[PSP] Archer Mclean's Steam Pile of Poo - impressions

[angrycoder]

Picked up my preordered copy of Mercury today. As you can guess by the thread title I am less than impressed after completing the first 2 worlds.

The premise sounded great, a super monkey ball type game using a glob of liquid. In practice the game just doesn't work out, it is far too difficult. Imagine trying to play Monkey Ball, but having to keep track of 2 or 3 different balls at the same time.  In monkey ball if you teetered too close to the edge, you still had a chance to recover - but if you get too close to the edge in mercury, you loose half of your mercury glob. The controls require absolute precision, so you can forget about trying to play this in a car or a on a train.

The camera is entirely manual, so while you are trying to balance your mercury glob with the analogue stick, you need to be readjusting the camera using the face and shoulder buttons. Camera issues in a platformer or action game I can understand, but not in a puzzle game.

On the technical side, the load times are horrible. You are looking at a good 30-40 seconds just to boot up the game. The between level load times run 10-15 seconds. Although that doesn't sound like much, considering the small amount of time you actually spend playing the levels 30 seconds to 1 minute tops, it really starts to add up. Thankfully restarting a level doesn't incur a load time.

The presentation is rather generic. The music isn't bad, but frankly it sounds like they just downloaded a bunch of techno MOD files off the internet.

Oh, and there is no auto save or load. When you want to quit your game, you need to quit out to the main menu and manually save your game. When you load the game up you need to manually load your save file.

Out of the 7 PSP games I've purchased (Lumines, Ridge Racer, Metal Gear Acid, Wipeout Pure, Twisted Metal, Puyo Puyo Fever, and Mercury), this is the only game I doubt I will be finishing, much less getting an urge to play even as a time killer.

[Devil]

Ouch!

Out!?

[depward]

Dang!  Thanks for saying how it is though - this title looked kinda sorta cool in a "marble madness" kind of way to me, but after hearing that . . . ugh.

[angrycoder]

Yeah, technical glitches aside, the game is just hella hard - I mean throw your controller across the room hard, but in this case you would shatter your brand new 250 dollar toy. Managing 2 or 3 balls of mercury at the same time is just more than a challenge than i am up for.

[Bullwinkle]

Out of the 7 PSP games I've purchased (Lumines, Ridge Racer, Metal Gear Acid, Wipeout Pure, Twisted Metal, Puyo Puyo Fever, and Mercury)

Where did you find Puyo Puyo Fever?  I haven't seen it anywhere and didn't think it was out yet.  Also, what do you think of that one?  Worth it?

As for Mercury, it was one of the games that sold me on the console in previews.  I wish I'd read your impressions before racing out to get it today.  I've only played through some of the tutorial levels and can already see the load times being an issue.  If this game gets as hard as you say, I'm going to be irked.

[angrycoder]

Where did you find Puyo Puyo Fever?  I haven't seen it anywhere and didn't think it was out yet.  Also, what do you think of that one?  Worth it?

I bought the import version off of ebay for about 55 bucks. I enjoy the game alot, I played the emulated GBA version of it do death at work.