Play This Thing

Turning the Tide

costik — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:11:44 +0100

According to the sell copy for Turning the Tide, in January 1945 "The Nazis' march towards total world domination is gathering pace". Which should tell you right off the bat this is an arcade shmup, evidently created by people who are historically illiterate. (The turning point was in 1942, with Stalingrad and Midway; in January 1945, the Bulge is extinguishing the Germans' last hope of stopping the Western Allies, the Russians are rolling relentlessly toward Berlin, and the Japanese are beginning to starve.)

In most of the game's 14 levels (4 in the demo), you're flying a plane (in some running a sub), with a wide variety of enemies and objectives -- mostly bombing missions of one kind or another, but some based mainly on shooting down enemy aircraft. A flight sim this is not; it's a sidescrolling shmup, with somewhat retro pixellated graphics but nice responsiveness.

What either makes the game interesting or makes it frustrating, depending on your attitude, is the control scheme; holding the left mouse button down increases your altitude, while releasing it puts you into a dive, so maintaining level flight means tapping the button in a particular rhythm. In the meantime, you're using other controls -- right mouse button to shoot, space to drop bombs, "a" and "d" to increase or decrease speed -- and keeping it all working requires practice and dexterity. As shmups go, it's less frantic than many, but the contrariness of the control system suffices to prevent it from being trivially easy for serious shmuppers.

Crawford meets Rohrer, Streams Available

the99th — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:51:13 +0100

The full version of the documentary episoide featuring Jason Rohrer meeting Chris Crawford, reviewed a week ago, is available here.

It also occured to me that you all might like to see the infamous Dragon Speech by Crawford, here´s the first part, the rest is in the window:

And here´s Jason at GDX:

Upgrade Complete, and Achievement Unlocked

costik — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:19:21 +0100

Upgrade Complete and Achievement Unlocked are a pair of satirical games from Armor Games. They're both playable, and quite different in terms of gameplay -- Upgrade Complete is a shmup while Achievement Unlocked is a platformer -- but you don't actually play them for the gameplay. At least, I don't think you do.

When you start Achievement Unlocked, a little blue "achievement bar" pops up at lower left, saying "Bandwith Exploiter." At least it does if you have a broadband connection. Then the Armor Games logo sequence plays, and another achievement bar pops up "Clink Clash Clink." Then comes a screen with a Play button, and another achievement bar: "Menu Explorer."

You get the idea; just about every damn thing you can do is an "achievement."

Similarly, in Upgrade Complete when you first go to play, you can't even start the game until you "unlock game start." They give you $1000 in game money to get you going. You can upgrade your ship, for sure, but you might also want to upgrade everything else -- like, if you want music with the game. Or a timer. Or a title sequence. Or graphics better than Atari 2600 quality.

TheDustin says: "Traditional gamers have been conditioned in the past couple of years to become junkies to both dubious 'achievements' and 'upgrades,' shitting on command whenever they are given these arbitrary rewards. Upgrade Complete (a vertical shump) and Achievement Unlocked (a single-screen platformer) are strawman arguments against these stale reward systems by providing single dimensional games based solely on said systems, and are a good recovery tool from the dopamine-drip of each respective 'reward.' There isn't entirely that much that could be elaborated on them, outside of Achievement Unlocked implementing a few clever achievements and Upgrade Complete's mildly novel weapon upgrades. Both are easily worth the combined ten minutes it would take to complete."

The Expert Problem

the99th — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:44:35 +0100

I´ve been working in a growing game company and reading The Black Swan by Nabel Taleb, and its got me thinking that the root of the problem with the game industry isn´t so much risk aversion, hierarchical inequity and creative myopia, as a radically high amount of "expertise" relative to actual performance. We as an industry suffer from an "expert problem" in the sense that we have too many decision makers with too much confidence in their ability to predict what sells and what makes a "good game". At the most intimate level this involves designers flabberghasted by playtesting where other people have difficulty learning the game, find ways to exploit the rules, or find something compelling utterly unrelated to the intended focus. At the highest level this invovles publishers taking a "safe bet" on franchise sequels that... (drumroll) often have dimishing ROIs as the particular market niche gets saturated.

Good game designers don´t write stuff down on paper and assume it will all go to plan, they play with prototypes until something good emerges surrepitously. Good producers don´t dream up a schedule and assume the chaos of dozens of individuals´lives will magically conform to it, they work with those individuals to try and marginalize risks of delay, and the milestone deliverables might still be way off the schedule even with those risks marginalized - thats how probability works. Good investment in games involves permitting the above two principal agents to act without the pressure of pretending to know things. What blows my mind is that the game investment entity most enlighted in this regard seems to be Sony 1st Party, a division of a multi-national corporation that was sure Blu-Ray would dominate media in spite of a format war and the emergence of digital distribution, and staked the majority of their business around that assumption. Even if you gave a couple million bucks to a studio, odds are that the management of the studio would be so egotistically married to their subjective notions that they would fuck it all up. The CEO of Flashbang is a notable exception, if you have any other honorable mentions please note them in the comments.

