Peeeer-fect!

Yesterday, I found myself with the privilege of securing a membership slot on Blackcats Games, a torrent tracking site that specializes in difficult-to-find console titles. For some reason they only have a few thousand membership slots and it's largely up to chance whether you get in at a time when there are places available, so being able to join isn't easy - and once you're in your uploads and downloads are monitored with efficiency that rivals the Germans to ensure that you behave yourself and seed back at least as much as you take out. But it's thanks to them that after years of searching, debating whether I should give in and pay the exorbitant $150 eBay prices for it, and wondering why no one's bothered to make a torrent of it yet, I now finally have a copy of Kurushi.

I'm not really expecting anyone to have heard of this (nonsensically, it was called Intelligent Qube in America), as the only time that I'd otherwise heard of the game was on the Demo-1 CD that came with early models of the Playstation. It can be loosely described as a puzzle/strategy game, but it's probably more descriptive to call it a very long Knightmare causeway puzzle. Your character is stranded on a set of platforms hovering in a black void, with an onslaught of cubes rolling towards him. The object of the game is to clear cubes without being squished or falling off the edge. Letting too many cubes pass or capturing black "Forbidden Cubes" by mistake will knock a section off the end of the platform, making your playfield smaller and more cramped for later rounds.

What made me play the demo for hours on end was the sense of atmosphere that the whole thing had (an unusual feature for a puzzle game, certainly). It was the sound that did it. The continual thump of the cubes as they advanced relentlessly towards you. The reassuring "zoosh" sound as you cleared one of them and avoided certain death for another couple of seconds. Conversely, the massively over-the-top bass boom as you mistakenly captured a Forbidden Cube combined with the crumbling sound of the end of the stage being sheared off behind you, and the tense string effect that played when the blocks you were meant to clear tumbled over the edge. After hearing too many of those, huge relief was brought by the choir sound when you completed a stage perfectly and were granted another row of the platform, equating to more time to live. Everything about it worked - I can't think of any other game with a set of sound effects so perfect.

You may have sensed a "but" coming up, and there certainly is one. In the full game, they've gone and duffed it all up by putting music in it. The dark foreboding lonely emptiness of the demo is replaced with a selection of Japanese orchestral/opera pieces that play in the background - as the developers don't want us to forget that this is, after all, an incredibly intelligent game. The music would be pretty great on its own, but playing Kurushi while the score Soul Caliburs away in the background feels as inappropriate as Unreal Tournament 2007 with a soundtrack by the Bee Gees.

People have said I'm very into my music, so it's rare for me to say that having it at all detracts from a game - and it's strange to think that the perfect atmosphere of the demo was created entirely by accident due to the CD tracks not being present. (There was a similar situation on another demo disc where a level of "Forsaken" got the music from another pinball game on the disc, and it fitted much better than the real soundtrack did). I'm going to have to work on finding some way to turn it off.