NAMCO RIGHTLY REVIVING PLAYSTATION’S KLONOA

Some of the finest Wii news I’ve received since.. well, since the Bit.Trip announcement earlier this morning: Namco has confirmed they’ll be bringing the hi-def remake of the original PlayStation platformer (shown above) to North America this year.

One of Namco’s more obscure properties, the series has since branched into additional platformer sequels for PlayStation 2, Game Boy Advance, and, most obscurely, Bandai’s original WonderSwan (my personal favorite of the franchise, and the most overtly puzzley), as well as an overhead RPG and, curiously, an altogether-skippable PlayStation beach-volleyball game.

The series has never fully got its due in the West, quite likely for its achingly saccharine overtones (particularly its admittedly piercing baby-talk dialogue, which has since been replaced in the Wii version), but beneath that sugar coat laid some of the smartest puzzles and challenging tests of dexterity of the PlayStation era, and was famed for its horrifying end-game cinematic that would shatter even the stoniest heart (and prove that strong men also cry).

Namco says the updated Wii version will have undetailed “new secrets” and option motion control — we’re just hoping the company has the good sense not to do this to a decade old cult classic.