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the band of time thieves.
Okay, maybe it sounds a little silly, and I don’t know what cats have to
do with time, but hey does Mario’s storyline really sound any more
sophisticated?
And by the way, there’s the mandatory princess to rescue. A game
inspired by the Mario series wouldn’t be anything without a princess to
save. For the most part, Blinx follows many of the tried-and-true
conventions of the genre that many a game has placed into its makeup.
It’s funny one of the levels is named Déjà vu Canals, because you’ll
swear you’ve played games like this before.
You must venture from level to level, collecting items (including golden
icons that are needed to buy new items from the shop), defeating
enemies, squaring off against a big stage boss, until finally the day
and the princess is saved. But Blinx has one of the remarkably freshest
ideas instilled in a game this year, and it’s only an idea that can be
implemented in an Xbox title.
Because of its built-in hard drive, the Xbox allows the idea of time
manipulation to be used in Blinx. The recording device element (the Xbox
hard drive) that is required to pull off this feature acts almost like a
VCR, storing the information until the game’s hero needs it. Blinx can
bend and twist time as necessary, and there are areas of the game where
you will not be able to progress any further without using this “time
VCR.” Blinx can slow down, speed up, pause, rewind, and record time to
use in the game.
To get control over these basic time VCR abilities, Blinx must collect
the numerous time crystals that are sprawled all over the game’s
individual levels and also appear after each enemy is defeated. The time
crystals take their cue from the Lucky Charms school of videogaming (you
know, blue moons, red hearts, yellow stars, green clovers…er…diamonds)
and must be collected in a specific manner to find their way into your
time crystal inventory.
If you need to get a pause, for instance you need at least three blue
moon time crystals and any other icon to get a pause time control. If
four blue moons are collected, you get two pauses. This is the same for
any of the icons. The only one that doesn’t perform a time control
function is the red heart, which refills in the same way your health
meters (three hearts fills one, four fills two). There is some strategy
involved in the collection of the time crystals, because you can only
fill a limited number of slots in your inventory with them.
When your inventory is filled to the brim, the next combination of time
crystals collected will push out previously collected time controls,
which may be a very bad thing indeed. If you are on a level that
requires a record time control and you just lost the only one you had
without any other enemies to go back and beat to squeeze out a few green
diamonds, then you’ll be forced to restart the level.
These time controls come into play in at least one area of each of
Blinx’s 36 levels in nine increasingly difficult stages. There are areas
where two buttons must be pushed at once to open two doors needed to get
to the next area of a level. But there’s only one of you. How do you get
around the problem? Record Blinx standing on the furthest button. As
soon as the record timer stops, the recording of Blinx will stand on the
one button while the real Blinx can run over to the other button and
stand on it, thereby opening both doors and allowing Blinx to hurriedly
(the time controls last only about 15 seconds once activated) pass
through both doors and advance.
Another time control, rewind, can help Blinx reach what seems like
unreachable areas. An avalanche-collapsed section of the seventh stage,
for example, cannot be passed any other way than having Blinx using a
rewind time control, which restores the section to its stable state and
giving Blinx passage past it. As I mentioned earlier, where frustration
can set in is when you reach a point of no return, where you cannot pass
without a specific time control that isn’t in your inventory and having
no way of collecting the time crystals needed to get that particular
time control. The only option left is to restart, or worse restart and
having to travel on previous levels already beaten to get those time
crystals.
Using time manipulation is the single-most creative idea Blinx has going
for it. From there, it sinks into a formulaic game that although still
extremely worth playing may be a disappointment to gamers expecting much
better from Blinx. The monsters that compose your opposition on each
level take various forms, but all stick to having a bouncy-ball shape,
movement and attack approach.
Major time glitches create these monsters. There are smaller,
easy-to-defeat creatures like the chrono blob, and harder to defeat
baddies such as the molegon and dust herder. The end-stage bosses
usually are just huge (and faster) variations of one of the smaller evil
denizens that populate the levels. All are defeated by using the trash
and items (rusted old cars, barrels, bombs) that are located all over
each level by sweeping it up with your time sweeper and shooting it at
an enemy. The bigger the item, the less hits it will take to defeat a
time monster. You can only progress to the next level of the game once
each of the levels is cleansed of any and all monstrous presences.
