big-screen mini-games with warioware D.I.Y. showcase and game & wario

even though i’d recently “finished” warioware D.I.Y., i was so close to finishing up the 9 games of the warioware series that i went ahead and played through warioware D.I.Y. showcase on wiiware and game & wario on wii u.

first off, warioware D.I.Y. showcase does exactly what it sets out to do, which is provide a way for you to take your warioware D.I.Y. creations from your DS and view them on your TV via your wii. the touchscreen controls are replaced by moving the wiimote’s cursor and pressing its main button, and although these controls make things more difficult because it takes more time to move the cursor on wii than the stylus on the DS, overall the change in input works fine. games look pretty good in the transition from DS to TV, and the wiiware title also includes about half as many micro-games as the DS game (featuring the characters who were left out of the DS game, including more retro games thanks to 18-volt), all of which can be imported back to the DS game for use in making your own micro-games, and a small set of comics and songs. while nintendo had wi-fi support for this title you could also download new micro-games, but otherwise there’s not a whole lot to do and the $8 price tag does feel a bit on the high side. still, for fans of the DS title this would be a nice complement, and the warioware formula is surprisingly strong, as there are quite a few micro-games included that are as funny and memorable as any that have come before.

D.I.Y. showcase may have been pretty basic, but game & wario feels like a real step back. almost completely eschewing the series’ formula to date (i.e. an onslaught of micro-games to conquer), this game focuses on mini-games, pretty much none of which are that much fun. each mini-game has multiple levels, but only beating the first level is required to unlock the next mini-game. this keeps things moving along, but the mini-games themselves aren’t interesting enough to even warrant the extra levels. it’s pretty sad that i found i didn’t even want to play through all the levels, few as there were, and that unlocking each mini-game just resulted in another stab of disappointment instead of excitement. in their review nintendolife commented that one of the games felt “like it’s all been done before on mobile devices”, but i felt that way about pretty much all of them. many of the games felt like the developers were really straining to justify the wii u’s gamepad, and in that sense felt like nintendo land, which i found to be similarly tedious and also more like a series of tech demos than a gaming experience. my affection for the warioware cast was the main thing that kept me even remotely engaged, and the only other memorable experiences were the virtual toys whose wacky humor fans of the series should be familiar with; “gamer”, the mini-game that actually revisits the typical warioware formula (including some hilarious variations of familiar micro-games from the past) but with the added trickiness of having to hide the gamepad when your character’s mom is nearby; and the miiverse sketching game, which is basically a pictionary-type drawing game where you can select from other people’s prompts and then view others’ responses alongside your own.

it’s too bad that the most-recent two entries of the warioware series are so middling compared to the brilliance of the first titles, but i have hope that nintendo and intelligent systems will be able to turn things around from here. in the meantime i’ll be taking a look back at the series before too long, and will be looking forward to revisiting some of my favorites in the series.

big-screen warioware D.I.Y. showcase link:
– entry at mariowiki.com

big-screen game & wario links:
– miiverse community
– official site, includes wallpapers
– parody kickstarter promo for the game, includes a ringtone
– tips from nintendo UK

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under the microscope with flow and art style: rotozoa

flow	art style: rotozoa

thatgamecompany has gotten loads of acclaim for their 2012 PSN game journey, so i thought i’d see what they hype was all about and start with their first game, flow, originally released online as a USC grad student project in flash. the game is stylish to be sure, and the gameplay is easy to understand: direct a snake-like microscopic organism and eat other creatures to expand your body. the gameplay is simple and a runthrough of the main experience can be completed in less than an hour. i got bored in a fraction of that time, though, and i agree with gamespot’s review of the PSN version which said it lacked “a lasting gameplay experience” and that “the aesthetics clearly take precedence over all else” and that “not everyone is going to have interest in spending money on a game that’s equivalent to an attractive screen saver you can steer”. although i’m all for “artsy” video games, i wasn’t particularly taken with this one, although i liked the concept of ascending and descending layers (like floors of a building) in order to reach the goal. i’m pretty surprised that they stretched the original flash game to a PSN title that pretty much just seems to add tilt controls and new creatures to play as (and of course, a slew of achievements of varying degrees of pointlessness), but even more surprising is that that version has 4.5 stars (user rated) on the PSN page and a price tag of $6. the reviews on metacritic give perhaps a better sense of the range of reactions, but for my part i find myself wishing there was more substance as opposed to just pure style.

