May 05 2009
Lucasarts Cancels 360 & PS3 Indiana Jones
I now dislike Lucasarts even more than I had been growing to dislike them previously. The 360 and PS3 versions of the upcoming Indiana Jones: Staff Of Kings have been officially scrapped, meaning you can only play the game on handhelds, Wii, or PS2…fun. I’m severely disappointed with this, as the reason Lucasarts cited for having canceled the next-gen versions of Indiana Jones was to spend more time focusing on the Wii. That’s stupid and makes no sense, considering there’s still a bigger audience to be reached on PS3 and Xbox 360, and we’d already seen a video for an early 360 build anyway.
(next-gen screens, but no next-gen Indy)
This just means that Lucasarts is lazy, their last few games have shown that, and now they’ve fully confirmed their laziness by scrapping the extra work of texturing and enhancing the new Indiana Jones to be awesome and take full advantage of the 360 and PS3’s graphical abilities. And that somewhat pisses me off.
I really liked the last Indiana Jones game, because I’m such a big Tomb Raider fan, and the last Indy game was just Tomb Raider with Indy instead of Lara Croft. But then again, the next-gen Tomb Raider games have been awesome, so I don’t really have anything to be pissed off about enough to really care that Lucasarts is being lame again. But I am just the right level of annoyed to ensure I don’t accidentally spend anymore money on a Lucasarts product.
I don’t know that I’d call them lazy. It’s a surprising move but it probably has more to do with budget cutbacks and projected sales than being lazy.
Hopefully the Wii version is worthwhile. Lego Indiana Jones was a decent tease that showed some of the concepts could work, but it’s going to take a real effort to create a true Indy adventure game.