This isn’t a games blog, remember? Hahahaha, oh yeah, I’m funny. Anyway.

I wrote up a little about this blog and myself at around 4 a.m. on a sleepless night. To validate my existence and such. It’s up there in the upper right corner under links. It’s been there a few days, but I keep forgetting to mention it.

It’s a work in progress, so there will be additions.

Polarium is a really, deeply, truly excellent puzzle game. It was a polarizing game when it came out, with people who liked it and people who didn’t like it, and noone could change their opinion. At the time, DS games were few, and people were still looking for that “killer app.” (footnote: i hate that term. =P) Polarium wasn’t it, and it tended to fall under undue criticism.

Some commented that it was like math homework. Surely, Polarium is not a nice game. It’s not friendly. Everything about it is hard and unrelenting. Puzzle mode is tough and only offers terse hints, and it’s probably the easiest mode in the game. Challenge is nearly impossible at first, and it dosen’t get a whole lot easier. And multiplayer? The multiplayer is actually very well done, but it only works with players of matched ability. Otherwise, the more skilled player will just constantly stomp on the other player. Polarium is mean.

But hey, some people like it, right? Some people also like math homework. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I like math homework. I’m analytical and I love it when all the little intricate bits of a differential equation or a proof fall into place. Polarium gives you that feeling when you succeed. It gives you… dare I coin the term… a math rush.

I’m on puzzle 91 right now. I got my copy back on Friday, and proceeded to go through all the puzzles again. I love the dang puzzle mode. After a while, you can, almost trance-like, absorb the strategy of the game. (I call it the music of logic. It comes naturally to me, like singing a song.) I know that a horizontal move MUST be to a square of the same color, and that vertical moves can (but may not) change color. No exceptions, except for the border. It is, of course, not that simple, but I noticed, as I reached puzzle 60 and up, I had absorbed the strategy so well that I was blazing through puzzles I’d never done before. Usually on two tries, sometimes with three, sometimes with one. The difficulty of the game peaks in the 30s, and relents a little after that. This seems to be because the first 30 or 40 puzzles are teaching you how to solve puzzles, and they can be brutal about it. After that though, Polarium has some fun with you. The puzzles become familiar icons and intricate, but recognizable and solvable patterns. It becomes fun. The price of this fun though (which isn’t even fun to some) turned off a lot of people.

Challenge and Multiplayer are pretty similar, and focus not on logic, but on being quick, precise, and decisive. This is sort of new to gaming. Being accurate on a digital pad or button is no problem, and analog sticks usually give you a pretty good margin of error, but the touchscreen has introduced something new. Now, you have to be able to trace a line straightly and quickly. You have to think and react to the screen at the same time too. Polarium is probably the first game to challenge your graphimotor skills. This is the game’s original intent though. The japanese title, Chokkan Hitofude, Elegant Stroke, refers to calligraphy, which demands everything that Polarium does. A precise, quick stroke looks best on paper. If it’s too slow, it loses its flair, and if it’s not accurate, it’s not recognizable. Calligraphy serves two equally important purposes: communication and beauty. Polarium is the video game abstraction of that skill. As far as I know, that’s never been done before.

Now that the DS’s game library is more filled-out, Polarium is looking more like an excellent indie game than the quirky letdown that some people think it was.