Orbient
Finally Nintendo releases something of their own on WiiWare, and it's a doozy. It's a movement game, where you're a planet in space and you move just by using gravity. It's really elegant. The A button pulls at other gravities, the B button pushes against other gravities. You try to enter bigger planet's orbits, and get smaller planets to enter yours. If you touch a planet which is the same size as you, you get bigger. When you're as big as one special planet, getting it to orbit you wins the level. And that's the whole game. Other, lesser developers would have tacked on a save-the-world plotline and cutscenes and characters and minigames and an overworld and RPG elements and fancy 3D graphics. Not these guys. It took me seven hours to beat all the levels (though there might be another 10 hidden levels, if the internet is to be believed), and not a single minute was wasted with padding. Pure entertainment, through and through.
It wasn't until later that I realized this was made by Skip. That's impressive. They made Chibi Robo, which was extremely story-driven. They
can do all that other stuff, and they do it well. But they understand that what they can do to show off isn't what's best for the game. They're smart, and I wish more people would learn from their example.
Orbient is great. It's clever, it's original, it's challenging, it's easy to learn, it's addictive, it's one of the best games on Wii and it's 6 dollars. Everyone involved in making this game rocks.
5/5
