(If you don't know what Half Minute Hero is, take a look at my XBLA review over here.)
The leaked registry entry from June was correct... We'll be seeing a Steam and Playism release of Half Minute Hero on September 27! This time around it's called "Half-Minute Hero Super Mega Neo Climax Ultimate Boy." The XBLA release, called Half-Minute Hero Super Mega Neo Climax, added new multiplayer stages, new normal stages, leaderboards, and optional new graphics. The new Ultimate Boy release is supposed to have all the content of the XBLA release as well as new achievements and the original versions of the non-RPG modes (if you didn't know, they were recreated as single Hero 30 stages in the XBLA release.) The non-RPG modes are in a "Super Gameboy"-ish framed screen. This release sounds awesome!
MAQL has said that high sales of this release would lead to Half Minute Hero 2 localized on Steam. Believe it and hope, if you want. This release does show that porting from PSP to PC isn't impossible. Either way, I think it would be great for more people to experience Half Minute Hero and I think the leaderboards should be fun. I do believe that the PC is a better platform for the game, at the very least MUCH better than XBLA. HMH is a casual game most likely to please retro JRPG fans. I would guess that most of that audience is on the PC rather than handhelds nowadays. IMO, PC is a better genre for quick play casual games and the price point is a lot better than the PSP version.
Steam is the big news, but I hope Playism (who released La Mulana when no one else would) also gets some love. If you order on Playism, you unlock the game on steam, get a slight discount, and get the chance to win a pretty nifty LED watch. I definitely recommend buying through Playism.
Marvelous will do a 30 second promotion giving out free copies on release day, so try your luck if you don't have the ten bucks needed for the game. There are a lot of promotions and contests for this game in general. For more information, check out the game's main page, the twitter account, the steam page, or the playism page. I've also got a tumblr page up, which has lots of art as well as Half Minute Hero 2 information up.
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