Warp Skip!

Meh-sonance of Fate

funanduseful — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 09:30:06 -0400

(Even the protagonists look sort of bored with this game.)

I’m about 20 hours into Resonance of Fate, but I’m having a hard time sticking with it. By all rights, I should adore this game, since it avoids many of things that I profess to hate in RPGs:

(1) I hate lengthy, plodding, cutscenes with over-the-top dramatics, and RoF doesn’t have any of that. The storytelling is, in fact, refreshingly sparse. There are cutscenes, but they’re usually only a few minutes long—no more than evocative vignettes, sketching in the backstories of the characters. There are a few hints of what the actual storyline will be, but no overt foreshadowing. The writing and voice acting aren’t great, but they aren’t offensively bad either.

(2) I hate simple battle systems that reward mindless grinding over good strategy and tactics, and RoF isn’t like that. RoF’s battle system is actually… fun. There’s a good mix of character building strategy, in-battle placement tactics, and real-time dexterity. It’s tightly constructed, too, which I like—there are a minimal number of stats and upgrades, each of which has pretty clear implications on how battles will play out.

(3) I hate interminable, intricate side quests in RPG, especially when they’re focused on exchanging “key items” with NPCs (instead of, say, exploring the world or defeating enemies in battle). So I love that the side quests in RoF move along quickly. There is some random walking around towns and talking to people, but there aren’t very many “fetch quest” type missions (where you have to trade something to a guy to get a thing to trade to another guy ad nauseum).

So if Resonance of Fate does so many things right, why do I feel like quitting? I’m not sure. The only complaint that I can put into words is that the “dungeons” (really just battles chained together with no chance to save in between) are too long and too… “samey.” Sometimes you’ll fight the same bunch of monsters on the same terrain three or four times in a row, which just isn’t fun. It’s possible that the game, in general, moves too slow for my tastes.

At least, I hope that’s enough to to explain why I don’t really want to quit playing. Otherwise I may have to re-evaluate what I like in a JRPG. Maybe I really do like ham-fisted, cutscene-riddled JRPGs about adolescent spike-hairs who grind their way from town to town after town talking to random NPCs in order to find a brooch belonging to someone’s grandfather’s pig so he can trade it to a bearded guy for an airship…?! Yikes.

—Adam

Come On Now, People, Make A Stand

ckolderup — Mon, 03 Oct 2011 10:02:00 -0400

Navy Fleet is an iPhone game in the vein of Picross or Sudoku, a logic puzzle built around Battleship-like placement of a specific set of ships of varying sizes in a field of water. Using clues telling you how many spaces on each row contain ships and an occasional starting space or two already revealed, you must uncover the location of all of the ships. It’s a pretty simple concept and there are only 100 levels but I’ve been really enjoying it for the past few days.

I’d like to see the developer add on to the game with levels that change up the concept a bit, maybe with a larger board and a different assortment of ships. Still, these are keeping me busy for now (I’m about to unlock Admiral, the last set of puzzles) and I consider it $1.99 well spent on a simple, well-executed concept. I’m still waiting for a truly killer Picross game to come out on iPhone (I keep an eye on this pretty carefully, and have not been impressed by any so far), so this is a nice game along the same lines to play while I wait.

—Casey

It's OK-ami, but not GREAT-ami

funanduseful — Tue, 02 Aug 2011 21:01:06 -0400

Do I really hate this wolf?

I started playing Okami a while ago and I don’t think I like it much. I can tell there’s a fun game in there, one I’m interested in playing, but there are just so many tiny problems.

(1) The camera control is terrible. You have two choices: move the camera with the d-pad, or enter drawing mode with B and use the nunchuk to move the camera. One requires you to choke up on the Wiimote; the other requires you to pause the game. Since neither is fluid, and the built-in camera is always kind of hinting into its own preferred position, I always feel claustrophobic: I can never quite see where I want to go.

The antecedent of “those” in the sentence above is presumably the letters in the game’s terrible typeface, rendered in poorly resampled pixels. They are indeed monsters.

(2) The text is awful. By which I mean: the auto-scroll speed is way too slow. It takes forever to get through one line of dialogue. The text also looks terrible: not just all the pixels are jagged, but because they chose an unreadable typeface. Is that Marker Felt?

(3) The controls suck. You’d think that drawing on the screen with the wiimote would be as natural as can be, but you’d be wrong! For some reason, the drawing feels cramped and inaccurate. My guess is that they’re translating the movement of the wiimote into a series of vectors and feeding that into the underlying PS2 code, which was designed to read input from a joystick, instead of taking the time to do the right thing (which would be to let the player draw whatever, and then analyze the drawing for shapes afterwards). (3b) Wiimote waggle for charging on the map and slashing in combat just feels wrong. I would rather have the waggle mapped to jump (since you do that much less frequently, at least in the first ~4 hours).

(4) I’m really, really getting sick of running around towns and asking people for something to do. Maybe this is just my JRPG fatigue talking.

—Adam

Tiny Tower

ckolderup — Thu, 30 Jun 2011 10:00:06 -0400

I’ve never played Farmville or any of that sort of Facebook game. Scott mentioned Tiny Tower, an iOS game that had just been released last week, and I quickly dismissed it as more of the same. You set up tasks that take time to complete and you either go away and come back later or you use currency to speed things up— currency that can be purchased with real world currency.

Then, last Wednesday, I quit my job. (Don’t worry, I have another one lined up.) The following day my wife left town, gone for six days. I sat in my apartment, alone, jobless. I downloaded Tiny Tower.

My first two floors

Tiny Tower is a little bit like Sim Tower. You build an increasingly-taller tower, populating its floors with businesses and apartments. People move in, businesses sell products, businesses run out of products. You decide who gets to stay in the apartments and where those people work (They all work in the tower. They never leave the tower. Until you evict them from the tower) and you decide what goods or services the businesses “stock”. Only one item can be restocked at a time, and the more expensive an item is, the longer it takes to restock. By employing your businesses with tenants who are particularly good at the given market that a business is in, you gain more efficiency and make more money.

