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I just got paid.
£10 each. Official site.
First up: boxes. The boxes are bloody gorgeous. The logos are all raised, so they feel great. The spine has the game logo in a kind of silver leaf. The bottom has all seven of the logos in miniature, with the one belonging to that specific game in colour and the others in silver. The outer cover has a tab that flips out, the game cart resting in a second, silver box inside. The effect of all this loveliness is that you buy one, you want them all.
bit Generations is Nintendo purposefully taking video games back to their roots, having them focus on one core idea, refusing to bloat them out. Visually, all seven of these are extremely basic at a first glance, but that simplicity means that there are no worries about any of the elements in an individual game looking out of place.
The whole series is like Nintendo's other handheld brand - Touch Generations - seen through a distorted mirror. Where those games step as far away from traditional videogames as they can in terms of looks, structure, etc., the bit Generations brand goes in the opposite direction and gives us a bunch of uber-games. They're totally feeding off the old school and are as pure as games ever get. There not embarassed of their heritage. They bask in it. Despite that, they're still easily playable by the people that Touch Generations is primarily aimed at: people who've not played videogames before or whose interest has lapsed.
If Jeff Minter had been Japanese, Commodore 64 games would have looked and played like this.
dotstream and Dialhex are the two that I've put most time into, but only because the other five didn't arrive until I got home today.
dotstream is the racer of the pack. It looks a bit like Tron/Light Cycles, but it's a misleading comparison. You can go up and down, and that's your lot for steering.
So it's a simple premise, but the thing I've discovered pretty quickly with some of these games is that the developers have wrung every last drop of complexity that they can out of that simplicity. The B button kicks the brake in, should you find yourself about to crash into something in your path and not able to move out of the way quick enough. You've got two lives, which deplete if you crash into a solid object, but which can also be spent - by pressing with right shoulder trigger - in exchange for a temporary speed boost if you're feeling lucky. At the end of each lap there's a recharge station - at the bottom of the screen - that you can drop into and get your lives/boosts whacked up to a total of 9 for use on the second (and, frequently, last) lap, but if you go for this option you'll be stuck in the station for a painful number of seconds as the clock ticks down.
Solid objects are those that are empty. Objects that are dotted can be rode over, but they sap your speed while you do so. There are pickups on some courses that you can use with the A button - one slows your opponents, one makes you invincible for a while, one destroys the next obstacle in your path.
It even includes a form of slipstreaming. Ride in a straight line next to any of your opponents and your maximum speed with start to increase, provided that you're already at the usual max while you're doing so. Move away from them or move up or down and you go back down to the usual top speed.
Further complexity: you can't ride in the trail left by an opponent. If anyone in front of you moves into your path, you get shoved up or down, potentially ending up smacking head-first into an obstacle. You've got to be on the ball all the time. The forced movement causes all the racers to snake around each other in an exceptionally sexy way - this is where the graphics stop being basic and become fascinating. It's the same story for all of these games - they look amazing in motion.
And then there's the music. Music and sound are absolutely the most astonishing thing about all of this series of games. dotstream comes fully dosed up with a range of electronic beats - one course'll be accompanied by a Kraftwerk-alike, the next Add N to X, the next Autechre, the next Squarepusher. And each of the 25 courses (25 that I've opened so far - I think there may be a secret set of five hidden away) has its own unique tune.
The cherry on top is formation mode, which I'm currently finding rock hard. You start off with control of one line and have to steer it into the dots on a never-ending left-right course. Eat enough dots and a second line appears. You've now got to control both at the same time. Then a third, then a fourth and so on. Objective = high score. For every one of the Grand Prix that you win in the racing mode, you gain a new control ability for use in formation mode.
Video of one of the courses
Dialhex is also great. A colour-matching puzzler. Triangles fall into a well and you have to rotate them within a hexagonal cursor to form hexagons of one colour. Form six hexagons of one colour and another colour gets added into the mix.
