NGamer Issue 7

"Happily teaching you to play around with electricity. Tsk."

Perhaps we'll get used to the name. Although we honestly don't know what was wrong with Elebits1. Still. However you pronounce it, Eledees always spells the same thing: Brilliant and Imaginative Fun That's Tailor-Made For The Wii Remote.

As expected, Eledees has turned out a bit like Katamari Damacy - the disturbingly happy PS2 game of rolling the entire world up into a snowballing spheroid. Because it's all about scale. Starting with an object-levitating laser that can barely lift a nail, you gradually build power until you're dragging air balloons out of the sky, throwing buses into the air - and casually swatting away giant bits of scenery that, back in the gurning-over-nails days, were the architecture that actually shaped the level. It sounds fun - and it really is.

Make a mess

You've got the Eledees to thank. You need to suck up a certain number, Ghostbusters-style, to pass each level. And for the most part, they hide. They hide good. So levels turn into a messy treasure hunt, where you move a vase and uncover a snoozing blue Eledee, or get yellow Eledees gushing from a lampshade like a fruit machine jackpot. Later levels - knowing what's good for them - play fast and loose with the rules. So you're picking out fully visible Eledees in an eerie gravity-free world of levitating furniture, or nabbing some particularly excitable beggars before they knock a vase over and smash through a breakages limit that's been imposed on the level.

So you need to turn playrooms and kitchens upside down in Eledees. Of course you do. But, by god, is it fun making a mess. By the time a level's over, you're left with a bomb site of discarded drawers, tipped-over tellies and upturned beds. It's every kid's dream to have permission to reduce a tidy room to "looking like a pigsty" (as Mum always called it). Here, you get to turn an entire town into a knee-deep carpet of junk, tearing through the place like a whirlwind to knock tankers off their wheels and throw trees into the air. The framerate might chug in places, but you honestly won't care. Wii remote aiming is a bit fiddly with smaller items, and door handle-twisting is a pain, but so what? It's still tummy-leapingly enjoyable, and, despite Eledees' limited number of locations, there's a decent array of challenges.

Slow moving

But we're not sold on all its ideas. Those zero-gravity bits outstay their welcome. The boss levels - bunging a beam at enraged, engorged Eledees - are awful. And the game could've done with moving a bit faster. It seems to take hours of kitchen sink drama (and bathroom toilet, and bedroom cupboard) for the beam to finally yank open the door to the fresh air of the yard. Which means frustration often sets in when the clock runs down, because you got stuck behind a fallen table; or fried by the odd little tanks that litter some areas; or slowed down by a less-than-obvious Eledee hiding place.

Still, by the time you reach the later levels - where you've got the power to hand-turn a fairground carousel, and 50ft tin robots are blasting into space around you for some unexplained reason - most of Eledees' problems will be forgiven. It's a shame the whole game is set at night, making for a slightly claustrophobic journey. But hours will have passed in the blink of an Eledee's starry eye, and you'll have formed a genuine phobia of the mutant knee-high, tantrum-liable bear-monsters that haunt the later stages.

With its messing-about-in-a-sandbox feel, and unlockable variations of each level that happily hand you a full-powered laser and no breakage/noise limits, Eledees feels like a game that's had some thought and love put into it. And nowhere is that better demonstrated than in the construction kit: a fully fledged level builder that unlocks as you play, giving you infinite - more than infinite, mathematicians are just going to have to admit it - possibilities to experiment with the game's rewardingly off-kilter physics and slightly eerie game world.

Eledees is one of those game concepts (like our beloved Super Smash Bros) that, in the hands of its clearly smitten creators, has blossomed. And it's one of the few Wii games that feels like it just wouldn't work on any other system.

Which just leaves that bloody name. Can we go back to Elebits for the sequel, please? In retrospect, we'll get used to the tantrum-bears before we get used to that new name.

Summary

Inspired, intuitive and a real giggle. The Connect24-enabled Level Editor is the icing on a particularly delicious electric cake. Kids: don't eat electric cakes.

