Portabliss: Russian Dancing Men (iOS)

Did you know that you can download handheld games now? That's amazingly convenient! The only inconvenient part of it is finding the right games to buy -- and that's where we come in, with our Portabliss column. In each installment, we'll tell you about a downloadable game on the iPhone, iPad, Android device, DSi, 3DS, PSP, etc. Today: Russian Dancing Men.

I had no idea how badly this needed to happen. Russian Dancing Men is nothing less than a Weebl's Stuff music game, featuring rhythm-based gameplay to the tune of songs I'm afraid to mention, because they'll be stuck in your head for months.

All right, I'll do it. You'll hate me for this. "Where can you see lions? Only in Kenya."

"Taking a bow, it's Magical Trevor; everyone has seen that the trick is clever."

And I'm really sorry to do this to you: "Snake, a snake, oh, it's a snake."

Russian Dancing Men acknowledges the secret shame of loving the looping music from some old Flash videos, and turns it into a strength. As the Russian Dancing Men, you take a tour through the worlds of Weebl and Bob's most popular earworms, as badgers, Amazing Horses, crabs, and beans, lots of beans, lots of beans, lots of beans fly around behind you.

Gameplay is reminiscent of Vib-Ribbon: you have four on-screen buttons, each bearing an iconic representation of a certain type of obstacle (hurdle, pit, spikes, loop). You press each button as each obstacle comes up (or two in the case of certain "combination" obstacles), to the beat of the music. For the most part, this is a simple, effective, and damned challenging design for a music game, and I never had any problems with the virtual buttons, except for briefly mixing them up.

Here's the big problem with this game, the one that makes me wonder if the developers understood the point of music games in the first place: at certain points in each song, the music (and the gameplay) will actually speed up or slow down. The rhythm changes arbitrarily. In a rhythm game. Who does that?

It's pretty annoying, but it just means you'll lose every level the first time you play it. That was going to happen anyway.

Russian Dancing Men is available on iTunes as a universal app. It's currently on sale for $0.99. We're always looking for new distractions. Want to submit your game for Portabliss consideration? You can reach us at portabliss aat joystiq dawt com.