Leger vs. Bit.Trip Beat (Wii)

In 2009 Bit.Trip Beat by Gaijin Games (now Choice Provisions) was a thing.

Arriving on the Wii Ware service it kind of blew people away with its audiovisuals going back all the way to Pong; A truly old game also acting as the main inspiration of Bit.Trip Beat.

Almost like experiencing an alternative timeline where all games played like Pong but with various unique twists and turns to make them stand out from the crowd.

In this particular case, a visual acid trip with a heart beating to the chip sounding blips and blops which actually makes upp the three levels the game consists of.

Three songs, where huge moving pixels (bounced back from where they came (from the right) with the help of the paddle controlled by tilting the wiimote) acts as what is added to the beats and rhythms the bulks of the songs consists of.

Of course, the moving pixels behave differently.

Some moves in a sine wave, some stop to think about life for a while before continuing their journey, some react to your paddles movement and some you will come to hate so much that you should consider having an insurance on whatever your wiimote might be thrown into.

See, Bit.Trip Beat is a hard thing to beat.

Too hard to be fun in the long run, unfortunately.

Thing is, if you die you have to start a song all over. No checkpoints, nothing. While the stages consists of different sections this is never put to use in any other way than to get a few seconds of breathcatching.

And the songs are up to 15 minutes long.

Playing the same song over and over and over just to learn the sometimes extremely difficult patterns of the moving pixels at a late part of a song takes the joy out of the experience.

I am tired of the second track Descent.

Tired of having to paddling my way through the first seven minutes over and over again just to fail in a couple of seconds when one of the hardest passages of the game kicks in, while knowing that there are another seven minutes to learn after that before beating the boss and opening up the third and final song Growth.

I do believe it took a couple of years until I finally beat Descent back in the days, and when I did I did so by getting help from a friend.

See, the game supports multiplaying... so that more than one paddle at the same time can try to bounce back the moving pixels.

It makes things easier, but at the same time it just helps to underscore the questionable game design where the single player experience suffers and the multiplayer feels like an afterthought.

Bit.Trip Beat thrives in its aesthetical presentation, the trippy attitude and the technotic soundtrack which sound rather timeless.

As an added bonus keeping up combos paves way for a higher state of trippy, whereas a filled meter evolves everything into... something MORE. Just like too many misses devolves things, at a final step back to what Pong looked like forever ago.

Black and white musicless gaming.

It is so sad, that the actual game design probably have resulted in most players never having experienced the third and final stage, Growth, which takes it all to the next level.

Somewhat chaotic, and at times even harder than Descent, but the trip in itself is well worth experiencing due to what it looks and sounds like.

While all that much more intense if being played, you could well look it up on YouTube if you are not up for the challenge.

A shame, really, considering how exciting the introduction of Commander Video and the prospect of following the character on a journey through life itself felt.

Fortunately Gaijin returned to this very concept at a later stage in the series, but when doing so they seemed to have realized that accessibility could be a good thing.

If you feel up to Ponging a couple of minutes of interactive music over and over again until your hair starts to fall off, sure.

Go for it.

As for me, well... I just can not stay with Bit.Trip Beat when I know what the rest of the series has to offer.

 

Leger vs. Wario Ware: Smooth Moves (Wii)

For all the blame of gimmicks taking over the medium Wii stood there, in the centre of it all.

Accidentally throwing wiimotes in televisions, hitting the shit out of the face of a friend or just looking completely batshit crazy trying to get some moves to register correctly.

Oh.

But considering it all, Wario Ware: Smooth Moves makes sense in every possible way.

Hundreds of a couple of seconds long lasting minigames where the thing seldom is more complex than quickly realizing what button to press or how to physically move the controller.

Aesthetically all over the place, but mostly with thick lines outlining characters and other stuff paving way for a truly cartoony look.

Mixed with some real life textures and the odd out of place whatever thrown into the mix; It all seems logical in the world of Wario.

Just as the grunts, sazzy music and suggestive presentations of all the different wiimote positions to use during the sessions.

That voice, it could lure whomever to bed.

