Format: Xbox360 | Genre: Platformer | Publisher: Twisted Pixel | Developer: Twisted Pixel | Release date: 22/07/09 | RRP: 800MSP

By Greg Giddens

There has been a very noticeable shift in XBLA games being released recently. Each one seems to be taking a positive step towards a more resounding gaming experience, and a step away from the more traditional, casual arcade experience.

‘Splosion Man, one of the most enjoyable and unique games to surface in some time, is testament to that. Its quirky humour, fast pace and challenging action contribute towards a title that stands out amongst the arcade crowd, and proves that the platformer is not by any means a dead genre.

//Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire
For an unknown reason, your character is imbued with the ability to explode in a laboratory. He must then escape the confines of the lab, killing scientists and avoiding their traps along the way. He’s a delightfully deranged protagonist, with crazed ramblings and goofy expressions, and the whole game has a cartoon-esque feel, making it sinister and welcoming at the same time. But you mustn’t be fooled by the unassuming aesthetic, as underneath the simple platformer premise is a challenging and enduring experience.

Simplicity is initially what ‘Splosion Man is all about. You have one move – exploding – and with it you jump, attack enemies and interact with the environment. The premise seems simple – traverse each level with the aid of explosions – but you’ll soon find that the initially simplicity is an illusion, as the puzzles and obstacles soon demand much more from the player, providing a challenging and intriguing experience.

You can ‘splode up to three times in a row before having to reignite yourself by walking or sliding on a surface. The majority of the time, you’ll need to explode off walls to reach higher areas; you’ll also need to explode near barrels to propel yourself to even greater heights. The obstacles become progressively more challenging as the game moves forward, with multiple barrel explosions and specific directional control being required to complete each level.

Great thought has been put into each of these to keep the game varied. Unfortunately, the locations themselves lack the same variety, so the background template remains similar throughout the stages. There are only thee of these stages in total, but each consists of 16 to 18 levels, so there’s plenty to keep you busy – and the levels are designed for speed runs, so the time trail mode adds even more replayability.

The well-designed multiplayer elements further add to ‘Splosion Man’s replay value. Instead of being a tacked-on extra, it’s a resounding addition, with 50 entirely different levels based on co-operation with up to three more ‘splosion men. It’s one of the best uses of co-op multiplayer around, but it certainly tries the foundation of a friendship as the puzzles involved require perfect timing from all players. The challenge of the puzzles could lead towards frustration, but thanks to multiple well placed checkpoints this is minimised. Add to that the fast pace of the game, and often you won’t even have time to become irritated.

//Humour is a reason gone mad
‘Splosion Man’s ‘2.5D’ presentation is perfect for a platformer such as this, and the cartoon aesthetic and excellent music are complimented by a dynamic camera that zooms in and changes angle to provide the best view of the current obstacle. Unfortunately, it does occasionally misbehave, giving you a less than helpful view – but this is rare, and doesn’t really make the obstacles any harder.

The game design’s plenty unique, but it’s the humour tied to the game that really brings it home. The main character is insane, as is the trio of bosses, and some of the songs are hilarious. It’s a shame the experience has to end, which is the only real problem with ‘Splosion Man. Three bosses and only three very samey locations just isn’t enough, regardless of the amount of levels. The amusing treats really enrich the game and make the whole thing beam with personality, but more would have been nice.

Still, Twisted Pixels have created something really special with ‘Splosion Man, and have pushed the boundaries of what we expect from XBLA games even further. A few more locations and more bosses would have made the game exceptional, but what we have here is still one of the most resounding arcade games released so far this year.

8/10

What does this score mean?

By Daniel Lipscombe

Over the years, there have been many attempts at dethroning Sonic and Mario as the ultimate mascots of gaming.

Crash Bandicoot tried, with little success. Lara Croft has only made it so far, and even the little dragon Spyro had a try. It takes a lot to topple these giants of platforming history. Maybe they will never be bettered, but in my heart there has always been one other champion: the sorely forgotten Robbit the robot rabbit from Jumping Flash!

Nintendo and SEGA’s lovable characters were born in a simple age, and with equally simple design they entered the hearts and minds of gamers for their memorable appearances. They were the champions of the 16-bit era – but those days were fading; it was only a matter of time before the 32-bit era needed a new figurehead. How about a large robot rabbit that shoots lasers and fireworks from his paws, in order to prevent Baron Aloha from taking the planet as his own private holiday resort?

