So I waited until I actually beat this game to start a thread, basically to make sure that it was, in fact, possible to complete.
This is the fourth game in the Bit.Trip series on WiiWare, and since I was able to finish it, that makes it the easiest Bit.Trip game, by default. But that is a very relative term.
In a nutshell, if you're the kind of person who thought they should have made an entire game out of the Speeder Bike level in Battletoads (Justin Clark), this game is for you. All you have to do is run to the end of the stage, and jump/duck/kick/block the obstacles along the way. But you don't control the running--you just never, ever stop. So much like the other games, Runner is a rhythm game in disguise.
The margin of error is literally zero--hitting any obstacle just once kicks you back to the beginning of the stage. But in a rather fascinating game design decision, there is almost no break between losing and starting over. You soar back to the beginning, your guy taps his toes two or three times, and you're off again inside of three seconds. It's almost literally impossible to put down, and it makes what would be (and sometimes is) a hellishly frustrating game compulsively playable.
As you can see, its visuals are a certain kind of retro-awesome, like a supercharged Atari 2600. (It's more directly aping the cover art to the Activision games for the 2600, with its rainbow trails and ultra-clean chunky pixels, which every other reviewer is apparently too damn young to remember.)
It's not for everyone, and I think the Bit.Trip series in general is too artificially difficult by half, but this was deeply satisfying to complete. For reference, it took me upwards of ten hours to beat, and a perfect run would take no more than a half hour. I probably died between one and two thousand times. But if you still have the muscle memory burned into your brain from some 20-year-old NES games, this may scratch a particular itch.
This is the fourth game in the Bit.Trip series on WiiWare, and since I was able to finish it, that makes it the easiest Bit.Trip game, by default. But that is a very relative term.
In a nutshell, if you're the kind of person who thought they should have made an entire game out of the Speeder Bike level in Battletoads (Justin Clark), this game is for you. All you have to do is run to the end of the stage, and jump/duck/kick/block the obstacles along the way. But you don't control the running--you just never, ever stop. So much like the other games, Runner is a rhythm game in disguise.
The margin of error is literally zero--hitting any obstacle just once kicks you back to the beginning of the stage. But in a rather fascinating game design decision, there is almost no break between losing and starting over. You soar back to the beginning, your guy taps his toes two or three times, and you're off again inside of three seconds. It's almost literally impossible to put down, and it makes what would be (and sometimes is) a hellishly frustrating game compulsively playable.
As you can see, its visuals are a certain kind of retro-awesome, like a supercharged Atari 2600. (It's more directly aping the cover art to the Activision games for the 2600, with its rainbow trails and ultra-clean chunky pixels, which every other reviewer is apparently too damn young to remember.)
It's not for everyone, and I think the Bit.Trip series in general is too artificially difficult by half, but this was deeply satisfying to complete. For reference, it took me upwards of ten hours to beat, and a perfect run would take no more than a half hour. I probably died between one and two thousand times. But if you still have the muscle memory burned into your brain from some 20-year-old NES games, this may scratch a particular itch.
