Yawn: Ubisoft bringing Prot�thea to WiiWare

by Jason Dobson { May 6th 2008 at 10:30PM }

With so many proposed WiiWare titles crossing Nintendo's gold-lined desk, you might think that the company would be interested in picking the best and brightest to release alongside its upcoming online service on May 12. And you'd be right, if by best and brightest, you meant old and uninspired, two terms that are well suited to describe Protöthea, the latest launch game confirmed for WiiWare, and the first from Ubisoft.

If the game's name sounds familiar, that may be because the top-down shooter is actually a port of a nearly three year old PC title, and judging from the above video Protöthea feels antiquated even by those standards. The game will include newfangled controls care of the Wii remote and nunchuck, as well as a number of other additions being introduced by the developers at Sabarasa and Digital Builders, but with Protöthea sharing download space with more interesting shooters like Star Soldier R and Gyrostarr, we can't help but wonder what the point is.

[Via Wii Fanboy]

Tags: Digital-Builders, DigitalBuilders, Protthea, Sabarasa, shmup, shooter, ubisoft, wiiware

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Fernando Rocker @ May 6th 2008 10:47PM

Looks very boring, and expensive at 1000 Wii Points.

Gyrostarr looks a lot better, and it's only 700 Wii Points.

Same with Animales de la Muerte (Animals from Death)... I mean, animal zombies from a mexinca zoo? Nice!

Gyrostarr:

http://wii.ign.com/articles/868/868645p1.html

Animales de la Muerte:

http://wii.ign.com/articles/869/869222p1.html

High Voltage Software is creating better games for the WiiWare, with just 50MB of space. A lot better than the crap third party shovelware games.

OhJustSomeRandomGuy @ May 6th 2008 11:08PM

Protöthea is perhaps the most plodding shoot 'em up I have ever seen. I'm getting really disappointed in Ubisoft shotgun approach to the game industry.

"Is it taken? No? We'll publish it!"

The in-house dev teams aren't any more hit and miss than the ones at other companies, but the stuff they decide to publish from other companies is by and large utter crap.

Gyrostarr looks OK, but I'm pretty unimpressed. I have both Tempest and Space Giraffe for my 360 already, so I don't see much more need for another tube-based shooter.

Animales de Muerte just looked boring to me, sorry. The premise didn't strike me as interesting, either. Any time you have to resort to monkeys and animals being a comedic element, you've run out of real comedy ideas.

ThornedVenom (Harley Quinn Defense Force) @ May 7th 2008 1:57AM

I think those games look great, especially compared to some of the Wii titles out there.

bender @ May 7th 2008 5:08PM

When I saw the first 15 seconds of Animales de la Muerte I thought it was going to be some kiddy title, but I LOLed when the elephants head got torn with a chainsawed(real word?). Thanks for showing them Fernando.

bender @ May 7th 2008 5:10PM

Grammer errors be damned.

Yourself @ May 6th 2008 11:00PM

Agreed that Gyrostarr looks cool, but Star Soldier R? What a letdown. I was hoping for a real Star Soldier game, that series kicks ass. Instead we get the time mode that I've played all of once in SSS. Sweet.

Pimliconite @ May 6th 2008 11:18PM

The controls seem much more interesting than SSR or Gyrostar (looks like the Geometry Wars Galaxies controls). The other two examples look like they could be on any platform, but this one seems to actually take advantage of the platform. Why the hand-flapping about this title?

But yeah, not a lot happening in that video. Maybe it picks up later.

mr nimblewick @ May 6th 2008 11:24PM

What would a wii-related launch be like without some crappy ubisoft games taking up space?

Kujel @ May 6th 2008 11:35PM

*Yawn*

D_Average @ May 6th 2008 11:36PM

Who cares about this trash, Wii Ware is still going to explode b/c of four important words; "Animals de la Muerte!!"

Blue_Falcon @ May 7th 2008 12:35AM

I think the last minute hyping is enough to show Ubi's not really focusing on this title, even if they completely re-did elements of it (or so the IGN preview said)

I'll still wait for general press reactions, but I still have plenty of other WiiWare games to look at if this ends up sucking.

Aprime @ May 7th 2008 1:18AM

Reminds me of Tyrian, but shittier.

ThornedVenom (Harley Quinn Defense Force) @ May 7th 2008 1:47AM

I'm sorry, but this game looks like an absolute bore. Some of the other Wiiware games are actually looking much more fun than full-priced Wii games: what sincerely makes these big publishers think that this piece of under-shovelware is going to stand a chance?

The Wii may be underpowered, granted, but goddammit, it's been over a year already: if you want that golden jackpot, learn how to design smartly instead of complaining that the console is either A) a toy, B) just a mass-market Wiisports party machine or C) only viable for 1st-party titles.