Syberia Creator Moving To DS With Last King Of Africa

Developer White Birds, founded by PC adventure game creator Benoît Sokal (Syberia) and French publisher Focus have announced Last King of Africa, a new DS adventure title that will rework Sokal's 2006 PC title Paradise for handhelds. Focus says the game, which is to be released at the end of 2008, will see players take on a "fantastic journey deep into an imaginary Africa" where they will play as "Ann Smith, daughter of the last king of Maurania," as she crash-lands a plane in north-Africa rebel territory. The publisher says the game was "totally rethought" from its PC original to take advantage of the unique features of the DS, and has seen the story undergo "some refreshing changes" to be "much more coherent and surprising." The company says those changes include "relationships between the principal characters and in the combination and simplification of the dialogues that retain only the essential information needed to understand the story line without artificially prolonging the game," and the removal of 3D action sequences to make the game more traditionally point and click.