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Developer: BudCat Creations
Publisher: Majesco
Release Date: June 10, 2008
System: Wii
ESRB Rating: E
Official Web site

0:00 I played a demo of this game for about five minutes at last year's E3. It was by far the most original game I played at the entire show.

0:01 A bass-heavy techno beat plays over a simple title screen, with labeled pieces of a cel-shaded plane marking the different options.

0:02 The controls configuration screen shows a total of three buttons: Shoot, Hide Attached Shapes and Pause. Now that's old-school.

0:03 Let's jump on in to the official-sounding Campaign mode. The difficulties are Rookie, Pilot and Ace. Since I'll be flying a ship, I feel like I should at least be a Pilot.

0:04 I know from my experience with the demo that shooting down the opposing ships lets me collect their falling carcasses and attach them to a growing ball around my ship, Katamari-style. It's a good thing I know this, because the game doesn't explain it anywhere that I've seen.

0:05 Right off the bat, I'm finding it hard to tell which enemies are dead, and thus OK to absorb, and which ones are alive, and thus not OK to touch. Some better color-coding or something would help.

0:06 I've already lost all three of my lives. The enemy shots seem to be magnetically attracted to the center of my ship.

0:09 My ship gets pretty unwieldy pretty quickly the next time around, taking up nearly a quarter of the screen at one point. As pieces get hit and fall off, new ones come to replace them. Still, no matter how many pieces I have shielding my core ship, the bullets somehow seem to find me. Blarg.

0:12 This time around, I focus on protecting my ship by constantly retracting my collected pieces and dodging the oncoming red bullets. This makes the enemies a lot harder to kill, though, as those new pieces were providing a lot of my firepower. I get a little farther this time, but still die before I've even gotten to a proper boss. One more try, then I'm going down to Rookie.

0:16 Practice makes perfect, I guess, because I make it to the first boss with relative ease this time. The key seems to be being less timid about going for those falling pieces. I may lose a few pieces in the chase, but replenishing them constantly is key.

0:18 The boss isn't too bad, despite the immense amount of splitting bullets it sends my way. I just keep retracted and dodge up and down. It reminds me of fighting Tatanga at the end of Super Mario Land. I just lost half my readers with that reference.

0:20 I die early on Stage 2 to some new, balloon-like enemies with harder to predict movements and shots. I'm still finding it hard to know when they're "dead" and ready for collection. I have to start over at the beginning of Stage 1? Haven't the developers ever heard of continues?

0:24 I get through the first boss again, bit with only one life remaining this time. The sheer amount of stuff on the screen makes it hard to keep track of the bullets.