A portion of a WiiWare World review... MaBoShi: The Three Shape Arcade is a rather unique game from Mindware, a company that's relatively unknown outside of Japan. As the title suggests, MaBoShi is all based around three shapes - Circle, Stick and Square. The gameplay comprises of three mini games which are based on these shapes, which all have the simple objective of getting the best high score. Mess up once and it's game over! It doesn't sound very interesting on the surface, but there is more to this game than meets the eye.
You are presented with three vertical rectangles on your screen, lined up from left to right. At the top is a list of all of your Mii avatars. Drag your selected Mii into one of the rectangles and you will be able to choose one of the three games, which you will then begin to play in the selected rectangle. The games are fairly basic, but they are not mastered easily.
The Circle game puts you in control of a ball, which is located in a circular playing field. The ball is always on the move, it will continuously try to go in one direction. If you press the A button, it will change direction and go the opposite way. Using this tactic, you have to try and defeat swarms of enemies that appear in the playing field before they manage to reach the edge and escape. At first, you will probably be able to beat the levels very easily, but later on, there will be added obstacles in the "arena", such as a ball attached to a rope that swings around when you hit it and thus blocks your movement, and no, it won't take out enemies....
"There's been quite a bit of talk on asynchronous gameplay in the past few months, particularly when it comes to the Wii U. Thankfully, we have yet to reach a point where the mere mention of the word causes irritation, but by the same token, this push for synonymous association also has yet to see proper realization. Reasons behind this lack of cohesion should be apparent to anyone who's been tracking the system's development; reasons I will choose not to delve into at this time. Respecting what Nintendo has already done, though, and the showing they had at this past E3, it's reasonable to say they've presented some well-meaning concepts that play to their overall vision -- which, to some, is still a bit wishy-washy." -- Wiiloveit.com
Here is a portion of a WiiWare World interview with MindWare about MaBoShi: The Three Shape Arcade on WiiWare:
"WiiWare World: How many levels does MaBoShi have? What sort of variation occurs as a player processes to the deeper levels?
Micky G. Albert: Each game will get harder towards Level 99. If you beat Level 99, you'll be back to Level 1. The challenge come from both the level design variety and enhanced enemies (they'll get faster as you progress, for example).
Circle:
We wanted to make each Circle level distinct by its central primitive motif. This way, players can see "this level is different and new!" at a glance. It was challenging to assure the level design variety only using limited design elements. We hope players will feel "What comes next? I want to see it!" as they progress. Kuniaki Watanabe designed all levels.
Bar:
We changed the whole level design several times. The biggest design decision was making each level drastically short to 1-3 screens long. We had some doubts at first. It's rare to see a scroller game with such short levels. But I think the change ended up well. We hope players can enjoy short yet intense Bar levels. I oversaw the game balance of the Bar game all by myself.
Square:
Square levels are procedurally generated. So each time you play, you would feel the levels look familiar, but they are not exactly the same. Jun Shimizu (He coded Slap Fight MD alone), Tadashi Ito (He coded the DS version of MaBoShi, as well as Bar/Square on Wii), and I wrote the generation codes. If only one coder do the generation code, the result might become monotonous. But if we have too many coders, the end result might become inconsistent. So we had three coders to make each level distinct yet consistent as a whole. We hope players will recognize each stage by their pattern not by their level number."
Eurogamer writes: "It's always nice to be surprised (unless the surprise involves a clown shining a torch in your face in the middle of the night) and MaBoShi is a very surprising game. It's a quiet, unassuming little thing, sitting there on the Wii Shop shelf and doing very little to alert you to the evil genius lurking behind its obscure title.
It's a compound word, you see, made up of the abbreviated Japanese words for Ball (maru), Stick (bou) and Square (shikaku), and these are the geometric shapes around which the three mini-games within revolve. Often literally. As the suffix suggests, this is a game made up of three parts - one game for each shape, all using minimal controls. The Ball game involves a constantly rotating sphere trapped in a wooden circle. Pressing the A button reverses the direction of the rotation, and you must use this basic Newtonian concept to manoeuvre the ball around the play area, hitting tiny enemies before they can escape."
