Art Style: ROTOHEX • WiiWare • Skip • www
In 2006, just as Nintendo was preparing to launch the last iteration of its Game Boy Advance hardware, the Micro, it also unveiled its most brazenly unique series of games, particularly for such a traditional company. Known collectively as bit Generations, the series was a collection of seven experimental games that it hoped would brand the Micro as much a lifestyle device as a games machine.
Put on display in trendy boutiques, each game devoted as much or more cartridge space to musical collaborations with artists like Cornelius, and each presented a unique mini-game design from traffic directing abstract shapes to playing by means of pure-audio, with little or no on-screen graphics to guide you.
Though we never saw the series in the West (despite an early ESRB rating), thankfully Nintendo has seen fit to use the series as a flagship WiiWare (and forthcoming DSiWare) franchise, now called Art Style. Dialhex, now known as Rotohex, was one of the most traditional of those puzzle designs, but by the same token one of its most approachable, and — of the three released to the U.S. so far — still the best.
Bangai-O Spirits • DS • Treasure • www
Developers don’t get much more cult- than Treasure. Its decades of shooter and beat-em-up design have earned it one of the most dedicated of followings, and with good reason: nearly all of its games, even at their most maliciously difficult, are triple distilled pure game design joy. Bangai-O Spirits is both. Perhaps most easily (and cheekily) described as LittleBigPlanet meets about-a-hundred-simultaneous-explosions-at-once, Spirits is a sandbox of sidescrolling mech shooting that lets the player design (along with some one hundred of Treasure’s own) their own levels.
It’s merciless from the start, but always happy to throw in some relic of gaming’s past (enemies leaving behind fruit when killed, for instance) or other unlikely curveball (baseball bats and giant soccer balls, say) to keep the levity high.
The greatest trick up its sleeve? Rather than messing about with the saddle-weight of friend codes and servers, sharing created levels is done via audio-encoding the level to record via line-out and read in by placing a headphone pad over the DS’s mic, meaning it’s entirely possible to have an iTunes album of levels.
Braid • Xbox Live Arcade • Number None • www
This one hardly needs much introduction, having become something of 2008’s art-game champion. That’s both by nature of David Hellman’s intricate painterly design, and by creator Jon Blow’s own (and questionable, in certain circles) decision to embed the game in melodramatic lost-love expository.
Like it or not (I did, for the record), beneath the pretense was the ‘two’ of game mechanic innovation’s one-two punch that started with Portal‘s earlier swing. Each world held a different time-warping trick, from simply being able to rewind mistaken actions, to literally scrubbing time like a tape-head by simply walking forward and back, that masterfully subverted traditional Mario-esque 2D platforming.
Castle Crashers • Xbox Live Arcade • The Behemoth • www
Don Bluth would have been proud if his Dragon’s Lair crystal ball could have shown him that some 20 years in the future, games really would be living cartoons. That’s the promise that Behemoth first started making good on with their earlier shooter Alien Hominid, but it was truly brought to life with beat-em-up Castle Crashers.
Nicking all of the best parts of previous co-op arcade beat-em-up design (including traces of the above Treasure), mixing it with a light RPG leveling system, and dressing it in adorably vivid vector-drawn armaments, Behemoth have formed their own branch of What The Future Of Games Should Look Like, alongside its photorealistic 3D brothers.
Crosswords/2Across • iPhone • Standalone, Inc/Eliza Block • www / www
Though the DS has seen its own slew of crosswords games (including One More Go’s beloved New York Times Crosswords), the launch of the iPhone saw two near simultaneous releases that, depending on your own UI tweak preferences (both are too similar to choose just one here), will likely be the last digital crossword game you’ll ever buy.
While only the most dedicated will ever see their way through the thousand-plus puzzles in the DS’s NYT, both Crosswords and 2Across have — with the ability to download and display puzzles from a huge number of newspapers across the world both archived and daily for the foreseeable future — ensured that they’ll never go obsolete. There’s simply no better way to enjoy the “sinful waste” of this “primitive form of mental exercise.”
