Kororinpa: Marble Mania

"Pandas! Penguins! Pink wafers!"

They say you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover. But a look at the cover of Hudson Soft's Kororinpa tells you everything you need to know. It all looks incredibly cute and basic - there is a lush green field of clover, a winding platform, and several of the game's animal-themed marbles are on display. So far, so disposable. Until, that is, you look closer, and realise that rather than being a computer-generated image, the cover is actually a photograph - the platform is made of cardboard, the clover and balls of felt, and there are even some plastic ladybirds lying around - somebody has gone to an awful lot of trouble to actually recreate the game world out of everyday items, like a Blue Peter presenter making Tracy Island out of Fairy Liquid bottles, egg cartons and their pet tortoise. It's this attention to detail in the face of the seemingly sugar-coated that best sums up Kororinpa - despite looking like a throwaway Monkey Ball rip-off, at it's heart lies a beast of a game.

The basic concept behind Kororinpa is astonishingly simple. As with Marble Madness you must guide a marble through a winding course. As with the Monkey Ball franchise you do this by tilting the course to make the ball roll. What sets Kororinpa apart, though, is that thanks to the Wii's magical motion-sensing abilities, the course can (unlike Monkey Ball) be fully rotated - you can tilt it to some dizzyingly steep angles, turn it vertical, or even turn the whole thing upside down, though this tends to make the ball fall off. It takes a little while to get your head around what this means for the 'rolling a tiny ball around a big level' genre, but once you get to grips with it, you soon realise just how many possibilities it opens up. In short, Kororinpa is the best ball-based game yet.

The courses start off being quite simple - the paths are twisty and winding, but all on the same level, and nothing more than some gentle tilting will see you reach the exit, which is opened by collecting all the red crystals that are scattered around the stage. It's a meandering, relaxed introduction that eases you into the mechanics of the control scheme very well. Not that the controls are too complex, mind - in fact they're blissfully logical. The Wii Remote essentially represents the course - when held flat, the course is flat. Tilt the remote slightly to the left, and the course tilts slightly to the left. Turn the remote fully upside down, and the course follows suit. It's astonishingly intuitive, which seems to be the Wii's mission statement, and what's more - and most vitally - it allows for a level of control over the course that simply could not be possible on a simple analogue stick - the speed with which you sometimes need to flip and rotate the course couldn't be achieved half as easily simply by holding a direction down on a standard joypad.

Once you've had a few stages to get used to the way the Remote bends, though, the game becomes far more complex, and the level design becomes simply staggering. The constraints of having the game take place on a relatively flat course are left behind, as are all the Monkey Ball comparisons that accompany this. Instead, the game becomes more three-dimensional than you can get your head around. You'll be twisting and turning the course so that the walls become the floor, and so that the floors become walls - often by the midway point of a stage you'll have to really think to work out whether you're technically on the floor or not based on where the level started. Courses also stop being continuous tracks, and often you'll need to roll your ball off a surface and onto a platform below to continue, which can lead to some serious wrist dexterity to ensure that the ball doesn't bounce off as soon as it lands.

There are also several obstacles in each stage - these range from magnetic strips that catch your ball and roll it over perilous gaps, to moving platforms that call for you to keep the ball dead still while they transport you (which, depending on the angle your wrist is at when you reach the platforms, can be rather tricky), to weighted platforms that roll down their railings and into position based on the tilt of the table. There are cannons that you must roll into before being blasted to another part of the stage. There are the many holes that litter the courses - some leading to lower platforms, some leading simply to oblivion; there are icy patches on the course that make controlling where the ball goes even more difficult; there are perilous jumps where you must quickly snap your wrist to send the ball bouncing off the course to try and clear the impending gap in the path - the levels really do start to become intensely complex by the halfway point in the game. And then there are the less frequent - often level-specific - dangers that crop up, like the floating magnifying glasses that try and burn your ball by focusing the sun's rays to a deadly pinpoint (these appear in a stage that is somewhat wonderfully titled 'Run! Solarbeam!'). It's superbly frantic stuff and miles from the simplistic opening levels, though the learning curve is such that you are eased in gently, and don't really notice just how basic the early levels were until you go back, and realise just how far you've come.

