The first batch - Dotstream, Dialhex, and Boundish - were a surprising trio of pick-up-and-play designs. These three were clearly the simplistic of the bunch. The second batch - Coloris, Orbital, Digidrive, and Soundvoyager - are just as clever and experimental as the first bunch in the Bit Generations line. The difference here is that these games are a little more complex with mechanics that are just a little more difficult to grasp than the first batch.
Coloris gets its namesake from two words: Color, and Tetris. Its gameplay isn't anything like Tetris, but it's just as addictive as we've spent hours swapping and removing tiles in the many different puzzle challenges.
We'll fully admit that the concept and design was lost on us for a good hour or so - with the instructions fully in Japanese we had to hunt and peck through multiple sessions in order to figure out the unique puzzle mechanic of Coloris. Now that we understand the idea, we can't put it down.
It's actually very simple: each puzzle has its own color spectrum, and players must change the on-screen tiles by lightening or darkening the tile's color to the higher or lower of the color spectrum. The cursor is constantly shifting from bright to dark and back again, so you'll have to work with its randomness in order to match up three or more like colors in a row or column to make the tiles disappear. More tiles will always drop into place, so you're not racing gravity this time - instead, you're trying to speedily fill up the color bar with combos. If you go too long without removing tiles, colored tiles will start blinking out and turning black, and the only way to get them back to useful colors is to remove tiles adjacent to them…twice. If all of the tiles blink out, the game's over.
Because later levels get crazy with their palettes, people with colorblindness need not apply.
The second game we popped in was Orbital, and boy is this game different. But in a good way. It's very similar in concept to the "bigger fish eat little fish to grow" design, but instead of swimming around in an ocean, you're floating around in space as a planet scooping up smaller planets to grow.
This game uses the A and B buttons exclusively: A to "attract," B to "repel." What you have to do is use other planet's gravity to slingshot around each universe and scoop up littler planetoids - if you bump into them fully, you'll absorb them and grow in mass. If you brush past them, your planet's gravity will attract them and turn them into orbiting moons for extra lives. To finish a level, you'll have to attract that level's "sun" to your planet.
Again, very simple, very unique, and very challenging. As your planet grows, it gets heavier and harder to control. The deeper into the game you go, the more complex the universes become - planets start rotating around other planetoids and asteroids zip through the area causing mayhem and just creating enough hazards to make life as an orbiting rock difficult.
Digidrive is probably the most complex of the second batch of four games - so much so that even after a few hours of play we're still not sure about the mechanics.
Best we can figure it, different styles of icons are moving in from four points on a cross. The idea is to direct the traffic of these various icons into the four different alleyways of the cross by pushing up, down, left or right on the D-pad. Stacking up like-icons together will build up the points, and if you manage to keep multiple channels filled up, a crazy multiplier mode will sprout up in some quick-paced traffic-shuffling maniacal session.
The game has a two-player wireless mode, and solo players can compete against the computer opponent in this versus mode. But a lot of our playtime was guesswork, and we'll have to put a lot more time into this one to figure out all the little nuances of the gameplay.
Finally, comes the most ambitious, but ultimately most unexciting of the batch: Soundvoyager. The theme is very exciting: sound-based gameplay. This design uses the stereo capabilities of the Game Boy Advance system to produce some odd game challenges, which means it's in your best interest to grab some headphones before you get started.
There are various different game styles in Soundvoyager, but they ultimately boil down to "find the center channel." In one mode, you're a dot sliding along a forced-scrolling environment trying to find an invisible dot on the grid by listening for its sound in the left or right channel. Center up your on-screen dot, and snag the soundmaker. A variation of it is the Sound Slalom where you'll have to try and shoot between two dots making noise by centering up the sound and making sure the left invisible dot's sound's coming out of the left channel, and the right dot's sound's coming through on the right.
Ultimately, though, even with its excellent sound focus, the game's very basic and bland. Audiophiles will love it, though, as it puts their sound sensitivities to the test.
Like the initial three game release, these four Bit Generations titles come packaged in sleek, smaller Game Boy Advance boxes, emblazoned with the proper Bit Generations art across the packaging. The seven stack neatly on top of each other with uniform package designs.
The big question: will these games ever see a release on these shores? We'll be so bold as to say: don't count on it. Nintendo of America is far, far too involved in the success of the Nintendo DS to confuse the market with the release of these overly simplistic GBA games. Nintendo has already received the ESRB rating for each of these games, which has been given the official series name of Digilux, but that's no guarantee that they'll ever rear their heads in the states. We're realists: these games are simple designs with visuals that don't exactly "wow" gamers, and these are original branded products with no familiar names or characters to attract customers to purchase them. And new GBA games retail for 20 bucks at the cheapest - and for that amount, Grandma would rather pick up a Spongebob title or even the Mario games that have recently hit the Player's Choice line-up.
Hopefully, we're wrong. Hopefully, Nintendo of America will be just as experimental with this series as Japan has been, because these games are a surprising treat. We'd love to see these on the market in the US with the same sort of packaging attention as the Bit Generations games have received. At the very least, they're cool collectibles with an enormous amount of gameplay within.