I usually check the website for budget publisher Phoenix Games around once a month. The reason for this is simply for my own amusement – they are the company that brought us White Van Racer on PlayStation 2, after all.
There were no cheap giggles today though – it would appear that they’ve shut up shop. Their website is down and going by the online retailers they haven’t released anything for a very long time.
Their last games were two DS titles that I haven’t ever seen for sale – Valentines Day and a collection known simply as 12. Seriously – was that the best name the company that gave us Snow White and the Seven Clever Boys could think of?
Just about everything they’ve put out has been unintentionally amusing. They managed to release the same racing game on PSone about a dozen times, merely by changing the name and the vehicles to trucks, bikes, stockcars, etc.
They also licensed some horrifically horrid cartoons from a company known as Dingo Pictures and slapped them onto a PlayStation 2 disk along with a few rubbish mini-games. How horrid were they, you ask? Try checking out this little gem on YouTube.
Just to prove how ‘budget’ they were, apparently a lot of music featured in their games was taken from free-to-share public domain music sites. Now that’s penny pinching.
In a bizarre way, I think I shall miss Phoenix Games. Nobody else has had the balls to release such a long string of dubious games without ever giving a single fuck.