World of Good

World of Goo.

2D Boy decided to honour their PC preorders a little earlier than next Monday's official release date.

So, on the 21st birthday of voice actress Hirano Aya whose love I secretly yearn for - one day, one day we will be one, even if you do like Disney films and Avril fucking Lavigne I can forgive you for your smile as bright as all the stars which summons the blissful sound of angels singi--

I'll try that again.

So, on Wednesday, imagine my surprise and delight when the full game download link popped up in my emails.

World of Goo is the follow-up to physics toy Tower of Goo, one of the best things to come out of the Experimental Gameplay Project, and just like in Tower you click and drag your little goo-balls into girders to build wobbly structures. As you build, the unused balls conveniently travel along the structure so you can reach them. But instead of just building as high as you can go, World gives you the goal of getting your structure to the level's end point where your unused goo-balls are collected. If you save enough goo-balls, you pass the level. Simple.

As you progress through the game, different goo-ball "species" start to appear which all have their own unique quirks. There's the standard black balls from Tower of course, but then there's balls you can remove after creating girders with them, balls that only connect to balls of the same type, balls which connect with more or less links than other balls, balls which can catch fire, balls which break into smaller balls, balls which you fire from structures like a slingshot, balls which stick to things, balls, balls, balls, etc. On top of this there's all the physics puzzle staples such as spike traps, moving parts, block sliding and so on. It's rich with small variations on the core features, which are all easy to understand but in practise offer a huge range of puzzle-solving possibilities.

Level design is consistently inventive and challenging, from the early gap-bridging and spike-evading to the later bomb-detonating and gravity-orbiting. The flimsy nature of goo-structures can make some of the levels fiddly and frustrating, but a simple undo feature is included to rectify that one misplaced ball that brings everything crashing down. And, if you get really stuck you can even skip the odd level, so there's no barrier preventing you from having fun with it. Even after finishing a level, there's the added challenge of the Obsessive Compulsive Distinction - a special secondary objective - or just collecting more extra balls.

Extra goo-balls make for a fun hi-score metagame. Collect more goo-balls than a level's quota, and the extra balls will be sent to an inifinite Tower of Goo level. In this level, you build a tower from the ground up, and with an internet connection can see the heights that every other player in the world has reached (with their profile name and country), as well as your numerical position on the world goo-tower leaderboards.

Everything is controlled with a simple and intuitive point and left-click system, making it a promising prospect on WiiWare next week. The green balls, which can be repositioned or removed after being used, do present frustrations however. Presumably to prevent you from accidentally removing a goo-ball of structural importance, the game prioritises the selection of unused balls. This means it can be difficult to pick up used goo-balls when a lot of other unused balls are moving around the structure in the same place. The whistle ability (click and hold in empty space to make any unused balls travel in that direction) partly solves this problem, but on smaller structures where there isn't space for the unused balls to clear the area these difficulties persist. This flaw is certainly not game-breaking though.

As you should know if you have seen any promotional materials for the game, the presentation, be it sound, music, art direction or writing, is outstanding and charming - even moreso than Tower.

Though the Q4 rush of big releases is just beginning, it would take one hell of a Christmas for World of Goo to be missing from my games of the year '08. And I suppose I'll have to do one of them in Jaunary again now that I've written that.

And if I just write the word "panties" here, then combined with the third paragraph this post ought to get a me hell of a lot of Google referrals. Take that, The Man.