzles and then return to work together when they need to. None of this is new in cooperative games; however, this combined with the elements that the 2.5D perspective brings could add something fresh to Mega Man, a franchise that has spent a good part of it’s existence being milked by Capcom.

This was a really interesting prototype that Peter Sjostrand has been working on. I really think Capcom should pick this up(and him as well) and make this into a complete game that could be downloaded various consoles and other gameplaying devices by players around the world. It was an excellent idea for Mega Man 9 and this could work really well. Whether the robot masters and stages they use are original or based on fan favorites, it can potentially be a very fun and interesting game to play with other people. Nintendo is doing somthing similar New Super Mario Bros. on the Wii, but that game is going to lack the challenege that the Mega Man series is known for.