These people will do in a pinch, I guess…

This is the first part where Tiny Tower gets weird. You have these people moving in, right? But sometimes, they’re not particularly great at anything. You’re not going to keep them around, are you? They’re deadweight. They’re bringing the rest of the tower down. If you just evict them, with the click of a single button on their profile sheet, you’ll create more room in the apartments and available jobs for more talented people. With more talented people, you’ll be able to generate money more quickly, and the tower will grow more quickly. It’s just good for the community. No hard feelings, right?

Poor bastards. Never had a chance.

You have a few currency-generating options that serve as busywork between product restocking times: shuttling people to different floors via the elevator and finding specific tenants for a variety of purposes.

When you shuttle people to different floors, you generally do just that: someone hops into the elevator and tell you a floor number and you control an elevator that takes them where they want to go. You generate a small amount of coins, presumably representing the assistance that you gave in helping them reach the business they wanted to get to (although I’m not sure how all the other customers are getting there— up an invisible set of stairs, maybe? And why do some people want to be taken to stores that are currently out of all products or construction sites?)

Every once in a while, you’re alerted that a different breed of person is waiting in the elevator lobby. These “VIPs” bestow special powers upon your ability to gain money or speed up time-consuming processes. Looking a little bit deeper, they break down into producers (construction workers and deliverypeople) and consumers (celebrities and “big spenders”). There’s an obvious imbalance in the value we place on these people, though— celebrities and big spenders are almost always valuable in some way; as long as you have at least one shop with stuff in it it’s worthwhile to send that person to the shop and collect the resulting cashflow.

For producers, though, you need to have a circumstance where they can actually help you— if a construction worker shows up, it can cut the time spent building a new floor in half for me right now, but if I’m not quite ready to build a new floor, I’ll just make them wait in the elevator on the ground floor. Producers are expected to patiently wait for me to need them and they’ll stay there as long as I want them to, waiting to be put to use. The lesson here is that consumers are always welcome; producers create new problems just to put their talents to use.

The other event that fills up your time, as mentioned earlier, is being asked to locate people in your building. This task itself is layered with all kinds of amazing messages— for one, the implication that this would be a hard task. I house and employ these (at the time of this writing) 45 people; of course I would know where they live and work and be able to find them quickly; right? Ha! Fat chance. Instead I run up and down the tower, looking for the most discerning feature of the photo given to me (thank god they show you a photo); hopefully this person is currently wearing a dumb hat. That’ll help.

The other concern with this “find the tenant” game, is, of course, the privacy issue. A lot of the missions are harmless. “A pizza delivery is here.” “A box of kittens is being dropped off.” “A long-lost relative is here to reconnect.” Hold on a second. How do I even know that this person is telling the truth? Couldn’t it be a bookie, a stalker, a serial killer? Why am I aiding these people? Then, of course, there’s the bombshell.

FIVE OH! FIVE OH IN THE YARD!

The worst part about this happening in my building? I helped the police find Leslie. And then, after it was done, they tipped me a “tower buck”. I felt dirty immediately. Why did I do that to poor Leslie? And yet… what if he was involved in something dirty? All those people who take the elevator up to the construction site and then just disappear? And the police didn’t even do anything about him! He’s working in my video store right now!

I’ll be right back; I’ve got a criminal to evict. Then maybe I’ll restock a few businesses…

—Casey

The Warp Skip crew has been a bit Magic: the Gathering crazy...

ckolderup — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 15:46:27 -0400

The Warp Skip crew has been a bit Magic: the Gathering crazy lately, so I thought I would mention that my favorite life-counter app, the confusingly named Thueyts, has been relisted as Thueyts II and marked down to $0.00. Along with the improved price tag, this new version includes the ability to track poison counters, a welcome addition in the wake of the Mirrodin block. Thueyts is the only game-assistance app I’ve seen for any TCG or tabletop RPG that didn’t make me want to claw my eyes out, which is a nice plus on top of the overall ease of use. Anyone who plays Magic: the Gathering and has an iPhone now has no excuse not to be using this app.

Somewhere in Hollywood, a casting director is wetting his...

shammack — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 10:14:59 -0400

Somewhere in Hollywood, a casting director is wetting his pants.

(In other news, Bryan Cranston looks quite similar to Gordon Freeman.)

—Scott

On Rain & Expectations

ckolderup — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 09:10:54 -0400

Session I

When I was in middle school, we would have orchestra field trips once a year to go to Cedar Point, an amusement park that was four or five hours away. We’d get up early in the morning, get on a chartered bus, and ride all morning, playing games on pencil and paper, watching movies piped through the bus to tiny TVs. Upon arriving, we’d be essentially let loose within the theme park, a thing that sounds kind of crazy now when I think about it. We’d spend all day in the park doing whatever we wanted, forming into small groups with only the promise to meet back up at the bus at the end of the day.

At the time I wasn’t a big fan of roller coasters, so one year I roped one of my friends into going to the back of the park, where there existed a ride that was essentially an endless loop of manufactured white water rapids. You’d sit in a big metal disc with high-back chairs lining the outside facing inward and ride down this course, the disc spinning as you went based on the movement of the water. Waterfalls lined the ride and depending on how the disc was oriented you might end up completely soaked or relatively dry. Seeking out the patterns in the ride, we’d try to predict where to sit and figure out how early on in the course of the ride we could predict which seats would get which waterfalls. We’d get off the ride and walk up the sidewalk a bit, then immediately down a long winding path that led back to the entrance to the ride. The ride itself appealed to us but also the idea of being able to say that we had ridden this ride 8, 10, 12 times that day alone seemed like a thing, like our dedication to this one ride was somehow worthwhile, whether it was because it made us weird or special or better, I don’t know.

