I’ve got a thing for strange games.
Kid travels through space, slaying rogue musicians to topple an evil overlord, and his dog turns
into an amp and materializes a guitar from the ether??
Sign me up.
Minuscule physics-defying royal scion devastates houses, city streets, cities, continents,
and planets with an infinitely sticky ball of stuff?
I’m on board.
Jumpsuit-clad superhero brightens the lives of young and old alike by running over and
toppling cityscapes, blades of grass, and trees?
I certainly can’t say no.
Wait.
It’s a UFO Game?
Oh, geez.
Well... uh, roll some footage, and we’ll see how it goes.
Fortunately, it’s tough to mangle absurdity of this calibur.
Domino Rally comes to us from Red Entertainment, who were responsible for the utterly forgettable
Fossil Fighters, the significantly better-received airship-centric RPG Nostalgia, an unfinished
Trigun game for the PS2, and a spate of Galaxy Fraulein Yuna games dating all the way back
to the TurboGrafix-16.
That’s the kind of lineage we’re dealing with here.
And now they bring us Minon, the helpful domino-elemental whose size-altering, silent-protagonist style
makes this whole thing seem like one big Ultraman joke.
And now I have Okkusenman playing in my head.
Great.
Here’s the crux of the game: You run across things, and they fall over.
Occasionally you’ll run out of things to topple, and have to make your own, spending
“Minonaide” energy to materialize dominoes from the ether and bridge the gaps.
While you’re running on collapsible objects, shaking the Wiimote in time with your progress
increases your speed and recharges your Minonaide.
Along the way you’ll come upon various collectable Memories, which each display... a memory.
A little snippet of a thought, with a single static illustration, the kind of thing that
makes for a good interstitial bumpers between songs in Gitaroo-Man.
That’s the best way I can think of to describe it.
The music is very JPop-centric, though it’s often covered with the rhythmic thumping of
downed dominoes, complete with manga-style onomatopoeic graphical effects if you get
running quickly enough.
But for a game that seems very on-rails given the fact that you’re running on lines of
dominoes, the experience is very open and allows for adventure.
Latch onto a construction crane and get up to speed in a hurry, transfer yourself across
electric lines, ride a mole throughout a golf course, all in the name of helping people
with oddly Australian accents.
I’m not even sure how that came about.
This publisher’s headquartered in Pomona, California, for crying out loud; far be it
from me to explain why they outsourced the vocal work to Perth.
That’s probably not even the right accent.
If you’re going to find Domino Rally, it’s probably in a bargain bin somewhere.
I suggest you be your own superhero and rescue it, especially if you have a warm place in
your heart for the absolutely absurd.
If nothing else, it’s one more game on your shelf, that you can line up on the ground
and then topple over.
I can wholeheartedly say that this is at least the second-greatest domino-centric game ever,
that doesn’t actually involve playing real dominoes.
Now I just need to track down a copy of the obscure PlayStation game No One Can Stop Mr.
Domino and I’ll be set.