Hello Kitty's Cube Frenzy

"Hello Kitty/Hello Doggy/Played this game til/I felt groggy"

Life is so much better when you have something you can always win at. For some it involves arguments with people they've singled out. For others it involves being able to twist around a conversation to talk about what THEY want to complain about. Still others putatively win the race of life as they rise in the business community or ranks of lawyerdom through cronyism and backslapping and buy a big house and luxury car and between picking up awards for Community Service cry about how hard it is to afford college for Junior to lots of other people who've done the same thing. I guess I have spurned the human touch, though, as I have a solid line-up of colorful games in many genres I can whip with relative ease and speed. To think I once settled for boring old FreeCell!

Hello Kitty's Cube Frenzy(HKCF) fits in well with an easy game for the puzzle genre. You probably know Hello Kitty--short straight whiskers, oval head, and a bow in her hair. Closest cartoon relatives(in terms of shape:) South Park. But she existed long before South Park and will do so long after people realize the gross-out jokes stopped being funny in the second season. Plus, South Park for the PlayStation just stunk. With HKCF, however, I saw an added depth to the Hello Kitty phenomenon. Subsequent perusal of the various scene backgrounds and bonus characters you can unlock proves that one could do the whole rounding deal with other animals and, in fact, kids as well! (No word on adults yet.)

But the game manages to be satisfying due to the multitude of relatively simple tasks, or variations on a basic task, that you need to complete. You have the whole bit with falling blocks, which disappear when you get three squares of the same color linked(zigzag or straight line,) but HKCF actually requires you to do two things at once, although neither is terribly complicated: with the L1 and R1 buttons you toggle her walking speed or the direction she's going. She can climb up stairs you've constructed or even fall off a ledge depending on where blocks are, stunning her on a long drop, and you can even get her to walk on a falling block.

The object of any one level is to guide Hello Kitty so she walks onto all the items in a playing field--the order doesn't matter except on the hard setting. There are only a few shapes and four colors(red, blue, green and yellow) and usually there will be some cubes in place as well as bricks. They come in several clumps: two kitty corner blocks, a single unit, a 2x2 unit with rows colored differently, and a two-colored 1x3, and anybody who's played any distant relative of Tetris will learn to rotate the blocks at the last minute for some trick positionings. Bricks are mostly solid colored and can create obstacles to curve a falling piece around, but they can also be colored like cubes and form part of a chain although they don't disappear with the cubes. Also when you form a chain, for every cube that disappears, whatever's above the cube falls down one unit. Sometimes this is necessary but other times it can cause a brick to fall over an item making Hello Kitty's task impossible.

You also have the chance to create chain reactions that get extra points, although getting rid of bricks is not always a good thing. Here's where the strategy comes in: it's not terribly deep, but you feel good about realizing the cubes themselves aren't good or bad. Sometimes you'll need to clear a path to a buried item at the bottom, and other times you will need to build a long stair or a tower to the top; often you'll need to run Hello Kitty into a wall or quickly move her back and forth while waiting for the correct piece to drop. The levels near the end often have alternate solutions, often requiring you to slide in a group of blocks just in the right area, and most reward foresight as if you make some good early placements the rest is pretty trivial.

There are also three enemies, or what pass for enemies in an alternate universe as pastel as Hello Kitty's: Badtz-Maru is a black penguin who gets upset when you drop a brick on his head quickly or when Hello Kitty gets an item. He runs to the side and tries to kick a brick, which can mess up some of your careful work, although if you watch and time him he can just wind up kicking a wall. There's also Pandaba who kicks a group of blocks and rotates them if you drop something on his head and Hanamaru who is just a nuisance. Sometimes you'll be able to use these ''enemies'' as stairs, but more often they'll sit around looking both ways and can trap you in when you crash into them, and you'll want to pen them in on the side. Enemies can't kill you; that's generally chalked up to neglect, as you lose a Hello Kitty if she manages to fall to the bottom or runs out of time. Even the second is marginalized as you get time added on for each monochrome lump of blocks you whip up.

But wait! That's not all! There are three fields per scenario, each with a different background, and once you pass a scenario in story mode, you often have a choice where to go next. The path you take allows you to try different puzzles and unlock all of Hello Kitty's outfits. For instance, 'School Diary' will have her in a sailor suit, or 'Wedding March' has her in a wedding dress, 'Angel March' gives her wings, or 'Chinese Robe' or 'Kimono Town' feature Hello Kitty in more traditional Eastern outfits. But you don't just get clothes--you get a story too! For each area you've completed, you get more pages in a story book. And it seems to make sense no matter which levels you've completed. Postmodernists the world over try at this sort of thing and fail; Hello Kitty's neo-classical simplicity leaves them all busted. Or maybe it's just that each scenario reuses the same trick to start and end a chapter, but it's all so helplessly cutesy that anybody who tries to throw literary criticism at it deserves to be smacked in the nut with a very large copy of Ulysses.

Should you be fortunate to get Hello Kitty past Snow Mountain and watch Badtz-Maru's ignominious and adorably incomprehensible defeat, you'll have the option of Extra Mode, where I learned that Hello Kitty has a ton of pals with equally goofy names. There's Purin and Pochacco, dogs of different yellowness, and Patty and Jimmy, your average kids, and Kiki and Lala who would be too except they seem to have wings and wands. Badtz-Maru and his cronies are in the last scene and at the end of it all I guess he is a friend too as he is holding Hello Kitty's hand in the background of the high scores. While only an unfamiliarity with the rules cost me in story mode, the game decided to place items and barriers all over, which made my journey through the extra mode perilous as, on my first try, I solved it with one life left and ten seconds left on the timer.

I'd guess HKCF would be great for kids. It has a steady challenge gradient through boards, starting at trivial, and I can see how it would take time to grow and be able to beat the best level. In the meantime it helps kids work at doing two tasks together. Plus once it's done you can play through it different ways, enjoying the soft fuzzy pictures. Among usual console-puzzle quibbles beyond how loading time takes longer than the easiest levels is that on later levels randomizing which blocks can come down can be very annoying. Treading water dumping them off to the side and zapping them can become tedious, but more disorienting is how the default controls flip the usual purpose of O and X(ok and cancel,) which caused me to lose my game score on one instance. And the high score list is a bit of a fraud for the hard level as very little of your points come from a time bonus or any cube placement tricks--it's all predetermined by item totals unless you died and recontinued and got to double-dip some scene completion points. But I guess the tao of Hello Kitty includes rewards for not giving up after a serious failure.

But what you're more inclined to remember are the cute backdrops and the animation. While there's no actual talking, the score changes for each triad. And Hello Kitty steals the show as she twirls around(hit by a block,) gets dizzy from falling, or looks confused or exhausted as she runs into a wall or takes a break from a long jog. The drum-and-cymbal flourish as she hops up and down to never gets old even if it does interrupt the peppy jingle in back(and yes, playing this game makes one less embarrassed to use phrases like 'peppy jingle.') And she is always cute even when with some outfits, she looks suddenly bald when turning around. You'll want to play the game with each outfit as well as the alternate characters--as Badtz-Maru you can risk confusing yourself a bit.

Yet HKCF is something more than just a fun game that makes you feel confident you can control more than one thing at once. For instance, I don't like picnics. But the thought of Hello Kitty not getting to the watermelon for her little beach picnic if I drop my blocks wrong is enough to make me think of more clever ways to get to it, and I even feel happy that Hello Kitty must be enjoying the picnic. How many RPG's with fancy controls and demarked muscular fighters locked in melodramatic sessions regarding the universe's very stability can do that?

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 06/01/03, Updated 06/01/03