i actually played the game several months ago, but thought it was too short to devote a whole post to. for completely different reasons i played through the bulk of art style: rotozoa (aka art style: penta tentacles). i’ve been documenting my gradual survey of the series, although up to now i’ve been playing mostly puzzle games on my DSi XL. rotozoa is a wiiware release, and unlike the other games in the series i’ve played is an action/arcade game rather than a puzzle game.

from far away the game looks somewhat similar to flow (and i’m def. just one of many who has noted it) in that you’re a little microscopic organism feeding on smaller creatures and growing in size. in the main mode of rotozoa it’s your tentacles that are growing, though, and the game starts with you having to grow two different-colored tentacles to a certain length, with the ability to both move your little organism and rotate clockwise or counter-clockwise. the higher levels increase your tentacles to three, four, and finally five (each a different color), and the behaviors of the creatures you’re feeding on (“goobugs”) get increasingly difficult to manage so that at the highest levels the goobugs intentionally try to hit you from the side opposite to their matching color tentacle.

as can be expected from being a part of art style series, the game glows with its clean, cool aesthetic. the visuals are eye-catching although a little on the simple side (although understandable given that it’s a wiiware release), and the music is suitably hypnotic. the game is more like the classic video game snake (which according to wikipedia has roots that go even further back) than flow in that the longer your tentacles get the harder it is to match the right tentacle with the right colored goobug. although the gameplay itself is fairly worthwhile, i didn’t find it to be nearly as addictive as the puzzle games in the series. i was never that big on snake type games anyway, although this game probably beats out the other snake-like game i played recently, the “square” mode of maboshi’s arcade, another wiiware title. the game is easy to get into, but at higher levels starts to fall into the “more frustrating than fun” category, and getting the “all complete” achievement for each level (no damage and no special moves) looks like by all accounts to be a lesson in self-masochism. still, there’s a decent variety of modes, and the gameplay is pretty solid for people looking to tackle a challenge that requires precision and patience. overall this is an example of a game that combines style with substance and doesn’t sacrifice gameplay for aesthetics.

get under the microscope with these art style: rotozoa links:
– glowing review at nintendolife.com
– entry at wikipedia
– some info on unlocking the second and third sets of credits

watching paint dry at my pokemon ranch

one more filler game. i’ve had my pokemon ranch (a wiiware title) for a while now, and feel like i’ve experienced pretty much everything the title has to offer. i came in with very low expectations, but got the game anyway since i’m a completist and there’s also the added lure of getting pokemon with unique moves or abilities via special trades within the game. as you probably already know, the “game”, such as it is, is mainly just a way to store pokemon from your diamond and pearl games, although you can watch pokemon and miis interact in pretty minimal and simplistic ways. more than one reviewer has had a similar reaction as myself and nintendolife, who described it as being “a service for storing and obtaining various Pokémon that doubles as a screensaver while you’re playing Diamond/Pearl”. with diamond and pearl having long been made obsolete by newer entries (and the games weren’t among my favorite in the series anyway) the game has less value than before, and the uniqueness of the art style, such as it is, has also been lost due to the similarly underwhelming pokemon rumble series, which also debuted on wiiware and reused the same blocky pokemon models. added to that, the game had offered special event pokemon in japan and an update to make the game compatible with pokemon platinum, features that were never released elsewhere. so out of the box the game already has a lot of drawbacks to it nowadays.

