Every so often, in addition to whatever twaddle I decide to write about game design, I'll take a game I recently played and discuss what I liked about it. Or in some cases, what I really didn't like about it. Expect the latter to show up often in the near future as I play through my expansive backlog of past impulse purchases.I start with Chibi-Robo for the GameCube, a fun little game (does Nintendo make anything else?) about a tiny robot and his efforts to make everyone in his household happy, humans and sentient toys both. Aww.
First off, I have to say I've always loved the use of scale in these types of game. It's fair enough to create some faraway planet or something with its random alien dangers, but I have a soft spot for games designed around something as mundane as a cluttered house really close up, presenting a world fraught with dangers of its own for those of a tiny disposition. Focusing the adventures of our toys around shelves, piles of books, the large tree outside and so on is something we all used to do as kids and continues to entrance us as grown-ups who really should be doing something better with their time. I guess there's also that "everything seemed bigger when we were little" thing too, but it's mostly the toys. Mostly.
For me, this game draws a lot of parallels with Pikmin, the other exceedingly cute GameCube franchise. While gameplay is vastly different, the setting of an otherwise boring landscape filled with trash made beautiful by the juxtaposition of the cartoony graphics of the characters with the hyper-realistic backdrops is just as prevalent. Furthermore, both games - lest you get driven to distraction by your surroundings - are constantly providing you with a "ticking-clock" feature to adhere to. With this title, the ticking-clock is both general (the game runs in half-days, which can be 5, 10 or 15 minutes long in real time) and immediate: your power supply constantly speeds downwards as you perform actions, and the more complex those actions are the more of your power supply is taken away from you. Spending several minutes scaling a large bookcase may come to an abrupt end if you used all your battery life getting up there. And so the game expands from the initial living room to those of the first and second floors and beyond as you increase the capacity of your little battery, plugging yourself into the mains whenever necessary.
A couple more notes about this game: The cast is wildly eccentric, as you'd expect from a game with such a bizarre premise, and fixing all their problems becomes an engrossing ordeal for you and the little robot. Solving peoples' problems awards you with their sticker for your collection, and I just love any inclusion of a collection subquest to follow after the main story is completed (I'll make a future update about the acquired taste of collection subquests). I also noticed the music, and whenever I do it usually means it's either really good or really bad, and this time it was really good. The background music ranged from the comical to the atmospheric (even poignant, when the sad tale of the family's now-defunct Giga-Robo is revealed to you piece-by-piece), with music cleverly interjected into the sound effects in a style similar to Rez: Attempting to dig into solid ground with your digging tool (a spoon) creates a classic piano noise, which strung together with repeated digging creates a melody. The sinister heavy metal music that signifies a Spydor (the protagonists of the game) appearance is accentuated with the power chords they make whenever they walk around.
Overall, I was impressed with this game both as a gamer and a designer (and it's usually either/or). It's growing up with games like this which put me on this rather temperamental career path in the first place.
