#840 Maboshi: The Three Shapes Arcade

Posted: 30th May 2020 by Jeroen in Games
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871st played so far

Genre: Puzzle
Platform: Wii
Year of Release: 2008
Developer: Mindware Corp
Publisher: Nintendo

With all the digital storefronts disappearing – in particular Nintendo’s offerings disappear early – it feels right to get these indie titles done earlier so I don’t have to worry about disappearing or breaking consoles. So far we’ve been lucky, but Reset Generation‘s disappearance still haunts me and I feel like we barely scraped by to cover that.

There are, of course, other ways to cover them, but it feels right to maintain decorum on this. MaBoShi: The Three Shapes Arcade is three games in one, where you pick which to play. When you play multiplayer, however, different people can play different games while they different boards interact with each other. Still, for me that’s three discussions in once!

Our Thoughts

As said, Maboshi has three games inside it, some more interesting than others. Square is probably my favourite, a Snake type game where you need to make your way up and burn blocks with the trail of fire that follows you. You need to keep yourself from getting trapped or exploding yourself. Circle is good fun – you’re switching the direction of a spinning circle as it bats enemies away – but while it quickly gets challenging, it gets too frustrating before you get to see different variants of it. The last, Bar, I liked the least. You need to fling a bar to the top of the stage. It’s an interesting idea, but controls annoyingly enough that i tried to avoid it when I could.

While these are okay games, the AI will join you playing if there are no other players who do. As they do well in the game – and they usually do a lot better than me – they send off waves that help kill or destroy things in your game to make your progress easier. You obviously do the same thing too and it really feels like you’re helping each other out as you do so – it’s quite nice to see the chain reactions cascade.

Final Thoughts

I’m not sure whether Maboshi could keep my attention for a very long time – especially considering my skill at the game – but it isn’t really meant to. Instead, it’s a fun diversion with simple enough mechanics that grow quite quickly and organically. I sometimes struggled with the controls though, and it does feel like they were sometimes trying to stick too much to the one button controls when you don’t need them.