James Mielke in the 6/15/07 “1Up Yours” podcast mentioned that he had a five and a half hour interview recently with Phantom Dust’s creator. Sixty three minutes into the podcast it is revealed that he will be leaving Microsoft Games Studios and would like to make a sequel to Phantom Dust. Because Microsoft owns the intellectual property rights to Phantom Dust Yukio Futatsugi is “talking with them about licensing it.” 1Up will have a huge feature in August with more details. Stay Tuned!!
Which reminds me, I’m still only about halfway through the original…
The “huge feature” was going to be about his next game, not explicitly about a PD sequel, so it’s probably something else. I listened to that podcast myself back when it was released and got the impression it was something else, anyway.
Agreed. I’m surprised there hasn’t been any copycat games with fighting/action engine overlaying card game mechanics. I guess when you say computer game with CCG mechanics it’s tought to get past Yu-Gi-Oh and Marvel CCG styles.
The word-of-mouth actually hurt this game, for me anyway. As soon as I heard “it’s like Magic The Gather-” my interest plummeted and attention wandered elsewhere.
It wasn’t until I happened across video of it in action that I suddenly realized “Oh, that’s what they meant…” and I was much more impressed.
I bought Phantom Dust after reading about how wicked-awesome it was here and other places.
Frankly, I couldn’t get into it at all. I’m just not into the whole deck-building stuff. I ended up selling it on a barter board for more than I paid for it, though, so that turned out OK.
A follow up to Phantom Dust with larger maps and next gen graphics would be sweet. The whole trying to come up with a new build part of the game was brilliant. It was so gratifying when something you came up with as a build worked in multiplayer.
I became enamored with it after hearing so many rave reviews about on these boards.
Like Deathrow, I initially didn’t get what everyone was talking about. But within the first hour, I was completely hooked. It helped that I had a friend over and we were learning about it together.
The only real failing this game had was the existance of a few weapons that were clearly better to other similar weapons, and the cartwheel dodge maneuver being a bit too good. Mostly stuff that could have been remedied through balance tweaking. Great game that was close to being awesome-o.
And when I talk about this I mean, of course, online multi against other people, where the crucible of everybody winning at-all-costs burns away any “non-optimal” solutions.
But what was great was there were counters to pretty much anything. So if someone was whoring a short range attack deck you could bring a deck with a lot of short erase powers or tangle powers or mines and crush them.
Ahh, I had some awesome erase decks. There really was no better way to infuriate an opponent than by stopping all their attacks, nuking their orbs and watching them die because they didn’t have any skills left.
The game had enough counters to make it impossible to build a one-deck-beats-all. However, the problem was that in a game with 300 powers, you wound up seeing arsenals comprised of the same 10-20 in varying combinations, simply because there were only about 10 different types of powers, and there was almost always a “best-of-class” power for each type.
Despite that, the game was a still a blast to play. If they had managed to balance the powers a bit more it would have been even crazier. The cartwheel was so good that it single-handedly made the majority of attacks in the game useless, as you’d never land a hit against somebody who could time it correctly.
Yeah, I remember that. God it was annoying. That game would work so much better with proper post-release tweaking and support, and the Xbox Live of today.
It was on Xbox Live and it did receive post-release tweaking and support - They actually added 30 additional “ultra-rare” powers through a patch, of which you’d randomly get one every 50 matches you won. The game didn’t need extra powers - it needed a reason to use the powers that were already there. The support just was too infrequent, didn’t fix enough, and didn’t last all that long.
It also badly needed an arranged team 2v2 system. The game was tremendously improved in 2v2, where some of the powers that would never work in ffa or 1v1 could actually be used, since double-teaming someone meant they couldn’t cartwheel BOTH of your attacks. However, if you were working with someone you knew and both built arsenals designed to work together, you’d smoke any two random players you might find to match up against.
The biggest difference is that in the Xbox Live of today you’d have to pay extra money for the ultra-rares.
Honestly, and this might sound odd, but the PvP in Guild Wars 2 actually is the closest I’ve seen to Phantom Dust. There’s probably 300-400 different abilities in the game and you mix and match 10-14 of them onto your character at a time and have other ways you can tweak your stats and abilities to create combos and counters.
