This weekend, I picked up a copy of Elebits for my much-beloved Wii and have become thoroughly addicted to its weird format of running around, creating a huge mess and zapping these little Pikachu-like bastards.

The game’s reminiscent of Katamari Damacy, with it’s cartoonish, basic style, crammed full of random household objects. Plot-wise, you’re some kid, living in a world where all electricity is powered by these little imps called Elebits. Some form of accident has occurred and the Elebits have revolted and all power is out, so armed with this ray-shooter that’s very similar to the gravity gun in Half Life 2, you run around your house looking for and zapping all the little bastards as they hide, sleep, sing, cry and generally act very kawaii and strange. The more you capture, the higher level of watts you have to light your home and accomplish other things relevant to completing stages.

The fun comes in two forms. First being the scavenger hunt-like aspect of trying to find these little weasels. At times, certain tasks must be performed to further the mission with different Elebits having certain properties like charging you gun. You also need to take care in how you interact with the Elebits as their moods or state affects the amount of power they supply you upon capture.

The other fun aspect is the sheer chaos you can visit upon a neatly ordered room. There’s a certain Godzilla-like glee (also reminiscent of Katamari) of being able to completely trash your house. Breaking vases, sending bookcases flying—no home furnishing or appliance is spared the brutal hand of your ray gun.

I haven’t checked it out yet, but there’s a pretty cool sounding level builder in the game, letting you create, stock and customize your own levels. I’ve read that at some point in the foreseeable future, the Wii’s WiiConnect24 will let you upload and share your custom levels with your WiiFriends (of which I have zero. Somebody fricken’ WiiFriend me already! I don’t know anyone else in my network that has one of these consoles!).

I like the fact that this game actually makes real usage of the Wii-remote. I’m finding that many of the Wii titles (mainly ports available on other platforms) really murder the possibilities of use. Granted this is likely because the game was made with the traditional controllers in mind and ports to Wii were just mainly quick-fix jobs. Elebits makes love to the Wii-remote. From twisting the remote to turn a doorknob, to pulling it back to open a drawer—the controls are instantly intuitive and easy to use.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 22nd, 2007 at 12:59 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.