Crazy Construction (3DS)

 This was one of the first games I got on my original 3DS, and I'd actually completely forgotten about it until pretty recently (I replaced my original with a New 3DS a few years ago, lured in by the system's potential as an emulation device). You might think that any 3DS game would be too recent to feel nostalgia towards, but once I loaded up Crazy Construction (also known as Choukousou Kenzou Keikaku Buildinger) really made me feel something for those halcyon days of seven years ago.

 

It's a falling stuff puzzle game with the reverse goal compared to most: you have to pile items up until they go past a certain height, and maintain that height for three seconds. The challenge comes from the fact that the items are a wide range of objects with many irregular shapes: furniture, junk, vehicles, moai heads, and so on. You can also rotate them a full 360 degrees, rather than just through ninety degree increments. So you have to pile these items up high, balancing them on top of each other, trying to avoid them falling off of the platform on which they're being stacked.

 

Of course, there's also a score to chase, and this comes in the form of item weight. Every item has a weight, mostly around two-to-four, and you have to have a pile weighing at least forty to clear a stage, with better grades being awarded for going beyond that. As well as that, each set of stages has obstacles, like wind, thunderclouds, birds, as well as an enemy character, who will periodically appear to use their power and hinder your progress. The problem with all of these things is that basically do the same thing in slightly different ways: they take away your ability to control the falling items as well as you like. It's a boring way to add challenge, and I would have vastly preferred something like changing the goals for each set of stages, adding objects that are harder to balance, and so on. Just taking away the player's ability to control the game is just no fun at all.

 

Crazy Construction isn't a bad game, just a flawed one. Just kind of mindlessly stacking items on a handheld while you watch TV is pretty nice, it's just a shame the challenges they added tend towards the mean-spirited and player-unfriendly, rather than actually being challenging. Also, the plot is about a bynch of construction androids rebelling against the evil corporation who made them, and the corporation sending other androids to bring them back under the heel, which I'm pretty sure is a Kamen Rider parody. Which is nice.