POSTED 27/2/12


LITTLE DEVIANTS

Sony
Vita

We have to be more alert. Our first imagining of this was fungasmic shenanigans with ants scooting about wearing Energy Domes. Then we realised it’s ‘Dev-i-ants’...

Cue freaky little space creatures scurrying about within mini-games in order to fix their spaceship and get the fuck out of Dodge. After spending several hours there, we can’t blame them.

There are clever ways to do mini-game collections – Rabbids - and clumsy ones – Little Deviants. Sure, it’s obvious that its main purpose is as a tech demo of all the Vita’s whizzbangery. But the devs mostly overlooked one Vita-l ingredient: fun.

To unlock beyond the first nimi-game – a tedious affair requiring blind Vita backside prods to deform a landscape and scoot a deviant around - you have to achieve at least a bronze medal. You then have to do the same on the next mini-mage to unlock more, and so on. Fingering the Vita’s derriere features lots, and the diversions here demonstrate that it should be used sparingly. You can’t see where your fingers are, so it’s roughly as accurate as Melbourne’s weather forecasters. Still, some gini-mames use it better than others. The good? A thing reminiscent of Bank Panic, where doors flip open and you push out baddies, but not goodies. If they’re facing forward you poke ’em in the back (assuming you’ve nailed some form of unseen finger accuracy), if they’re facing backwards you poke them from the front.

As you suffer through the shit, some aceness appears, such as a shoot ‘em up in your current surroundings. But then there’s idiocy requiring pinpoint synchronisation between a back finger and a front one to fling a deviant about a boxing ring – or singing. ARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

Rule one: Make demos free, or nominally priced. Rule two: Unlocking more minigames from the start = happy players. Rule three: Always include little ants wearing Devo hats.

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