Tuesday, May 26, 2015

Vita Games

I need to get some Vita game impressions down on some words before they slip away as transitively as they are.

Murasaki Baby is by Massimo Guarini the director of Shadows of the Damned.  He's decided to get away from Grasshopper and make something independent.  His product is a cute-scary scary-cute game about making the player try to manipulate the Vita to do some simple puzzles. 

There is also Escape Plan which is about making the player try to manipulate the Vita to do some simple puzzles.

In Metrico, the developers have the player manipulate the Vita to do some simple puzzles.

None of these games use language to explain their features.  That's a tiny bit clever.  There is almost the same escalation of feature reveal. I never felt clever in my experience with each game.  It was always a mild frustation at having to figure out how they wanted me to manipulate the Vita and how many of these manipulations would I have to do at the same time.  Sometimes you're pinching the Vita.  Sometimes you're using buttons.  Sometimes you're re-wiring your brain to understand what it wants you to do. 

It never made me feel smart or ah-ha!  Which should be a sign I should delete all 3 games off my console.  Murasaki Baby is the one I found most engaging, that might be because of who made it and in the credits discovered the Akira Yamanoaka sounding soundtrack was Akira Yamanoaka.  I got it because of Playstation Plus.

Also because of Playstation Plus? Well. I can't find it on my Vita.  Fennick and something?  I was going to say it was a 2D platformer controlled by Worms (the game).  In the running theme of this entire system, it was asking me to grope the controls to have me do numbing activities.

I guess the Vita is pretty good if you want to play an anime game.