Elebits

Some of the missions can be pretty challenging - for instance, a couple in the middle of the game where you're in your house, with messed up gravity, and have a limit on the number of objects you can break (tables and television sets are floating around next to champagne glasses) - but by and large, Elebits is more about tooling around and having fun than testing your performance. Much of the time, and this applies to the boss fights as well, the capture gun is objectively reduced to a twitch-fest. Don't get me wrong, the physics are still fun enough, but given that this is all the game has going for it, the novelty is beginning to wear thin (fortunately there are only a few missions left).

Despite the story and its cutscenes, the general atmosphere of Elebits is still cool and jazzy. All of the mission settings, from inside the kid's house to the streets outside to the huge theme park down the road, somehow work really well with the jazz inspired soundtrack.

The slowdown issue I mentioned before only becomes more evident as the levels get bigger and more complex (this is also incurring noticeably lengthy loading times). Busy situations will make apparent the issues of calculating and rendering the movement of tons of colliding objects. I am impressed by the sheer distance to which the character can both see and act, and the slowdown is nowhere near Perfect Dark levels, but it is still worrying that the Wii is encountering this kind of thing so early in its life. I do hope that this is due to shoddy optimization on Konami's part, and is not a sign of things to come for the little white box.

Progress: Mission 25