Twisted Pixel has managed to become one of the premiere developers for Microsoft's Xbox Live Arcade Service. The Maw, Splosion Man, and just recently Comic Jumper were each released to generally favorable reviews. The best of that bunch without much argument has to be Splosion Man. That game had great humor, gameplay, and an interesting concept of how to navigate your character around the levels. It appears that Twisted Pixel has realized this and has just announced a sequel to that game called Ms. Splosion Man.

Set for release next fall, Ms. Splosion Man is not just going to be Splosion Man 2. Twisted Pixel CCO Josh Bear spoke with Joystiq about the reason for calling the game Ms. Splosion Man instead of Splosion Man 2:

"We have never wanted to make a sequel to one of our games unless we thought it made sense, that we could add more to it and actually make a better game. I think with Splosion Mana follow up was something we really wanted to do, and that is why you never saw DLC for that game. We could have churned out new levels, but we wouldn't have had the time to add in new gameplay puzzles or cool new character stuff. But we didn't just want to do Splosion Man 2, it had to be something a little more interesting."

Along with the new gameplay puzzles and new character additions, the game's popular cooperative mode will return. The levels are now designed to allow for smoother play when there are four players running around and other improvements have been made to the net code. The entire point of this project is for the game to be similar in nature to Namco's Ms. Pac-man. Bear spoke about how they hope to have a similar structure to their game that classic game had:

"Ms. Splosion Man is an homage to Ms. Pac-man, where there were similarities in gameplay and look, but everything was just more polished and better all around. We have taken that approach with this game, to make sure it is more of what people liked about Splosion Man but also stands out on its own as a much bigger and better game overall, not to be confused as an over-priced DLC pack which I think a lot of retail "sequels" can be a lot of the time."

As one of the more popular titles in recent memory on a downloadable service, I am sure many people will be looking forward to this game. The original was a blast to play alone or with pals, and I don't think I can complain about that.

So readers are you looking forward to Ms. Splosion Man? Do you want more polished Splosion Man gameplay or would you rather have an entirely new game from Twisted Pixel?

Source: Joystiq