Mercury Meltdown

Fortunately for the likes of us, that doesn't mean Mercury's been dumbed down. On the contrary, it should be more hardcore than ever, with a total of 168 levels ("exactly double, completely by accident"), a host of new elements to overcome, and - most importantly - still a place for those of us who obsessed over finding shortcuts. In fact, we're better catered to than ever. "At the end of the day it's just a physics system," says Bradley. "There's no scripted control of the gameplay at all. All we've done is make the system and let people play with it. So people are going to find 'emergent behaviour' or whatever fancy word you want to call it, but of course it's a double-edged sword, so for every instance where someone finds a cool new shortcut someone finds a bug. But no, we've definitely tried to keep that aspect in there."

"Some of the levels are designed with the shortcuts in mind. On the first game, we were getting videos back from Sony QA in Japan where their testers were doing stuff that had our jaws on the floor. They sent back high scores we were convinced were impossible and we made them send videos to back them up. So we've definitely tried to keep that in place, especially on some of the more advanced worlds." Videos will play a part here too. You can save replays (cleverly, the game simply remembers what you did with gravity, so the actual file-size of each replay is minute - it just re-enacts your best runs), and you'll be able to swap them with your friends to see how tricky routes are done. You can play through a level while someone's ghost is at work too. "We may end up making replays and ghosts available so you have things to compete against and see how particularly difficult routes are done, too," Bradley says of the game's promised downloadable content - which will also, you'll be pleased to hear, quite possibly include classic packs of some of the latter levels of the first game that you may never have reached.

And of course Meltdown has plenty of new features. Mercoids - those pesky little buzzing fellows who ate up your mercury - return in several variations; some eat certain colours of mercury, others blow you up into tiny parts. There'll be three-way painting gates that change your colour depending on which side you go through, too (handy, and also "basically gives us more colour options on a single level without cluttering it up with 55 paint shops"), plus bounce-pads, attractors and repellents (think magnetism), dice with coloured sides that need to be rolled onto corresponding switches, Mouse-Trap-style runners for your solid state and, well, that brings us onto the different states.

Being able to vary your mercury's viscosity should add a whole new dimension to proceedings. Heaters heat your mercury and make it more runny, so it splits up much more easily, while the cooler-blocks harden it slightly so it's still gelatinous but unlikely to split up when you roll it over narrow ledges. You can also turn into a solid sphere - and thanks to some more advanced rendering techniques you can even make out the mercury rolling thanks to slight textural changes.

That in turn brings us onto the graphics, which are likely to be the most obviously different thing for fans of the original. The original's graphics were "well liked" says Bradley, but some people felt they were too cold and sterile. This is meant to be warmer, brighter. "A lot of people want to pigeonhole it as cel-shading or whatever, and it's really not the case," he says. "The engine does all the same sophisticated rendering techniques and more. The only thing that's really changed is the art style, and there's no fancy buzzword associated with it. We just went for a brighter, clearer style." Complete with a black outline, hence the cel-shading accusation. "There's divided opinion about the black line round the mercury," Bradley notes, "so the original skin is in there as well." Another nod to inclusiveness. "I've got used to the new one myself, but some people will say it makes them bleed from the nostrils or whatever so it's there." Well quite.

Perhaps spontaneous nasal eruption is a bit unlikely, but you might still fancy punching people. For all the shift towards accessibility, it's not going to be easy if you want to push it. "Yeah it still makes you swear, don't worry," Bradley jokes. I certainly swore when the game crashed just as I was about to beat a particularly tough level I'd spent half the demo session trying to conquer. You'll also be able to take your frustrations out on other people's faces, by playing ad-hoc battle mode on the same stages - and then there's two-player options for each of the party games, which we might as well move onto.

Unlocked by collecting bonus stars (remember? You have been paying attention, yes?), with "the thresholds set deliberately quite low", there are five of these to play through and first impressions are promising. There's the Monkey Ball-style Race mode, obviously, but there's also Rodeo (you're a blob, you've got to hang onto a ledge while a fan bombards you with jet-bursts of air - AI or second-player-controlled), Metrix (a three-in-a-row puzzle style game where you have to try and fill a grid by creating Tetris shapes), Paint (where you try leave a trail as you move around a tray, trying to cover as much as possible in your colour while the other person does the same), and my favourite Shove ("Paint" came close, but lost out because it needs to be called "Warring Snails"). Shove is basically mercury-curling, with multipliers, slow down/speed up buttons, and the potential to be just as addictive in multiplayer as Monkey Bowling. There are as many as 30 levels for each party game, including, for example, Shove levels with dog-legs and other obscure designs.