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Fez jumping to other platforms this year
by Alice O'Connor, Jan 02, 2013 6:45am PSTThe joys of adventuring in a 3D world as a 2D chap, not to mention scrawling pages of notes in an attempt to decipher cryptic symbols, are coming to new audiences this year. Much-beloved spin-o-jump 'em up Fez is shedding its Xbox Live Arcade exclusivity and coming to unspecified "other platforms" in 2013, creator Phil Fish has announced.
"Yes, I've heard you, dozens of people emailing me everyday telling me how much of an idiot I am for not porting FEZ to everything," Fish wrote in an end-of-year blog post.
Many people wanted to play Fez on their PC or PlayStation or whatnot, naturally, but Fez also had a nasty clash with XBLA policies. Polytron pulled the game's first patch after a save corruption bug was discovered, but later re-released it, bugs and all, to avoid paying Microsoft "tens of thousands of dollar" to recertify the patch. The developer reasoned, "For 99 percent of people, it makes Fez a better game" but it was an unpopular decision with many fans.
Polytron grumbled, "Had Fez been released on Steam instead of XBLA, the game would have been fixed two weeks after release, at no cost to us. And if there was an issue with that patch, we could have fixed that right away."
Fish said that Fez's XBLA sales "didn't break any records," but it "made more than enough to let me keep doing what I do. So I'm afraid you're stuck with me for a little while longer." He also noted that Polytron has "a couple of new games in the pipeline."
Reflecting on the past year, Fish wrote, "Between Sundance, [Indie Game: The Movie], winning the IGF, becoming a notorious racist, the game coming out, the patch incident, becoming a notorious asshole, travelling the world, battling a brutal post-partum depression and finding love, my ears are still ringing." Bless his little white cotton socks.
Polytron was curiously once approached by 'Ville magnate Zynga about a mobile port.
Comments
The joys of adventuring in a 3D world as a 2D chap, not to mention scrawling pages of notes in an attempt to decipher cryptic symbols, are coming to new audiences this year. Much-beloved spin-o-jump 'em up Fez is shedding its Xbox Live Arcade exclusivity and coming to unspecified "other platforms" in 2013, creator Phil Fish has announced.
The joys of adventuring in a 3D world as a 2D chap, not to mention scrawling pages of notes in an attempt to decipher cryptic symbols, are coming to new audiences this year. Much-beloved spin-o-jump 'em up Fez is shedding its Xbox Live Arcade exclusivity and coming to unspecified "other platforms" in 2013, creator Phil Fish has announced. : Shacknews
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Part of it may be due to how they portray him - they don't mention his partner other than a pixellated photo and some blacked out legal documents. His comments like "I'll kill myself if the game doesn't ship" and the little meltdown over whether or not the guy will sign the document just sound like someone under stress. And the game itself seemed pretty cool, but I don't have a 360 so I've never played it. They do address how he's hated on the Internet but let's be honest the Internet is full of shitheads a lot of the time so whatever.
It probably didn't hurt that I watched the movie the night before I had a big technical demo/presentation at work and I've had those be in front of everyone and shit the bed before so I could sympathize with his situation of finding a major show stopping bug in the playable build minutes after setting it up at PAX.
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