If I told you about a revolutionary new game console designed to play the latest PC titles, streamed directly through a broadband connection, you'd probably remember gaming's most infamous piece of vaporware -- the Phantom -- and laugh me out of the room. Thus it probably came as no surprise when a similar product, the WildTangent Orb, missed its April release date without a word to anyone. However, today GameCyte has learned that the Orb is "still on track," and slated for a mid-July release.
What with the lucrative PopCap partnership and a recent bevy of publicity stemming from the controversial words of CEO Alex St. John, it seemed unlikely that WildTangent's new game delivery service was headed for the same fate as its conceptual progenitor, and so we contacted the casual game ad-network to find out what happened.
According to a WildTangent representative, the Orb was never scheduled for an April release to begin with; instead, April marked the service's closed beta with a small test group. Our source told us that the platform has been in the hands of developers since its debut at the Game Developer's Conference in February, and the company has been busy trying to get more and more content lined up for the Orb's public release in mid-July.
Compared to its illusionary relative, the WildTangent Orb has a somewhat more plausible concept -- where the Phantom was trying to keep up with the latest PC titles using aging console hardware, the Orb draws inspiration from the relative graphical simplicity of the Nintendo Wii, and instead promises to run aging console and PC games on existing PC hardware, with a simple console-like interface.
We'll have hands-on impressions of the Orb closer to its July release date.
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