Let's tackle Pixie first. Pixie is essentially Qix, for those who remember that. For the rest of you, here it is. You're presented with a playing field through which are flying a number of creatures. You control Pixie, a little ... pixie. She flies around the field as well, but it's her job to fill the field with patterns by using her wand to bisect an empty area with a line. This might seem a little confusing. Imagine that you have a black rectangle. You fly Pixie to the center of the rectangle, and click the mouse button. A glowing line extends outward from where you click, expanding either horizontally or vertically from the click and eventually connecting the two perpendicular boundary lines it touches.

Once the line connects on both boundaries, a pattern fills the now-bisected space with a colorful pattern. In general, the rule for which bisected space is filled seems to be the one with less volume. Once the space is filled, you're done there, and must move on to the new, smaller empty space, to bisect it once again. The goal of each level is to fill at least 85% of the empty space of the playing field.

Getting in the way of this goal are the enemies floating around each level. At the start, you'll get a bunch of what seem to be a cross between ladybugs and spiders. If you're drawing a line, and one of these creatures touches your line, Pixie will start taking damage. She has a life meter at the bottom of the UI; she also has three lives at the beginning of the game. When there are a lot of enemies in the level, it gets really hard to draw a line without it being overrun by critters, and thus losing lives quickly.

Fortunately, if any enemies are in the pattern-filled section, they're destroyed by the pattern, yielding both points, and extra goodies. Goodies come in the form of temporary powerups, like a faster drawn line, slowdown of enemies, a bomb that destroys all enemies in its radius, etc. However, there are also negative powerdowns, many of which do the exact opposite: slower drawn lines, faster enemies or a slower Pixie, a bomb that destroys previously-filled areas, etc. You never know what an enemy will drop, and it can be challenging to try to grab a powerup while avoiding a powerdown.

The other things that enemies drop are golden coins, which can be collected and saved up to buy special items in the Shop screen. You can get items that shield you from harm when drawing a line, a health potion, a speed potion, extra lives, etc. Each succeedingly powerful item costs more coins, so it's worth saving up as much as possible. One of the powerups is a Coin Magnet that draws the coins to Pixie so you don't have to fly after them and possibly miss grabbing a more strategically important powerup.

Flying between two boundary lines will generate a line of a default orientation, either horizontal or vertical. If you want to force the opposite orientation, you can right-click the mouse, and the orientation will be reversed. This is sometimes useful if you want to section off a particularly annoying cul-de-sac, or if sending a line out in a given direction is proving difficult because of swarming enemies. It can be easy to forget that the real goal of each level is not to destroy enemies, but to complete the filling quota.

The enemies also get more devious in the later levels. There are erratically-flying bees that tend to find your line from all the way across the level, disrupting the draw, and there are caterpillars that only crawl along the boundary lines. This might seem innocuous at first, until you realize that they're drawn to your potential line, and exist only to thwart your drawing by hanging out right in the space where the line will attach, which is a guaranteed energy loss.

Grab Pixie right here on Big Download. It's great to be pleasantly surprised by something you expect will be just cutesy and dumb. It's another thing to have no expectations of greatness whatsoever, and still have them dashed somehow. Read on for Rubber Ninjas.