DunDunDunpachi
Banned
The Guardian with a pretty lengthy interview, with a few excerpts below:
From the very beginning, developers saw the Dreamcast console as a place to experiment. Sega set the tone with innovative outliers such as Shenmue, Jet Set Radio and Seaman, but other game publishers soon caught the wave. There was Acclaim with the odd extreme sports title Trickstyle, developed by the Burnout team; there was Interplay with futuristic shooter MDK2, created by Bioware five years before Mass Effect; and there was Capcom with its joyful, rule-breaking brawler Power Stone.
Set in a boisterous, steampunk-infused universe of pirate ships, taverns and temples, Power Stone was a two-player 3D beat-em-up, in which environmental awareness was as important as punching. There were 10 characters to choose from, most drawn from weird Victorian and Edwardian adventure fiction tropes: pilot explorer Edward Falcon; dancer (and ninja) Ayame; tank-like miner Gunrock; Galuda, a Native American bounty hunter.
Design philosophy behind Power Stone's mechanics
His idea was to abandon using button combinations to access special attacks. In Power Stone, players would need to know just three moves: punch, kick and jump. Access to powerful abilities would come via objects littered around the elaborate environments – players could throw chairs, tables and rocks, but also pick up weapons such as flame throwers and miniguns that would break after a few seconds of use.
This move away from specialist knowledge and abilities and toward making powerful weapons randomly available to all players was an important element of the emerging ‘arena battle’ genre – a forebear of the Battle Royale dynamic. In Power Stone and its close contemporary Super Smash Bros, players enter a match with the same items and abilities and have to search the map for the best stuff; all players, no matter how skilful, are at the mercy of the capricious world they’re in. In Power Stone, even a novice can become the most powerful player on the grid if they happen to be standing where a minigun spawns.
Abandoned features and future hopes
Itsuno can reel off features he never got the chance to add, due to the tight development schedule. “There was a Bomberman-esque mode where the only items on the stage were bombs, and you’d slide them around to hit each other,” he recalls. (Later, this made it into the PSP Power Stone Collection.) “There was also a puzzle mode where you had to use boxes and other items to reach the power stone placed craftily on the stage. And a mode where you could play in first-person perspective! If only we’d had another fortnight, maybe we could have packed it all in …”
Released into arcades in February 1999 and a few weeks later on Dreamcast, the game was a huge success, thrilling players with its impressive 3D visuals and accessible nature. A sequel followed a year later, and the two games made it onto a PSP collection disc in 2006. There was even an entertaining anime series.
“We weren’t just aping current trends or reiterating what had come before, and that has contributed to its lasting appeal,” says Tezuka. “I still get messages from fans about the game. People tweet requests to me to make another Power Stone, which I’d love to do if I got the chance. It would be a particularly great fit for the Nintendo Switch.”
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It's great to hear from these industry vets. DMC5's director also made mention recently of wanting to work on Power Stone 3.
