Pros: Clever design, unusual game mechanic.
Cons: Very hard to draw a straight line.
It is often said that the pen is mightier than the sword, but it turns out it’s not nearly as mighty as the felt-tipped marker. At least, that is lesson of the WiiWare puzzle game Max and the Magic Marker.
The Basics: Jump, Draw
The game begins as a little boy, Max, receives an orange marker in the mail. He draws a monster, which promptly runs away into another drawing of some scenery. Max then draws a cartoon version of himself to chase after the monster.
With that little sliver of storytelling out of the way, Marker gets down to the business of being a 2D side-scrolling platformer in which you have to draw some of your own platforms. As you walk through the levels, you gather ink to refill your marker. You can use the marker to draw stairs, bridges or ramps or, more elaborately, a seesaw on which you can drop a drawn boulder to propel Max into the air. You can also draw and drop boulders to vanquish little purple monsters who serve little purpose in the game, as there is no real difficulty in getting rid of them. The goal is simply to find your way to the exit.
Marker isn’t the first game in which you draw on screen; it is reminiscent of both the PC game Crayon Physics and the Drawn to Life series. Crayon Physics is a brilliant puzzle game with a crayon-drawn ascetic in which you can create fairly elaborate mechanism – for example, you can draw a platform and add wheels to it to make a car. Marker isn’t that sophisticated, nor is its look as unique, but it is more fun than the somewhat uninspired Drawn to Life games, which are focused more on designing the look of objects than using drawing to solve puzzles..
The Puzzles: Clever and Increasingly Tricky
Marker’s puzzles get increasingly tricky as the game moves along. At first they are pretty straightforward, involving finding enough ink to draw a staircase up to a higher point. Later they become much more elaborate, and players will have to create weights to drop on buttons and create vehicles to ride along dangerous whirling wheels.
The most difficult part of the game is collecting black balls that are placed in out-of-the-way locations. I spent an hour working on retrieving two black balls guarded by lasers. Failing to retrieve these balls will not prevent you from finishing a level, and towards the end I was ignoring the ones that looked particularly hard to get to. While I finished the game in about 8 hours, if I tried to collect every ball it probably would have taken a few hours longer. For the 1,000 Wii points ($10) it costs, Marker gives you a reasonable amount of play time.
The Downside: Gives You the Motor Skills of a Three Year Old
The problem with Marker is that it is very difficult to draw on screen. Often when I would try and draw a straight line I would wind up with a weird, jagged object. I haven't drawn that badly since I was a little boy. Once you’ve been playing for a while it becomes even more difficult, simply because your arm tires. It is fortunate the game allows you to freeze time (allowing you, for example, you can have Max jump in the air and then draw something underneath to catch him), because sometimes I needed to draw the same line five or six times before I got what I wanted.
I kept wishing the game had the sort of drawing tools you find in graphics programs. If I could have indicated a beginning and end point for a line or curve it would have made my life much easier. I tried a demo of the PC version of Marker and it was vastly easier to draw, to the point that I would expect to get through the game in two or three hours less than it took me on the Wii. I think the game would actually be more suited for the DS than anything else.
The Conclusion: Flawed but Fun
In terms of presentation, Marker is fine but unexceptional, with familiar visuals and a pleasant but often painfully repetitive score. In terms of level design, the game is a winner, offering clever challenges and a difficulty level that ramps up slowly but surely.
While the game lacks the ingenuity of Crayon Physics or the epic feel of yet another drawing game, Okami, Marker is still one of the best puzzle games available for the Wii. If I had a magic marker, I would draw a path straight from the reader to the game, but alas, all I have is this weakling of a pen.