Another item collected are the cat medals hidden through each level. The
only way to get the ultimate sweeper is to collect all 80 of the cat
medals that are hidden throughout each level. Each level has three or
four to find, and many are in hard-to-reach places. The biggest problem
with the cat medals occurs on the more difficult stages of the game. You
will be relieved to just complete a level, let alone worry about finding
each and every cat medal. The incentive isn’t really high to go and
retry harder levels, considering you have only ten minutes to complete
each level. Otherwise, you must restart the level from cat-scratch.
Artoon made a mistake in the usage of the shop of each level. Blinx can
go to the stage’s shops to buy new items like clothing, additional
health and time control holders, weapons, and upgraded time sweepers.
The problem here is that once you buy a time sweeper (or clothing), it
doesn’t stay in your inventory when you purchase a different time
sweeper in the next shop.
Instead, if you buy a new time sweeper the one you had in your
possession goes back into the store’s stock. There are areas of the game
where only one of the time sweepers should be used, but if you upgrade
to another time sweeper, you no longer have a previously owned time
sweeper. Instead, you must build up your gold by constantly replaying
previously beaten levels to reacquire it. The items themselves are
ridiculously high-priced. So much so that you may have to replay a level
up to 50 times just to build up enough gold to purchase the
higher-priced clothing or time sweepers. Again, even after you collect
enough gold to buy from the shops you will lose the clothing or time
sweeper you already have.
Even old-school platformers like Super Mario 3 on the NES kept an item
inventory so you didn’t have to keep repurchasing or finding items
already bought or found. Even worse, the clothing upgrades don’t seem to
have any effect on the gameplay so it’s almost useless to bother buying
Blinx’s variety of clothing choices.
You won’t find any fault with the visuals of Blinx. This is a sharp and
vibrant game, richly rendered both in the character models and the
sometimes-trippily colored levels. The lead hero, Blinx, looks
especially good. This is one of the Xbox’s better-looking games.
Although the worlds of Blinx aren’t fully explorable as Mario’s are due
to the invisible walls placed all over, most levels are designed nicely
to fit within the ten-minute time limit (some just barely though). The
sound effects include the bizarre Japanese-sounding feline vocalizations
of Blinx and his fellow time sweepers seen in the opening movie. The
music is your standard platformer variety and will have you
subconsciously humming it when you’re not even playing the game. Nothing
great, but does the job.
Blinx’s controls and camera can cause some difficulty. Blinx doesn’t
move too quickly. For a game that has a time limit on each level, there
should have been a faster way of moving through the levels. The
controller’s “X” button operates the sweeper (think Luigi’s apparatus
from Luigi’s Mansion), both sucking in the trash and shooting it out. It
generally works fine except when you’re trying to shoot an enemy from a
distance.
Shooting trash seems to take on a mind of its own and unless you are up
close and personal, shooting the trash into an enemy can be a crapshoot
at best. The controlling of Blinx can be a little too loose at times.
Stage seven is covered in snow and even standing still, Blinx slips and
slides, which can cause some footing problems when good footing is
needed. The game’s camera is adjustable, and works fine most of the
game. But there are times when a lot of enemies in tight quarters make
the camera absolutely impossible to see where you are in relation to the
rest of the game’s action. Defeat usually quickly follows. A tighter
camera would have made Blinx a less frustrating experience in these
instances.
It’s a shame that there were some flaws in the fundamental design of
Blinx, because the time manipulation feature and all-around sharp
aesthetics gave the game a lot of potential for greatness. Instead of
being the Mario challenger it could have been, the overall control,
camera issues and the above-mentioned weak points of the game bring it
down to good-but-not-good-enough status. Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy
playing through Blinx; it has enough good points to merit it being worth
the time and effort it takes to complete it. Xbox owners looking for a
game closely related to Mario 64 or the newer Mario Sunshine may want to
give Blinx a try, but just know that it does have its problems that will
affect how well you enjoy your time sweeping mission.
- Lee Cieniawa
lcieniawa@armchairempire.com
(November 14, 2002) |
