Bugs! They're inside meeeeeeee. Mental.
By Ely
The fact I spent a good 15 minutes this morning before work playing one of the mini-games you can win in Twisted tells you something about it. How many times I tried the Ski Jump is unclear, but it’s safe to say that I would have carried on for far longer if work was a sideline rather than a living I needed to earn.
Nintendo struck gold with the original mini-game-fest so it’s hardly a surprise that we have this new sequel to waste hours on whilst taking a dump. The twist, of course, is in the name. Now given that Nintendo are not known as a crazy, evil company, you should assume that this game is not of that variety. No, instead these whackos have put two small cockroaches with teeny hammers into the larger than normal game cartridge, so that when you turn the machine from side to side they do something clever so the game knows about it and reflects that fact on screen. I believe the cockroaches have been imported from New York and can survive indefinitely without food for as long as games are popular.
“Pssst! That Ely’s gone a bit mad!”
“Must be the jetlag. Now shift over to the left a bit.”
So given this new method of user interface you’d imagine there’d be some great mini-games to best make use of the fact, and you’d be right. From washing plates, trucks dumping dirt and using a moving hedge to keep wild pigs at bay (must be the Sushi these game developers eat), the game moves through different waves, each ending with a Boss stage. To mix it up, some of the waves use the cockroach interface, some use the standard GBA buttons just like the original and some use both of them.
Christ, they really do put him everywhere, don’t they? Twist! Blow him up!
This is all well and good and makes for quite a challenge in later levels, but it does give the game one small problem. Sometimes you aren’t quite sure how to do a mini-game or which of the input methods you should be using. This is especially true if coming back to the game after a week off playing something sensible like Wipeout Pure. It’s not a major problem but a frustrating thirty seconds of getting it wrong is never a good start to a gaming session.
The other small blot on the copybook is that whilst the cockroach interface is very clever, the fact I’m playing on a GBA SP means that the axis of spin is not the same as that of the screen. I reckon this game must be much easier to play on a bog standard GBA just because the screen is in the middle of the machine. Of course, given the shite screen of the GBA this probably isn’t the case.
Twist! No, er… A! Hmmm… RUN!!! Ah, bugger it.
So to sum up, lots of new mini-games, all of them as silly and fun as you’d expect, and a new interface to get to grips with. Portable gaming just gained another must have title, and it’ll amaze everyone who sees it purely because you’re going to look very silly spinning your GBA around on the bus or train. And then there are the cockroaches…
**Disclaimer: Way of the Rodent does not believe there are any live parts in this cartridge. Ely’s just been let out of the house for once, and the bright lights of New York City and a GBA SP have, erm, Twisted his mind. We hope you understand.
July 2005
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