Wii Fanboy Review: Orbient
In 2006, Nintendo and developers Skip and Q-Games released a series of Game Boy Advance games in Japan called "bit Generations." These lower-costs GBA games emphasized simplistic gameplay and minimalist, abstract graphics. They were very cool. But Nintendo of America, for some reason, decided not to release graphically simplistic Game Boy Advance games two years after the release of the DS.
Now, however, Nintendo has a system for which tiny, simple games make financial sense, and out of nowhere they've resurrected bit Generations as "Art Style." The first game to be remade is Orbital, which, if they had to give one game a visual upgrade, is the best choice. As it turns out, Orbital (or Orbient, as it's now called) is still cool in 3D, and it's still shockingly original even if it is a remake.
Orbient is a simple game about enlarging your own planet by engulfing other planets. Planets small enough to absorb appear blue, and planets that are still too large appear red. As you increase your size, the red planets start to become blue, and blue planets turn grey, indicating that you can attract them into your orbit. When your planet gets large enough, one of the red planets will turn into a star; pulling that star into your orbit completes the stage.
To navigate the cosmos and maneuver yourself toward your targets, you have only two actions, on two buttons: attract and repel. Holding A sends you into the gravitational fields of nearby planets, with the bigger planets being stronger; holding B sends you away. And that's it. You turn by orbiting planets and exiting at the right moment. Such a stripped-down mechanic seems like it would make for an overly simplistic gameplay experience, but as it turns out, it's more than challenging enough to have to plan your movements only in terms of attraction. Most of the time you'll try to cozy up to something in order to get into its orbit ... and end up slamming right into the thing, at the cost of a life.
The levels start off as the kind of planetary groupings we'd expect in nature: groupings of stars and large planets with a few other things orbiting. But once the setting is established, Orbient goes off into a more creative direction: black holes in the middle of solar systems, pinwheel-like assortments of spinning formations of planets, and basically anything that Skip thought would be fun in a game.
Orbient somehow manages to be both slow-paced and arcade-like; difficult and relaxed. It's the ultimate chillout game, but is still far too difficult to finish in a couple of sittings. Just getting the hang of the attraction mechanic takes a while.
The best thing about Orbient and the other bit Generations games is that it proves that not every gameplay mechanic has been invented; there are still extremely basic concepts that have yet to be made into pure gameplay experiences that are every bit as elemental as Pong or Space Invaders.
bit Generations fans may be disappointed with the "upgraded" presentation here. The circles are no longer pixelated outlines, and the whole thing has been redone in 3D. However, the new look is still minimalist -- it's just a different expression of minimalism in games. For the most part, the objects in the game are still plain circles. They're just a bit smoother and have lighting. There's still absolutely no detail to be found. The shapes are still just shapes. If anything, the use of plain, round circles is even less distracting than the look of the GBA game. And most importantly, the soundtrack, consisting of an atmospheric drone with added elements for each satellite you add on, is the same.
I feel like it's going to take a long time for me to understand how to play Orbient effectively. I'm going to be putting several more hours into this game. It can occasionally be a bit frustrating when I smack into a planet over and over again, but the game partially compensates for this by loading you up with lives. That way, there's not so much sense of impending danger, and the game remains basically relaxing. When was the last time you found a game relaxing?
Final score: 8/10
