While I still had the Wii U hooked up, I figured I'd try getting through another game that I'd attempted several times but never finished. ASA is a game that can be played with friends, but any friends I'd played it with had never beaten it with me, so unfinished it remained. This was the first time I'd actually tried playing it by myself, so I finished it wihin a few hours on account of how much easier it is to pilot an affordable spaceship yourself compared to with two other people XD

Affordable Space Adventures sees you as a space tourist with the company Uexplore. Manning your special Small Craft spaceship, you'll take a 3 day tour of Spectaculon, an almost entirely uncharted world that you'll get to claim your own piece of if you get there first! But rest assured, despite the crashed alien vessel and nearly totally unknown nature of Spectaculon, it is COMPLETELY safe as far as Uexplore is concerned. This is all communicated to you with the mock promotional travel video that the game opens with, and as you may've cottoned onto, Spectaculon is actually incredibly unsafe, and the mothership carrying all the Small Craft tourists crashes on Spectaculon, leaving only you alive to try and find an SOS beacon to contact Uexplore HQ with to try and get rescued.

Trekking across Spectaculon, through its dark caves, alien wrecks, and extreme environments, can feel pretty tense and spooky at times, and breathtaking at others. Though this is more of a tense game (highlighted by a very unsubtle pastiche of corporate heartlessness towards its customers), its pretty visuals and subtle music make an atmosphere that is very strong and difficult to ignore as you try and make your way to safety through increasingly dangerous territory.

ASA is a game exclusive to the Wii U's digital store, and definitely one of the best at taking advantage of the opportunities of the game pad. On your game pad (what the game calls you "Heads Down Display" X3), you have a set of controls that allow you to turn on and off different engines as well as all manner of landing gear, secondary systems, and power levels. All of these systems generate their own levels of heat, sound, and electricity, and you can tap on gauges on your screen to see just what is generating what sources. This is a very valuable thing to know too, as using your flashlight/scanner, you can scan the many types of robotic alien life out to kill you and see just what kinds of power they're sensitive to. By operating your ship properly and turning on and off different systems when needed, you make your way through your journey in what is definitely one of the more unique puzzle-platformers I've played.

This was the first time I'd actually played ASA by myself, and the reason I was able to complete it this time is that, much like one of my favorite games Octodad, controlling anything is often much easier by yourself than with others if solo-control is an option. This is very much the same for ASA, although it's certainly far less of a party game than Octodad can be. Your player 2 will get control of the ship's movement, and then a player 3 will get control of aiming the ship's scanner/flashlight, leaving player 1 with only control of your system operations (as well as when you scan things and fire flares). Given how often you need to precisely move the ship in coordination with altering power to systems as well as how tricky many of the shots to hit buttons with your flares can be, this makes the game FAR more challenging, and while a very cool multiplayer experience, I wouldn't recommend it to those who get easily frustrated (even though the game is quite forgiving with its checkpoints more often than not).

Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is definitely something under the ever-shrinking (with all these Switch ports) list of "reasons to own a Wii U". The nature of the control scheme makes me doubt very highly it will ever be ported, and it's a really unique and well crafted puzzle experience, especially if you're aiming to play through it with others. If you've already got a Wii U, I'd say this is definitely a game you shouldn't let yourself miss checking out, and if you've been on the fence about picking up a Wii U (maybe to get some of those games that have gotten ports to Switch and have their base versions way cheaper X3), I hope this might tip you a little over the edge to finally picking up one secondhand.

i was gonna do the hard extra levels, completed the first two and then watched someone else do the rest and was like...nah, i'm good. they're all unlocked from the start so there wasn't that same satisfying feeling of progression and achievement for me, though i might go back and do them later. the rest of the game, aside from a few obtuse moments, hit a sweet spot for me of challenging my brain without being headbashingly difficult....a very nice change of pace from smb 3 which i played before this. also, even though it's a fairly linear game those gorgeous backdrops and the frequent sense of scale really created a great sense of discovery and exploration