The upcoming dark, creepy, and downright awesome looking Mickey Mouse platformer Epic Mickey will be a Nintendo Wii exclusive. Hit the jump for gameplay details.

According to Gamezine, the game will involve painting and erasing levels, which sounds just like the unique functionality the Wii is perfect for. Epic Mickey currently has a release date of Fall 2010, but given how far away that is, don’t be surprised if it changes.

I often lay awake at night, wishing that some independent developer would make a HD 3D platformer with a main character that looks like a mix between Mega Man, Astroboy, and Viewtiful Joe, and also explodes.True story. Thanks to Curve Studios’s Explodemon!, I’ll be able to get those 8 hours of sleep a day I so desperately need.

Explodemon! is a platformer by the guys that made the Buzz! Quiz series, and from the looks of it, there is definitely some Mega Man inspiration going on here. Though the game looks like another 3D platformer, it clearly has some boss fights, which are set up in the same way that the Mega Man X series’s fights are. It seems weird that this game is releasing on WiiWare, PC, and PSN, but not XBLA. If I can recall, this is the first time XBLA has been shunned in favor of both WiiWare and PSN.

Explodemon! is definately a game I’m going to be following, because it looks really interesting, in a retro, Japanese homage kind of way. The game has no set date, but Curve Studios has assured us it will be released this year.

Source: Joystiq

Destructoid reports that EA and DICE have announced downloadable content for Mirror’s Edge, set to be released January 16. The DLC, entitled the “Pure Time Trial Pack”, will cost 800 MS points on Xbox Live, and $10 on the PSN. Hit the jump for the video and more info, and be warned: it’s pretty strange.

If the game didn’t make you sick already, this is bound to. This is one of those videos that makes you feel just a little sensation of “this isn’t right”, and going by that, playing the game is going to feel incredibly strange.

In other Mirror’s Edge news, DICE also confirmed today that the PC version of the game will ship to retailers in North America on January 13th and worldwide on January 16th, 2009. In even more Mirror’s Edge news, the following press release reveals that the PS3 version of the game will recieve a free tenth downloadable ‘race’. It really is a good news day for fans of the game.

Award-winning Action Adventure Game Delivers Fresh Content to Challenge Even the Best Runner
Guildford, UK. – Dec 4, 2008 – Leave the city behind! DICE, an Electronic Arts Inc. studio (NASDAQ: ERTS), today announced that the highly acclaimed first-person action adventure title, Mirror’s Edge™ will release downloadable content (DLC) for the PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system, the Xbox 360® videogame and entertainment system and the PC in late January. DICE also confirmed today that the PC version of the game will ship to retailers in North America on January 13th and worldwide on January 16th, 2009.

Players will be challenged to achieve the fastest times possible on nine races across seven all-new and totally redesigned Time Trial maps. No guns, no cops, and no city: this is true aesthetics, agility and flow that will challenge any runner. This special DLC pack will be available for $10 USD or 800 Microsoft points. As an added bonus, all PLAYSTATION 3 Mirror’s Edge fans will be able to download an additional map for free.

“The freedom of movement and control in first person has been the most popular aspect of Mirror’s Edge so we decided to distil these down to their purest form for this map pack,” says Owen O’Brien, Senior Producer, DICE. “We deliberately chose a more abstract aesthetic that is still within our distinctive art style and then focused on flow and gameplay to create an experience and challenge very different from the main game.”

Time Trial is a popular mode in Mirror’s Edge that challenges players to find the fastest route across various maps. Players can upload their best time to the Mirror’s Edge leaderboards for their friends to download and compete against. Players can see their friend’s ‘ghost’ run as they race their way through the course to the top of the leaderboards.

Mushroom Men: Spore Wars is one of the few Wii games on the horizon that caught my eye when I was at PAX. In my hands-on time with the game it seemed like a pretty solid platformer with a good sense of humor.

