Every Extend Extra

Does Mizuguchi's latest work inspire or infuriate?

	Version PSP	Developer Q Entertainment	Publisher BVG (US/EU) Bandai (JP)	Genre Music/puzzle

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By Dominick Hardy

It's often the simplest sounding things that turn out to be the most difficult. Take Every Extend Extra for example. Start with a simple idea, add a couple of twists and turns, blend in lots of music and graphical wizardry and what do you have? Another frustratingly addictive game from Q Entertainment that's what.

Like their previous puzzle-fusion game Lumines, the idea behind 'E3' is deceptively simple and also just as heavily steeped in the audio side of the game as the visuals. Dubbed a puzzle-shooter, there's refreshingly little shooting involved, with instead the traditional concept of preserving your ships and lives being turned on its head by encouraging you to self-destruct, destroying any enemy objects in the vicinity, racking up chain reactions and thus points and getting a bonus craft in the process.

So far, so simple. In fact, there is only one button used throughout the entire game - the detonate button. Tap this for a quick detonation or hold it down to build up your charge and create a larger explosion. Once your charge has been built up though, it must be released in a few seconds otherwise it will detonate regardless.

Based on the original independent PC game, Every Extend, E3 builds upon its simple premise by adding extra features that rack the complexity up a notch and introduce subtleties that cause players to quickly develop strategies in order to reach high-scores and trigger huge chain reactions. Destroying certain enemies will drop different coloured pick-ups; green for bonus points, yellow for a time extension and purple for a Quicken.

It's this Quicken which is often the most prized, raising the tempo a notch, both in terms of the music and the on-screen action. The more Quickens you obtain, the more enemies will appear, the greater the chain reactions you can trigger, the more points you will obtain and hence the more lives you will collect. All this in turn allows you to continue on in your cause, creating more detonations and gaining more points and thus the cycle repeats again.

The flip-side of this, of course, is that perversely the game gets harder as it becomes easier to rack up those scores. Thankfully control of your craft is precise and nimble enough to be able to quickly navigate even the most crowded game field, sometimes leaving you wondering just how you manage to get out of the tightest corners unscathed. As a punishment should a collision occur not only do you loose a craft but you also drop all your Quickens, causing the game to slow to a crawl again.

If you're fast enough though, you can pick up all the dropped Quickens before they float off-screen. However, the more quickens you originally had, the more crowded the game field will be and thus the more difficult it is to pick them all up. Sometimes you may decide to strategically detonate in order to clear the way to some precious pick-ups or to another chain of enemies, which is further example of the excellent balance in the game's design.

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