//Jump around
Jumping Flash! burst onto Sony’s PlayStation in 1995, bringing with it a new method of play. A platform game at its roots, the premise of Jumping Flash! was a simple one. You were tasked with exploring a map looking for lettered jet pods that spell the word EXIT. Once these were collected, you could head for the exit jump pad and fly off to the next level. Add in simple controls that were still attached to the 16-bit days, using only a few buttons, and you had a game that was easy to pick up and play.

There are many reasons as to why Robbit should have been a great icon, mainly stemming from the mechanics of the game itself. Yes, Jumping Flash! is a standard platform game, but it’s all played from first-person perspective. One of the first games to attempt such a hybrid, it really was ahead of its time. Looking through the eyes of this cyber rabbit and seeing the quirky enemies that inhabit the gaming world was a joy to me as a youngster. The creatures that guard the levels’ secrets still have a charm today – albeit a rather pixelated and jagged one.

It’s not just the first-person perspective that gave so much to this title. Previous platform games had geared towards your standard left-to-right affair, but Exact Co. gave us more. They gave us verticality. Levels would sprawl upwards as well as outwards, and Robbit could soar through the air with his triple jump. Using the unique viewpoint, he would even look downwards so you could judge your landing. This was the first time in my life that a videogame gave me a sense of freedom.

This freedom was amplified by the feeling that I was playing something unique, something new. With quintessential Japanese flavours sprinkled throughout, Jumping Flash! featured great character designs. It’s unlikely I’ll ever forget the MuuMuus – the white, asexual creatures with five limbs and palm trees on their heads. They’re the henchmen for Baron Aloha and control the bosses in each of the six worlds. At the time, this style of design seemed fresh to me. But while such an aesthetic should have been what shot Robbit to stardom, it could, in fact, have been his downfall.

//Hedge(hog)ing its bets
The jump from 2D to 3D was a big step for many gamers, and while Jumping Flash! was critically well-received it was sadly overlooked commercially. Perhaps it was too adventurous; perhaps people saw it as a desperate plea to become a pillar in the gaming world. And while the designs were different, there was a definite sense of déjà vu. A an evil scientist as a villain, who surrounded himself with weird creatures to do his bidding, jumping from one clichéd world to the next – was it all a bit too… Sonic?

Not only were you exploring worlds similar to our blue hedgehog friend – a volcano world, an Aztec world and a metropolis world – but the bonus stages were even accessed by jumping into a floating ring. Add to this that each enemy that was killed spewed coins to boost your score, and perhaps people felt they were being duped.

But beyond all the design points and the comparisons to others, Robbit was a hero. Each moment in Jumping Flash! felt like a Saturday morning cartoon. With colourful images, expansive worlds and characters that felt like predecessors to Pokémon, controlling Robbit felt like I was reaching into my TV and playing with the cartoons I loved.  Even the soundtrack, supplied by the late Takeo Miratsu, added to the hyperactive, early-morning adventure style that was so well known on television in the early nineties.

Robbit will always be dear to me for these many reasons. I recently ventured back to Jumping Flash! after downloading it on PSN. Fearful of what I might find, it was with trepidation that I picked up the controller and jumped into the TV again. It still felt as joyous as ever before. Yes, the graphics had aged, but it felt like playing with an old Thundercats toy that was covered in dust and grime from the chocolate bars of an easier time. I still felt the freedom, and it was still great fun. Robbit will always be my hero.

Kurt Cobain kissed the barrel of a shotgun in April of that year. The Tutsis and Hutus were turning Rwanda into a hell on earth worthy of Bosch. OJ Simpson was elbow deep in the blood of a crime for which he would never be punished and, perhaps worst of all, the BBC had commissioned a second series of the Nicholas Lyndhurst time travel comedy Goodnight Sweetheart.

Yet for an awkward, oddly bloated 12-year-old with no friends – not to mention a burgeoning interest in my parents’ drinks cabinet and the kind of vaguely pornographic European art house films found late at night on Channel Four – there was only a pervasive sense of restless boredom. Aye friends, I was as adrift and rudderless as a ghost ship at sail upon the high seas of pre-pubescence. No wonder I would soon find myself staring into a morrow as cold and black as a shark’s eyes, with only an inevitable asphyxiwank death in a hotel cupboard offering any future respite from the sheer maddening desperation loosed upon me from the moment of birth. But hey, that’s for my therapist and blank-eyed, chain-smoking, sham-marriage wife to deal with.

//Peep show
Amongst the numerous high profile titles of the time, such as Earthworm Jim and Virtual Fighter 2, I was to fall in love with a decidedly flawed gem of a game: Blizzard Entertainment’s Blackthorne. The game owes a lot to 1989’s Prince of Persia, with its horizontal scrolling gameplay replete with lots of jumping onto ledges and pulling the main character onto high precipices. Yet for me Prince of Persia was always something of a bloodless exercise, a kind of virtual dry-hump that failed to offer anything like the grubby delights present in the burgeoning host of more adult games, ones that weren’t afraid to throw a healthy dose of mindless violence and narcissism into the mix.

