Go! Go! Hypergrind Preview
Atlus and Spumco serve up a quirky new skater for the GameCube.
Now that gaming is firmly ensconced in the mainstream, the number of developers releasing quirky titles has dropped rather significantly. The display of wares at E3 2003 last week was decidedly more mainstream than in previous years. Fortunately, you can always count on at least one Japanese developer to do gamers a proper. This year, Atlus proudly carried the torch for quirky games with its upcoming GameCube game, Go! Go! Hypergrind. The cel-shaded skateboarding game is being developed by Poponchi, an internal team at Atlus, and it features character designs from Spumco. We recently tried a demo of the game and found that the quirky title is coming together surprisingly well.
The demo featured three selectable characters: a wolf named Decker, a Frankenstein-like creature named Freddy, and a genderless whatsit named Gigi wearing a pink bunny suit. We were also able to get a glimpse of the rest of the roster, although they weren't selectable in the demo. The most promising of the bunch appear to be Mr. Smith, a monkey; Piggy-Sue, a bikini-wearing pig; Pxhbigt (aka "Bob"), a bizarre alien; and the Johnson Bros., a very unique-looking pair of siblings. The three environments in the demo gave us a taste of the inspired looniness we can look forward to. Toon City was a bustling metropolis with street traffic and a host of fatal hazards strewn about. The billboards in the city reflected the special Spumco aesthetic, such as the enormous milk advert featuring a very busty and very enthusiastic spokeswoman. Haunted Night is in the same vein and features a number of obstacles like a rug with a voracious pair of lips. The Jungle stage is best described as a haphazard collection of movie sets. The game's control is solid and stays pretty close to the layout and controls of most skating games. You'll move with the analog stick, ollie with the A button, grind with Y, and perform special tricks with the B and X buttons. The triggers will let you spin in the air when held down individually or right yourself when held together. One of the cool elements in the game are the tricks performed by interacting with environmental hazards. Your character may have all manner of body-deforming accidents, such as decapitation or being set on fire, when you interact with the hazards. Each character will also have his, her, or its own set of special moves to perform as well. Combinations of the aforementioned moves will help you rack up points in the game.
The graphics in Go! Go! Hypergrind make liberal use of cel shading and look quite polished, even in the demo. The character animation is solid and lends the motley crew some personality, especially during some of the hazardous tricks. The environments are large and feature a number of interactive objects and hazards. The frame rate is shaping up to be respectably smooth, which just adds to the game's playability.
From what we've seen so far, Go! Go! Hypergrind is a promising game that mixes solid gameplay with a very eccentric design. The gameplay is solid, and it's perfectly complemented by Spumco's eccentric humor. Fans of skating games looking for an amusing change of pace should keep an eye out for Go! Go! Hypergrind when it ships later this year for the GameCube.
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