When you come across an impediment to your progress, it’s often not immediately obvious what you’ll need to do in full unless the game is introducing one of the freshly rebooted systems to you. In many ways, the levels of Affordable Space Adventures are puzzles focused on how you allocate power to your ship’s different systems. The manual can provide helpful refreshers on mechanics at least, but it also stands in humorous contrast to the eerie exploration of dark caverns as you search for some way to contact help. Your UExplore manual pops up on the load screen to remind you of the company that seemingly didn’t take your safety into account, especially when the game will play an ad of UExplore boasting about a perfect safety record that somehow goes back to the 1990s. Avoiding the attention of the strange machines active on the planet becomes just as important as weaving around lasers or trying to keep yourself from being cooked by extreme conditions, but a fun touch occurs between stages. As systems come back online you’ll be able to approach the hostile environment with new abilities, but your Small Craft was made for exploration, not combat. Luckily, despite only initially being able to putter around, the Small Craft’s features are gradually rebooting over the course of the game’s 38 stages. The vessel carrying your Small Craft crashes into a dreary part of the planet, your own vehicle only barely functioning enough to begin looking for some way to contact UExplore and hopefully find your way to safety. You are a customer of the UExplore company that promises affordable trips out to a mostly uncharted planet so you can experience the wonders of discovering a whole new world, but before you can ever reach the beautiful alien vistas of Spectaculon shown in the advertisements, somethings goes awry. While there are button shortcuts for some features like quickly cutting out or activating your two different engine types and swapping between the different types of landing gear really does need the quick button shortcuts for the puzzles it rubs up against later down the line, you will still spend much of your time considering the information on the GamePad control panel and trying to make things work out on the television screen showing your situation.Īs for why your little Small Craft finds itself in danger at all, that relates to the game’s title. Too much power and the Small Craft can start to have issues, too little and you won’t be able to get around the obstacles ahead of you safely, and soon hazards arise that will begin to truly test how well you can control your machine’s output to avoid triggering hostile machines and automated defenses. Different controls will appear on the Wii U GamePad’s touch screen that you’ll need to appropriately delegate power to. However, controlling the vessel involves more than just moving the control stick around as various systems must be managed to get around the hostile environments you find yourself in. There were some interesting ideas to be found in games like Nintendoland and Game & Wario, but while Nintendo was trying to sell the concept of its controller with those games that revolved around the GamePad, Affordable Space Adventures is an indie game that sought to explore a unique idea utilizing the controller without such an incentive.Īffordable Space Adventures has you piloting a spacecraft appropriately known as a Small Craft, the television screen displaying a side-scrolling view of you exploring an alien planet with it. Holding one screen in your hands while looking at the television set to play was not the cleanest concept for designing games around, and for the most part it was Nintendo itself that experimented within that space to try and find what potential it may have. With the Wii U far in the rear view mirror now, it’s clear the GamePad controller was a failed concept.
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