At one point in the early evening, heavy clouds rolled in and it started to rain. People started running around the park, ducking under canopies immediately outside serving windows for food stands or taking cover in the arcade near the front of the park. My friend and I, already thoroughly soaked, walked happily through the rain, confident that there was nothing it could do to us that we hadn’t already done to ourselves.

Sword & Sworcery EP left an intense first impression on me. The rain storms in the game felt real and put me in the world to a degree that I didn’t realize was happening at first. Then I met a looming shade that pursued me, displeased with my presence in a mountaintop template. My heart was pounding. I tried to run away for as long as I could because the way the music came in, the horrifying cry that he made(?) as he came into existence, the way he pursued me without seeming to really be in a hurry, to know that he would get to me inevitably— it frightened me. In a real way, a way that made me think maybe I DO have a soul and maybe this evil dude could take it away from me. Shook by the experience, I stopped at the next sign of safety, took off my headphones, and put down the iPad. It was late at night, and my neighbors were arguing loudly. I worried what was going to happen next. This was an adventure game where sometimes maybe it rains and sometimes scary things happen and it was pretty cool.

Session II

I took a trip to North Dakota after my sophomore year of high school. Together with the youth group I belonged to I rode over the course of two days in one of two 15-passenger vans to a Native American reservation, where we spent the week sleeping on the hard floor of a school gymnasium and working all day to fix up the homes of some of the people in that community who couldn’t fix up their homes themselves. The home I worked on was owned by a man named Robert, a retired alcoholic who lived in the middle of a huge open plain surrounded by sky the likes of which I haven’t really seen since that week. With a group of mostly strangers, I tore the siding off of a house, re-insulated it, and put up new siding while some of the adults and older high schoolers in the group re-shingled the entire roof. It was an intense week full of a lot of hard work.

On our last day before going home, the sky turned dark and began pouring rain. There was no warning, no summer rain shower with bright, reflective sprinkles of water to preface it. It just began, and the beautiful open plain turned almost immediately into a huge mud pit littered with our tools and belongings. We rushed to get backpacks full of valuables off the lawn and into the trucks and vans we had come in, but the decision was made fairly quickly that we couldn’t leave our work half-finished; that we had to continue and have the siding on the house or the weather could damage the house in real ways. We got back to cutting pieces of siding the lengths we needed to cover the house, trying as hard as we could to get them cut before the circular saw itself got flooded, unable to spin at the speed it needed to cut the siding as it tried to swim through the water caught in its casing. We worked through the afternoon, measuring, propping up, and nailing on siding, using power tools like the nail gun and wondering if we shouldn’t be using power tools like the nail gun, all while the mud on the ground surrounding the house got deeper and the beautiful brand new siding got smeared with dirt because there was no chance of it not getting everywhere. But we kept working, because the whole thing was ridiculous, and what else could we do?

Occasionally while playing Sword & Sworcery I would hit a boundary of belief, a moment where I would say “no, they didn’t make this to do that.” And I would try it, and it would do exactly what I hoped it was to do. Sword & Sworcery, in some ways, is a game of “what if we brought this back?” but also “what if we did what you always wanted that to do?” It trades heavily on your memories of games past, using the graphical style and the point-and-click adventure game interface to tie itself to something specific and set your expectations, but it does that not just to fulfill those expectations, but to occasionally break them, exceed them, and remind you that you are living in a world where more things are possible. You will go into a trance and literally move mountains just by dragging them with your finger. Why not? These secrets, these extreme moments that could take you to a room full of rupees or a set of warp pipes or even into corrupted memory, a place the programmers created by accident and left in for fun— these methods are now the basis of the game.

Sometimes, though, I’d put the Sycthian into a trance and I’d see an object and I’d stop breathing. “I know what I have to do.” I’d try it, and it wouldn’t work. Let down, I’d try a more mundane solution and that wouldn’t work either. I’d try a few more solutions, but at some point I’d realize that I’m just tapping the screen, hoping for a reaction. These moments are one of the places the game falls apart. The other big problem was discovering that the mechanics that seemed so perfect, so expressive and ideal for the moment in which I was first given them, were just introductions to three or four core mechanics that I would be reusing throughout the game. I felt a bit cheated the second time I was chased by a calmly walking spectre of death— the very one I had struck down earlier. I guess it’s scary that nothing I can do will kill him, but it certainly did scare him off for a while, and oh, what’s this, we’re going to fight in portrait mode and he’s just going to telegraph his moves the exact same way as he did last time? Oh. Okay. I guess I was dumb to be afraid that first time. I guess I was wrong about this game. I liked the facade, but underneath that I was deeply dissatisfied with what they have to offer. This was an adventure game where sometimes maybe it rains and one time a scary thing happened and sometimes it makes you play a weak version of Punch-Out and it was pretty disappointing.

Session III

Last summer, a month after moving back to Connecticut, I went to New York City with my wife for a concert in the East Village. It was our first time going to a concert in Manhattan after I had moved away from the area for a year and a half to live nearer to her, spending my weeks working in downtown Chicago and living in the suburbs and my weekends living with her in Indianapolis. When we left the venue, it was sprinkling a little bit, but by the time we had walked a block east toward the nearest subway stop on Bleecker and Lafayette, it began raining, the kind of rain I hadn’t been caught outside in since my trip to North Dakota. The streets and sidewalks flooded quickly and we hurried to reach our subway stop, only to find the entrance taped up with a sign instructing us to go to the next stop north of that. We followed Lafayette up to Astor Place, a larger subway stop with a covered entrance, only to find a crowd of people huddled under the entrance and another taped up stairwell instructing us that this subway stop was also out of service.

At this point I was tired and soaked and didn’t want to be responsible for what would happen next. I knew the next station on that line was at Union Square, 6-8 blocks north of there. I knew it was likely that there was another line we could take somewhere east or west of us, but I wasn’t familiar enough with the trains to be sure. I didn’t want to be in the rain, and I didn’t want to be the one who said that we had to walk up to 14th Street. I was angry and I was sad and we still ended up having to walk through the rain, all the way up to Union Square, only to sit on an hour-long train ride back from Grand Central to Connecticut soaked through more than either of us could remember being.

