Archive for October, 2009

Didn’t play much last night. Had a bath, watched Stargate Universe, Electric Dreams and some other bits and pieces, didn’t find much time for gaming of any sort. I did, however, have a few games of Soosiz over the course of the evening. I was trying a blue coin level, which are bonus levels where the aim is to collect all the blue coins within a time limit.

In this one, you have to make bits of the level appear and disappear by jumping on buttons, but the changes only last a set amount of time. I can only get so far, because there’s one section where the part of the level I’ve just made appear suddenly disappears with no warning. I suspect there might be some sound effects letting me know what’s happening, but as I play with the sound off that’s not very helpful.

When the level disappears, I disappear along with it, until I press the jump button, suddenly reappear and then plummet to my doom.

It’s not as annoying as it sounds, though. I know I’ve just got to work out how to do that section more quickly. I’ll keep plugging away.

I’ve got no idea where the title’s from. It may be the main character, or the world or something, but I didn’t pay an awful lot of attention to the opening text screens. Something to do with a happy place being taken over by an ancient evil, leaving me the only little round chap capable of saving the world. That sort of thing.

The story’s not especially important.

When it comes to the game, though, you’ve basically got a Super Mario Galaxy-inspired 2D platformer. Lots of little planetoids floating in space, all with their own gravity. Up becomes down, down becomes up. It’s all very confusing at first, but it becomes second nature surprisingly quickly, helped by a difficulty curve that appears to be close to perfection. I’m on the second world now and the game has been getting harder ever so gradually. You don’t really notice until you go back to one of the first levels and scoff at its simplicity.

It’s really very lovely. It looks great, with a Rolando/Loco Roco vibe and the controls are perfect, though getting used to the exact placement of the left and right buttons took five or ten minutes to get down. It doesn’t save your progress within a level if you quit out for any reason, but levels are short enough for that not to be an issue.

Overall, it’s a great game and one of the App Store highlights… but there’s a fly in the ointment.

The game commits one of the worst sins possible, something no game should ever do in the twenty-first century. Something that had me growling and almost giving up.

It has boss fights at the end of certain levels… without a checkpoint before the boss. So if the boss kills you, then you have to go back and do the whole level again. This was irritating the first time it happened, but later in the game when the difficulty of both the boss and the preceding level is higher, I think it might be fatal. I hope not, but I’m very worried.