Crazy Mouse

There are a lot of unanswered questions in the world. Questions like “In Heroes, how come Claire the Cheerleader’s pierced ears don’t heal up when she doesn’t wear earrings?” There are also a lot of answered questions in this world. Questions like “Is there anything worse than Beat’n Groovy” on XBLA?

Welcome to CrazyMouse.

The blurb on xbox.com concerning this game says that this is the first original Live game to come out of mainland China. Even so, that’s no excuse. Unless the mainland China they speak of is a different mainland China where no-one has ever played a game before and so has no measure of “good”.

So, CrazyMouse sees you guiding a mouse around a maze. The mouse, for some reason, seems to be strapped to a firework. Those crazy Chinese, eh? So you guide the mouse around the maze, eating food, and then you get to the next level where you race an AI mouse eating food. Sounds easy doesn’t it. Somehow, there’s a massive difficulty hike between level 1 and level 2. I haven’t made it off of level 2. I’ve browsed the interweb for comments on this game – I’ve seen one guy has made it to level 3, and that’s even harder as you have a boomerang which seems to prefer stunning you rather than the mouse you threw it at. Sounds bloody marvelous. I think I’ll stick to level 2.

Sure, the game is really colourful and pretty. What’s nicer than a bright blue mouse eating food in a maze? Nothing is better. And I mean that quite literally. Sitting staring at nothing is better than playing this game. The music annoys you. The fact that you can speed the mouse up using A, only for the mouse to slam into a wall and do some hideous stunned animation annoys you. It’s all bloody awful.

On the plus side, it’s 400MS points of bloody awful – so at least someone saw enough sense to knock the price down. But even then, it’s about 400MS points too much.

Do you remember when Sensible Soccer came out and it would log you out of live everytime you went into it. Crazy mouse does that. This makes it extremely hard to play online multiplayer, so I have no idea what this consists of. I imagine it’s shit though. If it isn’t, I will go out and buy a tasty looking hat.