I had two thoughts, one right after the other, during the last time I picked up Sword & Sworcery. I had played for ~45 minutes and had just finished “Session 2”, the longest of the three and the real meat of the game mechanics-wise. My first thought was that I was really unhappy with the game, that I felt betrayed by its outward appearance, by the things people had said about it and the first impression it had made and the promises that I had made to myself about what the game would achieve and what I would be able to say about it that I hadn’t been able to say about any game yet.

My second thought came after the Archetype reminded me of my goal, my protagonist’s fate and what I assume will be the penultimate moment of the game (the final moment being the repercussions of those actions and the examination of whether or not my fate is important to the rest of the game’s world). I thought about what he had said and I realized that I don’t want to see that fate come to be. Here’s this game that I am unhappy with, that I want to hate, that I want to put down for failing ME, the player, the consumer, the audience; but if it tells me that the Scythian must be a martyr and I can’t bring myself to watch that happen, what does that mean? Why can I carry out my “goal” in other games with similarly tragic endings knowing what it implies and watch the result and feel like there’s any meaning within that, but despite an urge to put the disappointment and the mechanics of Sword & Sworcery behind me, it physically pains me to think of taking the Scythian to the top of Mingi Taw? Maybe it’s an adventure game where sometimes it rains and sometimes it makes me play a weak version of Punch-Out and other times it makes me feel dread and other times it makes me feel wonderful.

Yeah, that’s it.

—Casey

Eat Poop You Cat

ckolderup — Sun, 01 May 2011 17:24:00 -0400

While we were at PAX East this past March, I had the pleasure of introducing the whole Warp Skip extended family to a game called Eat Poop You Cat (it goes by many names, but this is how it was introduced to me in 2007). It’s a great game to play with a group of 5 or more, and all it requires is one sheet of paper and a pen or pencil for every person who wants to play. Here are the rules:

Everyone writes a sentence at the top of their sheet of paper, then passes it to the person next to them— make sure everyone passes in the same direction, but you can go the opposite direction next game to mix things up.
When you receive a sheet of paper, read the sentence, then draw a small picture illustrating what you read. Fold the paper to obscure the sentence you read, but leave your picture visible. Pass the paper to the next person.
When you receive the next sheet of paper, look at the picture and write a sentence that describes what you see. Fold the paper again to hide the picture and leave only the sentence that you just wrote. Pass again.
Repeat steps 2 and 3 until the paper has made it all the way around the circle. You do not take a turn on the sheet of paper that you wrote the original sentence on, so you will play a number of turns equal to the number of people you have playing.

That’s it! There are successes to be found in pretty much any round of EPYC. You can celebrate your coherence if a sentence actually makes it relatively intact through your entire group of friends, or you can get angry at your friend for not recognizing a flawless drawing of Keyboard Cat when they see one.

Sometimes, though, magical things happen when you play this game. Magical, frightening things. At the Warp Skip meetup at PAX East 2011, this is what happened when Adam’s turn to draw came up:

This picture still haunts my nightmares.

—Casey

Weekend of Kirby: Kirby's Adventure (and others)

ckolderup — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 19:38:03 -0400

I spent somewhere around 10-12 hours this weekend playing Kirby games. Before Saturday, the only one of the traditional sidescrolling Kirby games I had played was Kirby’s Adventure for the NES. Over the course of Saturday I played both of the Game Boy entries, the first two Kirby’s Dream Lands, and today I played all of Kirby’s Adventure along with a sampling of Kirby’s Dream Land 3 and Kirby and the Amazing Mirror. After all of that platforming, I think Kirby’s Adventure still stands out as my favorite.

It’s definitely not a perfect game. You can tell it’s struggling against the NES hardware on a pretty regular basis, as any time the game has to show more than ~5 sprites on the screen at the same time the whole game slows considerably. It also doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense: the stages, as in most Kirby sidescrollers, lack any kind of creative focus, instead opting to just throw together a random smattering of trees, clouds, and Roman architecture, sometimes putting stars in the background. But it controls as solidly as the Game Boy games and has a huge variety of powerups to play with. Getting one of the rarer abilities like UFO, Throw, or Body Slam is an exciting moment, whereas in the later games like Dream Land 3 and The Amazing Mirror the powerups tend to feel pretty homogenous— you just pick up whatever you can get and run with it, and abilities from pretty early on in the game like Bomb can feel overpowered.

The best part of Kirby’s Adventure is the final boss and the part leading up to it (spoilers ahead on a 19-year-old NES game): after beating King Dedede, the final boss from Kirby’s Dream Land 1 and your ever-present adversary throughout the game, you go to restore the Star Rod that he had apparently stolen(?) to its rightful place on a fountain or something. Along the way, a beaten King Dedede begs Kirby not to do it, but his pleas are ignored. When Kirby places the Rod on the fountain, an evil Nightmare is freed from the fountain (apparently King Dedede stole and broke the Star Rod to imprison this jerk) and it flies into space. King Dedede inhales Kirby and the Star Rod and spits him into space to chase after the Nightmare. The real final boss fight begins at this point, a two-stage affair with the first being a horizontally-scrolling shmup reminiscent of the blimp boss from Kirby’s Dream Land 1 and the second half being a tough boss battle against the villainous Nightmare, who now looks kind of like a cross between Count Chocula and something actually intimidating.

At this point the only Kirby game I haven’t played a few hours of is Kirby’s Epic Yarn, but I have to admit that at this point I’m a little tired— not of Kirby, but of staring at the TV screen all weekend. I think Epic Yarn, which is supposedly quite good, will have to wait while I go read a book for a little while or something.

—Casey

Weekend of Kirby: Various Spinoffs

ckolderup — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 11:17:07 -0400

In my quest to play as many Kirby games as possible, I managed to run through varying amounts of a lot of the non-platforming Kirby games today. The pictures below that are obviously not taken with a cell phone camera are form the excellent vgmuseum.com.

