Saturday, November 10, 2007

Mercury Meltdown Revolution



The basic principle of Mercury is to guide blobs of metallic liquid around a maze. Points are awarded for speed and accuracy, meaning that you need to move quickly while preventing your mercury from dripping over the edge. While those are the basics, there are a great number of obstacles to overcome as you progress. For example, some obstacles will solidify your mercury or make it runny, others will attract it or repel it, and the most annoying creatures in the game will eat your mercury if you go near them. Once you throw in dexterity tests that involve escalators, moving platforms, and a variety of surfaces, you have a fairly tricky puzzle game.

While all these features were also present in the PSP game, the attraction of the Wii version is its intuitive and well-implemented control system. Holding the Wii Remote as you would a DS, you tilt the controller to angle the maze itself, with gravity dragging the mercury along in that direction. And that's pretty much it--the only other controls are for the camera; the D pad is used to rotate or pan and the 1 and 2 buttons are used to zoom in or out. It may sound like the most simple control system of all time, but it fits the game perfectly and has been implemented incredibly well. The controller responds to subtle movement without feeling twitchy, and you don't have to hold it with spirit-level accuracy to keep the level flat.


Mercury Meltdown Revolution doesn't have a convoluted backstory that explains why you're rolling metal around these mazes; it simply presents eight laboratories with 16 test tubes each to represent all the levels on offer. They're made up of a combination of levels from the PSP game (but have been reordered slightly) and brand-new ones created especially for the Wii version. The more mercury you get to the finish line on each level, the fuller its test tube becomes, and you progress in this fashion to open up the labs that are locked at the start of the game. This structure means that you don't have to beat every level to get to the next lab, nor do you need to complete them within the recommended time frame.

Although most levels take no more than a minute to complete, they usually require a bit of thinking and at least a couple of attempts to finish. Those who want to reserve a spot on the scoreboard will need to play over and over to perfect their runs.

The designers of Mercury Meltdown Revolution have produced levels that are both inventive and challenging. These levels also offer plenty of variety and a fair learning curve. It can be annoying to play the same level over and over, but the puzzles themselves are logical. Crucially, the accurate control system means that it's always your own fault when you fail. The most consistent challenge in the game is to use coloured mercury to activate colour-coded gates and buttons. Red, green, and blue spray points are dotted around many of the levels, while a chart in the corner of the screen shows you how to mix colours. For example, you'll need to push your blob against sharp objects to split it into two, and by combining two different coloured blobs you can create all-new colours to solve many of the puzzles in the game.

As you play through the main game, you'll be able to unlock five party games. Far from being poorly designed afterthoughts, there are a couple of really good minigames to be found in this mode. The highlights are rodeo, where you must to keep your blob of mercury on a platform while a computer-controlled fan tries to blow you off, and shove, which plays like a science-class version of bowls. There's also paint, where you must use your mercury to colour more of the level than your opponent, and metrix, which is a puzzler along the lines of Tetris or Lumines. Only one game called race, a poorly conceived Wipeout-esque racer, fails to deliver. It's also a shame that, along with the main game itself, the party games can't be played in multiplayer.

The game also offers 480p resolution, as well as support for the classic and GameCube controllers for any traditionalists out there.



Posted by wii-play at 4:42 AM
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Monday, November 5, 2007

Wii woes for the wee ones on Xmas



Thousands of angry videogame fans are hitting the blogosphere as word spreads that Nintendo won't be able to deliver enough of its popular Wii gaming console to meet demand this holiday season.

Reggie Fils-Aime, president of Nintendo of America, told Fortune that the company won't catch up with demand until "early next year."



Nintendo has struggled to supply enough consoles since it introduced the Wii last November. So why didn't the company just ramp up production in anticipation of another hot holiday selling season?

"The challenge is in demand, not supply," Fils-Aime says. "We planned optimistically for the launch, but no one could have foreseen how much more popular Wii would be than any other system in memory."

Increasing production, he adds, "is not as easy as flipping a switch."


Fils-Aime argues that calculating demand for consumer electronics products is difficult, which is why companies often ship a controlled number of units. Analysts estimate that Nintendo figured it would need to make 13 million consoles worldwide, but ramped up production nearly 30 percent when that estimate proved too low.

In the United States, Nintendo's goal was to ship three million Wiis for the first nine months of this year, and it's on track to deliver another three million in the remaining three months of 2007, according to Arcadia Research.

Fils-Aime acknowledges that won't be enough. "We're doing everything we can, but really, we won't be able to gauge how big demand is until we finally fill it," he explains.

That's small consolation for gamers. "After awhile you'd have assumed that Nintendo would've taken every possible step to correct this problem," fumed gaming fan DiatribeEQ on Neogaf.com, a videogame industry site. "But every month, for almost a year straight, they haven't. This just keeps the shelves empty and fuels mass paranoia to buy it now."

Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities, says Nintendo is playing its Wii strategy right. "Excess capacity costs money," he says. "It doesn't make sense to make two million more to accommodate capacity they won't need six months later."

Nintendo is known for being a highly disciplined company that rarely deviates from its master plan. "This is almost predictable behavior for Nintendo," says John Taylor, an analyst with Arcadia Research. "They set a plan and stick with it."

Yet, for all Nintendo's reasons for its supply problems, no other videogaming company has faced such severe shortages for so long.

This year, Nintendo sold 2.94 million machines in the United States through August. That's roughly double the sales of Microsoft's Xbox 360 and nearly triple that of Sony's PlayStation, according to the NPD Group, a market research firm.

David Riley, a NDP spokesman, says Fils-Aime is smart to warn Wii shoppers about looming shortages now.

"This isn't about building more hype to increase demand," says Riley. "He's trying to manage expectations now so that the week before Christmas you don't see a lot of upset customers wondering why they can't find the Wii anywhere."
Posted by wii-play at 10:09 AM
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