By: Atomicated
This Wednesday I decided, with a fair amount of skepticism, to download the latest arrival to the Xbox Live Arcade. The game was entitled Boogie Bunnies. It had me put off because the name certainly made me expect a delightful rythmn game where you have to push buttons in time to pop songs to make some bunnies dance. But alas it was another in a long line of puzzle games.
Puzzle games have it rough. Most people first experience in the genre was Tetris. A classic that has never truly been topped. Imagine if Freebird were the first rock song you ever heard in your life and now imagine how dissapointing every other rock song would be when held up against that standard of rocking. This exactly the problem facing the puzzle genre. Nothing after Tetris has quite managed to successfully add to the genre. Some try to shift the importance from row filling to color matching, some even have flipped the genre on its head by having the pieces move upwards in defiance of Isaac Newton rather than descending perpeptually from the heavens.
As I watched the download progress bar I wondered if this game was even worth the 10 to 20 seconds it was taking to download. However, upon checking my date book I found that I had left an hour of my schedule clear to try out whatever arcade game came out this week. So I proceeded to see what Boogie Bunnies brought to the table.
Upon starting the game I noticed that Boogie Bunnies not only used color matching but also involved shooting bunnies upward. Two strikes against it already. The game informed me pretty early on that the bunnies could move to the sides as well. This confused me. I naturally assumed it meant to the right and left most side of the playing field. Were the game designers so foolish as to believe that this was new to the genre? However in experimenting in moving one bunny to the far left of the screen I discovered the magic of the game. The bunny didn’t just move to the far left but then upwards as well. I could fire the bunny not only from the bottom of the screen but from the left or right of it as well.
The future of puzzle gaming
Never have I seen anything like this in puzzle gaming. I dropped the controller in shock. Could this truly be the first game to show those Russians that we can do anything better than them? Could this game win the cold war for the United States? If what I was seeing wasn’t a dream I had no doubt that it would. I know we are only in January but I firmly believe Boogie Bunnies will be a heavy contender for Game of the Year 2008 and that if Artech Studios plays it’s cards right Boogie Bunnies 2 could be Game of the Year 2009.
I fully recommend getting this game right away. If you’ve been holding off on getting a 360 get it for this game.