Kirby’s Dream Course

Kirby’s Dream Course is a strange isometric miniature golf game where you have to attack enemies in order to create an exit point, then exit through a “hole”. Like in golf or whatever. The best part of Dream Course is that it has a two-player competitive mode, which usually devolves into knocking each other off the course as frequently as possible.

Kirby’s Block Ball

A fascinating Arkanoid clone— I played through 10 levels of this game today, reaching the “bad” ending after a couple hours and enjoying every minute of it. Reaching the “good” ending would require getting the high score on every level: not something I have time to do right now. Block Ball is a really great use of the Kirby universe and the variety of enemies and bosses once again (and this is a common thread in Kirby games) makes what could be a mediocre game charming. My biggest problem with this game is that some levels are built entirely around using a particular powerup, which if you manage to lose you have no way of getting back without losing all your lives and starting over. I really liked this game and am glad I finally played it.

Kirby’s Star Stackers

A drop-blocks-in-a-well puzzle game with a mechanic I haven’t seen repeated anywhere else (which is surprising for Nintendo), Star Stackers has you sandwiching stars and other powerups between blocks with different animals on them, chaining together combos and such. It’s a really fun mechanic that I’d like to see revived some day, and beyond the charming animations it also has weird/hilarious menus and presentation.

Kirby’s Pinball Land

I’m generally down on video game versions of pinball. It seemed a novelty when I was a kid— being able to do crazy things that a real pinball machine could never do— but looking back they seem kind of boring. Kirby’s Pinball Land is no real exception; the execution is solid but nothing really drew me to keep playing.

Kirby’s Avalanche

Kirby’s Avalanche is a Puyo Puyo game— a good one, although not as exceptional as Kirby frequently manages to take generic ideas and turn them exciting. It has the exact same narrative presentation and screen layout as any number of Nintendo-branded puzzle games— Dr. Mario 64, the Panel de Pon reskins like Tetris Attack and Pokemon Puzzle League, and Wario’s Woods. I didn’t spend much time with this one, because I have more interesting games to play.

Kirby Canvas Curse

Kirby Canvas Curse, when it came out, was hailed as one of the shining examples of the early Nintendo DS catalog that figured out how to make good use of the stylus mechanic. For me, this game suffers from Sonic Syndrome: a feeling that you’re constantly missing out on important pieces of the game by constantly moving at a fast pace from left to right. It’s still fun, and still impressive as a demonstration of how touch screen controls can really change the way you play a game, but it didn’t draw me in like Dream Course or Block Ball did.

With that, I think I’ve played at least a little bit of all of the non-platforming Kirby games! From here on out it’s all platformers.

—Casey

That weird face-bag with rosy cheeks and ears in the middle is...

ckolderup — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 17:50:30 -0400

That weird face-bag with rosy cheeks and ears in the middle is Scarfy, my favorite enemy from the Kirby series. In the Kirby platformers, if you try to inhale Scarfy, he gets really pissed off at you and chases after you for a while. If he hits you, he explodes and hurts you. The trick is to blow something at him— a puff of air, a star, a block, whatever— and then he’ll harmlessly explode while you stay at a distance.

In Kirby’s Block Ball, an Arkanoid clone for the Game Boy, Scarfy just turns into a bomb powerup if you kill him, which is not at all unique and kinda disappointing.

I had to look up Scarfy’s name to make sure I had it right because I wanted to call him “Barfy.” I think my name is better.

In Kirby’s Dream Land 2, using one of your abilities while...

ckolderup — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 14:53:31 -0400

In Kirby’s Dream Land 2, using one of your abilities while riding one of your 3 animal mounts changes the nature of the ability. When riding Kine the sunfish, using the Spark ability lets you shoot light bulbs out of your mouth by pressing and releasing the B button— but pressing and holding the B button will hold the light bulb in place and continuously shock Kine. Gruesome.

RIP Lolo and Lala, Kirby programmer HAL Laboratories’...

ckolderup — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 14:12:10 -0400

RIP Lolo and Lala, Kirby programmer HAL Laboratories’ characters created for a series of puzzle games in 1989 and then murdered by Kirby in Kirby’s Dream Land in 1992. It seems a little twisted to make a game’s protagonist kill off a different series’ protagonists without any real indication as to why they’re a threat to you, but I did it and I only felt a little remorse.

Weekend of Kirby: Kirby's Dream Land

ckolderup — Sat, 09 Apr 2011 14:03:40 -0400

I’m on call this weekend and recovering from a long week at work, so I’m staying at home and playing as many Kirby games as I can. It occurred to me that I wasn’t as familiar with the Kirby library of games as I wanted to be, and various blogs and forums have recently reminded me of some of the great ones I HAVE played— Kirby’s Adventure for the NES, Kirby’s Canvas Curse on the DS, and the bizarre Kirby’s Dream Course for the SNES. So with all of this in mind, I’m going to play as many Kirby games as I can this weekend and write up any thoughts I have on each of them.

Kirby’s Dream Land is where I decided to start. It’s the first Kirby game, released in 1992 for the Game Boy, although I never had the Game Boy game for some reason. It came out just months before Super Mario Land 2, which I think is widely hailed as the first Game Boy platformer that can be compared to its console brethren. Kirby comes close, though; the animations are charming and the amount of variety and art in the game is really nice, the controls are really fluid, and the music is fantastic.

I think the only thing that I would ding the game for is its difficulty and length— I just played through the whole thing in ~35 minutes and only died twice. The fifth and final stage is essentially a boss rush, with very short versions of the four preceding stages followed by slightly more difficult versions of the four bosses you previously fought. The bosses are interesting but lack depth; even the final boss King Dedede doesn’t change his strategy as you hurt him, so once you learn the three or four things he does it’s just a tedious matter of following his pattern enough times to chip away at his health.