As expected the minigames are extremely varied, and as the main game progresses through the kind of themed stages (certain characters with a certain story and certain ways of using the wiimote) more and more ways of holding the wiimote are introduced to pave way for something rather chaotic in the later part of the game.

At a certain point even the nunchuck is thrown into the mix, and as such it becomes obvious that certain minigames will offer better controls than others.

While pointing at the screen, tilting the controller and pressing buttons always will work just fine, everything that has to do with adjusting the depth by moving the wiimote closer to, or further from, the tv works like shit... so dustsucking is an extremely unpleasant and erratic thing to do, with the thing moving uncontrollably all over the place.

Driving a car by using the wiimote as a steering wheel, pointing at the screen trying to shoot stuff into a giant nose or pretending the wiimote being a hand waving away fart clouds... well... it works flawlessly each and every time.

Actually, considering the wealth of minigames the ones that controls badly are few and far between, but for those trying to unlock everything (which you do by playing and replaying the stages over and over and over again, hoping for the minigames you have not seen yet will randomly appear) it can get pretty annoying to deal with the bad ones again and again and again.

Sometimes it is also oddly unclear what the game expects you to do, even with the holding position of the wiimote presentented and the minigame being practiced over and over again.

Just as it seems that everything related to playing the game with a friend seems like an afterthought (which just the fact of it not becoming available until after having beaten the main game), where the wiimote is passed around between the minigames while certain rules apply depending on the choice of mode (playing darts, pumping up a balloon until it bursts or passing around a bomb while playing random minigames... for example).

If not playing the two minigames where one player uses the wiimote and the other the nunchuck (a race on foot while jumping over holes and a flying minigame collecting friut while avoiding crasching).

Oh, and everything is for some reason presented in 4:3, in a time of 16:9 being what people had come to expect. Certainly not a deal breaker, but it makes it all feel a bit rushed to the market.

Wario Ware: Smooth Moves done right could have been a perfect way of showing off the motion controls and how fun they can be, but unlike Wii Sports which is pretty much as casual as it gets Smooth Moves sometimes demands more from the player than the controls manage to deliver.

It is mostly fun, crazy and intriguing, but lacks something that the series got right from the start on the Game Boy Advance (the controls and making all of the content feel relevant); While trying to evolve the concept, it all comes together as a somewhat disjointed experience.

A trip worth experiencing, for sure, but do expect some tedious and uncomfortable bumps along the way to completion making it rather easy to question the Smooth Moves part of its title.

 

Leger vs. Art Style: Cubello (Wii)

So, we have this rotating thing consisting of cubes in different colours.

By shooting cubes at this rotating thing, making them lock onto the thing and making the cubes the thing consists of disappear if four (or more) cubes of the same colour get connected, we can free the core of the thing.

And beat the stage.

And move on to another stage.

Art Style: Cubello keeps the theme of simple aesthetics the series is known for aswell as a (quite, in this particular case) concept of how to play it all.

But it adds some twists and turns which makes it all somewhat difficult to master even though the main concept is rather easy to grasp.

Such as only allowing a maximum of ten shootable cubes to be held at any point in time; If you run out of these without managing to make cubes on the rotating thing disappear (and with that add some new shootable cubes to the available stock) the game is over.

If one takes to much time to clear cubes, the thing gets so close to you that the game will be over.

Oh, and when reaching the final few cubes on the core of the rotating thing there is never a certain thing that the colours of the cubes you have available are the ones needed to eliminate the ones on the rotating thing.

To add even more injury, every now and then loads of new cubes will be added to the rotating thing, so it is not a good thing to take things slow or shooting cubes at random or simply aiming badly.

To eliminate parts of the difficulty some random symbols keeps appearing after removing cubes and if four of these happens to be the same a special mode will be activated.

One where you get a cube of a specific colour to shoot as much as you like on the rotating thing until time runs out, or until that very colour is eliminated from the thing which makes the cube you shoot shift in colour.

Another one where the cube you shoot will turn into the colour of the cube it hits on the rotating thing. Which makes you shoot as much as you can until time runs out.

These two special modes is often key in beating a level, since it easily can seem to go on forever otherwise.

