Disney Epic Mickey (Wii)

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Mickey's back, and this time he's a badass - if you want him to be.

Warren Spector wants to make Mickey Mouse cool again, and he wants to do it on the Wii. The more sceptical may think this is a near impossible goal - but if anyone can do it, Spector can. This is the man who helped create System Shock, Deus Ex and the Thief series; his games often defy easy classification, but they always offer something remarkably new. He's an ideas man, but his innovations never come at the price of gameplay. In short, he's the perfect guy to re-launch a pop culture icon.

Whatever your opinion of Disney and its Mouse, few people would deny that Junction Point Studios' Epic Mickey has a great premise: For reasons that have yet to be revealed, the celebrity rodent finds himself kidnapped and transported to a cartoon wasteland - a sort of existentialist waiting room for Walt Disney's forgotten creations. Discarded 'toons must live here until they're called back into service, but it seems something has gone awry. Some kind of dark force has spread across the land, leaving the world in ruins - and it subsequently turns out that Mickey himself is partly to blame.

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As if this situation wasn't bad enough, Mickey also has to deal with Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Unless you're a massive animation buff, you probably won't know about Oswald: he was created when Walt Disney was working at Universal in 1927, and he might well have become world famous had Walt not been fired over a contract dispute. Today he's virtually unknown, and years of bitterness have caused him to build up quite an attitude towards Mickey - the successor who grabbed all the fame. Oswald isn't exactly the villain of the game, but neither is he your best mate. He's a troubled soul, and he may cause you a few hassles, but according to Warren, he can also be redeemed.

All of this paints a rather intriguing backdrop for a hybrid RPG-adventure-platformer. From the footage shown at last week's showcase, it looks like you'll mostly be roaming around large and fairly open 3D levels, taking on quests for NPCs that can be resolved in different ways. There's a morality system of sorts, but rather than determining whether you are good or evil it looks at whether Mickey is heroic or "a scrapper" - an aggressive, mischievous rebel who gets into fights. You might think that such behaviour is somewhat atypical for Mickey, but Spector says that the idea is to get back in touch with the character's trouble-making side, the personality that typified his earliest cartoons.

That rabbit in the window is Oswald. He hates your cartoon guts.

Whether you choose to play as a hero, a scrapper, or some kind of mix between the two, you'll have to get to grips with the game's Paint and Thinner system. In a nutshell, the player has the ability to dynamically destroy and rebuild the environment. According to Spector, most of the game's scenery items and inhabitants will be have a puffy "marshmallow" quality that indicates that they're a cartoon; anything that's a 'toon can be erased with your thinner, and if you subsequently change your mind you can choose to bring the item or creature back by painting it back. Both processes involve you "painting" your target with the Wii Remote, and you've got a limited amount of power behind each action.

Paint thinner is essentially your primary weapon. What with this being a Disney game, you don't actually kill anything, you just erase it from existence (wow, that's so much better!). However, you'll also need to use this power to move through the environment. If you need to cross a chasm, you might paint back part of a destroyed bridge: just slosh some paint over the gap, and the platform will magically appear. Conversely, you might come across a large object that blocks your way (Spector's example was a large bookcase), and in order to move on you'll have to remove it from the world.

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