Why DotEmu Has Me Worried About Windjammers On The PS4
Early in 1994, an unassuming little game named Windjammers made its way to arcades. Developed by Data East for the Neo Geo Multi Video System, Windjammers is essentially high-octane video air hockey. Players pick one of six characters with different skills and shots, one of six courts of different sizes and layouts, and proceed to volley a frisbee back and forth with the hopes of jamming it past their opponent and into the goal. It’s a game that’s dead simple to pick up and play, but that simplicity masks an amount of depth to its mechanics and variety in a player’s options that makes Windjammers something special. When two skilled competitors go at it throwing rapid fire shots, counter-shots, trick shots, super shots and counter-super shots, the game is an edge-of-your-seat adrenaline pumping blur. Unfortunately, most people just didn’t seem to catch on to that hidden layer, and Windjammers was generally met with a middling reaction.
As time went on and arcade game emulation became easier, Windjammers gained a bit of a cult classic status. For a good long while it was a side-tournament staple in the fighting game community, and a French community had rallied around it and were doing their thing, but it wasn’t until website about video games Giant Bomb started playing it in 2013 that North American awareness of the game really started picking up. As much as I would like to be a cool on-line guy and say that I was way into it before that, I was only tangentially aware of the game prior to Giant Bomb’s coverage (I was more of a Street Hoop guy when it came to weird Data East Neo Geo sports games, for whatever reason). Nevertheless, it’s a game I feel like I’ve been a fan of for a long time, if that makes any sense. It’s an immediately and deeply lovable game.
The only port Windjammers has ever had as of this writing was a Japan-exclusive release on the Wii Virtual Console in 2010. This release eventually got delisted in late 2013, shortly after Giant Bomb’s coverage started strangely enough. Ever since then, there’s been a steady rumbling of people asking for the game to come to modern systems with online play, mainly aimed at PlayStation’s Third Party Production team. After all, they’re the guys who got us a Final Fantasy 7 remake and Shenmue 3, right? If anyone can get this weird obscure frisbee game out of whatever licensing hell it fell into following the death of Data East and years of turmoil SNK has gone through, they could! Well, at PlayStation Experience 2016′s showcase event it finally happened. The lights dimmed, a familiar tune started playing, and there it was on the big screen: Windjammers was coming to the PlayStation 4. The wish had been granted.
And then the monkey’s paw curled.
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