bit Generations
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| bit Generations

Forget that talk about the Game Boy being dead in the water. This is the dawning of Nintendo's bit Generations – a series of basic, retro-styled games for GBA that are designed to make our lives fun again.

The genesis of these little slices of gaming purity is simplicity itself. The game makers involved have been freed from the shackles of movie tie-ins and corporate sequels to conduct test-tube-billowing experiments in lo-fi game design. Think the Arctic Monkeys in a garage instead of U2 in a stadium and you're getting close.

Seven games in total have been released in Japan, all at the wallet-happy price of 2,000 Yen (around ten of our British pounds), and although Nintendo hasn't announced any plans to bring the games to Europe yet, we decided to get hold of and look over four of the more accessible offerings.

Let's start with Rhythm Tengoku, a crazy party collection from the people who bought you WarioWare. And sure enough, it can only be meaningfully compared to, well, WarioWare.

The name of the game is punching, munching and hitting stuff in time to Japanese-flavoured music by pressing 'A' or hitting the directional pad. In time-honoured tradition, medals are handed out for good performances and said medals can then be used to open up further musical escapades.

Also in time-honoured tradition, the scenarios are totally mad. Dancing monkeys. Check. Baseball-playing octopus. Check. Pork pie-punching kung-fu instructor. Check.

No corners have been cut in Rhythm Tengoku and what really impresses is the amount of play on offer. Not only do you get a charmingly quirky set of rhythm mini-games, you get a seemingly endlessly charmingly quirky set of rhythm mini-games.

Putting aside the occasional dud (there are a few), Rhythm Tengoku is the most obvious import option of the bit Generations range. It doesn't feel cut-price at all, and language students will get to learn the Japanese for 'right' and 'left' too.

The bit Generations shows its hardcore teeth in Dotstream, a majestically addictive racing title. Instead of boringly conventional cars, you race more-exciting-than-they-seem coloured lines across a horizontally scrolling screen that's littered with the coloured line equivalent of traffic calming measures.

Several features are notable. The more you move up and down the screen, the slower you go. To win you have to cut your way through the obstacle-laden course with brain-surgery-like precision, slipstream your opponents and make strategic use of strength-sapping boosts. Triumph has seldom turned more swiftly to shout-at-the-screen disaster.

Dotstream is also distinctly retro. It's got a knowingly cheesy synth soundtrack and gamers of a certain age will shout "Tron!" the instant they see a screenshot. Indeed, it looks and feels like the kind of coin-op you used to find in fish and chip shops. It's tricky, has no multiplayer facility and is hardly experimental, but for those who want their accessible gameplay with bite, it's manna from heaven and majestically addictive.

Altogether less familiar is Orbital, a cerebral space-based puzzler. You control a tiny planet that grows by absorbing other celestial bodies of a similar size. Collisions with larger planets, on the other hand, are deadly.

Except Orbital doesn't really let you control your planet. Instead, it's about influence. You press 'A' to move into a planet's orbit and 'B' to spin away from it. The pleasure of the game lies in acquiring the deft touch needed to thus manoeuvre round the game's mini-verses.

It's an unusually restful experience, but as the pick-up-and-play factor is approximately zero, most will file Orbital securely under the same header as mahjong and other Japanese crazes we don't really get. This is the sort of game that could inspire a book of Zen philosophy, but probably not a visit to your local game importer.

Finally, there's Hexic, a more conventional kind of puzzler that tasks you with clearing sections of coloured triangular tiles by arranging them into hexagons. When you're just about getting the hang of it, another colour comes into play. Cue frantic 'A' button mashing.

Hexic is enjoyable enough and there's a two-player mode (which requires two carts and a GBA link cable) but in light of the innovations on offer elsewhere, ever so slightly underwhelming. Unless you're seriously bored with Tetris, that is.

In short, forget their budget price tags and the current hassle of importing them. The bit Generations games are a great idea, marvellously implemented. Tuck in if you can.

bit Generations

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