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FASHIONABLY LATE REVIEW
Big Bang Mini

Considering that the shmup has been in existence for as long as we’ve been clutching controllers in our sweaty hands, it’s a less than ideal genre to tackle if your goal is to reinvent the wheel – FACT: I often dunk my hands in icy water before playing a shmup. Small innovations such as chaining, path variations, and scratching offer new possibilities, but most titles are left attempting new realms of bullet hell or bizarre designs to stand apart from a long list of games that seem to have every angle covered. If you happen to be a cup-is-half-empty type of person, there’s also the likelihood that Treasure or Cave will always manage to do it better anyway.

The touchscreen possibilities of the DS initially seemed to offer room for innovation via stylus control. But awkward results have caused developers to surrender quickly, perhaps using the stylus for some secondary purpose, with the central game-play conforming to the established standards of the genre. For all these reasons we should have paid more attention when Big Bang Mini released earlier this year. Arkedo has taken a path less traveled in the design, essentially disassembling the trappings of the genre with a fearless ability to shed as many elements as it brings, creating tangible innovations that are customized to the DS. But since any review is better late than never, it’s time we took a look at an essential alternative that breathes fresh air into the genre.

Beneath trippy and hypnotic packaging, the soul of Big Bang Mini is a shooter – one redesigned to provide an experience every bit as inviting to newcomers as it is essential to veterans. There’s an easy comparison to the layout of Space Invaders Extreme on the DS. The player fires from the bottom of the screen to destroy enemies at the top – though these targets are often inclined to invade the player’s sense of personal space as well. But there’s also an important parallel with Arkanoid, recalling how the paddle serves to represent the player, acting as a life preserver that continually keeps the ball in motion to eradicate the blocks and clear the stage. And using that model, Big Bang Mini turns itself inside out to achieve something unique - and since ideas don’t actually emerge from a vacuum, it’s no surprise that Arkedo also created the Arkanoid/Breakout styled DS title Nervous Brick Down, and have since built on what they learned.

The ship, or herein a tiny orb that represents the player’s physical form within the game, is not the enabling focus of the game, but actually the greatest liability. Players launch fireworks upward by striking anywhere on the touchscreen rather than from this object. And this creates a separation between the offensive actions of the player and that tiny ball that represents their physicality within the game grid – leaving the player to exist only as a target for the dangers coming from all sides of the screen. The result creates a game-play dynamic that feels instantly natural through simplified controls, but unnaturally separates the mind from the body so to speak – the body a nuisance which the player is forced to move at all times from harms-way.

The payoff is that where the ship would normally move as the player fired, here missed shots cause the fireworks to explode and rain down shiny repercussions that threaten that orb that has remained stationary while the player focussed on the attack. It forces one to consider every stroke in consideration of an object it is very easy to forget about. There were times I found myself able to get away with firing random bursts, the trick being to collect the stars needed from defeated enemies by moving the orb over them as they fall while avoiding that blowback - but firing constant barrages will only result in a quick defeat. The controls speak to a natural sense of play that most DS games lack. Strike the screen to fire, and touch the tiny orb to drag it to safety. There is no additional input required, though a button touch via the shoulder pads is introduced to stretch a finger at times. Strategic elements are also introduced as the player progresses through the stages of arcade mode, slowly raising the possibilities along with the difficulty. But it all utilizes the touchscreen, whether allowing the player to draw a quick line to create a shield or a circle to cause a black hole to appear and vacuum up the bullet hell.

This would have been more than enough to create a compelling experience, and yet the greater charm of the title is found in the subtle ways Arkedo pushed the envelope further with the environmental designs. The train trip around the world isn’t an attempt at recycling the same varied environments found in so many other titles – which I would have expected. Certainly players will encounter a snow level, but rather than just playing to the designs of enemies, the cold winds are used to blow your shots away, forcing you to consider the angle at all times. At the next locale the dense forest works to close in from the sides and crush you if enemies aren’t defeated quickly enough. At all times clouds can appear to absorb shots and shield enemies. The environment is always a direct factor on influencing the game-play rather than a static backdrop. The artistic bent of the game’s design runs a gambit that left me thinking of everything from Tim Burton’s old sketchbooks, Mexican art, and Japanese anime oddities – call me when you reach Luxor and find stages that resemble an Atari powered LITE-BRITE. It never leaves the player staring at any thing long enough to get bored of it – with each environment serving up nine levels like so many well proportioned and delicious pudding-cups. Each locale culminates in a layered boss-fight, and this is really the only weak link within the game. Boss encounters certainly work to tie together the theme of a stage, but appear as large objects that are relatively easy to bombard with shots, focusing more on speed rather than the precision players develop through the preceding levels. I would have anticipated attacking sections of a large boss as one alternative.

That small hiccup aside, there’s a sense that Arkedo tossed the rule book in the garbage, setting out to design a shooter that would achieve what few games have – creating an experience that could only exist on the DS rather than cramming or adapting an existing game-play style onto the handheld. It’s the kind of experience we normally rely on Nintendo for, but on this one you can thank SouthPeak Games for recognizing Arkedo’s keen eye for detail and commitment to pushing the final product further. This particularly shines through with the little nuances such as bonuses at the end of each level that challenge the player with something as simple as connecting the dots to earn a fireworks display. It all adds up to Big Bang Mini providing the most color our grey little lives could have hoped to squeeze out of the DS. And considering the nine environments of arcade mode, along with versus, bonus, and mission modes, there’s simply so much game crammed into this cartridge that we’ll still be playing it long after the sun has burnt out.

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