Happy birthday to me.
Inspired by this ineffably cute landscape I grab Trioncube and get stuck in.
At first I worry that it’s simply Tetris with fewer block shapes, but its meandering, bizarre storyline just keeps on making me want to play. I can’t stop. It has that repetitive monotony that feels much like a form of meditation, albeit one interspersed with vaguely disturbing and disjointed plot details – much like a guru suddenly interposing with a mind-expanding question – the always irreverent King Pluto will appear and inform you that he needs a girlfriend or that he’s spilt cocoa on his PC.
Cocoa? COCOA? Stop whining and come back to me when you’ve put two laptops and a Guitar Hero controller out of action with Amaretto, little man.
Essentially the task in hand is to pilot an obese bluebird shaped rocket across the expanses of the solar system by feeding it on 3X3 cubes in an attempt to rescue a kidnapped princess from the aforementioned King Pluto: not that he seems to care much about it.
As I send my podgy poultry into the depths of space it quietly cries in a manner I have only seen replicated by my sidekick, 2-Hydroxybenzoic Acid Boy. You know it’s been a good night when you wake up with your bedroom walls covered in squashed berries and there’s a young man, curled in the foetal position, weeping gently on the floor. My friend Murray has since apologised for the fruit and, slightly worryingly, for the distressed adolescent too.
As with Chocobo, the game I was playing last week, I am struck by how little influence on the gaming industry the effects of avian flu have had.
I would have expected birds, far from being the perky and pleasant stars of adorable Japanese games, to have become scapegoats for our age – forced into underground bases where they’d plot our downfall in War rooms, quacking, clucking and chirping vicious plans to decimate the human race; but after reassuring myself about this caponic conspiracy I get thoroughly absorbed, zipping from planet to planet, attacking a purple thing with three eyes, trying to rationalise the Fear and Loathing-style burblings of the villain and, at one point, gaining cuckoo clocks which spring joyfully out of every 3X3 cube I make.
With a very similar storyline (apart from the bird), the new Mario game due out on the Wii has also been getting me rather excited! The previous Wii games haven’t really held me enthralled for that long, but with eight different planets and low gravity jumping, I’m eagerly awaiting this offering from the eponymous Nintendonian plumber. Looks like there's typical Mario 64 platforming, NiGHTS-style freeform swooshing around and Ouendan-esque gesture tracing all set in a beautiful environment that reminds me of the ridiculously cool Raven boss level from Yoshi's Island. Might well be the best thing ever, when it finally gets released.
Here’s to hoping.