Some games feel like they were made by an artist, some games feel like they were made by a storyteller, some games feel like they were made a game designer, some games feel like they were made by a corporation, some games feel like they were made a programmer.
Mercury Meltdown is the kind of game that I feel like even an indie dev might not make today, certainly not with any expectation of commercial viability. Maybe something like this might be made in the smallest scale possible for a game jam or something. Its relatively narrow focus on soft-body physics and color theory combined with its unabashed use of what feels like surely must be "programmer art" makes it feel completely alien to today's video game industry paradigm. It opens with a reference to a C64 loading screen, it has autosave but it's quite slow; you might spend as much time in the menus between levels as you do in gameplay, even if you always select the "go to next level" option after finishing each stage. The ability to save ghost players and replays, it's a feature set we might consider rather unusual for a console game, especially for the time.
This is the version of the game that I played when it was new, so this is the version that I sought out. It is somewhat surprising to me that this is a port of a PSP game given that its liquid physics seemed kind of crazy at the time, but today it is not surprising at all that the original version of the game was the kind of game that had a person's full name in the title. It's just that sort of old fashioned piece of software, like an Atari 2600 game just showed up more than 20 years later.
It's like Monkey Ball meets Marble Blast injected with a variety of its own weird game-ey concepts, the kinds of things that feel like they could only exist in obscure PC shovelware, 100,000 game in 1 type stuff. I want to be clear: I am absolutely delighted that there is a major release for the best-selling console of all time that plays like this and is available on a physical disc. A decade and a half or so ago, this is just what a video game was still allowed to be, and I think there is something genuinely beautiful about that.
Mercury Meltdown is the kind of game that I feel like even an indie dev might not make today, certainly not with any expectation of commercial viability. Maybe something like this might be made in the smallest scale possible for a game jam or something. Its relatively narrow focus on soft-body physics and color theory combined with its unabashed use of what feels like surely must be "programmer art" makes it feel completely alien to today's video game industry paradigm. It opens with a reference to a C64 loading screen, it has autosave but it's quite slow; you might spend as much time in the menus between levels as you do in gameplay, even if you always select the "go to next level" option after finishing each stage. The ability to save ghost players and replays, it's a feature set we might consider rather unusual for a console game, especially for the time.
This is the version of the game that I played when it was new, so this is the version that I sought out. It is somewhat surprising to me that this is a port of a PSP game given that its liquid physics seemed kind of crazy at the time, but today it is not surprising at all that the original version of the game was the kind of game that had a person's full name in the title. It's just that sort of old fashioned piece of software, like an Atari 2600 game just showed up more than 20 years later.
It's like Monkey Ball meets Marble Blast injected with a variety of its own weird game-ey concepts, the kinds of things that feel like they could only exist in obscure PC shovelware, 100,000 game in 1 type stuff. I want to be clear: I am absolutely delighted that there is a major release for the best-selling console of all time that plays like this and is available on a physical disc. A decade and a half or so ago, this is just what a video game was still allowed to be, and I think there is something genuinely beautiful about that.
2 Comments
Racing games are definitely the exception. Even then it's the kind of thing I mostly would expect from PC games where the user generally has more direct access to files and could share replays that way, more recent consoles where the developer could more readily assume the user is connected to the internet, much more popular franchise games where you might expect to have local friends who play the same games that you might share your memory card with, or arcade conversions.
FrozenRoy
1 year ago
Hmmm, I wonder? It feels like at least in stuff like racing games, saving ghosts and replays was decently common even before then, so it doesn't seem that surprising to me.
Cool review overall. I should really try this already since I own the original on PSP.