I Want You (She's So Heavy) - 'bit generations' Orbital

Written by Dan Zuccarelli

Friday, 08 September 2006 07:31

My importing of Nintendo's bit generations titles continues! To those that don't know, take a moment and look at my earlier post about Nintendo's retro-esque titles. This time around I take a look at Orbital, which in a very basic sense is like Katamari Damacy in space. You start off as a tiny planet and bond and multiply with celestial bodies around the same size, growing with each new addition. (I'm not sure if you're a star joining with other stars or as a planet joining with planets... So I'm calling them planets.) It all sounds very basic, but the game gets interesting when you talk about the controls.

You don't control the star directly, you control it's gravitational pull. You can attract and repel it. Holding down the attract button will pull you towards the closest largest object. Slowly repelling as you move in close you can achieve orbit around the object. Circling around until you repel yourself out of orbit, shooting off into space towards another planet's pull. Using the two forces you can go into orbit around a body to change direction, or swing around the planet to move in a different direction. All in the name of joining with other planets and pulling small satellites into orbit around you, which give you bonus lives at the end of each level. Hitting larger objects results in losing a life. What's interesting is that when you lose a life, it's usually because you were holding down the attract button a little to much when you're close to a large planet. Moving to fast to get into orbit, accidentally putting yourself on a crash course. The game rewards a light touch and patience to get into position.

As you grow larger and larger, you're able to take in larger and larger objects. Eventually, one of these planets turns yellow and you win the level by pulling that yellow planet into your orbit.

Orbital has 30 different stages in all, split up into 6 galaxies with 5 stages each. You unlock these stages in a linear order, but you can replay any stage that you have unlocked already whenever you want. You can look at each stage to see your best score, best time, and whether you've collected the moon for that stage.

The game isn't instantly accessible like dotstream, mostly because of not understanding how to control the game at first. And it doesn't look nearly as cool while you're playing it. Having instructions in English really would've helped out here. But after some trial and error I have the basic ideas under control. Luckily for those of us that don't speak Japanese there are only 2 buttons used, and no d-pad.

I still think dotstream is the one worth getting if you only want to import one of these Japan-only titles. But if you're really looking to try some different types of games, give Orbital a whirl. It's really out there and after playing it I feel pretty confident in saying there's very little chance of it coming out here. I could be proven wrong, but I doubt it. It's a weird quirky game that sadly would probably go over the heads of alot of us here in the states. There's to many of us playing Madden to care.

Comments (2) Add Comment

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written by Marc Deangelis, February 03, 2009

This is one of my favorite games.

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written by TheBBPS.com (Bits, Bytes, Pixe, February 05, 2009

[...] and at high prices, leaving most would-be tuners out in the cold. One alternative was to buy a Game Boy Advance flash cart and upload the ROM of LSDJ. This, however, is less than ideal for hardcore chiptuners, [...]