This Day in Delay: Luigi’s Mansion: Dark Moon and PlayStation All-Stars
Both Sony and Nintendo had nuggets of disappointment today as they announced delays to two respective first-party titles: PlayStation All-Stars Dark Moon and Luigi’s Mansion: Battle Royale (that…sounds about right).
Despite a tentative Holiday 2012 release date announced at this year’s E3, Nintendo’s 3DS sequel to the Gamecube’s seminal Luigi’s Mansion – a gripping tale centered on an out-of-work plumber battling vicious hallucinations and his own personal demons with a vacuum cleaner – Dark Moon has slipped into the vast void of 2013’s first half. Nintendo has yet to comment on the push, but I suspect it’s because they’re shaping Dark Moon into a hundred hour odyssey that traverses the scarred recesses of Luigi’s psyche in a kid friendly spin on Dante’s Inferno. Just an educated guess.
On Sony’s front, their multi-licensed brawler PlayStation All-Stars Battle Royale has been shoved out of late October, now dated for November 20th in the U.S. (and Canada; I’d never forget you, Canada) with international dates being met in the days following. SuperBot’s own president, Chan Park, reasons the delay as a means to both meet high fan expectation while ensuring “well-balanced and compelling gameplay." A public beta is being readied for the Fall but certain hand-picked outlets have already gotten a hold of a closed beta, letting loose some first impressions.
At this stage, early word makes PlayStation All-Stars out to be a bit of a mess. Given that Sony is betting on All-Stars this Holiday so hard that it hurts, for their sake, hopefully the extra month of development really counts lest this experiment in cloning the Smash Bros. formula is deemed a failure, forcing us to destroy the abomination before God finds out how we insulted Him (I’m trying to say it might not do well).