Indeed, Blackthorne mainly consists of the gun-toting eponymous hero, looking uncannily like Escape From New York-era Kurt Russell, dispatching a host of identikit baddies in one of those bewildering fantasy environments, in which the inhabitants seem to have mastered laser technology and inter-dimensional travel yet appear to have built most of their finest structures from mud and sticks. Furthermore, the Land of Tuul (I’m not making this up) is exclusively populated by men, so Christ knows how the hell they aim to procreate in this Turkish prison-style nether world. But once past the fact that the whole premise is about as convincing as David Mitchell’s ‘common man’ voice, it is hard not to be drawn in to the game’s satisfyingly repetitive problem solving and bomb-blasting hijinks.

Let’s be honest: Blackthorne has many flaws, most noticeably the frankly impossible-to-kill end-of-game villain Sarlac. And compared to the richly textured and realised world of a game like Donkey Kong Country, which was also released that year, the whole thing seems painfully one-dimensional and oddly restrictive. In fact Blackthorne is perhaps a genuine contender for one of the last non-ironic, straight-up platformers that saw frustrating and infuriatingly circular gameplay as a virtue. It’s an example of a more primitive time, when Lou Diamond Philips was considered Hollywood Box Office gold, Michael Barrymore and John Leslie were light entertainment royalty, and the music of Britpop was viewed as some kind of positive revivalist fun as opposed to the defiling of an already knackered musical blueprint by cynical, coked-up halfwits with Rickenbackers. And though we may look back upon this time with knowing smirks and embarrassed guffaws, there will always be a special place reserved in my heart for that roguish vigilante Blackthorne and the unforgettable land of Tuul.

Format: PS3 / PC | Genre: Platformer/RPG | Publisher: Nobilis | Developer: FrozenByte | Release date: 03/07/09 | RRP: £19.99-£29.99

By Lewis Denby
Within seconds of Trine, you know you’re in for a visual feast.  Rarely has so much care been put into creating a distinctive, tangible aesthetic.  Trine’s world is a marvellous twist on traditional fantasy, with cogs and wheels and gritty steampunk merging seamlessly with the rolling hills and towering castles of this universe.

A three-dimensional yet side-scrolling adventure, Trine also masterfully combines a variety of genres to create a thoroughly satisfying experience.  Cosmetically, it’s a platformer: you jump and bash your way from left to right, across a series of levels that slowly unravel a competent yet sadly uninspiring story of wizardry and terrible curses.  But it’s also part-RPG, with collectable experience vials allowing you to boost your characters’ abilities in a variety of individual manners.  And it’s also, significantly, an excellent physics-puzzler.

//Come together
Bound together by the eponymous magical orb, your trio of characters – a wizard, a thief and a knight – must work together out of a single physical body.  You can switch between each character freely, but only one can present in the world at once.  Each character’s abilities are crucial to certain sections of the game, and they must regularly work together to bypass gargantuan obstacles along the way.

The thief carries a bow and arrow, as well as a grappling hook for latching onto and mantling high ledges, or swinging across gaping chasms.  The knight is tough, covered in armour and holding a sword and shield.  The wizard can’t fight directly, but he has the power to summon and manipulate objects around the world.

Trine’s finest moments are those which encourage you to experiment with the characters’ abilities, in order to overcome some of the more elaborate environmental problems you’ll face on your journey.  It’s an incredibly tactile game, with plenty of object-levitation, box-stacking and rope-swinging to occupy your stay in this evil land.  Experimentation is key, and you’re almost never punished for your ingenious ideas.  Indeed, most puzzles have a number of possible solutions, and a multitude of routes around them.

Levelling up provides you with new skills to utilise in such situations, and although the role-playing is fairly lightweight, it’s an invaluable addition that contributes to Trine’s surprising depth and malleability. There are also a number of treasure chests to be chanced upon – some in plain view, others obstructed or hidden away – which provide new items for your trio of characters to utilise.

//Hacked to pieces
It’s all surprisingly action-heavy, and this is where it begins to irritate.  Only slightly – much of the combat is meaty and satisfying, with gloriously animated skeletons crumbling under the weight of your knight’s attack.  But the bats, introduced after a couple of hours, are an unimpressive idea – as flying enemies generally are in games.  They get in the way and acutely annoy, particularly as they’re so hard to hit.  The result, invariably, is taking unnecessary damage, and hotfooting it back to the last checkpoint to heal up.