The only sure thing in this business is a new game dynamic that synchs with people willing to pay for the experience. If you knew what those game dynamics were, you would have already designed them. If you have, congratulations, and good luck getting funding.

Queens

the99th — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:53:39 +0100

Mel Brooks once said, "It´s good to be The King," but when he said that perhaps he was not taking into account the long history of abuse, excess, and belligerence that accompanies that title. It took a game to highlight the nuance. Queens is a brief platform game that, in the history of all the other dozens and dozens of genre-bending platform games we review here, uses one of the assumptions of the genre along with a clever coat. In this case, it's replay: every platform game has you trod along until some new thing or a timing issue kills you off, so you start the level over with a slightly refined neural map and maybe get a bit further. Then the next thing pops out and kills you and you keep at it until you get to the next checkpoint. In this game there are no checkpoints and every time you die you´re killing another innocent woman.

The game starts with the King pushing the Queen, apparently a wife he decided to fire for failing to perform her regal duties. You control this woman, being fed a randomly generated name that sounds very queen-like. You can hear the trumpets someone, with the troubadour proclaiming in measured pace: "Queen Anna! Queen Anna! Queeeeeeen Annaaaaaaa!" Splat! On down goes the next one. "Queen Gwenymore! Queen Gwenymore! Queeeen Gwenymoooooore!" Spike! And so on, until like Scheherazad in 1001 Arabian Nights, nimbleness and perseverance lead to a woman´s liberation and the sadistic bastard of a king gets his due. All of this done with four screens of 2d level design and a couple dozen 16x16 pixel art tiles. It's good to be the game designer.

Doom and Cookies

costik — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:50:46 +0100

Doom and Cookies is a 1000 Monkeys, 1000 Typewriters game, meaning it's a tabletop RPG created in 24 hours or less (and thus hasn't been playtested). It's a narrativist RPG in which the players are residents of a Victorian orphanage, from which they are attempting to escape as Doom closes in.

Where do the cookies come in? They're used as game tokens in an interesting, and somewhat perverse, way. Before the game begins, the host deposits a bunch of cookies in a bowl. They may be taken and eaten only per the rules of the game. Players may gain cookies by placing their characters in peril; and once a cookie is obtained, it may be used to modify a die roll by one in the player's favor, and then eaten.

In the same fashion as My Life With Master, the game doesn't specify the nature of the Doom or peril that the players face; this emerges during play. And like that game, it provides an emotional tone and structure for the setting, while leaving the players with considerable room for improvisation within that faily open structure. Unlike Master, it still relies on die-rolls for moment-to-moment task resolution.

On the whole, it looks like a game that could make for very entertaining one-session play. As with many indie RPGs, however, I come away wishing that more attention were paid to the setting and tone, and a tad less to nailing down the rules.

Sonny 2

costik — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 03:14:52 +0100

Sonny 2 is in many ways an impressive game -- but I have to note for the sake of fairness that it's also a game of a type I do not particularly like. Others clearly do -- almost 7.5m plays on Armor Games, and over 1m on Kongregate.

Like Final Fantasy, Sonny 2 is a game based around turn-based combat with story elements between battles. The combat is, in fact, very Final Fantasy-esque; when it's the turn of your character to act, you click on the target, then select the type of attack (or buff or other effect) you want. Enemies (and, unlike Final Fantasy, friendly characters) deliver their attacks automatically, and in turn. Between levels, you may use points earned to increase stats, learn new abilities, and so on; there's also equipment to gain.

I don't mind combat systems like this in themselves; they're friendly to the twitch-impaired, and while not strategically deep, there's at least some strategy in choosing which attacks to use, and in what sequence, and in what upgrade path to choose for your character. The problem, from my perspective, is that games of this type are, in essence, movies consisting of cut scenes that are kept apart by boring, repetitive battles. Linearity = 100%, and gameplay limited.

But, of course, people love FF -- and this game -- so this has to be chalked up to a personal preference on my part, not a universal criticism of the game style.

And as for the story elements, they're remarkable polished, for a Flash game pretty much implemented by one guy: decent voice acting, nice Flash animations to advance the plot, and surprisingly good faux-orchestral musing for the combat scenes.

Not that the story is much other than the usual macho thud-and-blunder of most American videogames, but it's well done for what it is. (You're a good zombie fighting bad zombies in a post-apocalyptic world, with a casette tape that may or may not help you restore the memories you lost when you became a zombie serving as macguffin.)

So, you know: Good for what it is, and remarkably polished (and lenghty) for a Flash title. If you like games of the type, you won't be disappointed.

How To Raise A Dragon

the99th — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 21:29:27 +0100

Gregory Weir, not to be confused with the kid from Freaks and Geeks, has come out with another masterpiece-lite. After giving us the inside view on hacking for liberty and the psychology of Cthulhu, Gregory slings us the childhood dream of being a dragon. You get to be a dragon people! A dragon!

