Mind Your Language

Spend five minutes with Spiky Snail’s The Splatters, which hits Xbox Live Arcade April 11th, and you’ll likely be left with a furrowed brow.

Its objectives aren’t immediately evident and its controls aren’t instantly intuitive. You’ll have a notion that you’re supposed to fling colourful, googly-eyed blobs around, making them splat into walls and coat sticky jelly things lying around the play area, but the details regarding exactly how to do this won’t come into focus. There’s a good chance you’ll cue to its presentation, which carries an agreeable LittleBigPlanet aroma thanks to a delightfully lighthearted score, playful menu design, and quirky levels built around oversized everyday objects, but that probably won’t be enough to make you keep playing.

Spend 20 minutes with it and you’ll have a better feel for what you need to do. Pop-up instructions and tutorials will help you to understand that you can control the direction of your blobs not only during takeoff but also mid-flight simply by tapping the A-button a second time and pushing a thumbstick in the direction you want your splatter to fly. What’s more, you’ll discover that you can pull off stunts with each shot that help build combos for higher scores and allow you to more efficiently eliminate those sticky jelly things, which you’ll have come to call bombs.

via Xbox puzzler The Splatters makes physics fun – The Globe and Mail.

Strange Random Physics Quote:

“In physics, you don’t have to go around making trouble for yourself – nature does it for you.” – Frank Wilczek

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