Inside every grown-up is a toddler waiting to come out.
Once you get the new game “LocoRoco” in your hands, that inner tot bounds out filled with glee and bubbly drool. Sticky fingers reach out for the PSP, and giggles erupt as a fleshy ball of orange with two eyes and a smile starts to roll across the fruit-flavored world like a raindrop down a seesaw.
Cute? Painfully so. Interesting? What else do you call a game that combines Japanese Pachinko machine dynamics with marble-maze physics and makes the whole thing look like a baby toy?
“LocoRoco” arrives on the gaming scene driven by two steady winds of change in the game business. One is the gusty success of weird Japanese games. For fans on the North American side of the Atlantic, the Japanese cultural gap has long provided a source of international pleasure. Maybe our Asian friends get a kick out of the Western obsession with guns, dogs and BBQ, but we certainly enjoy their funny way of telling stories, fastidious graphical style and whimsical take on pop music.
The other happy trend in gaming is the flowing current of innovation. Despite what the sales charts might indicate, game developers like to think of themselves as auteurs and expressive artists. No one really wants to make the next “Madden” clone or “Doom” derivative. So you don’t have to look too hard or far to find exciting flights of imagination drifting in the sea of look-alike products.
Put these two waves together and you get “LocoRoco” – a title as weird and cuddly as a Teletubby and as successfully different as anything released this year.
If you can imagine a smiling ball of mercury rolling through a bizarre nursery rhyme, you’d be well on your way to capturing the delightful mix of odd and baby-cute. The game’s play centers on tilting the abstract Loco world to the left and right, goading the rolling blob toward objectives and through the levels. A quick tap of the buttons causes the blob to hop and another to split the gelatinous Loco into droplets that are perfect for squeezing through small tubes and cracks.
The simple game play and fleshy graphics embrace you like your grandma’s arms and provide some of the most soothing play packaged as a game. And that’s a good thing. With so many games based on the battle of good and evil, it’s nice to take a turn where the contest rages between cute and cuddly. Even the game’s not-so-nice enemies are more a cheerful nuisance than any real threat.
Perhaps worried that the game would come off too much like a plush digital toy, the designers have packed in several fun-extending features. A timed mode, for example, lets you race for the fastest route through each level. Game or toy, “LocoRoco” gives players a chance to explore their soft side.
“LocoRoco”
VIDEOGAME| For PSP| $39.99 | Rated E for everyone
THIS WEEK | New releases
NBA 2K7, Xbox 360/Xbox/PS2/ 2K Sports; NBA Live 07, Xbox 360/PS2/GCN, Electronic Arts; Just Cause, Xbox 360/PS2/XBox/PC, Eidos Interactive; Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria, PS2, Square Enix; Dance Dance Revolution SuperNOVA, PS2, Konami; Naruto: Clash of Ninja 2, GCN, D3 Publisher; Baten Kaitos Origins, GCN, Namco; DEFCON, PC, Introversion Software; Mario vs. Donkey Kong 2: March of the Minis, DS, Nintendo; The Fast and the Furious, PS2/PC, Namco Bandai Games America |Source: Gamermetrics.com