still, it’s mildly entertaining to watch the pokemon and miis wander around and smile at each other. it’s sort of like a virtual aquarium: nothing much really happens, but the effect is somewhat relaxing. i’ve gotten in the habit of firing it up whenever i turn on my wii for some other reason just to see what new pokemon haley has brought to the ranch, and i’ll probably continue to do so in order to eventually get that ever-elusive mew (which is only made available after the ranch has a whopping 999 ‘mon). limited even for what it is (the main bummer being that the game requires you to withdraw pokemon to the same game card they came from), it’s hard to fault the game for being what it is. still, $10 for a screensaver is probably more than most people would be willing to pony up. the contemporary tool, pokemon bank, has the disadvantage of a $5 yearly charge but the advantage of permanent cloud storage across current gen and future gen game saves, for what that’s worth.

watch these my pokemon ranch links dry:
– entry at bulbapedia, with a page with details on hayley’s trades and the list of club look-see members
– an entertaining account of the game from someone with an unusual fondness for screensavers

bit.trip runner trips up

two wiiware games in a row! although in this case i actually played the wii version of bit.trip runner, as it appears in the wii compilation bit.trip complete. anyway, the game and the bit.trip series in general got tons of acclaim when they were released, and being wiiware exclusives certainly didn’t hurt (although they’ve since been made available on wii as previously mentioned, as well as 3DS and steam).

i was a bit leery of bit.trip runner since mobile phones are full of completely disposable “endless runner” games (one of which i tried out a few years ago). i’m not even sure how that genre got big, but in any case i like the bit.trip series’ retro, atari-era-inspired aesthetic in general, and i was hoping that bit.trip runner‘s emphasis on rhythm and music would help ameliorate the main problems with the genre.

which (to start a new paragraph), it doesn’t, unfortunately. the problem of the genre falls squarely under my main gameplay gripe, which is “try and die” gameplay. in this regard bit.trip runner is as big a culprit as any game, and as with most endless runner games it emphasizes memorization rather than fast reflexes (although you’ll need both). the aesthetics kept me engaged for a decent amount of time, though, and i soldiered through all of the first world, including what has become the notorious level of the game, 1-11 (one of the longest in the game, i believe). the boss level was particularly egregious in terms of requiring rote memorization over “skill”, and after playing through most of the second world (of three) i lost patience and had to put the game aside. by that time the game’s charms (namely, the music, aesthetics, and simplicity of the gameplay) had been far, far outweighed by the downsides, including levels that are too repetitive and overly busy visual effects and backgrounds that make it difficult to tell what exactly you’re supposed to be avoiding. not having any checkpoints doesn’t help things either. (from the reviews on metacritic it looks like i’m not completely in a minority in this opinion, although sean aaron from nintendolife gave the game a perfect 10.) but the clincher was realizing that getting through the game wasn’t going to be at all a question of brain power but rather just sinking time into trial and error over and over and over again. now, not being a stranger to old-school gaming i don’t mind a challenge as long as i consider it to be “fair”, but once blatant “try and die” gameplay rears its ugly head i quickly lose any interest in being a completionist.

so, a disappointment overall, although the soundtrack is pretty rockin’. i’ve already dipped into the sequel (with the lengthy title bit.trip presents runner2: future legend of rhythm alien) and aside from the glossier visuals, more stages (and presumably a more gradual learning curve), the usual pointless achievements, and the addition of a checkpoint at the middle of every stage, it feels pretty much identical to the original. so i doubt i’ll be playing through much more of that any time soon, although i’m cautiously optimistic about trying more from the original set of bit.trip games.

don’t trip up over these bit.trip runner links:
– official site
– set of videos of perfects of every stage, from nintendaan, of gonintendo fame
– entry on wikipedia
– entry on steam, including achievements
– entry at howlongtobeat.com

sticking to maboshi’s arcade

maboshi’s arcade, aka maboshi: the three shape arcade for wiiware, is a game that i had a hard time getting into. the game has a unique hook: the board is divided into three sections, and you and two others can each take one, or you can save any of your replays to any of the three sections. the twist is that doing well in your section will give bonuses to the adjacent window or windows, making the game significantly easier for you and your partners. the game’s concept is definitely interesting, although i found the games themselves to be more frustrating than fun initially. you’re not required to play a different game in each of the three windows, and i liked the visual simplicity of the three games, each of which is based around simple shapes (circle, stick, and square).

