News: No Ma... & ...gi in Byte Hell 2000? Objection!

December 01, 2005, 03:53 AM

by chazumaru, via SCE -
[permalink]

Byte Hell 2000 (or more accurately, "baito hell", the hell of part-time jobs) was one of the most addictive multiplayer games at last Tokyo Game Show. It draws heavy inspiration from Nintendo's Made in Wario series, but with an even more corrosive humour and a concept of minute-long frenetic score-oriented minigames instead of Nintendo's five-second-zapping fun. Although Byte Hell 2000 is technically unimpressive and an aesthetic misfit by PSP standards (which is not a reproach on this website), its main strength is to create an addictive sense of competition between players to get the better score in its bizzaro-Game&Watch events. We already mentioned it on ic a few weeks ago (but not enough, Tim says).

What attracted most people to the game is the presence of two little characters called Ma... and ...gi that face each other in a wood stock cutting competition - the challenge coming from their mischievous grandmother that sometimes switches logs for little bunnies that react to your axe as graphically as one would expect. The two kids are blatant parodies of Mario and Luigi, which to some is a disrespectful copyright infringement, and to others a positive sign that games are getting more and more self-referencial, which has always been a good sign for the artistic development of a medium. Anyway, there is a new rumor running on the net, apparently started on Nintendogal, stating that the two little rip-offs had been removed from the game. Indeed they do not appear on the latest trailer.

However! What is shown on the trailer is the single player mode, wouldn't show the two brothers in the first place, but always that kid wearing the yellow shirt. Ma... and ...gi only appeared in the multiplayer mode, as the Tokyo Game Show 2005 demo and the TGS report on Weekly Famitsu taught us last september. Therefore we still have no clue whether they are still in the game or not. Ha!
Note: if anyone has pics of ma... and ..gi in action, as we know some of you must, send them through (to brandon) please!