Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

By now if you haven’t heard that Okami‘s coming to the Wii, you at least know how badly I’ve wanted this to happen. In that light, here we have Okamiday, Volume 10. Okamiday is me posting assets and articles periodically about Okami, the PS2 game that’s widely considered Clover Studios’ swan song, a game whose sales were so weak as to likely be a major factor in the developer’s dissolution.

Okami has been delayed from March to April 15th. I didn’t bat an eyelash… take your time, guys, I’ve been waiting years for this and I’ll wait as long as it takes. Beyond that, now I’ll be picking up Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword this month instead of waiting. End of commentary on Okami delay.

There were some exciting surprises in a new IGN article called “Okami’s Second Chance” by Nintendo Editor-in-Chief Matt Casamassina. One of the biggest was that Okami has not been a failure after all. Despite some weak initial sales, the game has shown to have surprising legs, racking up about 270,000 units in sales so far. While this is nothing spectacular, as serious hits will score millions of units sold, it goes a ways to vindicate the game’s quality, as it’s clearly selling even today on word of mouth.

Call it a cult hit then. But why didn’t Okami for PS2 sell even better? “New IP is always hard,” says Svensson. “I think that the mainstream doesn’t see cel-shaded titles as super appealing. If you look across the slew of all cel-shaded games, developers sort of have an inside joke, saying, ‘Okay, it’s cel-shaded — it’s going to be sent to die.’ Believe it or not, unfortunately the mainstream doesn’t react well to the ‘games as art’ pitch and to do big numbers sometimes you have to tap the mainstream.”

Of further interest is mention that of course, if the game were to be an exceptional seller on Wii, continuation of the franchise would most certainly be considered. Hmm, not sure about that one. I’ll let you know once I finish the game if the story feels unfinished. Of course, there’s always other ways they can spin mythology to tell a story using that art style.

Source: IGN