You get to grow from a hatchling to an adolescant to an adult and then a god! You get to change your colors based on what you eat! You can cultivate different kinds of breaths and use them in different ways! Interact with people! The people are at least as interactive as the people in Black and White, mas o menos!!! Then you get to be a hero and take yourself on!! Soooo meta! Multiple endings! Dragon!

After returning from a mental regression to the 6th grade, you may notice this game, despite its charms and limited flower bud of choices, is actually just another paper folding pie like Bemergui´s stuff or Colors. The writing around each sort of outcome is a give-away that you´re dealing with a tree structure, which in terms of trying to provide deep choices is like trying to lift a sofa with a tooth pick (nod to Craig Perko). The game does a better job and others of its kind in rectifying the apparent paradox between novelty and shallowness, the algorithmic approach to color change, while ultimately inconsequential, feels like it means something when you first see it. And the platforming vehicle that allows the games options to be chosen gives it a sense of interaction. You can even get wounded when you fight the dragon, just like in a real boss fight.

Ultimately however I want more than boolean variables and fixed outcomes, I want an RPG world complete with procedural content and highly nuanced systems for chroma, genetics, gestation, population. I want the depth Dwarf Fortress with the presentation and accessibility of this game. However unlike Black and White its free and nobody has been hyping it up with greater expectations than it can possibly deliver, and for that I say all is forgiven! Dragons!

Jason Rohrer and Chris Crawford Documentary... RPG!

the99th — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:30:32 +0100

I´ve seen pretty much of all of the bakers dozen of game documentaries made in the past several years, Playing Columbine was my favorite not because I have a brief appearance but because it got a broad variety of voices together and examined games both "Serious" and "punk", and lots of other games that can be described with adjectives that need quotations around them. Moral Kombat I wasn´t too impressed with, but Danny Ledonne (Playing Columbine´s director/Micheal Moore) had a different opinion. To my feeble judgement, its a sad comment on the film medium´s apprehension of games that the best documentaries I can point to are so incestuously featured. Fortunately I just got a new high water mark.

This episode of German/French documentary series, english title "Into The Night" features the meeting of my two favorite game designers, Jason Rohrer and Chris Crawford. Having seen the whole thing I can say that the quality of ideas, the way their conversations are framed, and the humanity between them really brings the whole ivory tower aspects of game design down to earth. If the object of these documentaries is to bridge games as a high to the wider world of New York Times reading film goers, then this is perhaps the most effective. Its primary audience will be Europeans when it airs on July 2nd, and for that it will probably get further than it would if it aired in the States. For you folks, the proverbial choir, I have the above teaser clip. In two weeks they´ll provide an online streaming version we´ll have that in tow.

Basically the first half gives you a concentrated dose of Play This Thing!-esque critique, but its delivered by a grizzled old vet and an optimistic tall guy instead of... a grizzled old vet and an optimistic medium-height guy. They tear into PixelJunk Eden and the general spectacle of GDC and then talk about each others work. I´ve known Chris since 2005 and have tried to say "hey, this is kind of neat" over and over, consistently getting "I´ve seen all this before" kind of answers - so for Chris to praise Jason´s work is a truly high complement.

The second half of the episode involves them discussing their evolution as designers and what their current aspirations are. Chris inadvertently paints a sympathetic portrait of himself where, even if you think Storytron is junk, still evokes a sense that this guy has had the will to try for his personal Everest, and that deserves some respect. Jason plays a more subdued counter-point, and typical of a youngster, makes the case for month-long projects instead of decade long ones.

Highly recommended for all students of game design, indie developers, wanna-be auteurs and already auteurs, and also for mainstream developers who think Chris Crawford is an old bastard.

The Cherokee Indian

costik — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:13:39 +0100

The Cherokee Indian is a platformer implemented in Game Maker (and hence somewhat slow loading) in which you play a young Cherokee man undergoing his trials of manhood, which apparently involve platforming. It's evident that quite a lot of work has gone into the game; objectives vary by level (and don't all involve "getting to the end"), and new weapons unlock over time. You start with a hatchet, but can also gain a hammer (for breaking rocks), a spear (useful for spear-fishing), and a bow. Each weapon has its own capabilities.

The developer says he was "inspired by Harvest Moon", though the connection isn't obvious; gameplay is utterly unlike that farm-sim. Indeed, at first I was somewhat taken aback by the gameplay, which involves killing animals, cutting down trees, and so on, that is, destruction and exploitation of the physical environment, which would seem counter to the Cherokee ethos. But then I realized that the trees grow back, and the animals respawn, so you are evidently harvesting resources in a sustainable way.

Serious platform players won't find much challenge here; though it's possible to lose lives, it's difficult to do so, and the physical challenges posed by the platforms themselves are slight. It's somewhat casual in approach, in other words; perseverance more than player skill completes each level.

There are also minigames available at the Cherokee village, and as part of several levels.

Pleasant enough, and suitable for the kids.