VVVVVVery Good Chiptunes - VVVVVV Review

Go ahead and hit play.

I picked up a copy of VVVVVV months ago.  I think I got it as part of one of the humble bundles, probably the second or third one.  It had sort of been languishing in my pile of unplayed PC games, which is by far the worst pile to languish in on account of how rarely I play PC games.  That VVVVVV was sitting unplayed, it turns out, is very bad, because VVVVVV is a very good game.

Oh man he looks pissed.  We'll invade Siam LATER, Oda.

I was sitting in LAX awaiting my 12am flight to PHL so that I could hop over to ITH the next day and I had some time to kill. As is my custom, I had elected to arrive at the airport WAY too early rather than to have to worry for even one second that I miss my flight.  It was during this time that I decided to bust the new laptop out to play some Civilization V which I had enjoyed a little bit too much over the break.  However, it seemed that Oda Nobunaga's reign of terror was going to have to be put on hold because I couldn't get Steam to start in offline mode and thus couldn't play any Civ V.  Without a good surface to mouse on my only other alternative was to fire up VVVVVV and I'm so glad that I did.



VVVVVV is a game all about simple charm.  All you need to worry about is moving left and right, whether gravity is up or down, and spikes or other obstacles.  Apart from that, it is a story about Captain Viridian's efforts to reunite his spaceship crew which have been scattered all over lost in some new dimension.  It's a game not unlike Super Meat Boy, where you'll die hundreds (if not thousands of time) before you're through, but where death is of little consequence because the game is about discrete platforming challenges that are never more than a few seconds in length. Throw in a dash of collecting and a metroidvania style map and you know almost all you need to know about VVVVVV's gameplay.

The thing that really kept me going in VVVVVV, beyond the roughly 630 deaths in the 90 minutes it took me to finish the game, was the blistering chiptune soundtrack.  These are tracks so compelling and perfectly matched to the gameplay that they transcend the nostalgia of the genre and sound completely contemporary.  This is music that I would listen to apart from VVVVVV and not feel a hint of nerd shame about.

If you're at all interested in games, have $5 and a bit of patience, buy this game and enjoy the hell out of it.