Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Matthew Mumma

Using tilting Wii’s motion sensitive Wii Remote with poise and precision, players must seek to navigate their favourite cute and quirky balls, each with their own look and varying benefits, through complex 3D mazes. Therefore no complicated button combinations are necessary, the tactile controls allow players to tip and tilt their environment in all directions, even upside-down to 180 degrees - making the game intuitive and easy for anyone to pick up and play, whilst still remaining challenging and addictive.

I remember the days of the large arcade game, Marble Madness, with its hand eating trackball and monotone “mazes” to guide your marble through. The game was fun yet somewhat painful.  So when I was handed the Kororinpa: Marble Mania I couldn’t wait to revive my nostalgia bone. I knew that the Wii had no trackball that I could pinch my hand in, but I wondered how well I’d be able to control things with the Wiimote. Would multiplayer stand up to the fun crowd shouting days of yore? Well in no time I slid the CD into my Wii and got busy.

The graphics in this game are not what it is about. However, the graphics are sharp enough to be highly functional.  Whether you’re guiding your marble down a street, over a branch, or around an apple, you know where you are and your directions available. Elements of the themes are well done and detailed; roads have appropriate lines painted on them and have stop signs in the right places, the dessert puzzles have scrumptious looking cookies and cakes with all the toppings, natural puzzles are complete with flowers, trees and even bugs. They’re nicely done and clean, but not overly distracting from your mission: to guide the marble to the red crystals and pick up the green crystals for bonuses.

There are different marbles unlocked during your progress. You start off with your basic Cat’s eye marble, but quickly pickup marbles that look like cats, dogs, penguins, gumdrops, gas tanks, and many more. The starting marble is big and detailed, and the others appropriately convey what they’re trying to represent. After all, they do have to maintain a relatively round shape, so skewing of characteristics is assumed. There are more details than the appearance of the marbles that make them more fun anyway, but we’ll look at that in the other sections. The bottom line is that the graphics are clean, concise, smooth, and not a distracting spectacle.

You start the game with a single, non-descript, jingle playing in the background. It’s a fairly generic tune that you’ll barely notice as you’re guiding your marble around the basic concept puzzle. Very quickly you earn additional tracks that are still barely noticeable, but offer plenty of variety. I largely played each puzzle with the Random track setting so the background music never became tedious. Yet, I didn’t grow fond of any particular jingle either.

The greatest sounds are of the marbles themselves. The puppy marble yips and yaps as it rolls over the map, and even makes startled barks as takes a fall to a lower level. The gas tank marble clanks and pings as it bounces off walls and floors. The frog makes ribbit sounds and croaks. Each of over 20 marbles has a unique sound scheme to it and they’re all fun and engaging. My kids could spend hours just bouncing the marble back and forth to listen in. Hilarity ensues.

The control system of the Wii is, by now, legendary. The Wiimote allows the user such control that the marble may well as be on the back of your hand. The reaction is swift and clean and responsive to your moves so managing momentum is hardly a chore. Different marbles have different handling characteristics such as being heavier, faster, or slower than the Cat’s Eye standard. Thus, different marbles give a different feel for the road which makes puzzles that were child’s play earlier much more challenging.

You do have to keep a steady hand. It is not too hard to do, but if you’re engaged in a lengthy session it can become a bit tiring to keep the controller level. Some of the levels become a bit mind-warping in that sometimes what were once walls are now floors so holding the Wiimote on its side and still guiding your marble around corners requires some deep spatial thinking. At more than one point you’re actually holding the controller upside down, and yet you don’t have to reverse your thought processes. Even episdn umop, leaning the controller forward still moves the marble forward and so on. It gets tricky, but it is pretty intuitive.

The two-player game is good, but the second player kind of gets the shaft because he or she has to use the nunchuk to play. Its round surface is a bit trickier to keep level, and being bound to player 1 by the cable can be a bit jostling. Plus, the buttons are positioned on the nunchuk in a way to make them tempting to press. This doesn’t do anything except maybe pause things inappropriately. I can forgive them if they wanted to make the game available for 2 players without forcing them to buy a whole other controller setup; but, really, both players should have the same advantages of the main controller and be allowed to remain autonomous.

The first 30 minutes I spent on this game I had a blast. The puzzles were pretty easy, but I was unlocking things left and right and was tickled about the whole experience. However, it was not long until the puzzles became nearly tedious and short lived. For the majority, they were quite quick and simple, or they were sanity-testing efforts of mayhem and sheer luck. I growled and cursed several levels until I managed to get through them feeling like hours had passed when, in fact, my longest time of completion was less than 7 minutes. The clock never stops running once it starts until you complete the level so we’re not talking about large gaps while the level reloaded or anything. If you fell off the map, it wasn’t just a couple seconds before you were able to start over. I had trouble holding the Wiimote still, my nerves were racked, and I was getting more frustrated.

That’s when my kids took over and the joy resumed! Listening to my children cheer and giggle at the noises their kitten marble made while they worked their way around was pure joy. Even though they made mistakes and fell to their doom they were happy to keep going. My 6-year-old daughter was delighted at the challenges and even got me into the multi-player aspects. The split screen wasn’t too hard to deal with except a bit when the maps were tall. It was nothing impossible to deal with, and overall a pleasure. The camaraderie in the MP was fun, and it turned into a joy for the whole family. This is probably not a puzzle game for bachelors or bachelorettes – unless you’re throwing a lot of video game parties --, but young kids and families should not overlook this title.

There are plenty of options and hidden parts of the game to keep you coming back for a bit. Kororinpa: Marble Mania is as much fun to play as it is hard to pronounce. It doesn’t seem like it took a whole lot to put the game together, but the performance cannot be denied. My children will play this game until the batteries die if I left them, and it is a joy to watch them do so. With 50 levels, a couple dozen different marbles, and a few secrets the game will take a while to try everything, but each level is only a few minutes long so it won’t take forever. The game was a joy to watch my children play. I enjoyed the 1-player experience for a while, but quickly tired of some of the tedium. The multiplayer is a good bit of fun with minor limitations. The kids seem to love it, and I think it offers some nice lessons in dexterity, problem-solving, and critical thinking. As a party game there are quite a few opportunities for friends to challenge each other and have a good time.

Gaming Trend Score

80

1. Graphics: 75
2. Audio: 85
3. Controls: 92
4. Gameplay: 80
5. Value/Replay: 70
6. OVERALL:80