The rolling a ball about a maze in the sky genre of games goes back all the way to one of my favourite arcade games of all time of course,
Marble Madness. If I were to try to explain to you why
Mercury Meltdown Revolution’s controls work so much better on Wii than on PSP or PS2, then I would offer a similar comparison between
Marble Madness’s superb roller-ball control on the original arcade version of the game and the rubbish, nigh-on impossible keyboard-controlled version of the game on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. In fact, I’m fairly sure I remember throwing a poor old Speccy at the wall in frustrated gamer rage because of that particular game.
If you are not as old as me, then (a) I hate you and (b) you might want comparisons with some more recent games. You got ‘em. The obvious one being Sega’s wonderful
Super Monkey Ball (the original and still by far the best GameCube version, not the slightly-so-disappointing
Wii ‘Banana Blitz’ version) and Hudsonsoft’s Wii title
Kororinpa. But those comparisons are really not that valid when you take into account two things.
Firstly, in
Mercury Meltdown Revolution you direct a blob of liquid metal around the neon-bright mazes, which means that the feel and the motion of the thing is considerably different to a rolling marble or a monkey in a ball. Your mercury can also split apart into a number of different blobs – something which you need to do quite a lot of in order to solve various colour-matching puzzles to open gates and such like to proceed through mazes.
Secondly, Ignition’s game is just a lot more enjoyable and polished than
Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz (the Wii version) or
Kororinpa. In
Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz the control was still not quite right, partly because the Wii Remote had to be held vertically, which just felt a bit weird. Here you hold the Wii Remote in a horizontal position pointing at the screen, which just feels loads more comfortable and, somehow, natural.
You can, if you are a bit weird and just not a fan of Wii’s motion-control, choose to use the Wii’s Classic Controller, though if I caught somebody playing this game with a Classic Controller it would make me angrier and redder-faced than an enraged Wario. You also need to learn how to use the Wii Remote’s d-pad to switch your view around ninety-degrees and the [A] and [B] buttons to zoom in and out of the view, to get a better look at your blob’s current progress. But you very soon get the hang of all this, too.
