Super Secret details about the My Game Space program: details here
5.7 mid-normal
It's every hamster owner's worst nightmare. Red-headed Japanese girl ShoJo wakes from a peaceful sleep to find her adorable hamster, HammiGee, missing! Her tears quickly summon her grandfather, a retired bomb manufacturer. "I was afraid something like this might happen," he says. "Last night the Gremlin King awoke to prey upon the world again." Grandpa could have warned ShoJo to put HammiGee in a cage, or under the bed, or something... but then we wouldn't get to play Magic Blast (Japanese title: "Magical").
I know what you're thinking. No, ShoJo didn't resent caring for her hamster and wish for the Gremlin King to steal it away. ShoJo's grandpa tells her everything he knows about the evil monster: His majesty doesn't want to turn HammiGee into a gremlin - he just hates animals and has kidnapped all of them and turned them into stones. Before you can say, "ShoJo means 'little girl' in Japanese, what kind of name is that?" ShoJo and her grandfather have put on their bomb fuse hats, hopped aboard their hot air balloon, and embarked on a quest to save every petrified animal in the country. Speaking as someone who watched a documentary about hot air balloonmanship just last week, ShoJo's grandpa has pretty lousy technique. Their course is clearly marked on the map, yet he's drifting aimlessly every which way. Come on, Grandpa!
Magic Blast, from BattleLine Games, contains over fifty levels of animal-saving intrique. Each level is made up of many, many stones, each representing one of three or four animals. Most are regular old boring animal emblem stones, like you might find at a store that sells animal emblem stones. But some have actual animals trapped inside! These are highlighted with a blue star border. You can click on any group of three or more stones in a single line (horizontal or vertical) and unleash a blast of magic at them. If animals are trapped in the blasted stones, they will be set free, and hop/fly/swim to safety at the top or bottom of the screen. The animal emblems on the stones in the match will also be shuffled, so you might subsequently be able to create new matches with neighboring stones. Save all the animals in the level before the time runs out, and you can advance your hot air balloon even further in a random direction of Grandpa's choice.
Some stones are fixed in place with bolts... all others creep in a snaking fashion about the level every ten seconds or so. When the stones move, new opportunities to make matches appear, and opportunities you missed are gone forever. (Unless you use the reverse-o button that appears in some levels.) You can force the stones to move at any time by using your special Japanese-little-girl magic.
If the conveyor-like movement of the level's stones doesn't make things confusing enough, there are usually one or more gremlins at the top of the screen, watching your every click. They flutter from column to column, and if they see a match below, they'll shoot a gremlin power bolt at it, shuffling a stone and ruining the match. ShoJo also watches the action, with a look of anxious concern on her face. (Except when she's playing the underwater levels - she likes swimming.)
If you blast especially large matching groups, you may be given special items instead of a stone, such as one of grandpa's bombs, which explodes and frees any animal in a 3x3 area. Horizontal and vertical lightning bolts blast apart whole rows and columns of stones, and are fun to unleash. They can even kill gremlins if you activate them at the right time. (So can bombs.) Wildcard stones form any stone needed to make a match. Question mark tiles shuffle all the stones in the level... which is quite helpful when a match in a certain area looks to be a long time coming.
Okay, seriously. What do hamsters think about when they're running in their hamster wheels? Do they think they're really running someplace, or do they know they're just moving a wheel? I need to know.
Magic Blast has super-kawaii anime-style graphics and the Flash animation that makes up the game's story is well done for what it is. There are even cute animated sequences between levels, describing the gameplay. I was shocked to see HammiGee trotting out to give advice, too! Isn't he supposed to be turned to stone? Unfortunately for us all, the same background tunes repeat endlessly level after level, only changing after a turning point in the story. And the first song is the worst one. It sounds like after school rock band rehearsal at the local high school. By the time ShoJo and her grandfather have put on their swimming suits and innertubes and reached the underwater levels, the music has jazzed up and then mellowed out somewhat, and is much more listenable.
Why does the cute little green bird caw like a crow? Was there no other sound sample available? Even paying a fat guy to say "chirp chirp" into a microphone would have been a better choice.
The biggest problem with Magic Blast is the gameplay. It's too hard to quickly scan a level and see which stones need to be blasted. The blue-bordered pieces should stand out more, and in fact all the stones need to be more distinct. The snakelike way the stones move about the levels is hard to predict and account for if you wish to use some sort of strategy. And some levels require you to use a lightning bolt or bomb to free an animal on the edge of the gameboard where matches are not possible. Waiting for special items to appear, and then for them to move into place, can be annoying. BattleLine Games should have spent more time finetuning the gameplay.
Okay, I've gotta go cook a roast beef dinner.
I just want to say that this review is really funny.
But I didn’t try the game yet.