the reason the individual games were difficult for me to get into in spite of their simple controls (the first two require you to just use the A button while the third just uses the D-pad), is that the physics of the circle and stick games took a significant amount of time for me to internalize. the circle game features a fairly lightweight ball that spins clockwise or counterclockwise, and pressing the A button changes the direction of its spin. the changes in momentum and in turn the movement of the ball were hard to get used to and it was difficult to get it to go anywhere close to where i wanted it to, but after a fair amount of dogged persistence i was able to make much better progress. similarly, the stick game (which features a mechanic somewhat reminiscent of the mini-game chiritorie from the original warioware game on GBA, which was in turn based on an actual nintendo vacuum cleaner), was easier to get into than the circle game but still required some perserverance before i was able to make much progress.

the square game is completely different from the other two and features a mechanic somewhat similar to the old snake games although in this case the game focuses on the tail of the snake which burns blocks. the square game is much slower paced and more of a puzzle game which gives it a unique feel compared to the other two, but also makes it feel a little out of place. (incidentally, an extension of that game has also been released as a standalone DSiware title called flametail).

the game’s overall objective is to get a million points in each of the three sub-games (which also unlocks an expert mode), although getting 100,000 in each will unlock the credits, which was a good enough stopping point for me. a million points sounds daunting, but the game’s mechanics include a multiplier which maxes at 9x, so once you get it maxed out it should get much easier to rack up the points. using your own high-scoring replays in adjacent windows to help you progress in your own game is key, and the game also has some bonuses in the form of sending your best replays over wi-fi to your buddies who can then use them in their own game, and also the ability to download a version of the game to your DS via DS download play (although, as with all download play, the game is lost if you power down your device).

overall, although i enjoyed the inclusion of both arcade-y and puzzle elements and the unique hook, the game wasn’t a classic for me. i don’t think i have much patience for slogging through the same levels over and over again in order to try to get the goal of a million points in each sub-game, but the game provides a nice contrast to more typical multi-player types of games. an enjoyable game, but be prepared to be a bit patient and invest in some ramp-up time before it really starts to get you hooked in.

stick to these maboshi’s arcade links:
– review at nintendolife.com
– official page at nintendo.com/games
– entry at metacritic
– entry at wikipedia

hard to latch onto fluidity

fluidity (aka hydroventure) is generally regarded as one of the highlights of wiiware, but even though i got it a long time ago it’s taken me many attempts to gain enough momentum to actually finish it. although the game is visually appealing, with its storybook conceit and the resulting aesthetic, the controls tend to provoke a “love it or hate it” reaction. much as i tried to tolerate them, it was hard for me to feel anything but varying shades of annoyance with the controls, particularly the often needlessly motion-controlled movements which can be downright obnoxious. the most obvious example is having to pull the remote vertically to jump, which by now i imagine most anyone who has played any number of wii games will agree is one of the worst uses of the wii remote ever. also, while a novel idea, having the main character be a puddle of water ends up being a pain because it’s hard to control. even with the “gather” ability, which you unlock early on, despite your best efforts you’ll find yourself continually accidentally dividing your character and awkwardly trying to reassemble it into a single mass. in some ways the controls are actually worse than those of kirby tilt ‘n tumble and yoshi topsy turvy, b/c at least those games didn’t use the tilt mechanics as the central movement for a side-scrolling type of platformer, as having motion controls requires sacrificing a lot in the way of comfort and precision.