For a 20-year-old game that ran on an extremely basic handheld device, though, this game is kind of a marvel. It’s no wonder that Kirby went on to star in so many other Game Boy games (and branch out onto the NES and SNES quickly after: Kirby’s Adventure for the NES came out less than a year later!)… the animation and music in Kirby’s Dream Land is just too damn charming.

—Casey

Draggin' Quest

ckolderup — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 08:59:00 -0500

I don’t typically like real-time strategy games— I usually don’t have fun with them because they just stress me out, trying to keep track of what all kinds of different things are doing at the same time. With that in mind, I’m not really sure why I bought Battleheart for iOS. It was pretty up-front about the kind of game it was. I think I was mostly drawn to the art and the promise of finding and equipping loot, possibly my favorite thing to do in a video game.

Luckily, Battleheart keeps it pretty simple. You’ll never have more than 4 characters to control on the screen at a time, which is good— you can limit your party members to basic RPG character roles like tank, healer, or DPS, which means that you have a clear idea of which character to go to when you want to perform a particular task. You also can see everything going on at once, so you don’t need to rely on sounds or other auxiliary notification systems telling you that a unit is waiting for a command or in danger elsewhere. The art and animations are simple and fun, reminding me of old Flash animations on Newgrounds from back when I was in high school. There is very little artifice in the game; just enough to propel you forward and play stage after stage. Each battle tends to take ~3-5 minutes, depending on how well-prepared you are for what you’re currently facing. All of this put together makes for something that’s quick to pick up and play. I started out on iPhone and liked it, but switched to the iPad after only a few battles when it became clear that having the larger screen would make it easier to manage characters’ placement.

I only have two complaints with the game right now. The first is that you run out of different accessory items fairly quickly in the game. Once I had 8 items (2 for each character) improving various stats in place, I did very little trading of items around to improve my party. I mostly just saw copies of the same item, which I would sell for gold. I quickly ran out of things to spend my gold on besides just pumping up the stats of items I already had, which is not particularly exciting. (The good news is that it sounds like the developers have received this feedback from other people and they’re going to add more items and more characters to the next update.) My other problem is that I frequently end up with a lot of characters lumped together in the same small area, sometimes also with enemies blocking the way, and it can be hard to focus on the character I’m actually trying to target, whether I’m trying to tap a character to make them move or use a special attack or if I’m trying to make a particular character a target of a healing spell (which is especially crucial). I’m not sure how this can be fixed, unfortunately, but I’d love to see the developer try to find a way.

For someone like me who’s competent with gaming but not normally a huge fan of real-time strategy, I think this is a great game to play to get a taste of a genre you may otherwise feel that you need to avoid. The depth might not be enough for die-hard strategy gamers, although I think the price ($3) is extremely well worth the content provided compared to a PC title that costs $20-50. Overall I applaud the presentation and look forward to see how the title develops over time.

—Casey

"all you do is kill monsters in a stage then play the next stage."

ckolderup — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 13:37:28 -0500

“all you do is kill monsters in a stage then play the next stage.”

- The ultimate box quote for the extremely fun and simple iOS game Battleheart, from a disgruntled App Store user.

Adam's 2010 Games of the Year

funanduseful — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 10:23:06 -0500

And now: my goatee from 2003, here to introduce you to my GOTY picks for 2010.

[pictured above: just look at that fine goatee.]

I am adapting the criteria that Time magazine uses in awarding their “Person of the Year”: these three are the games that I liked most, or anticipated most, or thought about the most. They’re not necessarily what I think are the best games of the year—just the ones that I think will stick with me. Let’s get going.

GOTY the first: Mass Effect 2 (360). I loved this game twice. There was no other game this year that struck the such a perfect balance between grand, progressive game design—the dialogue system, the alignment system and the streamlined RPG/shooter battle system are all worthy of discussion—and being a genuine mainstream hit. Now, it’s not a perfect game by any means: the writing and story are sub-Star Trek schlocky sci-fi cheesy. But it’s worth noting that it was the only boxed game I bought new for the 360 this year… and I still played my 360 more than any other console. Either every other developer is doing something wrong, or Bioware is doing something very, very right.

GOTY Deux: Kirby’s Epic Yarn (Wii). This is going to be a strange analogy, but you know that feeling you get when you’re watching someone do something that they’re skilled at? Especially when they’re doing it off the cuff. Think of a jazz musician, or a trained artist sketching freehand, or a riffing comedian: they have the skills to spontaneously make up amazing stuff without even trying. That’s how playing Kirby’s Epic Yarn feels to me. Whenever I’m trying to describe the experience of playing game, the word “effortless” keeps coming to mind. The people who designed this game didn’t make any tough decisions, but every decision they made feels right and natural and—if you’re excuse the pun—seamless. It’s not the most innovative game of the year, but it might be the most virtuosic.

GOThreeY: Metroid: Other M (Wii). Aaaand here’s where the caveats from the introductory paragraph become relevant. Other M is on this list not because it’s a great game, but because it provoked a lot of thoughtful discussion—maybe more than any other game released this year. It’s 2010’s touchstone for conversations about narrative, gender and culture in games. But, let’s face it: Other M is a genuinely awful video game. The story makes no sense; the voice acting is beyond abysmal; the art direction and sound design are either lazy or intentionally milquetoast. Probably both. But there’s a seedling of an interesting game in there: the level design is classic Metroid, and the 2D/3D switching mechanic works surprisingly well. I would love to play a sequel to Other M that uses the same engine, but with a different director. (What are you up to lately, Mr. Miyamoto?)

Five runners-up: Persona 3 Portable, Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey, Game Dev Story, Costume Quest, Infinity Blade.

—Adam

Past Romantic

ckolderup — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 09:10:00 -0500

I was excited this summer to see that a Scott Pilgrim game would be coming to Xbox Live Arcade to accompany the release of the Scott Pilgrim movie. The graphic novel series used video games not as a series of pop culture references, but as a basis for a language that the characters in the world the books create all speak, a common ground upon which all of their conversations can stand. So it made sense to see that the Scott Pilgrim game would pay homage to the games its source material showed a love for: Super Mario Bros 3, River City Ransom, Final Fantasy, and any number of brawlers that people my age grew up pumping quarters into at the mall arcade.

