4cr Review – bit.trip Core

It’s a well established fact that 4cr’s readers can spot great games amidst the slew of mediocre releases that blind the market every year. It’s no surprise that the forums have long recognized that the bit.trip series stands out as a truly unique endeavor.

There’s been no shortage of experimental releases this year, offering shorter games that attempt to redefine what the label of “videogame” means while testing the perceived boundaries of the medium. Really, bit.trip constitutes very little in the way of risky experimentation. Instead, it represents a solid exploration of the medium that awards WiiWare with a legitimately unique exclusive.

While other studios are preoccupied with realism and narrative, Gaijin Games focuses on the core fundamentals that caused many of us to pick up controllers in the first place. They’re actively tapping into that mix of light, sound, and reflex that seduces our neurons and continues to enslave us as the gaming faithful.

Read on to find out why we’re criminally overdue for a salute to bit.trip.

Gaijin could have easily gotten away with adding more levels to the formula established within the Pong styled bit.trip Beat. Instead, bit.trip Core tackles a new control scheme, placing players as a fixed point within the center of the screen, able to fire in the four primary directions we’d expect from the setup ““ completing the circuit as it were to blast the bits flying past the line of fire.

In a sense, that’s it – with some perks along the way, such as multi-fire and challenge mode. So it all sounds really simple until you attempt to tackle the stationary nature of your position and your need to anticipate the bits as they come at you, waiting for the reveal of direction and timing with each new grouping. That gameplay is layered over backgrounds the balance trippy Tron flavored memories without distracting the eyes from the task at hand ““ though my swollen eyes needed a couple breaks along the way all the same.

My guilty pleasure is when the ranking drops and the game punishes me by downgrading the graphics to the barebone Atari line aesthetic, as if to say that I’m not good enough. I guess they’re telling me that I need to get back to my roots in order to get it right from now on.

That faux simplicity meets with the grueling endurance of each stage to subject the player to relentless bit blasting marathons. While a few voices have suggested that this setup could stand to be shortened, the nature of those lengthy sessions unquestionably strengthens the gameplay. In turn, this enables the game to mess with the player in the best possible way. Every time I felt myself getting the least bit comfortable with the patterns of bits, they changed! And as I neared the end of a stage, the realization of how long it had taken to reach that point brought on the sweaty palms of childhood.

The greatest compliment I can think to pay Core is to mention how it manages to derive more emotion from simplistic bits than other games can with the most complex motion captured characters money can buy. I sincerely feel that these bits are purposely screwing with me to find continually new ways to out-think what I expect them to do. And while I realize a wise man once said that paranoia wasn’t so much thinking that your boss was out to get you as his phone was, make no mistake, these bits are out to get you.

The moral here is that less is more – bit.trip Core continues to strip away all the secondary concerns of the medium to return the importance of gameplay to the player. It’s driver training for newcomers and veterans alike, offering an immense challenge beneath the simplistic disguise.

Nestled next to all those virtual console games, bit.trip has the curious effect of not merely retracing steps to join them, but exposing what many of them lost along the way as well. It’s all about control, taking us back to the relentless, reflex intensive hand-eye coordination that is at the foundation of a videogame. There’s every reason to believe that the full series will represent a vital thesis on the controls within gaming and the inherent importance of keeping that concern primary within game design.

The price of each installment is a steal at 600 Wii Points, and that only helps to sweeten the deal.