Fishlabs gets Deep

Watery 3D shooter on its way to your phone

Ever get the feeling that those 3D space shooters are, well, a bit too spacey? Fishlabs feels your pain. The German developer has announced its latest game, Deep. And it's a much more aquatic take on the genre.

See, Deep is set on a remote water planet that's full of exotic undersea life-forms. Your job, working for the Colonial Navy, is to shoot the bejaysus out of them. Well, kind of. There's also trading and resource-exploitation missions too.

Fishlabs promises gorgeous 3D visuals, more than 40 submarines and creatures, and ten playable vessels to control, which you can pimp up by buying items.

The game will have 24 missions to play through, and in a neat feature, you'll be able to use photos taken with your cameraphone for your character.

Deep is due out by the Summer for 3D-enabled Nokia, Samsung, Sharp, Sony Ericsson and Toshiba phones, and judging from the beta version we've had a go on, it's shaping up to be as absorbing as Fishlabs' space-based Galaxy On Fire game.

It's the best-looking game named after an E-17 song that we've seen in ages, but will it be any good? We'll have a review for you when we get our flippers on a finished version.

Theme Park DS and SimCity DS go overboard

How hard can it be to port PC games to DS? Well, if the travails of EA's Japanese development office are anything to go by, it's one of those things that's harder than it looks. It was only in December that Jon Niermann, president of EA's Asia publishing division was buffing up the studio. "We are in a unique position to develop compelling new games that appeal to consumers worldwide, by combining EA's proven global IP with the expertise of EA Japan Studio in the NDS platform," he crowed. Presumably, the ex-employees of the studio will now be asking him for similarly suitably impressive references, given that EA Japan has reportedly shut down its development studio and signed up external developers to finish the work on games such as Theme Park DS, SimCity DS and Dragon Zakura. A spokesman for EA said it would still release the games, although it's not clear if the re-organisation will affect release dates. Ironically though, EA has also just released some new screens for Theme Park DS, which was due to be released in March. There's no European release date yet set for SimCity DS.