Bit.Trip Runner

Gaijin Games have quickly become one of my favourite developers. Over the past year and a half, they've been quietly dominating WiiWare scene with their quirky, fun, and awesomely retro rhythm games in their Bit.Trip series. Starting with Bit.Trip Beat, a game that smartly blended Pong, Guitar Hero, Atari 2600 graphics and fantastic chiptune music, they've been making better and better games, and that's culminated with the best game in the Bit.Trip series, Bit.Trip Runner.

As soon as you boot up this $8 game (the best value for game conversion I've seen in quite some time), you're treated to Anamanaguchi's incredible 8-bit summer jam, "Blackout City." With such a strong opening, it was clear to me that this game was going to rule, and it absolutely does, in every way I could have imagined.

If you've ever played the games Canabalt or Tomena Sanner, you should have some idea of kind of what to expect from this game. It's a "rhythm platformer," meaning that the screen and the character you control (the iconic Commander Video, for the first time ever in a Bit.Trip game) automatically scroll from left to right, meaning you're in control only of his jumping, sliding and kicking. Lest you think that this game is going to be a cakewalk because of this, don't even worry. Bit.Trip Runner is a game that doesn't fuck around, and after the first five or so stages, the challenge gets upped significantly.

This is a hard game, but it's not hard in a cheap way. Every one of the challenges that it throws at you are things that you know you can best with just enough practice, and because the game is so intrinsically tied to its chiptune soundtrack, it makes a certain amount of sense. In a way, you're running through songs, "practicing" them, and just like in Guitar Hero or Rock Band, you sort of ruin the song when you mess up. This game therefore demands perfection, and when you're having this much fun, it's not asking that much of you to do so.

Unlike in other Bit.Trip games, there's no black and white "nether" world to denote your imminent failure. When you mess up along the way, you just get instantly sent back to the beginning of the level. While I would usually get frustrated by something like this, because the game does it so quickly and makes every level so interesting and the music so catchy, it's easy to get wrapped up in this game, playing it for hours at a time. That's more than I can say for most retail releases.

The synthesis of the amazing art style (which has never looked better than it does here), music and gameplay makes Bit.Trip Runner an easy pick for my favourite downloadable title of the year so far, and no other game gets a party going like Runner. Not to mention that it's simply one of the coolest games of all time. You don't get to have your main character turned into wall art if your main character isn't as cool as Commander Video.