Overlord: Dark Legend Preview

VideoGamer.com: So you didn't take opportunity to use the series' tongue in cheek humour to include any fun mini-games? We can see potential in a jester kicking mini-game, for example.

DS: Oh no. You went there again. There are no mini-games, for the reasons I talked about earlier. Does that mean Dark Legend isn't funny? No it does not. We've got the same scriptwriter and voice actors on board from the Xbox 360, so the humour is consistent. The minions themselves are hilarious enough. Imagine reaching into your horde during a chaotic battle and pulling out... a minion in a sombrero with a stuck-on Mexican moustache. You send him off to attack, and he jumps up onto a zip wire and slides along it to kick a bandit right in the face so he flies off a ledge yelping. We had enough humour in the gameplay without feeling like mini-games were required.

Funny you should mention the jester minion, though. He's in there. As the Wii game is a prequel of sorts to the Xbox 360 game, we explain how the jester minion came to be. That sort of attention to detail will let fans know this is a credible Overlord game. But for people that don't get the reference, it's still an amusing little maniac in a hat with bells on.

VideoGamer.com: Moving onto the DS game, Minions. Surely trying to squeeze what made Overlord great fun onto the handheld hasn't been easy?

DS: We took an entirely different approach. Rather than try to make the established idea of 'Overlord' work on DS, we decided to make a DS design that would work and fit the Overlordness around that. It's an important distinction. The gameplay is very different to on the Wii. Minions is more of a puzzle game with action elements. The pace is slower, it's less chaotic, and it focuses on four different-coloured minions only. The player *is* the Overlord, so there's no Overlord on screen. Your stylus swipes move the minions around, again giving the player a tangible connection to the world and making him feel in control.

Every decision we took was geared around making the best DS game we could for the franchise. We loved the old 16-bit platformer Lost Vikings, and knew that kind of multi character gameplay would suit Minions perfectly. The different minions have different abilities, and we use them to layer puzzles as they co-operate to get through the levels. Puzzle elements took a back seat in the original game, and we wanted to bring those to the fore to give the DS game a personality all of its own.

On a basic level, the red minion might light green minion's fart to blow open a blocked doorway. But by the later levels, the interactions get really complex. There's a lot of fighting along the way, of course. The levels are teeming with Dwarves and Halflings for you to obliterate. You can send brown in first, stealth green in from the rear, hit them from afar with the red minion... it's a lot of fun. And if you take a beating, the blue minion can heal you.

VideoGamer.com: Have you tailored the game to a different audience or will Overlord fans enjoy the DS game as much as the home console versions?

DS: The minion abilities are as Overlord fans would expect. The other minions haven't learned to swim or anything like that, it's still just the blue guy. Brown is the toughest in combat, they'll get it right away. We've given them new abilities to expand the gameplay, but it all fits with the archetypes we've established. Green gets a noxious fart ability, brown can shift heavy blocks, that sort of thing.

We're not really aiming at a different audience. Again, we've used the same writer as the Wii and next-gen versions to ensure consistency of humour. We've deliberately broken the gameplay up into discrete levels, because we think that suits a DS game. There's no game-wide persistency to keep track of, no long treks between save points. Think Mario Vs Donkey Kong or Lemmings: each stage is a self-contained challenge, and when you crack that you're onto the next one.

VideoGamer.com: Do you have any plans to release a demo for the DS game via the demo channel on the Wii?

DS: It's not something we'll be doing before launch. We're just focused on getting the game out, that's perhaps something we'd look at afterwards.

VideoGamer.com: For fans, can they expect any new minions in either game and where do their stories fit in to the original game?

DS: The stories for the Wii and DS game are interlinked. So both are set before the events of the original game on 360. With that in mind, there would have been continuity issues in introducing new colours. How would we explain them not being in the original game? Just have a footnote at the end of each game: "P.S. And then the Overlord ate all the orange minions because they were yummy. The end." No, the established four types gave us plenty to work with.

The games are set before the original game, but some time passes between the end of the Wii game and the start of the original Overlord. We're introducing the idea that there have been a series of Overlords throughout time. In the same way as not every Link in a Zelda game is the same Link. But there are constants: the minion master Gnarl is once again present to advise the Overlord, and we have woven in lots of little strands to link the games together, like the jester minion stuff I mentioned earlier.

VideoGamer.com: Thanks for your time Dean.

Overlord: Dark Legend and Overlord Minions are due for release on Wii and DS respectively in the summer.