Simplicity at its best.
I apologize for the clumping of text in many spots. Some parts were supposed to be their entirely own paragraphs, some were meant to be headings, such as "Speed Monkey" which was clumped into the Fireball Frenzy paragraph and I'm sure there are plenty of other problems in there. Get your act together Gamespot! With all of these complex, poly-heavy titles flying around nowadays, it's hard to find games like this anymore. Simple in both design and function, yet a blast to play. Made by PixelJunk Studios, the idea was to make a low budget, 2D game, with a short development period (supposedly around 6-8 weeks) that is over-the-top-fun. In my opinion, they succeeded. The premise of this game is racing a small car around many different tracks with different objectives depending on the game mode you pick. You can play offline solo, or with up to six friends (Yep. Seven players.) or you can take to the online leader boards and see how high you can fly. Now, from the overhead view this game takes, there could have easily been problems with control but the developers took a pretty unique and interesting method to controlling the vehicles. On any given track you don't worry about turning corners, just which lane you're in. This may sound pretty stupid but it actually works pretty well. I'll name a few of the game types to give you an idea of what to expect:
Fireball Frenzy
In Fireball Frenzy you weave through other car sprites and when you pass enough you turn into a flaming fireball and tear through anything in your path. The nice little trick to this is that while you're a fireball you speed up when you hit the other cars. Theoretically you could finish the entire race in a matter of seconds if you are sharp enough in your aim. Speed Monkey
In this particular game you once again try to weave through many other cars, but this time you're trying for a high score. Every time you pass another car that's one point. Obviously, if they're bunching together which they do plenty often you could score quite a few points all at once. The catch here is not so surprising- as you pass more and more cars you go faster while they stay at the same speed. You need to have pretty quick reflexes or be pretty lucky to get the gold here. The highest I've gotten 61, though that was on a plain circular track. As you try it on more complex tracks it can get quite a bit more difficult.
Balloon Blast
This is a pretty weird one. Your car in this particular game is an inflatable car/balloon and the objective is to fill it up at the start line as much as you can without popping it and then when it blasts off you have to guide it through the course in trying to avoid the obstacles. This is pretty easy game but still amusing.
The many games in this one game are surprisingly varied. If you've ever wondered how many different ways you could race around a track then this should give you a pretty good idea. Rather than focusing on making the cars pretty or the dirt realistic they focused on the ideas and the execution thereof. And because of this complete disregard for heavy graphics the loading times are pretty much non-existant. They are, at most, the length of a black screen between TV commercials I.E. half-a-second. The longest loading screen is when you start the game. From there the loading time between games would need to be measured in milliseconds. PixelJunk Studios has very sagely realized that games don't have to all be in 3D; rather than replace one with the other completely, like all good things, it should be used in moderation. Hats off to PixelJunk on this fine creation!