The level design is also very clever in that the courses are designed so that it's just about possible to skip whole sections provided you have honed your Kororinpa skills to almost Ninja-like levels. As your confidence grows, you'll find yourself flicking the course to try and make your ball 'jump' from one section to the other, cutting out a tricky corner, or quickly spinning the course a full 360-degrees, so that the ball leaves the course and lands - hopefully - at a further point. More often than not you'll end up failing, and spending more time trying to find some clever shortcut than it would have taken you to simply go the whole way around, but trying to shave valuable seconds off of your record time through such wrist-snapping trickery is irresistible stuff - Kororinpa really brings back that high-score chasing sense of achievement with a vengeance

It's not just the level design that's clever, though - a lot of time has gone into designing the various marbles that you can use in the game. Again, it may well seem that the various different balls on offer (which include spherical cats, penguins, pandas and pigs) amount to little more than an attempt by Hudson to make the game as cute and disposable as possible - an impression furthered by the simply adorable (and ridiculously irritating) animal sounds that some balls make as they are rolling about the stage. And, again, things are not as simplistic as they seem, with each ball offering some subtly different mechanics - while a simple glass marble offers some all round balanced play, using a basketball offers far greater speed, but, naturally, bounces much more - not what you want if you are planning on trying some sort of crazy short-cut that relies on pixel-perfect accuracy. On the other hand, using a rounded gasoline tank is as slow as a redneck's cousin, but it's weight means that it won't bounce at all. And while not all the balls play completely differently, there are enough subtle differences in the mechanics to make choosing your ball for each stage quite a tactical affair.

For all it's wonderful hidden depth, though, the main game in Kororinpa won't actually last all that long. There are fifty stages, spread across five different worlds (including a vertigo-inducing city skyline and a rather yummy-looking Zool-esque World Of Cake), and while later levels may last you upwards of twenty minutes to beat, the first two-dozen levels can be blitzed through in a single sitting. And when you are done with these fifty levels, there isn't anything particularly impressive to do. You can play all fifty stages in 'mirror' mode, which works exactly as you would expect it too, which adds some longevity but really doesn't offer up anything new, and there are some rather lacklustre hidden levels to be earned by collecting the hard-to-reach green gems in each stage, but these aren't enough to change the fact that you'll likely see everything there is to see in a weekend, a fact not helped by a truly poor multiplayer mode where you race a friend to the finish of any given stage, but can't actually make contact with their ball - Kororinpa is a game practically screaming for a mode where you and a friend try and bash each other off the courses.

The disappointing length of the game is made up for in part, though, by some truly charming graphics. There's nothing at all to set your component cable alight with pleasure - this is hardly a genre that lends itself to flashy effects after all, but once again the level of detail that Hudson go to is evident. The backgrounds to each stage are usually animated - cars are seen going about their business on the streets far below in the city stages, while various toys are seen at work in the playroom levels. But it's not just the backgrounds that impress - the actual levels themselves show some lovely little touches. In the cake-themed stages, for example, some sections of platform are made up of those pink wafers that come in those biscuit selection tins that you can only ever find in the shops at Christmas, while in the initial woodland stages you can see the grain of the wood that makes up the platforms. It's the little details such as this that make the final product seem so polished.

The sound, too, is magnificent. In short, the various tunes (that you can unlock as you progress) sound like videogames used to sound - subtle key changes, emotional and uplifting swells, dazzling crescendos.... all are abandoned in favour of pure enthusiasm, and the soundtrack is all the better for it. The music on offer here (which includes a tune based around Star Soldier, fact fans) is intensely jovial and simplistic, blasting forth from your TV speakers with no sense of shame - it's so old-school that it can't help but raise a smile, and it proves to be far more fitting than any modern-day musical wizardry could ever manage - after all, Kororinpa isn't about technical achievement, it's pure old-fashioned gameplay and high score chasing, and the music perfectly captures that feel.

While it lasts, Kororinpa is an absolute blast. It's maddeningly addictive, the level design is amazingly clever and deep despite it's simplistic appearance, and the subtle use of the motion-sensing Wii Remote makes it that rare thing - a Wii game that you genuinely cannot imagine working on another console. It has it's little niggles - the multiplayer is surprisingly weak for a console that is supposedly geared around getting families and friends playing together, the length is a little suspect, and if you want to play in widescreen you have to readjust the settings every time you turn on the game. But the sheer simplistic joy of playing the game shines through these flaws, and once you've let it's wrist-twisting magic into your life it's impossible not to get hooked. Against all odds, the game with the photo of cutesy felt animals on the cover has become one of the best games on Wii in it's infancy. And, if nothing else, any game with a level entitled Hexagon Of Doom must surely be a winner. Dismiss this at your peril.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 05/29/07