Arcade games are great, aren’t they? You can shoot aliens and zombies with a gun. You can swing a tiny baseball bat to hit an incoming ball. You can even go bowling, play darts, and throw footballs in some arcade games. However, when you bring the arcade experience home to the consoles, they lose some of their appeal. Shooting aliens and zombies doesn’t feel as cool when it’s on your tiny TV. Flicking a control stick isn’t as exhilarating as the baseball bat. And let’s not even discuss how boring it can be go virtual bowling or to press a button to throw a football.
This is very much the case with Irritating Stick of the Playstation. Based on the arcade game The Irritating Maze (which is itself based on a Japanese game show where contestants perform similar actions), the game has you navigating a 3D stick through a series of mazes and obstacles without touching the sides. I immediately though of the board game Operation, and was kind of surprised to find the term Wire Loop Game as the genre of game this would fall under. It is a very apt name, as that is largely what you’re playing with in both Operation and Irritating Stick.
I was fortunate enough to have played the arcade game during a trip to the California Extreme arcade convention in California (go figure). The machine itself has a trackball to control the stick through the titular maze. This is a decent enough way to emulate the action of the television game show. Realistically thinking, how else could you attempt to do this better? At least with the trackball you get something unique for the arcade experience, which can create unique memories and gameplay compared to a home console’s controller (we’ll get to that shortly). Spinning the trackball up and down, side to side to try to move quickly through the maze, without touching the sides, and before the timer ran out was perfect for short bursts of play. Also, this particular cabinet had the air burst component up and running: between stage (and I think even during them), short bursts of air would blast at the player, potentially causing them to mess up and hit the walls. I am reading this is an attempt to replicate some of the challenges seen in the TV show, and I’m here for it. Anything to make a game more fun in my opinion is worthwhile.
Moving over to the PS1 game Irritating Stick, there’s not as much praise I can give it. Gone is the trackball for movement (though I’m thinking there’s probably a way to incorporate that controller scheme with some modding). Gone are built-in air bursts and incredibly bright lights from the arcade game. Moreover, there’s even less recognition this game is based on a TV game show, as there’s no real mention to it at all here. This is more forgivable, as the game show itself didn’t air outside Japan, but it would have easily fit the game show video game motif if they had just added it. What you’re left with is the core gameplay of moving a stick through a maze.
Sadly, the game isn’t the best. My biggest gripe comes from the controls. Being a maze navigation game like this, you’d expect the controls to be precise and spot-on. They aren’t. There’s a sort of momentum that your stick keeps as you let go of the directional button, meaning you’re going to have several moments where you touch the sides unintentionally. I understand this is part of the game and can add to the “Oh man, I just missed it!” sort of feeling, but it didn’t land well with me. It felt a bit more cheap and frustrating (dare I say, Irritating?) than a truly justified miss.
Also, we have to talk about the 3D and 2D presentation. The game largely has you moving through what you expect to be a 2D plane, given the shape and appearance of everything. However, it is very much a 3D plane, just that you are only allowed to move on the X and Y axes. Many a time I found myself hitting the edge of the maze unintentionally because of this. It wasn’t until the game moved to a 3D focused section, where I could see the intention of the maze to have multiple dimensions, did I understand what was happening. Worse yet, there are some sections you are supposed to move through that shift the camera to this 3D angle. However, only being able to move up, down, left, or right, it’s so difficult to tell the depth of what you’re looking at it becomes a nigh-impossible guessing game. Irritating, indeed.
For what it’s worth, there are some neat design elements here. For starters, there’s an option you can include that allows you as the player to input certain “Challenges” when playing with friends. These could seemingly be anything, and are there to give the game more of a fun party game setting. I imagine anyone that tried this, if there even is anyone, would have done things like “play at full speed” or “only use one eye” or other silly gimmicks. This would effectively emulate the game show and arcade games methods for distracting the player, and I think it’s a cool way to try to incorporate that. There’s also a stage creation mode, which is a nice add-on as the game itself doesn’t have a whole lot to offer. I can imagine there are some insanely talented Irritating Stick players out there able to full speed through the most devilishly challenging stages. I do not envy them as that sort of sadistic punishment is not what I enjoy doing in my video games.
Irritating Stick is a lot of things. It’s an interesting take on a puzzle game. It’s a weird console conversion of an even weirder arcade game that likely shouldn’t have been ported over at all. It’s also one of the worst titled games I can think of. And it’s not that great of a game overall…
Laters,
Jsick
