'ChuChu Rocket,' interstellar game

From the simple but evil minds at Sonic Team comes "ChuChu Rocket," the first fully online Dreamcast title. It's also the first full-fledged Dreamcast party game. So, logically, it's the first full fledged online party game for the Dreamcast.

ChuChus are space mice that you need to get on board rocket ships in order to escape from the space cats known as KapuKapus. The ChuChus move faster than the KapuKapus, but both species move with the intelligence of oxygen deprived fruit flies, turning right when they hit a wall, going in the direction of arrows players drop and otherwise travel straight.

And there's no complicated board to make the game any harder it sounds. The game moves in two dimensions, and even though the characters are nicely rendered in one more dimension than that, the angle of view doesn't interfere with seeing what you're doing the way most games of this ilk do.

The player does not actually move anyone; control is effected by diverting the streams of ChuChus and the occasional KapuKapu in various directions. The mice are meant for your rocket ship and the cats for those of other players. Every cat that enters your rocket kills and presumably eats one third of the mice that you have so far managed to get into your rocket and keep there. Most mice normally add one to your score, but some add 50, and others start a roulette wheel spinning that can vastly alter the game. It can precipitate an attack on the other players by hordes of cats, huge amounts of mice or a change in the speed of game play.

All this takes place with four players, either humans or AIs of varying intelligence, trying to steal the ChuChus the others have diligently been trying to direct towards themselves while plaguing those same players with hungry KapuKapus. That doesn't sound so bad, but when facing three independent players at cross purposes with you and streams of space mammals uncontrollably rushing hither and yon. And, since there's only enough fuel for one space ship to escape the KapuKapus, only the rocket with the most ChuChus will survive. To win the game, you need to launch three rockets.

You also get to gloat if you're winning and taunt your opponents when you're losing. They're only mice, so it's not very mean. Of course, what good is taunting in a game when you can scream all you want at the guy next to you? Since you can get online and play against someone in Japan, the in game messages become much more important.

Getting on line takes a little bit of work, but not too much. You need to have internet access and be sure you have your online settings and an email address entered. Once you do that, you need to register with the ChuChu server. Then it's time to jump into a chat room and join a game online. This is all much easier with the Dreamcast keyboard, especially the talking to people online part. Sega is providing a slew of servers to host ChuChu games, and it's free. While you're connecting, you get a run of warnings on the order of "gosh kids, don't give out your personal information to creepy strangers in chat rooms" and "hey, don't piss on people on our server." Nothing is ever truly free.

Add to all this a pretty hard puzzle mode (where you can even make your own and give them to people online) and a very low price and you have a shipshape little application. ChuChu Rocket uses more than a solid fuel booster to be a blast.

Courtesy of Sega