Mushroom Men: Hands On
Hands on with the new franchise for the big N’s systems
Tags: Mushroom Men Categories: DS Previews, Previews, Wii Previews
Posted by Mike "Two Tone" McConnell on Oct 7th, 2008
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Mushroom Men is a new franchise from Red Fly Studios. A solid platform game infused with the same odd sense of humor you would expect from games based on anthropomorphic fungi. When you throw a bunch of Les Claypool music into the mix, this game may make a rather large splash when it hits for the holidays. The story is divided into two games, The first part of the story is on the DS, while the second is on the Wii. It is quite smart to push the franchise on Nintendo’s system. Both the DS and the Wii trade in nostalgia, and platform games are as nostalgic as they get.
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Nostalgia is great, but Mushroom Men manages to be engaging while using both systems’ unique control schemes. The DS version is a 2-D game using the stylus and pad control scheme. It is a bit awkward at first. The stylus is used to execute the special moves for the various special moves to navigate the stages. This ranges from flinging your character around the stage to using the cap to glide down. While the stylus controls are somewhat engaging, the Wii controls are far superior. Similar to Mario Galaxy, you use the pointer as well as the controller. The Pointer replaces the stylus and it instantly lowers the barrier to entry. Allowing the context sensitive cursor makes it far easier to make the characters do what you like. Although I think the stylus controls aren’t that difficult, it depends on how much they expect you to do with simple gestures, other titles have suffered when the touch screen has a meltdown in recognition.
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The new world created for Mushroom Men looks to be both weird and whimsical. The fungi have been brought to life by a meteorite, and have been endowed with some off abilities as well. They aren’t the only fauna to be granted both life and powers, giving the inch high view of the world it’s own feeling. Combining the inch high view of titles like Chibi-Robo with a new and dynamic environment is a great accomplishment. It has an instant flash of familiarity, but once the novelty of an ant’s view of a garage wears off, you still have all of the world’s mythology to deal with.
Mushroom Men is unique. That alone these days is enough to pique most people’s interest. Given the fact that the title is fun to play, and I’m excited. I just hope that the small peek that I had into the world isn’t the whole experience. Mushroom Men is supposed to be a new franchise, and in a genre that doesn’t have enough actual franchises.
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Tags: Mushroom Men
Posted by Mike "Two Tone" McConnell on Oct 7th, 2008 and is filed under DS Previews, Previews, Wii Previews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
