MaBoShi - The Three Shape Arcade

[Hendo]

This is a bugger to explain, but here we go.

You pick one of three screens to play on and choose one of the three styles of game. There's a ball game, a stick game and a box game. Apparently that's where the name comes from - "It's a compound word, you see, made up of the abbreviated Japanese words for Ball (maru), Stick (bou) and Square (shikaku)".

The ball game involves only pressing the A button to switch the balls' direction, the stick game you press A to launch the stick in whichever point it's gravity is heading, and the square you use the d-pad and it's similar to the old school Snake game.

The thing that makes this unique (other than already sounding like a head fuck) is that when you're playing your chosen game, the A.I. will start playing the other 2 screens games and they will interact with yours, like knocking blocks from their screen will knock onto yours, etc.

I'm still not doing a very good job of explaining it, so have a read of the Eurogamer review or the one at WiiWare World for a better explanation.

Failing that, here's a video:

I've only played for a brief few minutes of each type but I was very tired and struggling to get the concepts of each single game, so the "genius" of the 3 games interacting hasn't hit me yet.

As you can see it comes very well recommended but at the moment it's too early for me to say whether it's worth parting with the 800 points that it costs. It's certainly unique though.

[Hendo]

I played again last night and decided to stick to just one type and try to master it before moving on to another one, so I started on the ball game.

This is definitely the easiest one to understand and play, you just have to hit all the enemies and make sure that none leave the big circle that you're all in.

I did start seeing some of the interactions from the other screens, like sending over a powerup that made my screen bigger and sending over multipliers and stuff. I should've picked the middle screen though rather than the left one, so as to see what happened on either side of me.

It is one of the most unusual games I've played in some time.