Rayman's an Original

I've been trying out Rayman Advance on the GBA SP.  It is one of two games featured on Rayman 10th Anniversary, the other being Rayman 3.

The first and most striking thing about the game are the rich colours of the opening area.  It is a forest setting and and the greens and blues of the environment tell us immediately that love has gone into making this game.

Rayman himself is also noteworthy.  This is the first of his games I've played and I never expected him to be so big.  He takes up more than 1/3 of the height of the screen, making him much bigger than any of the platform characters I've previously written about.



Rayman in his element.

 Rayman starts the game with 6 lives and 4 pips (that's what I'm calling them, anyway).  If he walks into a tortoise or other type of bad guy he loses a pip.  When he's lost all 4 he loses a life and returns to the start of that section.  At several stages he has to jump over water and if he falls short and drowns he loses a whole life.

Rayman is no Sonic.  He lopes along at his own pace and the main danger is in lack of precision in jumping, not in running into a hazard that was on you before you knew it.  Nevertheless I managed to kill him off frequently.  It is because of the low speed nature of his adventures that Rayman can afford to loom so large on the screen.

The game works.  It is generous with incompetents like me (allowing you to start up again on the level you finally died off at with all 6 lives intact) and is the most engaging of the 3 GBA platformers I've written about so far.

Despite that I think I will be neglecting Rayman for a while as I got Colin McRae Dirt for the PS3 through the post today.  More on that subject soon.