Review: Max and the Magic Marker

 

It's not often I buy a WiiWare game. For my money the only one worth the Wii points has been World of Goo (though I did buy Swords and Soldiers and Bomberman Blast). World of Goo is now joined by Max and the Magic Marker.

Max is the story of a young boy who receives a marker pen in the post without any explanation to its function. He draws a monster with it and this monster comes to life and escapes from the paper! Max now needs to get him back and you might need to use that magic marker to help you with the puzzles along your way...

The game is ideal for the Wii. It uses the Wiimote as the marker pen, and the Nunchuk as the joystick to direct Max where you need him to go. Its standard platformer action is good enough as it is, but then there are areas that are too difficult to reach with the normal jumping behaviour and this is where the magic marker comes in to play. You can draw a staircase for Max to climb, or a block to drop on the head of the pesky purple monsters. It gets more intricate though, if you draw multiple lines that cross they get "glued" together to form a single object to enable you to go a bit further with the designs needed and then there's another twist. You can hold down the A and B buttons to freeze the action whereupon the graphics transform into a kid's drawing style. At this point you can draw at your leisure and when you unfreeze your drawing is in there already. This allows you to jump in the air, freeze, draw a box under Max, unfreeze and have him land on the box. He could then jump again, you freeze and draw an additional platform under Max's feet and so climb up the screen in this way.

The learning curve is well-adjusted. My son Finn who is nearly seven loves it and it makes a nice change from shooting games. With the simple introduction of the puzzles including signposts giving you a hint what to do the first few times you encounter a new puzzle, the fun of the game is not tempered by the frustration of failing to know what to do to reach your objective.

The game has crashed a couple of times, and a couple of times the camera has zoomed off to an area where you can no longer see Max or your marker and your only recourse is to restart the level you are on, but even this doesn't stop the game from being extremely polished in only 40MB (the maximum allowed on the WiiWare shop). The graphics are pretty and clear in both the normal and frozen "kid's drawing" versions, and the sound effects and music are very well-chosen.

Lastly, on the Press Play website there is a demo of Max playable on your computer (not on the Wii itself), that uses the free 3D engine Unity. Have a look and I'm prepared to bet that you too will shell out the 1,000 Wii points necessary to buy the game... 4/5

Downloadable DS demos on the Wii

Just a very quick one here. Did you know that you can download demos of games to your DS from your Wii (if you have both of course)? On the Wii you need the Nintendo channel. You go into it and choose the "Our Titles" item from the top of the screen once you have the list of videos. Now choose the bottom item from the list "Downloadable DS content" and you will see a whole bunch of downloadable stuff. You just need to make sure your DS is on, and in Download Play and the Wii will start sending the file once it has it. I just played Ninjatown on it, which is a cutesy RTS game with DS elements.

The only downside on the DSi is that the download is not permanent in the way software from the DSiStore is.

PS. We have a DSi and a DSLite here in the house, and the Wii is set to WPA for wi-fi (and so is the DSi) but the DS Lite had no problem downloading...

PPS. Please excuse the execrable page layout. Making tables in Blogger isn't fun in a hurry with the stupid size of the edit window, having to do it in HTML and so on. Also, the text in the pics is obviously in French - no choice since we live in France even though the rest of the Wii is in English - but the locations of the buttons to hit will still be the same.

Wii Homebrew

I've hesitated for a long while before posting this because, well just because, but it's all info freely available on the web, I just Googled for things (I did not "Bing" them). Since System 4 came out for the Wii, with obstruction of the famous Zelda save game loophole, it was thought that the Homebrew Channel was dead and buried, but it may be easier to install than before (I didn't try before System 4, but since I don't own any Zelda games I would think that method would be harder).

To start off, all you need do is visit this site. It provides you with details of how to go about installing the Homebrew Channel on your System 4 Wii. Why would you want to? Well, it's not for piracy, despite what official sources say. There are a growing number of independent applications that a) don't require official licences or packaging and b) this is the way new developers start, without the learning avenue of independent thought all we'll get is ever-safer sequelitis or movie tie-ins from the few remaining established publishers at huge prices.

You will need an SD card for this to work, and SDHC cards and MicroSDs in SD card adaptors work for me having tested an 8GB SDHC card, a 256 MB SD card and a 2 GB MicroSD.

Once you have this, visit the site I listed above and get the software you need to get it installed. I used the Bannerbomb tool and the first piece of software I installed (after the Homebrew Channel, obviously) was the Homebrew Browser, a self-updating browser of all the games and apps that are available directly through the channel - My faves include the 2D Portal games Portii and Still Alive; Picross for the Wii (since there isn't an official one); Google Earth for the Wii in WiiEarth; various utilities for loading and saving games and Miis and the not-very-useful-but-good-demos of Balance Board tools and Spirit Level. The Homebrew Browser is available on the same site as the Homebrew Channel itself. There are also numerous emulators of games (like Scumm, Quake and Doom) and platforms (including the NES, SNES and N64 obviously, but also the Amiga and even Mac, although I haven't tried any yet).

Anyway, the Homebrew Channel will doubtless be "cured" with the next system update again, but it's a great thing to have. Publish your homebrew game to the Homebrew Browser and let me know so I can try it out!