Trajectile: Aiming

Trajectile is a new DSiWare game developed by Q-Games and published by Nintendo that every Warp Skip! writer who owns a DSi has been raving over for the past week or two. It presents an interesting puzzle game that reminds me a little of Breakout mixed with Bust-a-Move. Its aiming mechanic requires the use of the stylus to pick an angle at which to aim your shot, which comes from the bottom screen and shoots up towards the square bricks on the top screen. What I find particularly interesting about this mechanic is that because the exact angle at which you make your shot can make a very big difference, the trail that shows the beginning of the path your missile will take is drawn with a series of faded grey dots while you’re dragging your stylus left and right. It’s only after you pause in one spot on the screen for a half second or so that the dots turn blue, indicating that you are free to lift the stylus and fire a missile. It looks like this:

Left: not ready to fire yet. Right: ready to fire.

The reason for this becomes clear if you’re using the stylus and aren’t being careful— it’s fairly easy to not lift your stylus directly off of the screen, causing a “adjust the aim” signal to be sent to the game. If you skid off of the screen before lifting, the angle could change slightly before your missile fires, ruining that shot and wrecking your chances of completing the level in the allotted number of turns! By requiring your shot to be lined up before firing, this aiming mechanic avoids almost any chance of that happening.

It can be annoying that you have to wait for this “lock-on” to happen at times, but after playing through the bronze and silver puzzles, I’ve decided it’s worth the hassle. I’d rather not fire when I meant to than vice-versa, and I appreciate Q-Games paying this attention to detail. That said, I also wouldn’t mind a D-pad + A button control scheme for this game since playing on the train in the morning can lead to more canceled shots than successful ones.

—Casey