aside from the extremely frustrating controls the game is fairly well designed. the game isn’t a real metroidvania in that it’s more just like a series of levels that can only be tackled in a particular order as opposed to providing much sense of exploration, but the levels make good use of the water mechanics (and the various transformations you’d expect) and there are some cute objectives, like rescuing fish and returning them to their bowl and collecting rubber duckies and dropping them into a bathtub. nothing too surprising, but there’s a good amount of variety and some gentle surprises, and overall the levels are nicely done with some nice touches. one other annoyance comes in the form of the boss levels, which are simply levels that are significantly longer than regular levels and no continues beyond the five lives you can hold in reserve. in the regular levels dealing with the hard-to-tolerate controls is easier since you usually have unlimited retries, but in the life-and-death situations of these longer levels, which are more focused on defeating enemies and have many more environmental hazards, having to restart the boss level and redo huge chunks of it gets old fast, esp. since by their nature the game’s controls make the game proceed at a much slower pace than the average platformer. i’m glad to see that totilo over at kotaku had a similar experience as i with the end of the game (although he was much more positive about the game overall). he said:

The problem wasn’t just that a few of the jumps required in the game’s final goop-clearing boss stage are tough. The problem is that, after each failed attempt, the developers inexplicably force you to replay more than five minutes of complex gameplay before you try it again. And when you lose your four or so lives, you get to re-play at least 20 minutes of gameplay to try again. Infuriating. … It suffers from an archaic flaw — the intensifying of its own difficulty due to forcing the player to re-play significant chunks of levels they can pass easily just to get back to that one tough jump.

although the game left a bad taste in my mouth and i felt like the controls were working against me most of the time, i can see why others would enjoy it more than i did. i’m skeptical the sequel, which is available on the 3DS eshop, will leave me much more satisfied since it seems it uses the same mechanics with the added annoyance of having the screen constantly shifting around, but hopefully the overall experience will be a bit more smooth and streamlined.

latch onto these fluidity links:
– official site, includes interviews with the developers
– entry at wikipedia
– barebones guide which also includes links to more-detailed maps that writer submitted to gamefaqs
– review at nintendolife
– entry at metacritic

stutterin’ groovin’ blocks

continuing my wiiware kick, i recently sat down with groovin’ blocks, which was released about 5 years ago (yikes!) and was also later released as a boxed retail version with additions including more levels and balance board controls. (for people who may be interested, apparently the game was also released on PSN, and was supposedly released on the iphone although it doesn’t seem to be available there now.)

anyway, the game is your pretty standard tetris-type game (although to be more specific columns is the closer relative), with the twist that placing blocks in time with the music (usually on the down beats) increases your score multiplier. depending on your love of house/techno this may be a great hook, but while i generally enjoyed the music i didn’t find much of it to be really rousing or memorable. i also found that the central mechanic got quite tedious and that being tied to the beat was too constraining to be much fun. on top of that it felt like it was easier to get chains randomly than through careful planning, and although the game is designed so that you have to fully master the mechanics to beat the harder stages and difficulty levels (apparently there are four), after a few hours of playing through all the stages at the lowest difficulty i didn’t feel at all motivated to invest more time in the game. on the plus side, the lumines-esque visuals are pretty polished, esp. for a wiiware title (although the yellow/orangish and red blocks were harder to distinguish between than they should have been), and i don’t doubt that the game has found a decent set of fans. wiiware itself has continued to be more mediocre than memorable, but there are still a decent number of highly praised games for me to check out, probably before too long.