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"Get back in your balls, nonkeys - it's marble related madness

Kororinpa makes us feel guilty. Sort of. It's not that it's usurped Monkey Ball's place in our hearts, exactly, it's just that...well...now we've seen so much more of it, we kind of want Monkey Ball to pack a bag full of its tired, tedious minigames and get its embarassing soundtrack and limited flexibility out of our goddamn lives forever. It's time for Kororinpa to move in; glorious Kororinpa with its 100% responsive, meaty 3D, its sanity-defying corner leaps and turns, and its entire lack of banana-obsessed morons.

It's not that Kororinpa's the most beautiful game we've ever seen - it's not. You can't accuse us of just being shallow or anything. What the screen shots and video footage don't tell you is how intimately successful your remote interaction with the board is; how every tiny tremor of your tensing fingers makes the game board twitch and turn around the marble, flicking your round ludicrously tight corners and flipping the board 360 degrees so you can get around and behind it for shortcuts and bonuses. Not to mention doing things like rolling up stairs (by the power of twist), jumping through gaps to fall perfectly on to hidden levels, dodging obstacles, and basically doing more things with a remote and a marble than stupid, predictable old Monkey Ball even realises is possible.

Feeling ballsy

A cross between Marble Madness and the wooden board game Labyrinth, Kororinpa is immediately homely and familiar, but this doesn't mean it's without delightful surprises and innovations. From the first level, and in every consecutive level after, youo'll be tenderly greeted with new challenges: how to flip the ball over a hurdle; how to accelerate down a ramp; leap a large gap and then stop the ball absolutely dead still; how to turn the remote upside-down in your hands without losing your wrist strap and your mind. Kororinpa promises it will never bore you.

In order to exit each level, you have to collect lots of sparkling gems along the way. There are two kinds - oranges and greens. Only the oranges are compulsory; the greens are bonuses that'll unlock a variety of different balls to play with (see box above right). There's only one green per level, and their locations range from the easily accessible to fiendishly disguised and dangerous corners that mother used to warn against: on the pinnacle of a micro-thin slither of board, or high above a platform that will risk a death-defying leap. Do you hear us, Monkey Ball? Kororinpa's got its edge, too.

Getting the green gems and completing the levels quickly unlocks the new marbles to use. Well, we say 'marbles' - they include cats and dogs with protruding body parts. Although they take a bit of getting used to, the pokey limbs act as a sort of brake, making it easier to complete some of the harder levels. We particularly like the dog, which barks at you through the Wii remote speaker when you drop from one ledge to another. All the marbles make noises, in fact: the cat miaows, the standard marble klonks solidly and the panda, er, makes a gravelly groany yawn noise.

All manner of terrains are explored, and they all feel convincingly different: rugged conveyor belts whisk you along from one end of a platform to the other, while others try to stick to you, or else merrily dance you around on a stage of ice. The boards themselves are incredibly intricate, and the 3D just works, superb and satisfying.

The ball drops

But we know that affection can blind us to the truth, and we're well aware that Kororinpa has flaws. The levels can be too short and, actually, the death-defying leaps to get certain gems aren't really death-defying. You have an unlimited number of lives, and whenever you respawn at the start, you no longer need to collect the gems you got before dying. So there's no incentive to complete the level in one go without falling off the edge. It's not so much death-defying as suicide-inducing. Oh Kororinpa, no! Just when we were falling for your ready handling and flexible boards. Plus, the multiplayer has no player interaction - so what if player two gets to use the nunchuk? How the hell is that meant to make us feel better now?

And then - oh, as if Kororinpa hadn't already lied to us about how much it has to offer - getting to the end of the first 45 levels unlocks another 45 levels, but they're just the first levels reversed. Not played from back to front. Just mirrored. It was about at this point that our heart broke, and we couldn't do anything but weep softly.

Kororinpa - how could you do this to us? You didn't keep the promises you made. We left Monkey Ball for you, and going back to its minimally tilty boards would just be a dry and empty experience now. We're left alone with you, and all we can think about is how great it should have been. Balls.

Summary

Kororinpa wowed us with its lithe 3D flexibility, but it lied about its depth. Now we're stuck: we can't ever go back to Monkey Ball, but know we've been cheated. Life is so hard.

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