Is it a game? Is it a screen-saver? What is "LocoRoco Cocoreccho!"?
Confusion currently abounds. And some of the information out there is off. Thankfully, I can clear it up -- a little.
I played the game on Wednesday morning during a New York City demo of Sony's fall PlayStation line-up. After a few rounds of "PixelJunk Racers" and "Go! Sports Ski" the Sony reps loaded up a build of Loco Roco.
They apologized in advance. They weren't sorry for the quality of the game: it's as lively, colorful and engaging as the PSP original and looked highly polished. They just hadn't had much time with the title, only getting it on Friday from the home office. They weren't sure how to unlock every little thing. But together we managed plenty, and had a good time with it.
So how does it work?
I recommend you click on the post's lead image and use it for reference as I try to make sense of this. Ready?
The first thing to note is that you control the butterfly. It's the small pink, blue and orange thing dead center in the middle of the screenshot.
You move the butterfly with the Sixaxis controller's left analog stick and glide it around the level. The levels are essentially big mazes, filled with hidden LocoRocos.
What you see in the enlarged shot on this post is just a small piece of the level we were in. Think of the screenshot as Washington State and the level as the Pacific Northwest. The Sony reps zoomed out and showed me the game map. It was the equivalent of the western half of North America, from Alaska, to the south of Mexico. I got the impression of a side-scroller game map turned on its side.
As we controlled the butterfly, the LocoRocos tumble around the level on their own. Only a few were in play. The rest had to be found and woken up. To wake them you have another LocoRoco bump into them. Or you fly over them with the butterfly and shake the Sixaxis to wake them up. Once a little guy is awake, he starts rolling. Tapping the circle button makes the LocoRocos jump.
If you want to speed the LocoRocos up or get them to follow a path, you press the circle button and a ring of light emanates from the butterfly. The LocoRocos surrounded by that ring of light follow along somewhat slowly, but at least they go in the direction you nudge them in. (At this point you know enough for this video of the game in action to make some sense.)
What about motion control?
The one thing we never did during my demo was use the Sixaxis to tilt the entire game world. That is what you would have expected, had you played the PSP original.
Instead, we moved the butterfly over various objects and tried to tilt them. For example, in this post's big screenshot, do you see that big red flower? If we hovered over that with the butterfly it might have caused the flower to spin, the petals to fall off and a few hidden LocoRocos to be uncovered. See those two guys standing above the cog wheel? Hovering over them and shaking the Sixaxis left and right might cause them to raise and lower the handlebar between them in order to make that wheel turn.
Now that I think of it, we played "LocoRoco CocoReccho" almost as if it was an old-school point-and-click adventure game. We used the butterfly as a mouse pointer and utilized shakes of the Sixaxis controller in place of probing mouse clicks. We wanted to see what happened and kept trying to meddle with different parts of the scenery.
And what was the point? There was a sign in our level indicating the number of LocoRocos we had to awaken before moving to the next stage. We had to find that many and get them through the gate. If our group of LocoRocos wasn't big enough, the little guys caught a gust of wind and flew back to where they came from, constantly moving in a grand level-wide circuit.
The Sony reps and I were able to zoom out and look at the overall game map. A few other areas were unlocked. We could go into them and mess around, but without our army of LocoRocos, we couldn't make much happen.
So IGN reports that this thing is a screensaver. Is it? My Sony reps didn't describe it that way, but maybe it is. It certainly played like a game to me. We loaded it out of the PS3 dashboard like we would any other PSN title. And, like most games, it had a goal.
Ah, but there was one thing missing in the version we played: failure. Even though the game world looked to be taking place up in the clouds or something, there didn't seem to be any bottomless pits. When my guys took a big fall, a gust of wind or drifting pack of clouds saved them. The challenge was to find enough of these hidden guys in order to progress to the next level.
I may have missed a whole lot. IGN reports that there are enemies in the game that will rub out your LocoRocos. I don't think I saw any in my demo. Still, what I saw was fun.
There. I hope I cleared that up.