stutter through these groovin’ blocks links:
– here’s the fairly bare-bones page on the game on the company’s official site
– tips on getting high scores, at gamefaqs
– review at nintendolife.com
– list of trophies for the PSN version
– entry at metacritic
– entry at wikipedia

playground-level pokemon rumble

although some people may be deep into pokemon rumble u, which was released a few weeks ago, i’m a bit behind and only just recently played through the main mode of the first game in the side series, pokemon rumble on wiiware. unlike thruspace, also on wiiware, which had a demo that was much less satisfying than the actual game, in the case of pokemon rumble the demo tells you pretty much exactly what the full game is like: repetitive and monotonous. the pokemon series has had more than its fair share of mediocre spin-offs, but this one ranks pretty low. you navigate your “toy” pokemon through a series of stages that have the same layouts but with different skins (such as a forest, a cave, a fire stage, a water stage, etc.) and battle waves of other toy pokemon. the toys come with one or two moves and don’t level up, so you’ll be constantly replacing your current main character as you go along. although there is a range of moves that the pokemon may have, mostly influencing the trajectory of their attacks, they don’t make much of a difference and don’t require you to modify your mindless button-mashing strategy much. similarly, some pokemon you pick up may have special abilities, but they aren’t needed since the attack and defense stats dominate; type advantages play a similarly minor role.

not a whole lot more to say about this one. at $15 the game is fairly overpriced for what will only take a few hours to play through. beating the main mode, which features generation I pokemon, unlocks an “advanced” mode that features the generation IV pokemon but otherwise looks like is exactly the same. it’s kind of surprising that the developers felt that this gameplay justified two sequels, one on 3DS and one on the wii u eshop, but in the latter case a game that cashes in, in even a small way, on the huge success of the recent skylanders games is an all too obvious way to rake in some major bucks. this experience has made me highly disinclined to play either of them, but completionist that i am i’m sure i’ll be picking up the 3DS entry eventually.

play with these playground-level pokemon rumble links:
– official site: includes some passwords as well as a mini-game.
– entry at bulbapedia: which includes a more-comprehensive list of passwords and how to earn release tickets
– FAQ at gamefaqs: has info on increasing chances of getting specific pokemon (basically use pokemon with specific abilities/moves to increase the chance of a critical hit and use pokemon with a type advantage).
– review at nintendolife.com
– entry at howlongtobeat.com
– entry at wikipedia

make room for thruspace

i’ve played through a fair number of the demos available on wiiware, and the one of thruspace didn’t seem particularly fun. the game made it back onto my radar when its sequel (available on the 3DS’s eshop) ketzal’s corridors (aka speedthru: potzol’s puzzle) came out a little more than a year ago. i decided to play through the original before tackling the sequel, and the game turned out to be much more fun and addictive than expected.

the game’s central mechanic is basically the video game version of the “human tetris” game show that originated in japan, in which contestants try to contort themselves to fit through shapes cut out from walls, and has appeared in various versions in other countries, including the US and the UK as hole in the wall. the game is also shares superficial similarities to 3D versions of tetris, which this random blog post reminds me is called blockout and not welltris which is something quite different.

anyway, fortunately, this video game is more fun than either the game show or blockout. the game starts off quite easy, and you can get to the end of each stage in the regular mode simply by rotating the keydron (i.e. block) to the smallest shape and slipping through each hole in the wall with room to spare. however, getting the highest score gets to be much more involved, and you’ll be rotating the keydron to catch all the crystals, as well as to perform “tricks” which is where you move the block so that is “paints” in the shape of the entire silhouette. performing tricks is almost a game in and of itself, and in fact the game includes a separate trick mode where you have to perform tricks for each wall in order to progress.

at the higher levels the keydron gets more and more complicated and each side makes a different shape, and before too long there’s only one way you can get through a given wall and performing tricks almost becomes like playing with tangrams, not to mention the added complexity of trying to do so in an efficient way so that you can also have time to nab the crystals. the game can get to be very “tricky”, although the hardest part is mastering the rotations of the block so that you can get the shape you’re looking for as quickly as possible. mastering the shapes of the various keydrons can be difficult and off-putting, esp. if you’re not particularly spatially inclined like myself, but it didn’t take too much trial and error with each block to feel more of less comfortable with them.

