by:	October 17, 2007

Every Extend Extra Extreme is a psychedelically stylish, but at the same time it can be an incredible headache to look at. If you have played Live Arcade titles such as Space Giraffe, this game, which at first doesn’t seem to have any real meaning or point, might be for you. When you first begin playing the game, chances are you will be confused as to what the purpose of the shape you navigate is. Eventually it becomes abruptly clear that in most of the modes, the only purpose is to cause an explosion, enveloping other shapes around you, causing a chain reaction of explosions.

You will probably spend most of your time in the E4 Unlimited and Limited modes. The only differences between the two, is Limited limits your time in intervals of five, between five and twenty. On both modes there are four stages accompanied with it’s own unique song, and feel. As you gain steam from the explosions you set off, collecting icons called “quickens”, the faster, trippier, and more frantic it gets. When I say trippy, I mean visually like an animated spiral-graph, color pulsating over a black background in a strange wiry, fireworks display. In order to get this far, you have a shield you start up with every time your icon regenerates, allowing you to position yourself through all the globs of shapes coming at you and shooting flashing balls of light at you. Every time you destroy stuff you get a bunch of power-ups that help you extend the time, give you more time for shields, and so on. You typically start a match off with three minutes in Unlimited mode, but you can theoretically go forever, until your points counter reads 999,999,999,999. The game is stranger because of how many points you can garner, with one of the achievements even being that you have a total of fifteen trillion points in all on Unlimited mode.

R4 the Revenge: in R4 you actually shoot your enemies instead of destroy yourself in order to bring them down. You can choose cruise speed by pixels per second, have a boss shape every so often, the music is more frantic, and the only real challenge seems to be the bosses. While it is nice that you can actually shoot, and trust me you shoot, in four directions at the same time actually, it doesn’t get to exciting until about level fifty. Until then, it follows the same formula of shooting at some white blobs, then a “boss blob” comes out, you kill that, repeat.

The “S4” Wiz Ur Muzik mode is probably the most interesting mesh of the Xbox 360 technology and a Live Arcade title to date. In the mode, you simply select some music from the Xbox Guide to play, and the game detects the music. Once it is detected, you must play the song all the way through so it can analyze it, but once it is done you can then select the beats per minute, or whenever the game “bumps” manually, or automatically. If you do either, you can always fine-tune the BPM by pressing the A button to the beat of the music. I selected a song that I thought the game would be able to use best, and that was Ferry Corsten’s “Rock Your Body Rock” a decent electronic/techno song with a good beat to it. It worked well, the controller, which vibrates to the beat. It worked very well, but since the rest of the game doesn’t quite fine-tune itself, it became very easy. I tried it with some rock, and rap songs as well, with similar results with the game being easier. It still is a very neat experience and a great use of Xbox 360’s technology.

“H4” is the versus component of the game, allowing you to go up against others online to see which of you can make the biggest combo. It is an interesting twist on the gameplay, but it doesn’t the title. That is the biggest downfall of the game though, is that while the techno riffs are decent, and it masks itself as having variety, there really isn’t much there. The two biggest modes are basically the same things with the exact same four levels to choose from, suggesting that they will try to milk the game more in the future with marked up downloadable content. The “S4” mode is a good distraction, and the “R4” mode feels as if though it was tacked on rather than given as much attention as all the other modes. Still it is a very stylish experience, and at 800 Points, or ten dollars it will please Lumines, Space Giraffe, and maybe even the hardcore Geometry Wars players out there.

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It is definitely not your normal game, but it shows that we are at least getting some better variety on Live Arcade. It is a very stylish and color experience, but it is only really for the hardcore gamers out there that want a semi-causal experience. It is almost as if though the game requires you to completely “get it” for you to enjoy it, and if you don’t completely “get it” your time and 800 points will probably be better spent elsewhere.

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