Those of you who eagerly ran out and bought your shiny new PSP back in those heady launch days of late summer 2005 may well remember Archer Maclean’s Mercury as one of the more interesting titles in amongst the rather disappointing first batch of games. Despite being a cracking concept for a handheld Mercury was, however, more ‘interesting’ than actual ‘fun’. As a puzzler it was both frustratingly hard and felt in too many ways more like a PSP tech demo than an actual full game.
Despite the difficulty level being set to nigh-on impossible, not to mention the issues with the niggley analogue control which lead on more than one occasion to
pure PSP rage*, SPOnG persevered with the game, which was still a nice pick-up-and-play puzzle snack in between much larger, more satisfying feasts of
Ridge Racer. Mercury stood alongside Tetsuya Mizuguchi’s (far easier)
Lumines as both a fun little diversion and a promising sign of things to come in the world of ‘just-one-more-go’ handheld puzzlers.
So here we are again: over a year on from our initial late summer fling with Sony’s gleaming little Game Boy-usurper, it was with equal amounts of intrigue and trepidation that SPOnG approached Ignition’s follow-up title: Mercury Meltdown. Intrigue, because MacLean’s original was so full of promise. Trepidation, because if Mercury Meltdown was anywhere near as hard and frustrating as its predecessor we would probably find ourselves swearing out loud on public transport again quite a lot; this always attracts the worst kinds of frightened/pitying stares from fellow passengers (or, worse still, those people who scream along with you).
For those not familiar with the original concept for Mercury, suffice to say that Archer had clearly been hammering an old
Marble Madness machine in amongst his famed collection of retro arcade cabinets. This gave him his inspiration for a ‘rolling something around mazes in the sky’ type game. Add a dash of the more recent, and far superior
Super Monkey Ball to every schoolboy chemist’s obsession with the wonderfully gloopy liquid-metal that is mercury (‘Hg’ to the boffins) and you get the picture.
Simply put, you use the PSP’s analogue stick to direct a blob of mercury around various mazes, with numerous puzzles to solve in order to get to the finish-point in the shortest time possible, picking up as many bonuses and losing as little as possible of your own precious mercury-self on the way.
Moving the analogue stick doesn’t shift your mercury blob directly though. Instead it tilts the floating maze-world around it, thus causing the shiny metal splodge to move and navigate itself around the various precipitous narrow ledges, traps and puzzles of each increasingly difficult level. One of the coolest mechanics in the game is the fact that while any mercury lost over the side of the floating maze is lost for ever in space, you are still able to complete the level, just with a smaller blob. Of course the more mercury you manage to retain through to the end of the level, the more bonus multiplier points you’re awarded.
(*Pure PSP rage – the syndrome whereby the devil in the right side of your brain tells you to throw the damn machine at the wall. Thankfully, the angel in the brain’s left side kicks in to inform you that should you break it you can’t afford to buy another one.)
