
	Platform PSP Genre Action Publisher Beuna Vista Developer Q Entertainment ESRB E (Everyone) Released Q4 2006

- Excellent graphics - Unique game system - Plenty of skins

- Might take awhile to “click” - Sometimes a bit too dependent on luck

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Every Extend Extra

Score: 8.0 / 10

Every Extend Extra – the latest from Q Entertainment, the group behind Lumenis – isn’t quite a puzzle game. There’s no way it fits into any real genre classification, except maybe the catch-all term “arcade”. It’s blissfully abstract and quite simple, much like the golden age of arcade gaming, which makes it a remarkably refreshing experience.

This PSP version is actually a vastly enhanced version of a Flash game called Every Extend. You control a little dot on a square playing field – the only thing this little dot can do is explode. There are all kinds of other shapes and objects flying around, which will also detonate whenever you explode near them. The goal is to create huge explosions by chaining these tiny detonations together.

The challenging part is that your little blip can only blow up a limited amount of times. You’re generously given extra “lives” based on your score, which requires that you carefully plot out your detonations – why waste one on a five-chain when you can try to wait a few more seconds until some more shapes line up, and get

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a thirty-chain? Furthermore, certain enemies will drop little score enhancements that slowly float out of the playing field. This score bonus multiplies each one you pick up without exploding, so it’s vastly to your advantage to grab as many of them as possible. To make things more difficult, getting hit by anything will cause you to lose one of your precious lives, as well as detracting several

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seconds from the timer. Occasionally little enemies will pop up and toss torrents of bullets around the screen, making an already busy game even more cluttered. The major challenge comes in being able to sort out everything on the screen amidst all of the chaos, and time your explosions just right.

Picking up purple power-ups also increase the speed of the floating debris. This means more crap will fly onto the screen, thereby making it even more difficult, but it also allows greater combo scoring opportunities. You’ll want to build up this speed for the boss battle at the end of each stage, which usually requires that you create huge chains in order to damage it. If you manage to beat it before time runs out, your score is tallied and you move on to the next level. There are branching stages depending on your score, which is further incentive to play as well as possible.

It takes a little while to get a hang of Every Extend Extra, just because it’s so hugely different from everything else out there. It might take awhile, but after a bit of playing, suddenly it will all click, and it becomes incredibly satisfying to pull off huge combos with ease. The only real roadblock is that, like puzzle games, your success is at least somewhat dependent on the randomly generated patterns of debris that are thrown at you. Maxing out the speed meter definitely helps, but it can get frustrating in boss battles when you’re doing nothing but dodging enemy fire, watching the clock tick down, and waiting for big enough combo opportunity to pop up, if one arrives at all.

Still, even when you lose in circumstances like these, it’s hard to put the game down. Much like Lumenis, each stage is a different “skin”, featuring entirely different graphics and sounds. In keeping with the trippy theme, the music is mostly variations of electronic music, with the repetitive beats occasionally broken up whenever you get some particularly high scoring combos. Ultimately the graphics are what set this PSP version far and beyond the original freeware version – one is a spinning vortex of Vegas-style neon signs, another is filled with carnival lights, yet another is a white canvas filled with flowers. They’re a bit less abstract than Rez, one of Mizuguchi’s other titles, but they’re trippy and appealing in precisely the same manner. The constantly changing visuals give a sense of progression, which is important for a game as inherently repetitive as this one. As you progress, you unlock more and more skins, which can then be played again at any time.

The entrancing graphics and addictively bizarre gameplay help define Every Extend Extra as a fantastic game, but the $20 price tag ensures its status as one of the best values on the PSP.

- Kurt Kalata

(February 19, 2007)