Elsewhere, boss encounters fail to impress, amounting mainly to a few goes at button-mashing your way to victory.  There are also a few odd moments in which skeletal foes get stuck on scenery or half-disappear through the ground, removing some of the visual shine.  More awkward than anything is the tendency for Trine to throw wave upon wave of enemies at you when, really, you just want to get on with the puzzle solving.  It’s primarily a game about the environment, and cluttering it with incessant combat scenarios comes across as an unfortunate misstep.

Still, it’s telling that – despite these problems – Trine remains so marvellously enjoyable.  It’s clever without pretension, quietly confident, and brimming with visual flair.  The bizarrely hidden co-op mode, in which three players can work together simultaneously in the world, adds yet another dimension to the fun.  And while the price tag is relatively high (and, oddly, considerably more on the PC than the PS3), it’s a game that charms, excites and invigorates at nearly every turn.  A whimsical, valiant effort.

8/10

What does this score mean?

By Graham Jones

I don’t get on with mushrooms. Never have. While I find their flavour unpleasant and their texture revolting, it’s the fact that eating them involves putting a fungus in my mouth that really puts me off.

Regardless of this, I tried to approach Red Fly Studio’s side-scrolling platformer with an open mind, determined not to let the fungal nature of the game’s subject matter affect my overall judgement. I didn’t need to worry however, as mycophobia is nothing compared to my hatred of seriously flawed game design.

//Magnified
Mushroom Men: Rise of the Fungi follows the battles and adventures of several different tribes of mushroom awoken from their slumber by a mysterious dust which fell from a meteor as it passed through our Solar System. The player takes control of one of the mushroom tribesmen and begins a fairly standard 2.5D platform adventure doing battle with all manner of insects and members of rival (and invariably evil) tribes.

The game looks pretty good on the DS. The characters and foregrounds are all rendered in full 3D and the backgrounds are highly detailed with fantastic lighting effects. It seems that this is where the developers made a huge mistake, however. In order to show off their well-crafted creations in this fungal world, the game’s creators have positioned the camera too close to the action. It’s zoomed in so far that your field of vision within the game is too small. This is then coupled with badly designed levels, hidden platforms and poor collision detection, which all come together to provide some of the most frustrating and unfair instant deaths I’ve experienced since the original Prince of Persia.

//So unfair
Combat is made interesting due to the ability to customise weapons from items you find lying around the levels. For example, a toothpick can be used on its own as a sword but combine it with a wooden stick and you’ve got yourself a spear, giving your attack a greater range. Unfortunately, when it comes to actually using these items in combat, the controls are revealed to be clunky and unresponsive, which combines nicely with some truly horrific collision detection to produce yet more ‘pull your hair out and throw your console at the wall’ frustration.

These poor choices in game design remind me of one of Shigeru Miyamoto’s rules he gives his teams when creating a new videogame: the player must feel that the game is fair. If I die, I need to be satisfied that it was my fault that I died so I can learn from my mistake and move on as a better and more experienced gamer. While playing Mushroom Men, there have been far too many occasions when my character has perished and the blame can be squarely placed on the poor game mechanics. On top of this, many of the checkpoints scattered throughout the game are positioned next to instant-death pits, which means there’s a high chance that you’ll be dying after just one button press. Not good.

After all of this, battling through the frustration just doesn’t reward the player. The game is ultimately a run-of-the mill action-platformer, made almost unplayable by the lack of thought put in by the developers which has resulted in an incredibly frustrating title that fails to be fun. This Mushroom Man is not a fun guy (I’m sorry, I really couldn’t help it).

3/10

What does this score mean?

We’re all familiar with the cult classics. Unusual, quirky little games, hidden away from the public eye but adored by the select few who stumble upon them; niche releases with a very specific appeal, shunned by those without the necessary mindset. We’re talking about the Pathologics, the Fahrenheits and The Paths. The art games that appeal to a select few, and divide opinion something rotten.

Braid is the art game that appeals to everyone. In a sense, it absolutely screams “cult classic”, but its gameplay is accessible and invigorating enough to transcend such status. The glowing reviews and stratospheric marks for the 360 version, released through Live Arcade last August, surely went some way to popularising this oddball indie adventure. But really, most credit has to go to developer Jonathan Blow, for his astounding aesthetic direction and tight, evolutionary game design.

