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IGN Review of Myth Makers: Trixie in Toyland
If you'd just invested the time and effort to develop and publish a console video game, you'd probably want to give it a significant marketing push to ensure it brought in solid sales. That's what most companies do. But that's not exactly the strategy that Conspiracy Entertainment and Data Design Interactive have settled on -- to them, individual games seem dispensable and unimportant. The real money is made in bulk.
And it's that quantity-over-quality attitude toward game production that brings us to their latest "game," Myth Makers: Trixie in Toyland. Really just a recycled rehash of past Conspiracy-published titles like Ninjabread Man and Anubis II, Trixie in Toyland takes the exact same game engine, control style, menu screens, background music and more and simply layers different 3D models on top to make the main character into a girl in a rabbit suit instead of a sentient piece of gingerbread or a kid-sized Egyptian god.
Seriously, it's the same game. It's like if Nintendo chose to take Super Mario Galaxy, change the main character to Link, and remarket the whole thing as The Legend of Zelda: Outer Space Adventure. It's that egregious of a cut-and-paste job here, and it's as offensive in concept as it is to actually try and play.
The controls are horrendous. The game is a standard 3D platformer, with large environments to run around and blocks and bridges to jump across -- but the control is so poor that jumping across even the most minor of gaps becomes a terrible ordeal. For whatever reason, rather than mapping jump to a simple face button like A, it's instead triggered by swinging the Nunchuk upward. Then, to double jump, you have to swing the Nunchuk up again immediately after the first swing.
At the same time, your main movement control for Trixie is also on the Nunchuk -- the analog stick makes her run. So, putting it all together, running and jumping is all achieved with your constantly gyrating and adjusting left hand, while your right hand does nothing but maintain a loose grip on the Wii Remote. It's ridiculous, and it makes completing jumps terribly difficult -- it's incredibly tough to keep your thumb pressing the analog stick in the right direction while also waggling your wrist feverously up and down to get a jump command to register. It's the worst control choice I've seen on Wii so far.
What's more, the game's completely lacking any plot or explanation for Trixie's adventure, and does nothing to inform the players of the purpose of each level. The tutorial stage is simple enough, teaching you how to run, attack and jump (good luck), but after that the game just plops you into the middle of enemy-populated environments and says to go for it. What's the goal? Who knows. Something to do with grabbing glowing orbs to open up a portal in the ground, but you'll be reaching for the Reset Button long before you finish even one of Trixie's meandering, directionless and altogether un-fun Toyland levels.
©2008-09-03, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
And it's that quantity-over-quality attitude toward game production that brings us to their latest "game," Myth Makers: Trixie in Toyland. Really just a recycled rehash of past Conspiracy-published titles like Ninjabread Man and Anubis II, Trixie in Toyland takes the exact same game engine, control style, menu screens, background music and more and simply layers different 3D models on top to make the main character into a girl in a rabbit suit instead of a sentient piece of gingerbread or a kid-sized Egyptian god.
Seriously, it's the same game. It's like if Nintendo chose to take Super Mario Galaxy, change the main character to Link, and remarket the whole thing as The Legend of Zelda: Outer Space Adventure. It's that egregious of a cut-and-paste job here, and it's as offensive in concept as it is to actually try and play.
The controls are horrendous. The game is a standard 3D platformer, with large environments to run around and blocks and bridges to jump across -- but the control is so poor that jumping across even the most minor of gaps becomes a terrible ordeal. For whatever reason, rather than mapping jump to a simple face button like A, it's instead triggered by swinging the Nunchuk upward. Then, to double jump, you have to swing the Nunchuk up again immediately after the first swing.
At the same time, your main movement control for Trixie is also on the Nunchuk -- the analog stick makes her run. So, putting it all together, running and jumping is all achieved with your constantly gyrating and adjusting left hand, while your right hand does nothing but maintain a loose grip on the Wii Remote. It's ridiculous, and it makes completing jumps terribly difficult -- it's incredibly tough to keep your thumb pressing the analog stick in the right direction while also waggling your wrist feverously up and down to get a jump command to register. It's the worst control choice I've seen on Wii so far.
What's more, the game's completely lacking any plot or explanation for Trixie's adventure, and does nothing to inform the players of the purpose of each level. The tutorial stage is simple enough, teaching you how to run, attack and jump (good luck), but after that the game just plops you into the middle of enemy-populated environments and says to go for it. What's the goal? Who knows. Something to do with grabbing glowing orbs to open up a portal in the ground, but you'll be reaching for the Reset Button long before you finish even one of Trixie's meandering, directionless and altogether un-fun Toyland levels.
©2008-09-03, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved