Reviews// Feel The Magic

With some of us here at SPOnG a little underwhelmed by the DS's launch-time reunion with Super Mario 64 DS, purely on the basis that some of us had played it eight years ago, we've been eagerly awaiting a game that feels tailor-made for the new system. Feel The Magic is just that, having already launched in the US and Japan, and having been confirmed in the guise of 'Project Rub' as a European DS launch title. And with Yuji Naka and Sonic Team behind the scenes, we were expecting interesting things.

'Interesting' is definitely one of the first words that will spring to mind whilst playing Feel The Magic, if you happen to be a master of understatement, that is. Otherwise, 'Totally effed up' would probably be a more appropriate sentiment. Because Yuji Naka has clearly been putting something peculiar, and probably lysergic, in the office water-cooler. This is a very, very strange game indeed. The gameplay revolves around a string of over 20 mini-games that tell the tale of one bicycle-helmeted youth's quest for romance. He does this by hanging around with a groups of musicians who wear big bunny ears, and by doing unspeakably weird things in-front of the lady in an attempt to show-off/rescue her from a captor.

The artwork is stylised to the extreme, marrying 70s comic book style with 60s council-flat wallpaper, using silhouettes as characters and psychedlia as a fundamental design framework. It is quite unlike anything we've ever seen before, and on that basis, the way it looks makes the already whimsical gameplay seem even more bizarre. But it certainly helps inform our understanding of why Nintendo of America have been so keen to point out marketing plans to snare 'the full spectrum of hipsters'. Dust down those paisley flares and bush up those sideburns groovers, because Feel The Magic would have been the game of choice on the Jimi Hendrix/Marillion tour bus.