The market for cute 3D platform game characters is getting pretty crowded nowadays. Old-school heroes like Sonic and Mario now jostle for attention with new kids on the block like Jak and Daxter. Not wanting to be left out of the fray Microsoft have waded in with their latest champion, Blinx: The Timesweeper. Blinx isn't just some johnny come lately wannabe either, he is the creation of Artoon, a company formed by Yoji Ishii and Naoto Ohshima (who was part of the original Sonic Team).

So what or who is Blinx. Like another member of the 3D platform mafia he has a pretty menial day job. Blinx is a janitor (time sweeper) at the time factory where time is 'manufactured and managed'. Apparently he spends his time chasing up lost time crystals before they cause any problems with the temporal flow. Perhaps it isn't such a menial day job after all.

The story kicks off with Blinx uncovering a plot by a group of ill-mannered thugs. These scoundrels have kidnapped a princess and stolen a pile of the time crystals that Blinx spends his time looking after. They haven't stolen for the benefit of mankind either, so it's on with the time sweeping vaccuum cleaner thingy (that's what we reckon it is anyway) and off to work.

Blinx looks great which is no surprise considering the hardware it's running on and the development team responsible. The queues to take a turn on the game at E3 were pretty long and it took some serious shoving to get our turn. The environments and character models look awesome and show some real personality. The special time effects (more on these soon) have also been executed really well.

To stand out from all the other 'me too' platform games Artoon have built their game around one very interesting gameplay mechanic, the manipulation of time. Blinx isn't called a time sweeper just for fun, he can pull off a number of very cool tricks including slowing time down, speeding it up, and even recording a sequence of events then playing it back. It's hard to explain just how cool this feature is. When you see it action it's very impressive. The rest of the gameplay mechanics are fairly standard, run, jump, climb and get rid of your foes.

Blinx looks quite unique despite the fact it's aimed squarely at the 3D platform market. It's lead character may not have the charisma of some of the old school legends but given some time he's likely to make a good impact. The game is graphically impressive and it's unique time-based gameplay mechanic is sure to spark some serious interest. We'll have a full preview when Blinx is about to arrive in New Zealand till then ... enjoy the screens!