One game coming out this week that slipped under my radar is Real Heroes: Firefighter for the Wii. I had figured it was one of those throwaway budget titles. I was partly right. It's for the Wii and it's only thirty bucks. But I'm not so sure it's a throwaway game.

It arrived with a letter instead of a press release. And I don't just mean a brief cover letter. An actual page-and-a-half letter, with lots of words instead of bullet points, signed by the developer's co-founder. He used a ballpoint pen with blue ink. It looked so out of place folded in with a copy of a videogame where you'd normally find the press release. I just had to read it. It started with a disclaimer that Epicenter Studios was a small developer and couldn't afford super fancy graphics. So they instead took this approach:

We created a very unique, and in many ways, quite experimental enemy in our thinking fire technology. Enemies in action games are often simply implemented: these nazies will stream from the bunker, the swordsmen will wait until the player gets near before attacking, the police won't open fire unitl the player attacks them, etc. With Firefighter, our enemy is not something that we just spawn in and direct until it's killed. It has a really unique AI...it knows where it is in an environment, it knows what surfaces it can move across faster or slower, it knows that it'll travel across a floor, up a wall and across a ceiling. If a player accidentally knocks a burning chair into a wall, that wall will soon catch fire and the player just created an entirely new opponent to deal with. Throughout development, this was a unique challenge as we just never knew what the fire was going to do.

I'm mostly impressed with what they've done. The graphics are chintzy, but when it comes to action and pacing and even characters, this is a solid action game. The fire technology seems limited by the level geography. You can see fire moving from node to node, as if every surface had a burn routine calculated on the fly and laid out with graph paper. No matter how long fire burns, it doesn't actually consume anything. It makes me eager for a time when this sort of attention to fire is combined with the destructibility of Red Faction: Guerrilla. But it's still convincing enough in Firefighter. When things get hectic and the fire and smoke are pressing in around you, when you can't find the survivor who's supposed to be in the burning building, when your extinguisher is running low and your hose won't reach, Real Heroes: Firefighter is an honest-to-goodness taut action game.

It has a great sense of place. The opening mission is a big frantic factory fire that spreads to a nearby warehouse. It's constant action, and some puzzles, and lots of different hardware. But the second mission opens with an eerie quiet in a shopping mall. There's no fire here. Is it a false alarm? And based on that screenshot up there, the game seems to go to an amusement park. Putting out a fire on a rollercoaster? That can only mean the fire has spread to the haunted house and merry-go-round! Sounds good to me! The developers seem to have a very good sense for making this a dramatic action game and not some turgid reverent firefighter sim. I wouldn't be surprised if zombies show up at some point. Okay, maybe not that extreme, but I'll bet you dollars to donuts they considered it at one point!

Unfortunately, another symptom of a small developer published by a small publisher is beta testing. I only played through the first two missions, but I ran into a few scripting errors, two of which forced me to restart. I must have burned (ha ha!) nearly twenty minutes thinking I was doing something wrong, listening to Jenette Goldstein (Vazquez from Aliens, playing here a firefighter named Vazquez) berate me for taking so long. "Do you want to let the workers in this factory bite it?" she asked over and over and over. I restarted from the last checkpoint and everything worked just fine.

The second time I ran into this issue and had to restart, the checkpoint was so far back that I just popped the disc out of the Wii and called it a day. You can get away with a lack of QA in a PC game, and maybe even in a 360 or PS3 game these days. The patch will be along. But I have yet to play a Nintendo Wii game that so immediately and obviously needed a patch, and that probably won't get one.