As you play Scott Pilgrim, it becomes apparent that it’s not just trying to do the “retro aesthetic” that’s pretty popular among a certain crowd of gamers who appreciate being in on the reference; this game also makes purposefully old-school decisions about its mechanics, and I think that this can cause serious problems— both the choices that were made to be like “classic” games and are bad on their own and some choices that don’t mesh well with other decisions that are based on modern gaming design.

One example: you have a persistent game that saves your progress after completing a stage (well, it saves the progress for the character that PLAYER 1 is currently playing as, which is dumb but is not really related to the intentionally retro thing), but you also have a stock of 3 lives that you start with before getting a game over and then going back to 3 lives. As a result, here’s how the game basically played out for me:

Beat Stage x, losing a life or two along the way
Got a Game Over on Stage x+1 because I had fewer lives/less starting health
Started Stage x+1 again with 3 lives and full health, beat it
Got a Game Over on Stage x+2 because I had fewer lives/less starting health
Started Stage x+2 again with 3 lives and full health…

You see the pattern. As a result I saw a lot of stages twice and didn’t necessarily do any better on them the second time; I just passed them because I had more resources than before. This is dumb. If you’re going to stick with the whole “lives”/”game over” system, you should at least not have the game save your progress like an old game and then adjust your difficulty appropriately in order to allow the game to be beatable. What I think would be better, though, would be to have lives reset in between levels, which would lend to a difficulty curve like that of the retro stages in Super Meat Boy— you have 3 lives to complete 3 stages, but those lives only apply to this small set of 3 stages. If you can complete it, that’s great, those lives don’t matter any more. If you don’t, you can try again right away with another set of 3 lives.

It doesn’t help that the game features a weird upgrade system— you can’t see how items will help your stats until you buy them, and you can buy items over and over again to pump up your stats, so the solution to feeling stuck is just to grind for money until you have powered yourself up enough to blow through enemies with no troubles. All in all, the game feels torn between wanting to be an artifact of the period of gaming that influenced the source material so much and a fun romp through the Scott Pilgrim universe. When set alongside other modern arcade brawler-style games, the game ends up feeling frustrating in a lot of ways.

Final Fantasy: The 4 Heroes of Light is a game that has similar ideas about appropriating nostalgia but I think it works more often than Scott Pilgrim. I knew ahead of time that it had a very strict limited inventory system: you can only hold 15 items per character in your party and not only does any weapon or piece of armor you’re carrying take up a spot (which basically means 4-5 spots gone immediately) but any spell you want a character to cast requires carrying a spellbook. Add on a few items to handle healing and different status effects (no stacking!) and you quickly have no room for even gathering loot. I’m willing to give this mechanic the benefit of the doubt as an intentional and carefully thought out design decision— the game does tend to aim for small outings in tiny labyrinths rather than the modern RPG’s sprawling, real-world-mimicing castles with huge sets of rooms and branching paths, so while it does require careful planning, the inventory system is just limited enough to feel like a part of the game’s challenge.

I am still on the fence about one mechanic, though— I was shocked when I started playing to realize that you can’t choose a target when choosing an action in its turn-based RPG battles. I’m still not 100% sure how it’s choosing which enemy to hit, but I know that in the case of healing an ally it chooses the person with the lowest raw health number— it’s not percentage based. I can’t tell how Phoenix Downs work in the case of reviving one out of more than one downed party member. This can be tricky. I have lost a battle because it revived the character that didn’t have the heal spell instead of the one that did, and I did find that frustrating. However, in general when it comes to attacking, you know (and it reminds you right on the attack menu screen) based on the weapon you have or the spell you’re using whether a character will attack an enemy in the front or back row (melee weapons for front, ranged weapons for rear, and spells are a mix) and you can use that along with the knowledge you gain through trial and error about elemental weaknesses to make some light strategic decisions.

However: eliminating a step from the battles does speed things up considerably and makes for a good match with the AP system, an interesting alternative to MP. The battles are turn-based, and each turn you gain one AP. You can choose to spend it on various actions— a conventional attack costs one AP, while some spells and special attacks cost more. You can choose to Defend to save that AP in order to build up more and cast a spell, but there are also other ways to accumulate more than one AP, such as by carrying over points from a previous battle or getting bonus points for getting the killing blow on enemies. In the end the battles feel simple but slightly puzzling and if it weren’t for the rare exception where I really wanted to make a manual targeting decision I’d feel like they had actually pulled off the use of mostly old-school mechanics as an intentional game design decision.

There are numerous reasons for wanting to make your game feel old. Sometimes it’s an attempt to cash in on nostalgia. Other times it’s a conscious choice to keep things simple, whether that choice is intended to reach a specific audience or to keep production costs low. I think the main risk you take with the decision to use low-resolution graphics (as long as it doesn’t cause issues with hitboxes, which I think makes it a mechanics issue) is turning off your audience due to personal tastes. When you move into the world of old-school mechanics, ignoring changes that have come along since, you risk reintroducing long-solved problems that will only feel more annoying to gamers that already know of a better alternative.

—Casey

On Walden Waterblock

ckolderup — Mon, 22 Nov 2010 09:21:39 -0500

Minecraft has spawned this huge community of people showing off these ridiculous things they’ve done and they’re accomplished through all kinds of means: plain old hard work, usually by a significant number of people pitching in together but sometimes the work of one industrious jobless person; the use of “creative” mode to allow things like flying through the air and having no scarcity of resources; the use of server admin commands to grant infinite amounts of resources; and even the ridiculous automated things people have done to convert various 2D and 3D imaging formats into Minecraft worlds. All of these things are totally amazing and worthy of the community of “holy shit look at this fucking thing” that has grown out of it, but speaking to my own time with the game I feel like it risks taking away almost all of the actual meaningful experience I can have with it.