along with the normal and trick modes, there’s also an endless mode. there are 6 keydrons in all, and the game starts off with three levels for each keydron. after beating the first 15 stages, the final keydron is unlocked, and an additional extra stage is unlocked for each keydron, bringing the total up to 6 x 4 = 24. this is plenty, and with the addition of the other modes as a whole it’s a surprisingly substantial package (although a vs. mode would have been nice). beating the default high scores is definitely a worthwhile challenge, and every stage allows you to submit your score to the world leaderboard which is a nice addition.

all in all this was a surprisingly solid title, and one of the more enjoyable games i’ve played this year. there are some small drawbacks, such as the fact that the shapes the keydrons make when rotated are hard to visualize at times (which has been addressed in the sequel because the parts of the keydrons are different colors). there’s also a problem the review at nintendolife.com mentioned, which is that the space between walls isn’t constant, which means that at times there are some just plain cheap deaths simply because you don’t have enough time to react to the next wall; in these cases you end up just having to memorize what comes next, which feels unfair. i’m also surprised that tricks are scored by how many smaller shapes you use to “paint” the silhouette, with more points given to more moves. this seems counterintuitive to me, since it takes more mental effort to paint the silhouette more efficiently, with less moves. all in all, though, this was a surprisingly solid wiiware title, and one well worth checking out. it sees that the general consensus is that the game is eclipsed by its sequel (which does include a 2-player mode), but i’ll just have to wait and see on that.

make room for these thruspace links:
– page at nintendo.com
– entry at metacritic

prescriptions filled with dr. mario online rx

the GB edition of dr. mario was so interchangeable with the NES version that i thought i would take a peek at another edition i had on hand, dr. mario online rx for wiiware (which, incidentally, is one of the few wiiware titles you can buy outside of nintendo’s eshop via amazon). in doing so i skipped over the SNES and N64 editions, but i was interested in checking out the new co-op and worldwide wi-fi vs. modes.

the review at nintendolife.com provides a run-down of the other modes, which are mostly what you’d expect so i won’t dwell on them too much here, although i appreciated the ability to do a “hard drop” (press up to make a pill drop to the bottom, as in the modern tetris games) and the game also allows you to see the next three pills instead of just the next one. another unique feature is that you can send a demo version to friends so you can battle over wi-fi. i haven’t tried it out yet, but will def. be making use of it. the game is bright and colorful and i appreciated that it doesn’t have the maddening cheapness at the highest levels of difficulty that i mentioned in my previous post and that the viruses are distributed in a reasonable fashion. i also enjoyed the two new-to-me tracks, called “cough” and “sneeze”, which apparently were introduced in the N64 game under different monikers.

the co-op mode is no doubt inspired by the version that appeared as a stylus-controlled bonus in brain age 2. like that version the game features two nice reworkings of the classic “fever” and “chill” tunes, but this game’s mode is designed to be much more fast-paced. the size of the playing field is significantly smaller than the normal modes, and each stage starts off with only one pill dropping down at a time. this quickly increases to two and then three pills at a time, and then things get really hectic. the levels are designed to be short, and i played with someone who actually knew what she was doing and so we ended up alternating turns until the inevitable mad scramble that resulted when three pieces start dropping down at once. this was a fun, if somewhat shallow, diversion and one that would be even more stupid fun with more people.

the wi-fi mode serves as yet another reminder that my video game skillz are sorely lacking when compared to the rest of the world. this shouldn’t be that surprising, since according to the nintendo channel data the average owner of the game has played it for more than 26 hours (now up to more than 27). as with the game boy game, this has motivated me to spend more time mastering the combo system, but i’m going to have to come back to that since for now i think i’ve had my fill of dr. mario madness.

prescriptions filled with these dr. mario online rx links:
– as with other games in the series there’s an ending after beating the highest difficulty at level 20. in this case the credits roll and you see viruses and mario floating around in what is presumably some sort of petri dish.
– the reviews at metacritic seem a bit low, since this is probably the best version of the game yet
– the game was developed by arika, who’s been responsible for many a nintendo remake, including the 3-D classics series
– entry at mariowiki.com
– entry at wikipedia