One of the sleeper hits on the PSP has arguably been Archer MacLean's Mercury. It's a game that I own and continue to play from time to time, so I was pretty happy to hear that a sequel is well into development. The new Mercury, targeted for release later this year, is titled Mercury Meltdown and promises some radical new game play elements and modes. You may have also noticed that the name Archer MacLean is gone from the title. Archer has apparently left the development team too. A recent interview via Total Video Games (TVG) with the current developers talks both development politics and game mechanics. Here's a snippet:
"In terms of building all the levels, putting it all together, making it work, that was entirely down to the team and Archer had little involvement. It certainly was a big shock for us when he left, it came out of the blue and to this day we don't really know what happened. For Mercury Meltdown, Archer had left before the design was completed; he had some initial input but the game has changed radically since. Fact is we had so many ideas from the first game we'd actually used less than half of them."
Among those new ideas are the implementation of party game modes, wireless multi-player and a bevy (yes, a bevy!) of diabolical new environments and puzzles (just checkout the screenshot above for a preview). With or without Archer, we're looking forward to this one. Checkout the full and excellent interview here.
