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This is all Wario's fault. It started off as a creative and original idea, making a game out of nothing but a long chain of unrelated mini-games, and in truth it can still be fun to keep switching gears every few seconds as a new and different challenge is thrown out. The problem is that each new version of the formula wants to put its own wacky stamp on the genre, and Hot Pixel's style is amazingly obnoxious.
Urban-cool probably appeals to somebody, but these are people I try to avoid at all costs. Hot Pixel is drenched in that style, and while many of the mini-games are creative and use low-res art in clever ways, it's impossible to escape the feeling that it's trying too hard to appeal to a really stupid demographic. If that sounds elitist, it just means you've had the privilege of not seeing the FMV clips that bookend the ten episodes of the main game.
Anyone who's played any WarioWare will be familiar with how Hot Pixel works. One micro-game after another flashes by, the longest of which might last up to ten seconds, and it's up to the player to constantly figure out what to do with limited time and instructions. Some are easy enough to sort out, requiring little more than tapping the X button to succeed, while others have strange rules that only become clear after failure. As is usual for the genre, quality is a mixed bag, but Hot Pixel has the advantage of drawing from years of Atari classics. Nods to obvious games like Breakout, Tempest, and Battlezone show up, as do more obscure titles like Fire Truck and even a few I didn't recognize. Other small successes are the games where you need to collect a certain type of item, whether it's the pink squares or a specific type of food, and the way objects shatter and reform is a treat to see. Then Hot Pixel ruins it by confusing an increase in difficulty with cheap aggravation, obscuring the screen with lame skull and crossbones icons or speeding up a mini-game that was already a matter of chance to begin with, so the little goodwill it had accumulated vanishes in a puff of bad design.
Still, at least it's short. While Hot Pixel boasts over 200 mini-games, the ten episodes they're clustered into can easily be beaten in under two hours on Normal difficulty. Beating it again on Hard will obviously extend its length, but that's due more to screwed-up difficulty causing cheap deaths than any real added content. There are plenty of unlockables to flesh out the package, but once again they just aren't that fun. Do we really need a version of Simon on the PSP? Even the horizontal shooter is both horrible and easy.
Hot Pixel just isn't very good, despite a few decent ideas. It's a collection of mini-games of variable quality bound together by an obnoxious urban style, and throwing in some classic Atari touches isn't going to make it any more tolerable. The mini-game genre has become a crowded place since the debut of WarioWare, which is odd seeing as that's the only series anyone has paid much attention to. It would be nice if another game could come along to challenge the undisputed king, but Hot Pixel isn't the one to do it.
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