Now, the game is short with only six stages to beat to reach the credits roll. Each stage has five sub stages to unlock, and there is also a Endless mode to active where the goal goes beyond clearing a stage into just keeping alive for as long as possible.

Unfortunately beating all the thirtysix stages will result in nothing at all, besides just knowing that it has been done.

Given a couple of hours there is not really that much more to do in Cubello except trying to beat the high score in Endless or beating already beaten stages in the main game over and over again.

But since it all plays so nicely, and the game is way more intense than it may seem at first glance, the longevity does not suffer as much by the lack of content as one might believe.

Cubello is a great part of the Art Style series. It makes good use of the pointing aspect of the Wii Mote and never strays aways from the arty attitude.

The music and overall soundscape of the experience seems to resonate with the gameplay, and while the robotic voice that just can not keep from telling everyone what colour of the block fired is, and when blocks are ELIMINATED from the roting thing, may get on ones nerves every now and then by just not shutting the fuck up... it would feel odd not to have it there in the midst of it all.

Not an essential experience (depending on what essential is defined as).

But a nice one, for sure (if nice is defined as fun to play, challenging and well put together aswell as a treat to interact with).

Oh, and the little detail which shows what cube, and what side of that particular cube, one is pointing at on the rotating thing... is great.

It would be a completely different experience without this very feature, and probably an annoying one at that.

 

Leger vs. Alien Crush Returns (Wii)

Certainly Compile showed their muscles with Alien Crush. Not by doing something as technically impressive as whatever shmup they ever released, but by going H.R. Giger in a pinball context.

While keeping almost conceptually true to pinball machines as seen in the arcades, it still very much played around with the virtual possibilites by adding stuff a mechanical machine would not be able to produce.

Never going beyond the easy to pick up and play affair it needed to be to make a mark on the market.

Quite celeverly set up, one did not really have to bother about the fact that Alien Crush originally was released back in 1988 on the in the west rather obscure PC-Engine, here known as the TurboGrafx-16, since Nintendo with the Wii in 2006 reintroduced the console with their digital retro service; Virtual Console.

A year and a half later Wii Ware launched, and with it came the need for some software to showcase the service. Hudson, involved with NEC on the PC-Engine, took that very opportunity to go back to Alien Crush, put Tamsoft (partly of Toaplan fame) behind the wheel and produce a follow up with the added Returns to the title.

Then came the trailer, which in all honesty made things look rather terrific. A pumping technotic track, some truly disgusting intestine looking things coupled with classic pinballing glory not shying away from including bossfights and such.

Wow.

After a couple of hours of actually playing the game it will become rather obvious, though, that something certainly seems to be missing.

The tables (all three of them aswell as two boss battles) while nicely presentend from an aesthetical point of view just seem to be lacking.

Alien Crush Returns puts most focus on a short story mode, where a table is cleared once enough aliens are killed or a boss goes down. Going for multipliers is not really a thing, since all the lights to be triggered are gone from the tables.

The story mode is quickly beaten, no matter what difficulty setting chosen, and playing the tables for high scores shows just how barren they actually are.

You could go on for hours, with the game seemingly helping you out in all kinds of ways to keep the ball going. Hitting the same bumpers, killing the same enemies, over and over again.

I just could not bother to keep playing until I ran out of balls.

Considering the online services (the official ones, at least) have been shut down things are kept local and the DLC (such as a new table and some few time limited ball modifying features besides the ones included in the base package) are nowhere to be found.

Not that it matters, since nothing of the sorts makes the game more fun to play and the features already included (such as giving the ball a short period of boost or making it inverse its motion) are seldom attractive to use.

The Crush series in the hands of Compile may not have been the best of digital pinballs ever, but just comparing how fun it still is to play Alien Crush to this borefest makes me feel that Tamsoft had no clue whatsoever what makes a pinball game fun to play.

A good presentation with nice graphics, pleasant music (though, the awesome music from the trailer is unfortunately only to be heard in the rare bonus rooms to be found) and decent ball physics is simply never enough.

Some classic pinball elements, lights to trigger, modes to active (besides the multiball) and multipliers to activate, would have made a world of difference.

Do not bother about this one.

No.