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By Keith B (23rd Mar 2007)

Every now and again a puzzle game comes along that seems to seize the world's attention. Back in the good ol' days of Game Boy-before I developed trick knees and a love of whittling-Tetris was the digital handheld equivalent of heroin: painfully addictive to the point of nausea, migraines, and two-inch by two-inch screen-induced visions. Just as today, hardly can I ride a streetcar, subway, or rollercoaster without the person next to me feverishly scribbling away at a copy of The New Book of Super Difficult Sudoku Puzzles. And yet, while Tetris was always great fun en route, there was always something disappointing about it on the big screen: part of the joy of that game-like Sudoku and the myriad other handheld puzzle games-it would appear, was its very portability. While racing games tend to induce vertigo when played on moving vehicles and FPS games rely far too heavily upon split-second reactions for the back of a jostling bus, puzzle games have always offered that ticklish balance between the necessities of portable play and the zen-like obliviousness we desperately seek on our way to work, school, or the dentist's. Having never developed an obsession for Sudoku, I'm more than happy with the arrival of Kororinpa: Marble Madness, though its subtitle evokes the kind of over-enthusiasm one might expect of games titled House Vacuuming Insanity or Eucalyptus Gardening Mayhem.

The gist of Kororinpa is unsurprising to the point of folly: you are a marble; you careen through courses. The game's innovations, if not shocking, are however noteworthy. You're not just any marble, for instance, but a choice of twenty, including the seemingly indestructible classic. A barking dog, a meowing cat, a penguin, fruits, and footballs are all in evidence here, though not without important differences. The animal balls (vulgar as that may sound) have limbs, for example, which are useful as somewhat makeshift brakes. Other marbles are bouncers or sliders or speed demons, so marble choice, which increases as you successfully move through the game, is somewhat important, especially when a level seems erratically quick or unpredictably tortuous. The game possesses some 40 stages (plus a few unlockable ones), which are generally pretty diverse and at times surprisingly long, though when completed these are lamely mirrored as an additional 45.

Unfortunately the game has some difficulty intelligently managing those levels. Granted an unlimited number of lives, players are generally disinclined to guard them with any effort. Worse still, points and tokens are restored to players even after an in-game death, so the motivation to complete a level in one go never quite develops. On the upside, completing some of the later levels in one try is damn near impossible: finish points aren't even activated until a given number of orange gems are collected. As the game wears on, levels become larger, longer, and more complex; this is in part broken up by checkpoints, though these are amply spread out. As well, levels are clocked against relatively arbitrary, though in the last case quite difficult, time rankings: bronze, silver, and gold.

One of the game's strongest features is its clever if at times noisy use of the Wiimote; depending on your marble, you're likely hear a lot of barking, croaking, or oinking. Simply hold the remote in your hand, tilting and turning it to guide the marble through turns, up inclines, and down descents. Rather amazingly the screen and the course follow the marble-not the other way around. This frequently gives you the surprisingly enlivening feeling of actually being inside your seemingly gravity-defying marble. It's much like being in outer space: it's hard to discern which way is up, because no way actually is; your environment seems to follow you, turning and rotating as if you are in a centre-orienting position. The resulting intuitiveness of play aside, the developers were able to imagine and create what consequently feel much less like stable, fixed environments.

Head-to-head competition, reserved only for racing, is fun if not terribly inventive. Even in the most amateur of racing games, opponents can interact with one another, so that at times during Kororinpa, split screens equal autonomous play, killing on-screen and limiting off-screen interaction: no unsportsmanlike elbowing, no obligatory trash talking.

Not much can really be said negatively about the game's visual elements and soundtrack, though maybe less can be said with rabid excitement. The levels are generally pretty vividly coloured and as varied in theme as the levels in challenges. The music is surprisingly catchy, even hum-worthy. Hands down the strongest feature of the music might be the absence of the generally obnoxious, needlessly anxiety-inducing rhythms so common to puzzle games. I felt less like I was barreling through byzantine tunnels en route to a fiery death than casually and pleasantly awaiting my elevator car to reach the top of a fifty-storey-high department store.

For as much as I genuinely enjoyed playing Kororinpa, I couldn't help but feel that the intuitive way in which the game is actually controlled made the entire process of firing up the Wii console feel rather arbitrary. Sitting confined in my living room holding the Wiimote like I would any ball-in-the-slot puzzle, produced and sold for nearly nothing in dollar stores the world round, I felt really quite silly, like parents playing tomagachis, or a fan listening to a baseball game on a radio while sitting in the stadium. In all fairness, I like and would recommend Kororinpa to any puzzle enthusiast, though I can't help but paradoxically think that it would have been more useful and popular as a handheld game, though less engaging and original if it were produced for any other console than the Wii.

In many ways Kororinpa is as good a game as possible: without introducing guns, hand-to-hand combat or more diverse challenges, a puzzle game stays more or less a puzzle game. The only real puzzle here is if it's going to dethrone other puzzle games-and chances are that the next time you get on the subway you're more likely to see me uninterestedly leafing through a Sudoku book than lugging Kororinpa, my Wii, and a TV through the subway car doors.