I loathe putting together these round-up posts because they require so much effort and no one bothers to read through them, but someone has to cover these DSiWare items, right? Sure, Nintendo Life and Go Nintendo mention this junk from time to time, but I’m kind of focused on building the audience for this site. Anyway…
This trailer for Burning Puzzle Flame Tail presents a curious concept: the game scrolls like a vertical shoot’em-up with the DSi turned on its side but has the mechanics of a puzzler. You ignite block groups by touching them with your snake-like form, and collect letters spelling out power-ups. It’s the latest from Mindware, the little known studio that produced surprise gem Maboshi’s Arcade.
In this review, game designer Anna “Auntie” Anthropy takes apart Maboshi’s Arcade, Nintendo’s latest WiiWare release, explaining the appeal of this initially bewildering game and its “cooperative single-player” experience.
The word “arcade,” when referring to home games, is most often used (or misused, as most of these games have never been in an actual arcade) to describe games that are straightforward, fast-playing and designed with repeated play in mind.
The three games that comprise Maboshi’s Arcade (from “maru” meaning circle, “bou” meaning bar, and “shikaku” meaning square, the three shapes around which the games are based) certainly fit that description, with an almost Bit Generations-style simplicity and approachability.
But there’s another, less frequently used context for the word “arcade”: an arcade is a social space where people play games in close proximity to one another. Maboshi’s Arcade allows up to three different players to play as many as three different games alongside one another, in tall windows that change size and position depending on a player’s multiplier and how well she’s doing (a way of encouraging competition between players).
There’s something else going on here, though. The game doesn’t let you in on it for a while, giving you the chance to work it out yourself. The deal (and I’ll try to be vague on the details) is this: the players have ways of reaching past their windows to affect other players’ games, potentially helping or hindering their progress.
The term “massively single-player” was coined to describe the the experience provided by games like Spore, World of Goo and Jesse Venbrux’s Deaths: essentially a solitary experience, but one that’s affected by how other players have played their own games. To describe the experience of Maboshi’s Arcade, I’m coining the phrase “cooperative single-player.”
If you happen to be playing alone, games will begin playing themselves in adjacent windows so you’ll have someone to interact with. Alternately, you can save replays of your best games and have them play in the next window over, essentially playing co-op with yourself.
But the more interesting possibility is the appearance of a character named “Mr. Maboshi” in a vacant window, challenging you to score points in a game with no direct controls for which you are given no explicit instructions. Figuring out how to play Maboshi’s game — and to score enough points to satisy him — is a game in itself.
Maboshi’s Arcade is a WiiWare title that poses some genuinely interesting ideas about the ways people might play games in tandem. It’s by Mindware and costs, if memory serves, the equivalent of eight US dollars.
You can download Anna “Auntie” Anthropy’s games (Mighty Jill Off, Calamity Annie) and read more of her writing, like her recent reflections on homebrew DS games, at Auntie Pixelante.