I’m grateful for the the presence of the internet as a way to discover that there are people who are building entire cities in Minecraft and beating Super Mario Bros in four minutes, that I can share high score boards with my brother halfway across the country, that there can be a whole culture of people who are as obsessed as my friends and I are with shoddy translations and quirky games, but I can’t help but feel like I’ve taken away the ability to ever feel proud of what I do in a video game by making myself a part of that network. In terms of the amount of time I actually spend playing video games these days, I’m probably somewhere in the lower half among people who would consider video games a part of their identity, and when it comes to a lot of these kinds of accomplishments, putting the time into it is often a big factor.

That doesn’t always bother me— I can enjoy a lot of games just for the entertainment they bring to me or the challenge they present. But Minecraft isn’t a particularly challenging game, once you manage to make it over the initial learning hump, and I think that the rewards in Minecraft come from the pure accomplishments: building a new tool, building a structure of some practicality (which I would argue is essentially the same as building a new tool), discovering a new material, discovering a large source of some new material, or building a structure of no practical use.

Within the structure of the Minecraft community, the extremes to which people have taken the game got everyone over the first four of those accomplishments extremely quickly. I think it’s cool that people can work together to so quickly assemble an authoritative reference on a fictional world, but since there are just so many people and programming this sort of thing takes an intense amount of work, the people will always overwhelmingly “beat” the world-creators, even if Notch hires more employees. There will never be mysteries in the world of Minecraft, and I really want there to be.

I wish there existed a much harder difficulty curve to Minecraft— one that was far-reaching, not just the damage tweaking that happens in the Settings. Right now I think that in single player the game does a pretty good job of proving how insignificant you are within the scope of the world that exists, but I wish there were more things that could go wrong in such a way that the odds were stacked even more severely against you. Biomes should be bigger, so if you are in a snowy area there is a chance you will make it out of it but it will take some amount of fortitude and it’s difficult to make fire or you can’t move out in the open for too long without getting hypothermia or there is some sort of resource shortage that makes sense for that climate (other biomes would have different challenges). I wish that rather than just losing health from falling you could break an arm and maybe you wouldn’t be able to use tools as effectively for a while, or a leg and you’d walk more slowly; something that isn’t just a decrease on a health bar easily remedied with food.

The times that I feel most “immersed” in Minecraft are when I am overcoming some ultimately primitive obstacle: when I died and realized that I was carrying something valuable, so I spent two days wandering around looking for some familiar landmark and swearing to myself that I’d start leaving trails. In some ways, I ruined it for myself by browsing the wiki and the forums almost immediately after playing— if I had managed to figure out how to build something like a compass on my own, I think it would feel like one of the greatest accomplishments in gaming in my life.

If I had kept avoiding wikis and spoilers from friends, I could have kept the value in those first 4 accomplishments. I could have made it 12 months into the game before discovering portals. To tell the truth, with the game as it exists right now, I probably would never have discovered portals, because before portals there was little incentive to do arrangement of… things in the real world, just within the crafting pane. But I think that the game as developed into a beta and eventually a real final game could (and should) find ways to nudge you toward things— let you find half-assembled items that you can decompose into partial crafting patterns that you could complete, leave ruins of long-gone civilizations that could point you to the existence of items like stairs or portals or pressure plates… give you ways to not be quite as aimlessly left to your own devices, but still let you discover things at a slower pace, to make the day that you build a record player and put to use a record that you found on the second day you played and have been holding on to for months a day that you’re unlikely to ever forget.

—Casey

Shepard v. Shepard

funanduseful — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 17:04:32 -0400

We’ve all got problems. Hoo boy. And we’ve all got to talk about our problems from time to time. Today, we’re talking about my Mass Effect 2 problem.

I want to play Mass Effect 2 again. First time I played it, I played as Jane Shepard, my Paragon-as-you-please female soldier imported from the original Mass Effect. I enjoyed the game immensely, and now I want to play it again. I want to play it again with all of the DLC in place; I want to play it again as a different class; I want to play it again with a male Shepard; I want to play as a Renegade instead of a Paragon. In short: I want to get my money’s worth, and see the game from the other side.

Now, I should play with the male, biotics-wielding, unrelenting Renegade I made in my second play through of the original Mass Effect. On the surface, it would seem that starting a new game with this character would fulfill all of my desires.

Except.

[Pictured: Cmdr. Nutty Shepard, unbearable jackhole]

I can’t STAND this guy. My male Renegade Shepard, I mean—he’s a dick. I hate listening to him talk, I hate the way he treats people, I hate his attitudes and I hate his goals. Every time I think about playing Mass Effect 2 as this guy my heart sinks, and for a little while, the thought of playing video games loses all its appeal.

Which makes me wonder… why? Why does Nutty Shepard fill me with such loathing? Is it the way I made him look? (Gaunt, pale, snivelly?) Or have I made negative associations with him because of the things you have to do in Mass Effect to max out your Renegade points? Is it just impossible for me to stomach playing a Renegade character at all? Do I hate Mark Meer’s voice acting? Do I hate Mark Meer… as a person? Or is it something else entirely?

[Pictured: Jane Shepard. Stuck with me through the good times (Mass Effect 2) and the not-so-good times (the original Mass Effect). Spoiler, I guess: she talks about geth.]

I’m faced with deciding whether to (a) suck it up and play as Nutty; or (b) replay the game as Jane. The former would scratch my completionist itch, while the latter… well, the latter just seems like the most natural and fun thing to do. Jane and me, we’re interstellar friends, you see? It’s difficult to imagine playing the game without her.

It’s strange. I mean, I like to talk the talk about how narrative isn’t the important thing in games and how mechanics are king and so forth. But when it comes time to walk the walk, I find myself so attached to my Mass Effect 2 character that I don’t want to play the game as anyone else.

Well played, Bioware.

Related: On FemShep’s Popularity In Mass Effect at Gamasutra.

—Adam