Braid proves that games don’t have to be inaccessible to make an artistic statement. They don’t have to obstrue their mechanics or stray too far from the beaten path in order to speak to their audience. They can be pure and traditional – albeit with a clever spin – and use that to their advantage. There’s nothing at all abstract about these 2D, side-scrolling planes, or the enemies that plod around their platforms. There’s nothing immediately unfamiliar about the lost princess story that dominates the main bulk of the game. But in Braid’s conventionality lies a compelling subtext, a deeper layer of meaning, and a tragic and haunting story of obsession and regret. Braid is clever.

Certainly, this side of Braid will divide opinion, and has done extensively on the Xbox. The narrative is fragmented and ambiguous, and its refusal to stick to anything like a linear path will be offputting to some. It’s presented primarily via a series of memories between levels, snapshots of lead character Tim’s life prior to the events of the game. And it’s at least heavily implied that these in-game events aren’t real at all, but a fantasy-orientated representation of his blinkered fixation on achieving his goals, without considering the wider implications. It’s not until the closing moments that the story reaches coherency at all, and even then the conclusion is wide open to interpretation. It could be that the PC audience, more traditionally sympathetic to abstract expression in videogames, is more receptive of this than a large portion of its 360 players, but it’s still not for everyone. Which is in no way to say one opinion is more valid than the other. For me, the ethereal beauty of Braid’s story is what lifts it into the dizzy heights of wonderfulness, but do be wary of the mark at the bottom of the page. It’s a 90 for me. It won’t necessarily be for you.

Equally, though, it’s such a high score because there’s something here for even the most traditionalist gamer. Ignoring the plot strands completely still leaves a brilliantly stimulating puzzle-platform game, one that never outstays its welcome and rarely stagnates. Intrinsically linked with the game’s theme of hindsight, its primary mechanic is the manipulation of time, which allows the elaborate environmental puzzles to be solved.

Initially, the sole available ability is rewinding to correct mistakes. You might be forgiven for assuming it’s the same principle as a number of other releases, most notably Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, but Braid sports a couple of keen differences. Firstly, the whole game completely revolves around time control, with the platforming being almost incongruous to anything else. Secondly, as Braid progresses through its five main stages, the laws dramatically change. In the second section, time appears to stand still, before you realise moving to the right causes time to move forward, and moving left erases everything you’ve done. In the third, rewinding causes a split in the continuum, releasing a ghostly representation of Tim into the world, resulting in a bizarre teamwork session between actions past and present.  Things get progressively stranger until the final level, unlockable by solving all previous puzzles, which completely defies expectation and sets up a remarkable twist in the tale.

This constant re-writing of the rulebook means regularly casting aside everything you’ve learnt so far. Complacency never hits, and the difficulty remains consistent throughout. There’s one section of really, moronically stupid design: a couple of levels involve races against the clock where certain items reject your time-manipulation and continue in motion regardless, and failing to achieve your goals in the meantime means starting the level from scratch. It means you’re often unsuccessful because of your lack of platforming prowess, not your ability to think logically around the problem, which is idiotic in what is essentially a puzzle game. (UPDATE: Since this review went live, I’ve been contacted by a few people – including the developer – who suggest I may not have quite understood this collection of puzzles.  While having the mindset explained to me does soften their blow (no pun intended) a little, I maintain that forcing the player to start the level again if he/she makes a mistake is a design choice that leads only to frustration.) But, fortunately, it’s all over quickly enough. The rest is delectably good. It’s always challenging, often completely bizarre, but when you work out what to do things slot beautifully into place.

The one overarching problem with Braid is one that’s only so apparent because the rest is so ferociously good. Though the time mechanics are clearly linked with the narrative statements, the rest of the gameplay is not. That it’s a platformer would be completely irrelevant, if it weren’t for the frequent references to Super Mario Bros. This wouldn’t be such an issue if the story were presented differently, but there’s a part of me that wishes it were all more closely tied in. There’s nothing that suggests Braid wouldn’t work just as well – if not better – poured into a different mould entirely: a mould in which the story could play out within the game, not during its intervals. As it is, it’s the only thing that threatens Braid’s status as a truly remarkable piece of work, a revelatory example of storytelling and design.

There’s something for everyone, and that’s important to remember. Whether you gel with the story or dismiss it as pretentious twaddle is immaterial when the game beneath it is so enjoyable. It’s also slightly cheaper than the price the 360 version emerged at, meaning the admittedly disappointing length doesn’t sting quite so much. At just a few hours, Braid certainly left me aching for more, but perhaps that’s testament to its quality more than anything else. It’s a triumphant achievement for its indie developer, and its PC release will hopefully pave the way for more to come. A shining example of how artistic expression and pure, unabridged entertainment don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

9/10