Product Description

Kororinpa: Marble Mania is a fun and addictive action puzzle game for your Wii Remote. Players tilt and rotate the Wiimote to roll a ball around a maze to reach the goal. Using an intuitive control scheme, gamers of all ages and skill levels can pick up a Wii Remote and immediately join the fun.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8061 in Video Games
• Brand: Konami
• Released on: 2007-03-20
• ESRB Rating: Everyone
• Platform: Nintendo Wii
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .50" h x 5.50" w x 7.50" l, .22 pounds

Features

• Simple and intuitive control system
• 20 kinds of marble variations with different control, playability and look and feel
• Full 3D control, tip the world on its side, and even upside down!
• Over 40 diverse stages packed with tricks, traps and secrets
• Compete against a friend with a 2-player race mode

Customer Reviews

It's Been Done - But It's Still Fun
Kororinpa Marble Mania is in essence Super Monkey Ball without the monkeys. Taking its cue from the classic Labyrinth game, you guide the maze in 3D and the marble acts with basic physics responses.

First, the premise. You have a series of themed maps that involve three dimensions of track. As you twist and turn the Wii remote, the track moves to match. As you give a tilt to the board, the marble rolls down the tilt. This is of course the basics - but soon there are ramps, sliding doors, sliding platforms, rotating pieces and other tricky objects involved in your path.

There are of course crystals to collect - what would a game be without collecting crystals! There is also a bonus green item on each level which is rather tricky to achieve, but unlocks new items. This gives you incentive to go back and re-play levels repeatedly.

Each level has its own theme. There are nature themes with leafy objects, a sugar-high theme with candies and cookies, an industrial theme with concrete, a cardboardy paper-Mario style theme, and so on. There are also background theme songs to unlock, and a variety of balls. Some make cute little noises, like the pink pig or the mrowling cat.

My first reaction was - do we really need another Super Monkey Ball game? Super Monkey Ball has a ton of great mini-games, great levels, and all around fun. Kororinpa is lacking a lot of that. All you have is mazes. The multi-player is just map racing.

It is challenging in a brain-train sort of way to figure out the solution to each puzzle, thinking in three dimensions. So from that point of view, I suppose you can consider this "Monkey Ball 1A" - not really better than Monkey Ball, but it gives you a new set of puzzles to figure out. Again, though, it lacks a lot of the features that Monkey Ball has, so I would start with the Monkey Ball series, and then move on to this one once you've figured all the Monkey Ball puzzles out.

The only real complaint I have about the core game is that the game treats the balls too delicately. There were many times where we were done with the first half of a map, and did a 'leap' to get to the second half. We landed nicely, plainly on the map, and it made us die. These are marbles! They're not eggs! If they land on a surface, they don't explode in a million pieces :)

I do have to give kudos here to the Wii remote. When I remember back to playing these types of games on a regular remote, it was always a little challenging to get the board tilt just right with the stick or buttons. With the Wii remote, it is very simple and obvious. You tilt the remote - the board tilts. No thought, no translation - it simply does what you do.

Recommended!

Simple, but entertaining
The first time I sat down to play this game, I played for a couple hours before realizing how much time had passed. It is extremely simple to pick up, for gamers and non-gamers alike. There is no concept of "lives", so you can never really lose if you keep trying - you just keep starting back at the beginning of the level you are on, and you get to keep all the crystals you have collected. You can earn gold, silver, and bronze trophies by completing the course quickly, and you can also collect special objects which unlock secret levels, new music, etc. The game is easy to learn, but difficult to master - getting gold trophies is HARD!

I imagine the game probably isn't as much fun once you have gotten all the way through it and received however many trophies you are willing to put the effort into getting, but in the meantime I'm having lots of fun with it!

Unlike the other reviews I see here already, I have not played Super Monkey Ball on the Wii; I found the previous Monkey Ball game I tried on the GameCube repetitive and boring after about half an hour, so take that into account when you read this review.

well done use of wiimote
This is a fun and addictive game, and it really shows-off just how precice the wiimote is to the most sensitive movements. Great control combined with good software physics give the game a very realistic feel of momentum, gravity, etc. I actually like that the orientation of the camera remains fixed (doesn't follow behind the marble), however it would be nice if the camera would pull back a bit when when the marble heads towards it, such that you could see what is up ahead better. Thankfully I think the designers created the levels in such a way that the "coming towards camera" portions are rarely an issue. The 2 player gameplay was also entertaining.