What makes it intersting, besides the unusual shapes it uses, is that there's a form of gravity at work. Trangles will slide down any slopes that they're on. You can catch them in mid-air if you time and position your cursor right (I've yet to try forming a hexagon in mid-air like this, but I've no doubt that it's possible). And when you form a hexagon with a flashing piece in it, a hole appears in the floor of the well and the pieces start to tumble through, giving you more space and some breathing room.
That's it. That's all there is to this one. It only keeps track of one score - your highest. I've been tempted to say that it's more of a toy than a fully-fledged game, but that'd be a poor description. I've sat down with this one for hours-long sessions. It's not a limited feature set, it's a clarity and purity of vision.
Visuals are basic again, but super-sharp and super-clean. And, once more, it's got superb music. An ambient electronic jazz soundtrack that reacts to your progress and is totally hypnotic. Anybody remember that 16bit puzzle game that supposedly had subliminal calming messages in the soundtrack? Endorfun, or something. The effect here is the same as the publishers of that game always claimed for it. Also, the triangles falling sound like a kid's plastic blocks clattering against each other. That's inspired.
So those are the two that I've spent most time with to date. The others, based on five minute goes on each:
Coloris is another colour-matching puzzler. You've got to cycle squares on the grid through different shades of colour to make lines of three or more. I've got to admit to not understanding how the rules work here yet - not sure why sometimes the squares get lighter when I change them and darker on other occasions. Don't know why some squares are locked to a certain shade or others only have a limited number of times they can be altered. Once I get a handle on the rules, I suspect that this might be one of the best of the seven games.
Digidrive. Another that I've not got a handle on. You're sorting black and red arrows into one of four sections on the screen to build up enough to power a circle on teh right hand side of the screen away from approaching spikes. Sounds odd, because it is. Need to spend a lot more time with it - has a multiplayer link-up option, which could be brilliant.
Orbital. Bloody difficult, but fantastic and very different. You're a tiny planet floating in space. There are others hanging around, all with their own gravitational pulls. You can add smaller ones to your own mass to make you larger and increase your own gravitational pull. The objective: get large enough to trap a star in your orbit.
The trick: you can only exercise any control over your own movement by being attracted to or repelled by the orbits of the other planets in the system. B repels, A attracts. Like I say, very difficult to get the hang of at first, but entrancing when you do. I love this game.
Soundvoyager. The ugly duckling of the bunch, but ugly on purpose. You're supposed to play it with your eyes closed and a set of headphones on.
It's all about the stereo sound. The main levels have you moving up a grid. In the distance you can hear a beat. As you get closer to it, you can make out whether it's to your left or to your right. Move so that it's directly in front of you and you pick it up. The beat's now playing constantly. Now you can hear a bassline, in the distance again but under the beat. Move to it, capture it. Now a melody. As you add more elements to the tune, it becomes more difficult to make out the new ones off in the distance.
There are other game modes, too - one has you avoiding traffic on a highway.
Works far better than you'd expect. Another great one.
The only duffer is Boundish - five variations on pong, possibly alrightish in two player but dulltastic on your own - but six to one is a superb hit:miss ratio, especially given the high concept nature of this lot.
At the moment there's no word as to whether or not they're ever going to make it out of Japan, but I suspect that if they did they'd either be bundled together or released in a really shitty set of boxes. My recommendation would be not to wait (they're most likely never going to show up here or in the US officially) and to get them now from YesAsia, where they're more or less the same price as in Japan (other importers are charging slightly over the odds for them). Added bonus: YesAsia orders never get hit with customs duty, because they're shipped freight.
Which is another thing, quickly. All these games work fine on any vesion of the GBA or on a DS, obviously, but they're definitely best suited to the GB Micro, purely because the concept and design behind them fits so perfectly with the concept and design behind that piece of hardware.
I know it's a long shot, but has anybody else picked these up yet? |
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