Floigan Bros. Episode 1

"Moild Enjoiment."

Floigan Brothers is a platforming game that attempts to make up for its lack of platforms with a brother-buddy routine and the sort of silly story that really fits better into fifteen minutes of cartoon than several hours of game play. Indeed, I would find Hoigle and Moigle Floigan more fun to meet than Mario and Luigi--and still at least as Working Class(tm)--even if their Brooklyn accents didn't put the fake Italian stuff from Super Mario Advance to shame. Too bad for the Floigans that stuff like game depth and background detail count, too. When you see how the brothers bond in the frequent cut scenes you feel good for them that they have their own little world--yet often while it's cute that they're having fun, well, you're not. The buddy act starts well with even a funny tutorial(Moigle wants to make cookies, and you have to grab progressively tougher items) and never tries to run on credit it had before. But it never builds up enough.

Hoigle is the skinny brother; although he lavishes stereotypical condescending encouragement on his younger brother and plays along with obvious attempts at manipulation, he has chutzpah to burn and the question is how it smells when burned in mass quantities. Moigle is the oversensitive goof with a streak of genius in him, a soft spot for kittens like the evil spy he unwittingly pets Lennie Small style, and a gut as big as Hoigle. The game plot revolves around finding seven disjointed junk items for Moigle's big secret machine. And of course it has to start revolving early to fly apart more efficiently at the end when you realize it involves pushing back someone you don't see or hear of until well into the game.

Although you control Hoigle in this game, with the usual camera running around him, the key to solving puzzles is to make Hoigle manipulate Moigle's feelings and use him as a sort of power-up. Of course since Hoigle only suffers odd special effects where most people would be killed(i.e. stung by a giant spider or sucked into a water tube) you can't say Hoigle's risky jokes ever do anything for his bravery, but you can still make him punch or insult or hug Moigle or ask to play a game. Moigle's moods are amusing, as though he slips into a funk frequently when you need him, there are ways to get him to come around.

The moods comprise most of the game's humor but they're also important after they get repetitive and you just want to solve the darned game. In every area around the Floigans' house, you'll have a box that unfolds into a circle(all is high resolution, and LOOK what they botch) when Hoigle has made Moigle feel a certain way. Hoigle must stand on it for Moigle to do something special. If Moigle's happy, Hoigle gets a piggy-back ride to move faster but more erratically. Moigle gets angry and finds a different way to transport Hoigle if you decide to punch him ten times in a row and step on a red circle while fleeing, but if you don't, you still get WWF style action in the sort of brief clips I find bearable. Unfortunately there's only one of the most interesting circle in the game: the dizzy circle. Hoigle runs circles around Moigle, who falls down, and Hoigle can bounce on his gut like a trampoline. What's worse, these hidden areas could extend the game as well.

However Moigle's simple-mindedness works pretty well. He has a little pad he keeps track of points on. These points determine what new games you can teach him if you can find various secluded apples. You can even cure his arachnophobia, but watch out, if all the apples are gone your saved game may get stuck in the realm of the unsolvable. You can also bribe him with points to get him to do what you want, right now, which often consists of asking you to play the next mini-game. Yes, it's arbitrary, but it's endearing. Even if ultimately it's useless because a sub-game called 'high five' works as well and gains you points. It boils down to pressing A to slap one hand or B for both, with the corresponding direction Moigle puts his hand(s) in, but it's a funny brotherly male-bonding gesture that underlies Moigle's simplicity. You get points for finding an item for Moigle's machine or beating him in High-Five. The silly comebacks don't get old as you don't have to play too much, and it all does feel like humoring a lovable goof or even a reticent pet. And his brooding when you mess up a mini-game to help him beats the usual 'You lose/die. Retry?' fare.

As for interaction you aren't able to skip the stuff you've seen before, and the handful of random exchanges for each event runs out quickly enough. You could say the dialog is doubly forced--on you, and the jokes start to feel forced, and this is the level the jokes descend to after their initial flair wears off. There's not much to interact with, either. You'd expect plenty of places to look for weird surprises, but sadly there aren't any, and for a neighborhood that seems to try for a junkyard feel it's all rather sparse and orderly. The landscape is depressingly flat with the exception of a roof you must bounce onto and some other isolated places where you must tap the controls very carefully. You'll run into a few cockeyed billboards or sewer-pipes, and ants hold up ''Look Over Here'' signs that tell which of the areas really should be completed next in the story version's mostly linear mode. But you can also get trapped falling into a few places you aren't supposed to. Then the analog control is sloppy, and the minigames you can teach Moigle don't exactly last. The red button switches functions arbitrarily too as the letters saying which colored button does what are rather behind schedule; in one critical and rigidly timed game you must continually climb up a water tank without perfect analog skills, and once you get to the ladder the game often makes you dive past it. Between this and the surprising challenge that walking across a straight pipe affords, the game needs to rely on its humor. And can't quite.

Granted, the major confrontations with cats are amusing although frequently it's just a matter of following the instructions in the help file. You'll be throwing bombs around a lot, and they flash when they're about to explode, but occasionally you'll find it harder to give one up than you'd hoped. More fun is when you need Hoigle to ride Moigle past a gate after activating a time-sensitive lever without bumping into anything, and there's a clever one where Hoigle must chase off magpies as Moigle plants a garden.

If someone felt a need to criticize this game seriously as a work of post-modernist art they would point out that the joke is on Hoigle; he thinks he's controlling Moigle, but you're the real puppeteer. But sadly the joke is on the player. After some entertaining self-referentiality Hoigle's too-obvious asides make it more believable that Moigle's the smart one. So Floigan Brothers is simplistic enough to be over before its staple of belly-laughs become outright tedious and will be good for marginal and brief entertainment, but you shouldn't expect more. I don't suspect you can really hate it, as the Floigans have good chemistry, but even those with a clear bias towards offbeat titles will find it hard to overlook this game's flaws.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 04/14/03, Updated 04/16/03