We really liked Bit.Trip Beat. Combining old-school gameplay with an awesomely neo-retro aesthetic and just plain awe-inspiring level design, this first installment of Gaijin Games’ new WiiWare series encapsulated everything great about indie development.
Less than five months after the release of Beat, the fellas at Gaijin are back with the second installment in the six-part Bit.Trip series, entitled Core. Eschewing the Breakout-esque gameplay of the first game with…well, with a mechanic a bit too complex to describe in a single pre-jump paragraph, Core presumably seeks to provide a completely different Bit.Trip experience, while still remaining true to the spirit of the first game.
But is the damned thing any good? After the jump, Anthony Burch and Jonathan Holmes will attempt to answer this question.
Bit.Trip Core (WiiWare)
Developer: Gaijin Games
Publisher: Aksys Games
Released: July 6, 2009
MSRP: 600 Wii Points
Anthony Burch:
People will invariably compare Beat and Core, but apart from the art style and basic twitch-rhythm-gameplay premise, they share nearly nothing in common. Maybe that’s why I was so surprised to find myself totally in goddamn love with Bit.Trip Core once I finished it.
Initially, the game felt like a flaky, less-interesting interpretation of the core Beat experience. Instead of using a paddle to hit beats, which felt immediately intuitive, familiar, and satisfying, I was awkwardly pressing one of four directions and hitting the 2 button to zap a beat just at the right moment. It felt more rigid than Beat, and much more spatially confusing: I pretty much floundered during my first few minutes of the game as I attempted to identify which beats were headed to which quadrant of the screen. This was uncommon. This was perplexing. This wasn’t fun.
Then, an hour later and entirely without warning, something clicked.
Once you get sufficiently used to the basic gameplay, everything suddenly makes sense. No, it’s not as tactile or outright exciting as Beat; it’s something else entirely. At some point, you realize the game has subtly shifted your spatial perception to the point that what originally looked like a remarkably confusing hodgepodge of dots flying in different direction somehow resolves itself into a clear, measured ballet. I’ve heard fans of Space Giraffe refer to the process of playing it as something akin to learning how to see in a brand new way; until playing Bit.Trip Core, I didn’t know what they meant (though I still don’t like Space Giraffe).
