Listen: There are a lot of weird Dreamcast games, but this is one of my favorites. Frantic mutiplayer puzzle action from the insane minds at Sonic Team. A simplistic premise: despite all your rage, you are only mice in a maze. Evade cats by placing directional panels and reach the rocket to win.
There's three game modes at play here, each with their own appeal. Puzzle mode gives you 100 puzzles to solve, each with a premade layout and specific panels to use. Leave it to ChuChu Rocket to make the presentation so frantic and mesmerizing, though. There's often a real satisfaction to placing down the panels in all the right spots, and watching your handiwork in motion. Stage Challenge mode pits you in 25 stages of reflexive, real-time challenges. These are interesting, but they begin to show the cracks in ChuChu Rocket's formula. The cursor you move around to place panels is barely fast enough to react to a lot of the shit this mode will throw at you. However, the true strength in ChuChu Rocket is its multiplayer.
In multiplayer, you and three other players set down panels in an attempt to get as many mice as possible in your designated rocket within three minutes, while preventing cats from getting to your rocket. It probably goes without saying, but once four players are all in the mix, the game goes from frantic to downright chaotic. There's so much on-the-fly thinking, opportunities to gain a huge lead, or sabotage your friends, either by abducting their mice or redirecting cats. If someone collects a roulette mouse, it'll cause one of several gamechanging events to shake everything up further. But what if I told you that ChuChu Rocket has one more trick up its sleeve?
A decently robust online mode helps this game soar to even greater heights. You can create lobbies to host games, simply chat with strangers (this was weirdly acceptable in the 2000s, okay), or share puzzles that you created in the game's level creator. Yeah, you read that correctly. Potentially infinite puzzles to play/create, and the ability to potentially share them with anyone else who owns the game. For the record, fan-maintained servers allow these features to persist even to this day, you can set them up on official hardware (or just download Flycast, it's preconfigured for online play).
ChuChu Rocket may be limited in scope and kind of a one-trick pony, but I stand by the fact that it completely nails what it wants to do. I'd be remiss to not mention the soundtrack that accompanies it too, which is this bizzare, almost cosmic series of compositions from Tomoya Ohtani. Twangy guitar sounds, synthesizers, and breakneck percussion. I am dead serious when I say to reach out to me on Twitter/Discord if you wanna play ChuChu Rocket. I will always be down for a few rounds of ChuChu Rocket. The japanese advertisement for ChuChu Rocket lives rent free in my head.
There's three game modes at play here, each with their own appeal. Puzzle mode gives you 100 puzzles to solve, each with a premade layout and specific panels to use. Leave it to ChuChu Rocket to make the presentation so frantic and mesmerizing, though. There's often a real satisfaction to placing down the panels in all the right spots, and watching your handiwork in motion. Stage Challenge mode pits you in 25 stages of reflexive, real-time challenges. These are interesting, but they begin to show the cracks in ChuChu Rocket's formula. The cursor you move around to place panels is barely fast enough to react to a lot of the shit this mode will throw at you. However, the true strength in ChuChu Rocket is its multiplayer.
In multiplayer, you and three other players set down panels in an attempt to get as many mice as possible in your designated rocket within three minutes, while preventing cats from getting to your rocket. It probably goes without saying, but once four players are all in the mix, the game goes from frantic to downright chaotic. There's so much on-the-fly thinking, opportunities to gain a huge lead, or sabotage your friends, either by abducting their mice or redirecting cats. If someone collects a roulette mouse, it'll cause one of several gamechanging events to shake everything up further. But what if I told you that ChuChu Rocket has one more trick up its sleeve?
A decently robust online mode helps this game soar to even greater heights. You can create lobbies to host games, simply chat with strangers (this was weirdly acceptable in the 2000s, okay), or share puzzles that you created in the game's level creator. Yeah, you read that correctly. Potentially infinite puzzles to play/create, and the ability to potentially share them with anyone else who owns the game. For the record, fan-maintained servers allow these features to persist even to this day, you can set them up on official hardware (or just download Flycast, it's preconfigured for online play).
ChuChu Rocket may be limited in scope and kind of a one-trick pony, but I stand by the fact that it completely nails what it wants to do. I'd be remiss to not mention the soundtrack that accompanies it too, which is this bizzare, almost cosmic series of compositions from Tomoya Ohtani. Twangy guitar sounds, synthesizers, and breakneck percussion. I am dead serious when I say to reach out to me on Twitter/Discord if you wanna play ChuChu Rocket. I will always be down for a few rounds of ChuChu Rocket. The japanese advertisement for ChuChu Rocket lives rent free in my head.
Hooblashooga
1 year ago