1. If I was a betting man, I'd bet whoever decided Hot Pixel should be made handed the development team a copy of a WarioWare game and said, "Here, do exactly this."
2. Okay, it is not exactly the same as WarioWare but the influence is clear and present. Hot Pixel consists episodes, each a collection of micro-games, followed by a micro-game boss battle. I think this will strike Nintendo fans as not unfamiliar.
3. This is going for some kind of a sanitized 90s urban vibe. Or, it might have been a very out of touch attempt at a contemporary urban vibe in 2007. Suffice to say: break beats, skateboards and "attitude" are all front and center.
4. Oddly, many of the micro-games are throwbacks to early 80s arcade titles so who the hell knows how that fits in.
5. Before and after each episode, there are brief and strange live videos of a thirty year old acting like a teenager. This is absolutely baffling to me but it does kind of fit in w/ the sort of scattershot presentation Hot Pixel has going on all the time.
6. Lack of attention to detail that holds the game back generally. Micro-games are an established premise but you've got to keep it polished to make everything flow.
7. The games themselves are pretty good. Well, mostly pretty good. There is supposedly two hundred of them but it depends how you count. It feels more like there's a couple dozen games, each of which have a couple variations.
8. Some of the variations just have the screen shaking a bit or scrolling around. It's kind of annoying.
9. Some of these game variations seem randomized and I think some of the random variations might be actually impossible. It is hard to tell since you can't really get back to that exact version of the game to retry it. Even if there aren't impossible scenarios, every now and then there will be a giant difficulty spike and that's never fun.
10. This gets into a problem a lot of these micro-games type deals. Your goal is typically to get through a set number of micro-games in a row w/ only a few failures allowed. Successfully completing these can often feel more like luck of the draw in getting mostly easy challenges rather than like you are actually getting better.
11. This is one of very few PSP games where I notice the load times from
the UMD being distracting. The micro-games are meant to come at you fast
and furious and those split seconds are much more egregious in
something like this than in most games.
12. In addition to episode mode, there's a couple other ways to play. You can do a marathon of random games or pick your own list of games to play among other things, This stuff is all unlocked by playing through the episodes. It's a pretty decent bonus but it's all the same games just in a different order so not really all that much more content.
13. I have a soft spot for micro-games. This isn't the best of the genre but is certainly worth having as a weird low-budget Atari curio if nothing else. The whole thing seems a little half-baked in the end but Hot Pixel will distract you pretty well for a few hours.
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