Gamer Column

Ok, now that’s out of the way…

Everyone remembers Rayman- the limbless little French creation. He was dreamed up Michel Ancel, a man who is kind of like Shigeru Miyamoto but without any of the Pikmin and who has gone on record as saying he doesn’t enjoy Mario games.

For a man who makes platofmers, this is a pretty bold statement, yet when one plays a Rayman title the feeling that occurs is as dissimilar to Mario as one could ever home to encounter. The games are, by and large, more artistically diverse and dark than those of the Italian Stallion, and when Rayman was released in 1995 he gained an immediate fanbase.

The first Rayman title was a 16-bit 2D platformer which featured beautifully drawn sprites, imaginative and occasionally surreal locations and a level of plot which was seldom seen in the fore-runners of the genre. The characters were loveable and the game itself had enough variation in gameplay and a difficulty curve which was, in retrospect, incredibly unforgivable and has been a favourite of the Playstation-era cemented into the memory of many, many people.

Following the success of the first Rayman title (which may have had a little something to do with a lot of people getting the game free with their PS1) Ubisoft released a 3d sequel in 1999 which bolstered the franchise’s list of characters to include the Teensies, a race of little assholes and Globox, Rayman’s lumbering best friend.

Rayman 2: The Great Escape grabbed all the critical acclaim it deserved, and was an incredibly familiar-feeling 3D Platformer which was separate enough from Crash Bandicoot and Super Mario to seriously contend in a market saturated by smiling mascots and irritating blue rodents. Level design was stellar, and involved all your favourite Rayman signatures such as swinging and gliding, but with a darker, more twisted outlook. This was, sadly, the last time in close to a decade that Rayman would have a definite hurrah.

Rayman: Arena (an early party-game with a multiplayer focus) sold poorly, as did Rayman Golf (yeah, what?), and pretty soon the Ubisoft mascot would drop off the deep end entirely with little more mention of him than endless re-releases of Rayman 2 on every console known to man. N64, PC, Dreamcast, Playstation, PS2, DS, 3DS, iOS- I don’t care if the game has been noted in IGN’s “best games of all time”, rehashing your old products only serves to cause brand stagnation. The first Rayman was re-released on GameBoy Advance and since then every Nintendo handheld has had a Rayman title at launch.

If you only have two titles in your franchise’s primary catalogue though, that’s a pretty poor selection.

Rayman did meander back onto our screens in a minor capacity- his lack of arms made him the perfect avatar for Wii games due to the dual-hand free-floating style of control the console had, so when Ubisoft announced Rayman: Raving Rabbids classic Rayman fans held their breaths for what was in store. They were rewarded with a party game which made little use of its namesake, our titular hero, and verged instead on utter silliness with the absolute stars of the show: The Rabbids.

These characters were just about lolrandom enough to sustain public interest, and became an iconic figure in themselves (going on to star in their own Platform game on 3DS) but did little to actually showcase Rayman as the world-saving fist-slinging helicopter-haired hero he actually was. This disappointed his fans, but gave us hours of amusement in front of the Wii while drunk, so I guess we can’t really complain.

Horror struck in 2010 when it was rumoured that Michael Ancel might be about to leave Ubisoft. As well as the Rayman games Ancel had been instrumental in the creation of another absolute classic: Beyond Good and Evil, and this rumour caused a small panic as to the future of the long-awaited sequel. Beyond Good and Evil 2 was a fan-favourite as far as projects go, so for the company to lose its Miyamoto or Inafune was an unparalleled disaster!

Oh wait, no it wasn’t!

At E3 2010 Ubisoft announced that Ancel was in fact leaving to work with a team of artists in another Ubisoft studio to work on- you guessed it- another Rayman title! Rayman: Origins!

The game came out on the 25th of November and was a return to the series’ 2D roots, with an emphasis on style, sound and artistic definition with the graphics hand-drawn by an ex-Disney artist. It looks incredible, sounds incredible, has an incredible number of levels all of which can be played in co-operative with up to three friends. It’s like a New Super Mario Bros, but with Rayman and an infinitely larger cache of levels and gameplay elements. Oh, and it’s faster-paced than the older Rayman games yet manages to recapture that feeling of exploration and discovery in a surrealist world.

You’ll fight killer oranges and take on screen-filling dragons by calming the fire in its belly. You’ll slap your friends and laugh together. What more could a game want?

Oh yeah… It cost too much.

Turns out that in this world of 3D audiences are too plebeian to realise that gameplay can be uniquely brilliant without mandating the requirement of polygons.  Because of this Rayman: Origins has been around £20 everywhere for weeks, and yet still very few people are buying it. Josh Ralls of Falmouth said: “It looks like a 1200 point arcade game. Nobody wants to spend £40 on a game which looks ten years old.”

Goddamn it, I wish he wasn’t right. The game is HD, and it doesn’t look like it’s 10 years old, and in fact has better graphics than the recent 2.5D levels of Sonic Generations, but people simply won’t pay full price for a game which looks like it does.

Fucking idiots.

Go out right now and buy this game. Trade in whatever kind of Fifa you’re playing, you’ll have more fun with this. No, I don’t care about you wanting to play multiplayer- play Rayman and fight each other but end up collaborating to collect Lums and defeat enemies.

Seriously. Stop it.

Oh, and they finally explained why Rayman has no limbs- it has something to do with Zombie Chickens and the attention span of Nymphs. The real question is why the hell you’re reading this and not leaving right now to go and pay under half what the game is worth to try it for yourself.

Toby Ellis