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Sunflowers head to the Black Sea

Bulgarian developer signs four title deal with Germans

Bulgarian developers Black Sea Studios have signed an exclusive four year deal with Germany's Sunflowers Entertainment, creators of the popular medieval strategy game Anno 1602. Founded earlier this year by Vesselin Handjiev, the man behind the amusing (for all the wrong reasons) real-time strategy game Tzar : Burden Of The Crown, Black Sea is already the self-described leading game developer in Bulgaria (certainly it's the only one we've ever heard of) and is aiming to become a center of excellence for south-eastern Europe. Amazingly enough their first project with Sunflowers will be another real-time strategy game, and we are already quivering with anticipation. Well, maybe not. In one of the three press releases we've received about the partnership so far, Gerhard Schanz of Schanz Consultants (the company which brokered the deal, in case you were wondering) announced in a wonderful piece of bungled translation that he is "confident that Black Sea Studios will deliver games to the industry that are path-braking blockbusters". We think the words he was looking for were probably "ground breaking". Or maybe "path finding". But certainly not "path braking". Meanwhile Sunflowers boss Jürgen Reusswig decreed that "providing an incredible level of fun and long-term motivation in a both technically and graphically high-quality environment is priority number one for the Bulgarian team". We can only hope that Black Sea will live up to these aspirations and produce something more impressive than their founder's last project... Related Features - Tzar review

Dialogue wasn't one of Tzar's strongpoints. We can only hope that Black Sea can do better.