Perry Shows Off Wild 9

Shiny's president, Dave Perry, and gang swung by our offices yesterday with the latest build of Wild 9, a PlayStation game that's been in development for something approaching forever. It is, however, slated for release on October 1.

While our time with the game was limited, what was obvious is that Wild 9 is about killing. It's a platformer, but it's a mean one, and you'll find yourself grabbing hold of enemies with a laser beam, flinging them back and forth, back and forth, until all the life is beaten from their poor little bodies. Then you take the corpse and use it to help you move farther through the level, by say, stamping out a fire with the body. You can grab the enemy with the beam and hold him in black smoke over the fire till he chokes to death, push him into an electric wall, or drop him onto some uncomfortably sharp spikes. As Perry said, "Every kind of death" the team could think of is in the game.

There is a total of 13 levels in the game, each with its own particular feel. One's a racing level where you ride a sort of hovercraft-like vehicle across water and navigate through trees (reminiscent of the speeder bike scene in Return of the Jedi) and another has you fall through a long tunnel inspired by a scene from the film Titanic.

Watch for a full preview in the next three weeks.