In the famous Victorian satire Flatland, a two-dimensional square is suddenly plucked out of his flat world and lifted into the third dimension. It is a spiritually mind-blowing experience -- by looking down on his flat house, the square is suddenly able to see the insides of objects that, when he was 2-D, appeared solid. He sees through the walls of his house: His children sleeping in their rooms, the servants in their quarters.
"I looked, and, behold, a new world!" he cried. "Lo, the secrets of the earth, the depths of the mines and inmost caverns of the hills, were bared before me."
When I read the book as a kid, the concept of slipping between dimensions fried my tiny mind. I hankered after some new way to recapture that sensation. Last week, I finally did, when I played Super Paper Mario and Crush, two games that turn the Flatland conceit into a piece of gameplay. In each one, you navigate puzzle worlds by flipping from 2-D to 3-D -- and using the different perspectives to explore hidden areas and fight enemies in unusual ways.
In Super Paper Mario, life begins as a regular 2-D game -- your Mario is a flat, "paper" cutout in a world of paper cutouts -- until he suddenly acquires the power to shift into a 3-D perspective. Suddenly you can see that all your 2-D enemies are wafer-thin and easily avoidable if you just sidestep them. When threatened by a horde of onrushing Spiny Tromps, I didn't bother trying to jump over them -- I just shifted perspective, stepped sideways, and they rolled past me harmlessly like huge, flat coins. (Check some video of that here.)
The upshot is an experience precisely as hallucinogenic as Flatland itself. Indeed, these titles permanently alter your sense of the possibilities inside game-space. This is particularly true of Super Paper Mario, because it completely renews the age-old Mario conceits -- like the bricks, the tubes, the platforms. They're all here, except that often they're concealing new stuff only visible in 3-D. I found tons of hidden areas lurking behind boulders, and secret enemies "inside" objects that appeared to be solid blocks in 2-D.
more: http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2007/06/gamesfrontier_0604
Games like these amaze me.. even back in the days of playing some pretty awesome games on the Amiga, I never thought we'd see the range or depth of game playing we see in the home today...
"I looked, and, behold, a new world!" he cried. "Lo, the secrets of the earth, the depths of the mines and inmost caverns of the hills, were bared before me."
When I read the book as a kid, the concept of slipping between dimensions fried my tiny mind. I hankered after some new way to recapture that sensation. Last week, I finally did, when I played Super Paper Mario and Crush, two games that turn the Flatland conceit into a piece of gameplay. In each one, you navigate puzzle worlds by flipping from 2-D to 3-D -- and using the different perspectives to explore hidden areas and fight enemies in unusual ways.
In Super Paper Mario, life begins as a regular 2-D game -- your Mario is a flat, "paper" cutout in a world of paper cutouts -- until he suddenly acquires the power to shift into a 3-D perspective. Suddenly you can see that all your 2-D enemies are wafer-thin and easily avoidable if you just sidestep them. When threatened by a horde of onrushing Spiny Tromps, I didn't bother trying to jump over them -- I just shifted perspective, stepped sideways, and they rolled past me harmlessly like huge, flat coins. (Check some video of that here.)
The upshot is an experience precisely as hallucinogenic as Flatland itself. Indeed, these titles permanently alter your sense of the possibilities inside game-space. This is particularly true of Super Paper Mario, because it completely renews the age-old Mario conceits -- like the bricks, the tubes, the platforms. They're all here, except that often they're concealing new stuff only visible in 3-D. I found tons of hidden areas lurking behind boulders, and secret enemies "inside" objects that appeared to be solid blocks in 2-D.
more: http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/commentary/games/2007/06/gamesfrontier_0604
Games like these amaze me.. even back in the days of playing some pretty awesome games on the Amiga, I never thought we'd see the range or depth of game playing we see in the home today...
