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Has the wicked witch met her match?
By Bog
Boards and puzzles seem to have been part of game development since mankind's had the spare-time to devise games. Visit a penny arcade, and you're bound to find a wooden, tilting maze with a big, rusty ball-bearing in it. Go to a toyshop and especially at this time of year you'll see plastic mazes with teeny, chromed ball-bearings in 'em. Look at videogame history, and you'll see Marble Madness winking at you coyly. Archer MacLean's Mercury was a launch-date iteration of that noble heritage, and in a lot of ways it improved on the idea. Except for the fucking loading times.
Rather than a rigid ball, this PSP title had you tilting a glob of shiny liquid around your maze. Part of the challenge was the at-one-remove control-type of tilting the world, a familiar prospect to any Super Monkey Ball players out there, part of the challenge was using the map itself to split, re-colour and re-form your glob of mercury, and in later levels keeping control of blobs on opposite sides of the map without it all dribbling off into space.
Whee!
The maps, while populated with fun things like ramps, tubes, teleporters, variable-friction flooring, conveyer belts and the like were quite closely tied to cubes and rectangles, and the graphical style was a bit dated looking, more reminiscent of a late Amiga demo than 21st-century gaming. Also, it strongly contributed to the PSP's early reputation for bollock-awful loading times. For that, it was stylish, impressive in a Cool Physics kinda way, and great fun to play if you're into devilishly-hard agility puzzles.
Mercury: Meltdown is the kind of sequel I really like. It takes the original concept, and adds to it without breaking the mechanic that made it a good game in the first place.
There's a lot more meat in this new version. Instead of having the paintshops, a couple of shovers and a bit of sticky floor, the number of active elements in the map has increased dramatically. From the methods of altering your colours, through to nasty ways of doing you in, there's a new twist added to every facet of the world. Add in the fact that your mercury can actually change physical properties rather than just colour - Heaters make your glob thin and trickly, Freezers solidify you into a ball, which allows for map elements like rails you can trundle along and down.
The "Amiga Demo" visual style's been dispensed with utterly, and there's a warmth and cheer to the interface that was just absent in the game's previous incarnation. It took me a while to get used to seeing a heavy black stroke around my blob, but the new 2.5D toon style actually meshes with the gameplay really well (no, I'm not proposing to Smaggers, I just like the way it looks).
Amiga not shown.
The difficulty curve's definately still there - I made the mistake of unlimbering the PSP in a CAMRA pub that had a swear-box and cost myself a fiver before I realised I was cursing under my breath. However, it's not quite as rapidly-challenging as it's predecessor, and progress can be made tolerably swiftly.
Especially as there's no longer time to go and cook a meal for six including appetiser, dessert and shooting the fucking main course yourself between levels. My main pet-hate with Mercury was, as you may guess, the loading times which seemed about three geological epochs long - now, the loading cycles are barely noticable. If that had been the only change that they'd made to Mercury, it would have made it worth buying all over again. As it is, with all the new gubbins, altered playtypes, more interesting level design, and no longer looking for a bouncing scroller with copperbars behind it, it's a winner.
It is, however, still Mercury. Mercury++++ to be sure, but if something trickier than Super Monkey Ball, with a sadistic bastard's touch to the level design, and puzzle elements that make the mind boggle is not your thing, then you may feel it's not woth the pfennigs. I'm not calling it Marmite by any measure, but this will really be of most benefit to people who like bastard-hard agility/mental puzzles.
October 2006
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