I wanted to wait until I’d seen the film to play THQ’s WALL-E tie-in. I wasn’t so interested in the quality of the game – Matt’s covered that – but rather how it relates to the film.
The answer: tenuously.
It starts with the same opening sequence – WALL-E trundling around, compacting scrap, building structures, interacting with his cockroach friend. This nicely highlights the embarrassing inferiority of the game’s visuals compared to the film. Of course it’s not going to be as beautiful as Pixar’s original, but it really doesn’t look very nice at all. FMV doesn’t have to be your enemy, THQ.
Then it all gets terribly arbitrary. Admittedly I’ve not played it for an awfully long time, but I was quickly introduced to a variety of cubes of scrap – which WALL-E forms in his metal tummy. There are standard cubes, but also heavy ones, and cubes that carry some sort of electrical current.
This is pure artistic license on THQ’s part, though not unreasonably so – it opens up plenty of staple video game puzzles. But it starts to get ridiculous when the scrap for the ‘special’ cubes comes from vending machines. And WALL-E’s solar panels are recharged at special points where the sun has been magnified. It’s not only completely made-up for the game, but – as far as I can work out – unnecessarily so, and not really in-keeping with the film.
To be fair, the early parts of the film – with WALL-E just getting about on his own – can’t have been easy to mould into a game, but it just seems like such a cursory effort, and I can’t help feeling that there are going to be a lot of vaguely confused kids.
I thought the opening level would pave way for some novel puzzles – having to make and carry blocks in the correct order or something – but the introduction puzzles are just copied throughout the entire game.
WALL-E isn’t an ideal videogame character either as he slips and slides all over the place. And then the game ends after three hours or so.
Have the forum been hacked?
Or rather ‘ has’. My grasp of the English seems to diminish with time…
I meant to type ‘English language’. I’m giving up.
Looks like it’s borked. Adam can usually get it going again though
I was about to reply “oh, just a simple SQL error, I’ll repair the tables and it’ll be back up”, but actually… it looks the forum was genuinely hacked!
It’s borked. I’m guessing there’s a security error in that version of the Vanilla software. Not too keen to simply put it back up online straight away, I need to look into it.
Any news on the status of the forums?