lilt line (demo)

The "lilt" in lilt line refers to music—specifically dubstep, a genre with which I was not previously familiar. The "line" refers to the geometric figure you guide through a narrowing and widening path using the Wiimote tilt control. Occasionally, there is a fence (played in this game by a vertical swath of mismatched color) corresponding to a musical beat which must be cleared by a button press or you will lose points. Running into the side of the path or pressing a button outside of a fence region will also cost points and when you lose all your points the game ends. That's pretty much the entire specification document for the game.

Prior interest: none

The WiiWare demo program has reached the point where new games are released simultaneously with demos, which allows games to be tried out at the same moment they are being promoted. Clearly, Nintendo and WiiWare publishers have found the demo program to be a success. Gaijin games, the creator of the Bit.Trip series and publisher of lilt line, certainly have. Considering the type of game and the publisher, I probably would have looked twice at this particular game, but it sure helps to have the demo to try out since as with Bit.Trip: Beat, "a screenshot just doesn't do it justice."

Odds of purchase: low

Lilt line hits its notes just right: minimalistic graphics match the minimalistic gameplay which is offset by a rich soundtrack. The controls work well as long as you are able to find a button on the Wiimote that you can press without altering its orientation. Hitting a sidewall produces a jarring sound and causes the line to bounce back into the path in a similarly jarring manner. Missing a button press or adding an extra one causes the music to die down as if it were on the radio and you've just driven through a tunnel. Alternatively, hitting the beat causes a sudden flash of color in the background like the visual representation of a hi-hat hit as imagined by Walt Disney¹. Scoring amounts to nothing more than losing points for each mistake and ending the game when you run out of the alloted points for a stage. Passing a stage sets the high score, which may be bested later, and opens up the next stage.

However, the minimalism extends a bit far to overcome the barrier of breaking out a credit card and buying the game. Compared to the Bit.Trip series or even ThruSpace, there just does not seem to be enough content to justify the full purchase price. Worse, this seems to be title for which a good demo will also be enough of a taste for many consumers as was the Bit.Trip: Beat demo. While the demo does end in the beginning of a stage, it didn't leave me wanting more². It's also hard to shake the feeling that while the music was given plenty of love, the graphics and gameplay are minimal not for artistic reasons, but because they weren't seen as a particular priority. As an example, when the music shifts to a more expansive easy-going mode, the path ought to open up and become more forgiving and when the music becomes tighter and more aggressive, the path ought to get narrow and twisty. But the path never seems locked to the music and contains long stretches where nothing much happens. Not that lilt line doesn't show potential. Rather it fails to fulfill it's promise.

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1 - See Fantasia.

2 - Except to replay the Bit.Trip: Beat demo.

ThruSpace (demo)

ThruSpace is an action-puzzle game in the vein of Tetris, or rather it's often overlooked successor, Welltris. The object is to guide 3D polyominoes (called keydrons by the game) through gaps in walls that block the hallway the pieces are being propelled through. Keydrons may be flipped, twisted, turned and shifted in all directions and the gaps are designed to require all of these manipulations to pass the walls. According to the promotional information, the game features three different modes of play and you can earn higher scores by collecting crystals within gaps, performing tricks (covering all squares of a gap with the keydron's shadow) and accelerating toward the corridor more quickly. These scores are tallied on a global leaderboard.

Prior interest: low

That screenshot pretty much tells the story. WiiWare has a surplus of interesting and stylish puzzlers including, of course, Tetris, Dr. Mario and the Art Style series. Because of it's size limitation, the service has plenty of graphically simple puzzle games. It's just a lot easier to squeeze this sort of game into a handful of blocks¹ than, say, an RPG. In order to stand out from the crowd, a game needs to do something unique. Groovin' Blocks incorporates music into the structure of gameplay, for instance. ThruSpace has... well it has a demo now. Honestly, I wouldn't have taken a second look at it otherwise.

Odds of purchase: low

So the demo turns out to be a tutorial followed by a small taste of the timed mode with two keydrons. In my first run-through I used the NES-style Wiimote controls, which don't fit into the brain very well. With any 3D world, it's hard to map the freedom of movement to any human understandable control scheme. Generally controls (both in real life applications and games) reduce the freedom of movement to some manageable amount. You don't, for instance, directly control every twist and turn of a 3D platforming character. Rather you control movement direction on a horizontal surface and have a jump (or similar) button to give your character a short vertical acceleration. It turns out controlling all possible movements (pitch, yaw, roll, and translations along the three axes) requires 12 distinct inputs. ThruSpace only allows acceleration in the direction of travel and not decceleration, so it requires just 11 inputs. But the Wiimote only has 10 inputs (including + and -, but not the power or Wii Menu buttons). So the control scheme simplifies the rotational movements to one direction, which means if you over-rotate you need to cycle through the other attitudes.

With the Nunchuk (and Classic Controller), all six rotations are possible and the buttons are mapped slightly better than with the Wiimote alone. Even so, as I explained when discussing And Yet It Moves, some of the rotation buttons are mapped the wrong way around from how I'm most comfortable. Unfortunately, the game does not allow rearranging the controls so I'm stuck doing a lot of trial and error to get the keydron lined up just so.

There are things to commend the game for: catchy music, appropriate sound, functional visuals, responsive controls (modulus rotational confusion), plenty of modes (apparently), interesting choices (to go for tricks, crystals or time, etc.), arcade-style accessibility and challenge, and all around high production values. But I feel the game falls short of its potential in many ways. More interesting visuals and better control configuration would have been welcome as I've already alluded. It seems like the tilt controls and/or pointer would have been useful and intuitive (see And Yet It Moves). But the game as presented by the demo lacks inspiration. Maybe the full game has it, but if so the demo fails to show us through a tedious tutorial and truncated timed mode.

Doing some research on this style of puzzle, I discovered Blockout, which was released in 1989. It's also very similar to ThruSpace in that the focus is on manipulating polyominoes in a 3D space. Unlike ThruSpace's racecourse analogy, Blockout works like a box filling exercise. Even so, I felt a sense of urgency in the earlier game. Perhaps the difference comes from the relative lack of consequences for sub-optimal play in ThruSpace—if you can make it through a gap, there's usually enough of time to play the next gap perfectly no matter how poorly you set yourself up. It makes me wonder how the demo would have come off if the game had a multiplayer race mode.

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1 - ThruSpace almost seems like a metaphor for the WiiWare service itself. Apply clever transformations to get an object through a confined location.