Bit.Trip Beat

[shMerker]

It's awesome. I'm shocked that they're selling it for the same price as an NES game. I'm gonna say it right now: Best value on the shop channel.

Also, thanks for pointing me to more wonderful music.

[raezr]

After hearing your most recent podcast about music games I was almost going to post something about how you guys should play this. It's really an amazing game. I think if you add the total length of each level it's about 45 minutes long, but I've been playing it for nearly 10 hours since I got it. And apparently it's going to be part of a series! The second part should be out in 3 months or something.

[Kneecaps]

This game really is great. Besides World of Goo and Mega Man 9, it's my favorite WiiWare title to date. I have yet to beat the second level, though. The only thing that's kind of frustrating is that there are a few points during the game where the balls and paddle are hard to distinguish from the background (specifically, the comet in the first level and when you're nearing the planet in the second). Luckily, both of these instances last no longer than two seconds and can be more or less memorized.

I'm glad that they chose to have a few long levels instead of many short ones. It really helps the immersion in this case.

[Kaatridge]

Does anyone know if this is available in the Australian Wii Shop Channel yet? I would be interested in checking it out.

[raezr]

John Constantine is free to have his own opinion but this is just silly:

Bit.Trip is oppressive, necessitating that you pay attention constantly, or fail as a result.

You mean I have to pay attention for 10-15 minutes straight? Please, I am merely human.

[shMerker]

Games are becoming fewer and fewer that actually require a sustained effort to proceed. The mean autosave time in your typical action game has got to be around 30 seconds. In fact I seem to remember that being a stated design goal for the Halo series.

Music and Rhythm games though are typically an exception to this, requiring you to play through a whole song successfully before being rewarded in any way. I haven't been timing the levels in bit trip, but they seem long even by that standard.

But there's no point in continuing to play a level in bit trip if you haven't mastered the earlier parts of it. You'll just be getting even further out of your depth. When you fail the game pulls you back to something easier so that you can get back up to speed before tackling the more difficult challenge that defeated you.

What this allows though is some really hairy, but defeatable, patterns that work because you get built up to them incrementally.

[raezr]

Bit.Trip Beat doesn't even really require that much more out of you than any other music game I've played. Rock Band and Elite Beat Agents for example are about as intense (although they also have difficulty settings). The only real difference between those and Beat is that Beat's tracks are about 15 minutes long, which aren't even fast or challenging the entire time. There are lulls in the action and repeated patterns which are pretty easy.

Constantine's review just felt weird to me. I thought he had listed all the good parts about the game but said they were bad. It felt to me like it just wasn't his thing. He's allowed to dislike it, but it bothered me how he tried to act like it wasn't just his opinion and claimed it's an objectively bad game. Now I love the game, but I realize it's extremely niche and the kind of thing someone's going to either love or hate depending on whether or not you like the style.

[shMerker]

Yeah, I don't get it either. He's not talking about the "mean autosave time" that I mentioned before, though my best guess is that that's what's really bothering him. The whole thing about distraction seems...naive? I mean, that's a staple of the rhythm genre. Dance Dance Revolution is loaded with that kind of stuff.

And then it turns into that staple of games writing, the "Let me diagnose everyone else's insanity essay" in which an intrepid writer seeks to discredit positive feelings about something he dislikes and explain how he is the only one who has looked beyond the curtain.

The thing that's funny to me is he pins it to the "retro style". It rings hollow because that was never really the draw for me. I can't imagine it looking any other way, but I don't particularly crave things that look like they were on the Atari 2600. Although I suppose it's possible that's what everybody else likes.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just irritated because I think someone should wait more than a few days before calling everyone "the new graphics whores".

[Ensenada]

John Constantine: Slaughtering sacred cows, and also demons I guess.

I haven't played Bit.Trip Beat yet (I'll wait till Cave Story comes out and just buy both at once, so I don't end up blowing the leftover points on Major League Eating or some shit like I always do), but I agree to some extent. It seems like a game can get away with any possible flaw as long as they can justify it by saying "It's supposed to be old school!" Old school shouldn't be synonymous with deliberately flawed, and not everything that came out on the NES was the stuff of legend.

And then there's this:

The whole thing about distraction seems...naive? I mean, that's a staple of the rhythm genre.

If there's an element of a game that you don't like, you shouldn't be expected to accept it just because every game before it did the same thing. Of course, I could see where this would be a matter of taste. Personally, I see a line between cool animations and flashing colors that exist purely to distract you. We'll just have to settle this in the Thunderdome.

[shMerker]

Fair enough about the distraction thing. I was just trying to highlight that things like that are clues to when a game is simply intended for a different audience. What annoys me about the review is not that he dislikes the game, but that he's implying that everyone who is saying positive things about it are doing so disingenuously.

I'm going to play devil's advocate here and say that Bit.Trip is too hard and the levels are too long. It seems like there are still other good points that have nothing to do with it being retro and that maybe people even recognize the flaw and have fun anyway. It's a leap to go from "This game has a serious flaw." to "People are just giving this game good reviews because it looks like Pong." which seems to be the thesis of John Constantine's review.

Maybe he's right. I just think there are other reasons to give a game an 8 out of 10 when it's good, but not perfect, and I think he knows that.