What I have for you readers today is a closer look at the boss battles in this game. Like the title of this blog reads, simply bopping these guys on the head isn’t gonna cut it. Different puzzle and strategy elements are necessary to make it to the next level.

In the press release I received, there were three different types of boss battles outlined:

Bosses as Mechanic Reinforcement

Several of the bosses and mini-bosses reinforce a specific mechanic, such as the Telekinesis-Throw (whereby Pax uses his Telekinesis ability on an object and tosses it back at the enemy). Players have the option to use this ability during the game to get the upper hand on an opponent, or could let Player 2 perform this to help them out in the midst of battle, but it is never enforced (didn’t want to force the player if they didn’t want to).

However, Red Fly used the bosses as a chance to make a puzzle and encourage players to use different Spore Powers. Several of the bosses require this Telekinesis-Throw attack to beat. One of the mini-bosses actually acts as a tutorial for the Spore Punisher maneuver, flying out of the player’s reach until they can successfully execute it.

Boss as Action/Puzzle

Red Fly created action/puzzle battles with some stand-alone boss encounters. For example, the player will need to use the environment components and specific game mechanics to take out bosses they can’t reach directly or might just be too strong. This frames these specific boss fights as puzzles to be solved, not simply a skill exercise (although there is some of that, too!).

Bosses as the Level

In the Parking Lot, the player will face not one but FIVE bosses. The entire area is centered on these encounters and each of the bosses use their environment in interesting and unique ways closely tied to them.

Looks like the company is trying to mix it up a bit with the bosses. Puzzles and “mechanics reinforcement” aren’t exactly the newest of techniques, but the idea of “Bosses as the Level” intrigues me a bit. It is also reassuring to know that each boss will be a different experience. I’m looking forward to seeing what this quirky little platformer has to offer this coming November.

Playing a recent demo of Mirror’s Edge, I had been trying to shave a few extra seconds off of my time trial run, and after all the obvious routes were exploited, I passed along the controller. I watched mouth agape as, instead of directing Faith to run up the stairs like a normal person, the journalist next to me sent her careening off a nearby wall and up over the guardrail, all ninja-like. Is this an example of practice-makes-perfect, or a new kind of exploit?

Mirror’s Edge has a unique hook—it’s a game featuring the platforming of Assassin’s Creed meshed with the first person perplexity of Portal. This stylistic choice does have some pitfalls, though: The first person view does make distances hard to judge, and the animations that you desperately want to see all occur off-screen.

Although it takes some time to get used to the unusual controls, which use L2 for sliding and L1 for leaping plus the X button for grabbing onto handholds, they’re not your biggest hurdle. Instead, the trick is figuring out the limitations of your moves without actually seeing your character interact in the world.

To wall jump, for example, you can run up to a wall, hit L1, and then hit the R1 button to spin around to see the other side. While third-person games like Prince of Persia and Splinter Cell show your character interacting with their environment, here all you have to go on is a bouncy, jarring perspective.

This leads us to the astonishing shortcuts I discovered in Time Trial mode. I never would have guessed that you could circumvent those stairs by wall-jumping up and over the guardrail. Since Time Trial is all about repetition and speed, it’s easy to miss those not-so-obvious routes.

Time Trial mode is also missing the combat and cutscenes of the main game, but from what we saw it is otherwise the exact same level design. However, you do get to see a red silhouette “ghost” racing just ahead of you, suggesting the ideal routes and helping you plot out a course. Since this is the only way you’ll actually get to see your character in action from an outside perspective, it’s a pretty weak substitution for an actual player character model.

The single “wow” moment from the demo of Mirror’s Edge comes at the end, when you make a huge leap and grab onto a helicopter, as it pans around giving you a view of your reflection in a skyscraper’s windows. Other than that, though, it was a whole lot of misjudged leaps and clanging over catwalks. The demo will be available soon enough, and if you preorder the game you can demo the time trial mode as well, but so far we’re not very impressed with the gimmicks in this first-person platformer.