N¥M NET / Evaluation  / Devil Dice
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Devil Dice

Developer
Shift
Publisher
THQ
Street Date
09.25.1998

  Usually, puzzle games are shunned when they come to America, bringing only moderate sales and little fame to the companies that bravely release them. One such game has a bit of history behind it, from hands at Shift, a small developer with an expert staff on a low budget, to Sony Computer Entertainment Japan, one of the biggest companies in home entertainment with a marketing presence that would make the hair on any competing executive's neck stand up, to THQ, a small North American publisher that picked up the title in hopes of giving it the release that it deserved on our side of the Pacific. And they succeeded at doing just that, as their Devil Dice title, a popular puzzle game called XI (pronounced "sai") in Japan, developed on Sony's Net Yaroze development system of all things, is one hell of a puzzler. Not only is it innovative, it's downright enjoyable.

  One try at a heated two-player game of Devil Dice just might convince any gamer of the addictive nature and the single player modes are just as fun. The visuals are truly amazing. The very first time that I popped Devil Dice into my PlayStation, I never expected the game to be this good looking. Your cute little guy in an anime-style devil suit walks frantically around on the dice, as lightning falls faster and faster from above the grid to regenerate any and all dice that you've destroyed. All the while, the score meter is glowing and counting up your ridiculously high total rapidly. Wow. The tunes in Devil Dice are some of the nicest orchestrations I've heard in a puzzler, ranging from beat to tempo to even organ tunes, all the while fitting the current gameplay on screen. This is a great addition to an already great game and gives Devil Dice a really relaxing sense, as well as an edge-of-your-seat, brain-grinding, hair-pulling puzzle experience.

  Every game, of course, needs a goal and the seemingly simple goal of Devil Dice is to make as many dice disappear as you can, by making your cute little devil named Aqui tumble the dice around him. However, to do this, you must line up and cluster similarly numbered die into groups equal to the identical number showing on all of them. For instance, a cluster of three dice with four on top of them simply refuses to disappear. Align another dice showing four on top along the cluster, which brings the total to four die with four showing on top, and magically they all shrink into the ground. Wait a minute! Try and move yet another die showing four on top with the already disappearing die. There. That one disappears, but resets the total points and adds the other dice as well, times the total of dice, as if ones that are disappearing are still there, which they are.

  Although this sounds confusing, it's the very core reason that Devil Dice is so addictive. The second rule, called Happy Ones, is that all dice that are showing one will only disappear when one is aligned with an already disappearing group of other numbered dice. The third rule is that whatever is on one side of a die, the other side, when added with the opposite side, will always equal seven. If you need a three, find a four and flip it twice in one smooth direction. Finally, the fourth rule is that no matter how many times a die is rolled in one fluid direction, the numbers on the sides not touching the grid never change; a very intricate gameplay system, indeed. Of course, Devil Dice has numerous modes of play, including one just to explain the rules, Manual Mode, but it is the play modes that most of you wish to hear about, so those are what I will talk of next.

  The Trial Mode can become pure madness, with dice constantly generating and regenerating in clusters, while you move them into extremely long chains and rack up the points faster than the game can count them. This will probably be the point of addiction that most solitary players will experience. The Battle Mode is the first attraction for multiplayer enthusiasts. Two players line up dice, trying to be the first to get a total of four unique chains before the other player can. Chains that've yet to disappear can still be linked, which of course means you can steal your opponent's chain, simply by flipping a similar numbered dice next to their hard earned chain. The biggest multiplayer feature of Devil Dice, in fact, is the five player Wars Mode; in this unique version of the Battle Mode, up to five players (with a multitap) can have a go at proving their mad dicing skills.

  Each player, of the five, is given a life total, which is lowered when a player scores a chain. The more chains, the more health said player sucks from his or her opponent's total life and adds to his or her own. If you have a multitap and four friends, this mode alone is the most competitive aspect of Devil Dice, hands down. Up next is Puzzle Mode, the last and final play mode in the game. Puzzle Mode lives up to its namesake with a multitude of dice puzzles that require strategic thinking and a limited number of moves to solve. Some puzzles in this mode can be solved in short fashion, leading to the achievement of "Excellent" status. As a reward for beating all of the puzzle sets in Puzzle Mode, for every ten that are beaten, you get a new floor pattern to use in the single or multiplayer modes. Devil Dice may have been created by a small developer, published by a small publisher and may not have the bells and whistles of most other games, it more than makes up for it with superb gameplay that rivals every other puzzle game to date and still adds some excellence to an almost never changing genre. In short, Devil Dice definitely earns its own name; it is truly one wicked puzzler.
RATING:


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