Hey 10 Year-Old You: Welcome to the Future
Sorcery makes good on the promise of what the Move can do, and does it while awakening all those long-forgotten dreams of being a wizard.
Published: May 21, 2012
As I watched the credits roll at the end of Sorcery it took until probably about the halfway point until I realized the meaning behind the name of developers The Workshop. They aren't a studio -- not in the normal sense -- but a collective of close to a dozen different international satellites that work in tandem to deliver a finished whole. And, of course, it's not without help from the folks at Sony Santa Monica Studios.
The result is one of the lengthiest and most international credit sequences I've ever sat through (and make no mistake, I really do sit through them all; I feel it's the final part of my ride through a game someone made, and it's often enlightening). But it paints an interesting picture of where development is going.
If that's what it takes to get a game like Sorcery made, I'm cool with that. Hell, if it gets a game like Sorcery done a mite faster than it took for this one, then so much the better. It is an unfortunate result, this game -- not because it's a poor effort (far from it, this is the best Move game yet) -- but because it labored in this sea of different but complementary studios just long enough to see the whole Harry Potter fervor build to a crest and then break.
Make no mistake, this is the kind of game that anyone who has ever fancied themselves a Hogwarts could-be would be happy to enjoy. It's a legitimately great apprentice-to-sorcerer story that, while hardly deviating from the normal formula, does precisely what it sets off to be, and knows well enough to end where it should. In stark contrast to proofs of concept like Sports Champions (until now, the best of the Move offerings and it was there at the start) and Medieval Moves (a basic concept that was stretched like taffy until the basic concepts were worn out), Sorcery not only uses some of the less-activated parts of the hardware like that colored ball at the top, but feels like a honest-to-goodness game using the tech. Remember how you felt when you first saw the game at E3 a few years ago? Yeah, it makes good on that promise, even if the rest of the Move library largely hasn't.
Better than that, it grabs that part of you that geeked out at the whole idea of flicking a wand and having a spell head right there and suffuses it with even more fantasy tropes. Making potions? Sure, sprinkle some powder into a pot, grind some berries, pour some ichor, stir and presto. Drinking that potion? Shake that sucker up to activate it and then drink with your Move controller. It's all goofy, sure, but those simple actions coupled with the ever-changed colored ball on the top just feeds that kind of wonder you probably had when you were 10 and saw commercials promising half of what this game can do and delivered about 1/100th of it with LED lights and terrible sound effects.
The result is one of the lengthiest and most international credit sequences I've ever sat through (and make no mistake, I really do sit through them all; I feel it's the final part of my ride through a game someone made, and it's often enlightening). But it paints an interesting picture of where development is going.
If that's what it takes to get a game like Sorcery made, I'm cool with that. Hell, if it gets a game like Sorcery done a mite faster than it took for this one, then so much the better. It is an unfortunate result, this game -- not because it's a poor effort (far from it, this is the best Move game yet) -- but because it labored in this sea of different but complementary studios just long enough to see the whole Harry Potter fervor build to a crest and then break.
Make no mistake, this is the kind of game that anyone who has ever fancied themselves a Hogwarts could-be would be happy to enjoy. It's a legitimately great apprentice-to-sorcerer story that, while hardly deviating from the normal formula, does precisely what it sets off to be, and knows well enough to end where it should. In stark contrast to proofs of concept like Sports Champions (until now, the best of the Move offerings and it was there at the start) and Medieval Moves (a basic concept that was stretched like taffy until the basic concepts were worn out), Sorcery not only uses some of the less-activated parts of the hardware like that colored ball at the top, but feels like a honest-to-goodness game using the tech. Remember how you felt when you first saw the game at E3 a few years ago? Yeah, it makes good on that promise, even if the rest of the Move library largely hasn't.
Better than that, it grabs that part of you that geeked out at the whole idea of flicking a wand and having a spell head right there and suffuses it with even more fantasy tropes. Making potions? Sure, sprinkle some powder into a pot, grind some berries, pour some ichor, stir and presto. Drinking that potion? Shake that sucker up to activate it and then drink with your Move controller. It's all goofy, sure, but those simple actions coupled with the ever-changed colored ball on the top just feeds that kind of wonder you probably had when you were 10 and saw commercials promising half of what this game can do and delivered about 1/100th of it with LED lights and terrible sound effects.
