Gooder Than Hell!

This little game didn’t make much of an impact on American markets when first released for the Playstation 2, but now that it has arrived on the Xbox 360 Arcade in full high-definition wide-screen glory, it’s time to play catch-up. And what a feeling of play, solid unabashed unfettered play, washes over you from the moment the game starts.

Likened by some to an electrified Kandinsky painting, Rez puts you in control of an on-screen avatar that flies on a pre-determined course through an electronic landscape, zapping, um, things and picking up other things and evolving into different iterations of yourself. There’s more story than that, of course, but the story is secondary to the visuals – and the sounds. For when you zap things, they don’t go “pow” – they emit a musical tone.

By holding down the A button and hovering the cursor over multiple baddies, then releasing the button, you zap multiples at once, creating chords of sound. The result of all this is a singular creation that resides somewhere between video game escapism and performance art.

One thing that isn’t available yet for the Xbox version of the game is the Trance Vibrator, an optional peripheral for the PS2 that vibrated in time with the game. What was the point, since the PS 2 controller already vibrated? Well, use your imagination.