Trash Panic Follow Up

August 22nd, 2009

Upon editing my last article on Trash Panic I realized there there were a few points which I forgot to mention or emphasize as heavily as I probably should’ve;

The unpredictability of the fire and decomposition ball are probably the most significant issues contributing to the slippery nature of the title. Trash Panic clamps down on difficulty early on, yet a huge deciding factor of success is luck, therefore rendering much play time as simply testing the odds. The fire/decomposition is mostly unpredictable, sometimes completely random It’s a little worrying and cuts off access to a good chunk of content to the player.

This oversight is rather far-flung too. The first mission in the ‘Mission Mode’ requires you to hit 118 logs against one of the large bells. Problem is the logs don’t break easily, but even if they did a tall pile up of logs ensues, smothering the surface area of the bell, ie there is no room to smash logs against it! Fire torches are there to alleviate the problem, yet fire for some reason or another hardly damages the logs, let alone remove them. Furthermore, the means to gain torches falls into the same trap too. To gain a torch you must drop the Mottainai item into the bin and allow the Mottainai to collect it. Problem is they can’t reach because of the amounting logs. I only managed 18 dongs of the bell! It’s beyond me how these issues of difficulty were never considered.

I also never properly explained why I felt to game to be so compulsive, despite it’s unfathomable difficulty. The unitless nature of the game feels very freeform, it’s fun to throw things at each other and have the destruction trickle between the cracks of rubbish, or just turn your stockpile into a blazing inferno. I guess the compulsion comes from the way the slipperiness persuades you into believing the odds will be better next time, this is of course spurred on by the difficulty. So, when you put these pieces together, Trash Panic is fun because the foundations elicit a heavily experimental type of playfulness (similar to that of many physics sims) yet this experimentation is turned into a game and then challenged heavily. So retrying isn’t so bad as you’re just mucking about anyways.

Hmmm…I’m not sure whether this post has served it’s purpose, but that’s more or less the skinny of what I missed.

Trash Panic: Causing Much Mayhem, Dropping Drama!!

August 21st, 2009

trash-panic-psn-header

I tighten some of my main ideas in a follow-up here.

I detest Twitter as an alternative to blogging. Well at least my preferred shade of blogging. 140 characters can in no way replace a strong editorial, critique or exposé, yet it works wonders for live-blogging and random link sharing. Previously, web enthusiasts discovered media through social bookmarking (digg is perhaps the prime example here) but now such articles are emitted socially as part of this wider collection of utterances, cobbled together in profiles and placed under this service called Twitter.

Despite my objections to the service in some regards, Twitter gets to the point and hence allowed me to easily share my summative conclusions about the PSN title Trash Panic before I’d even come to write this article. Here’s what I tweeted:

The problem with Trash Panic’s single player is that it demands precision in an inherently precision-lacking game
10:13 PM Aug 16th from web

Still, it’s ultra compulsive just to play for kicks.
10:13 PM Aug 16th from web

Here’s the elaboration:

Trash Panic is a neat little Playstation Network title which you can acquire for under $9. It’s one of those PSN titles which is truly a unique gem. Unlike the other titles which people lump into this esteemed category of PSN rarities (ie. Pixeljunk Eden and Flower) Trash Panic hasn’t been blessed with the same enthusiast-driven attention. Still Trash Panic retains a lustrous individuality and charm. That is, it’s a truer fit of the term than the other titles often exhibited.

Perhaps the most fascinating part of Trash Panic is the way it wraps a very real issue into the fabric of the gameplay. In a nutshell, Trash Panic is an eco-friendly waste management puzzler, sharing much commonality with Tetris. As the video below (captured using the in-game tools) depicts, a conveyor belt delivers a stream of junk which must be placed in the blue rubbish bin. Your goal is to squeeze as much junk into the trash can until the conveyor belt runs X distance. Overflow of three unbroken items concludes the game and you’ll have to start the round over, reaching the end of the line sends you through to the next level. Space can be opened up in several ways which leads into the central theme of environmental management.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHeZaDlEGj4

Destroying objects in an environmentally-friendly manner such as breaking them against one another or using a decomposition ball with water to degrade items will yield a higher eco rating. Preserving items for the Mottainai characters (those bizarre black creatures wandering around the set) also adds to the eco rating. I guess they’re an endangered species or something. On the other hand though, fire, mixed with explosives or a little oil, is easily the most effective method of rubbish removal, burning off piles of waste with relative ease. Of course, such disregard to the environment will only increase your ego points. Pass or fail a stage, the level concludes by tallying the two scores against each other to create a final alphabetic rank, with the skew obviously favouring environmentally-friendly action.

Depending on the skill level chosen, a boss item may appear near the end of each stage, demanding the player break the item within a 10 second time limit. These often appear at the worst of times with only a couple of useful resources on the conveyor belt available making the process extremely superficial. Furthermore, beyond providing you with a lack of heavy objects, the game always seems to throw the worst items at you in these predicaments. Items such as bouncy balls which easily fly out of the can are frustrating to deal with when you’re simply trying to beat the boss and hence the stage. The boss feature is a real kerfuffle.

Getting to the point of my Twitter comments, Trash Panic by design is intrinsically variable. That is each object does not represent a fixed number of units (as in say Tetris) and properties of weight, physics, flammability and infectionability are themselves often sporadic in nature. This makes Trash Panic unpredictable and a real riot to play. The levels are more or less constant with the same items falling in the predictably same order, yet how the events unfold per round is always unique. As I discussed in the Wolfenstein post, games often require an inconstant variable (or two) to act as diversifiers to the predictability of the core design. Trash Panic is full of them which acts as both a quality and detriment.

As said in the tweet, the problem that arises is that as progression mounts, Trash Panic demands a level of precision which is difficult to grasp. The game effectively gives you woolen gloves and then asks you to shift a pile of slippery stones. (Sorry, that’s the best analogy I could come up with.) Beyond the first 2 stages, balancing the amount of water/oil in your can with the distribution of matches and decomposition balls is crucial for winning. If a decomposition ball is left for too long or absorbs oil then it disappears, squashing the opportunity to remove that critical build up of waste. (It should be noted that oil rises to the surface of any water in the can, hence you don’t want to break any oil drums open before receiving a decomposition ball etc.) But then again fire must also been managed as well. Closing the lid of the bin traps in heat, increasing the temperature, yet lowering the amount of oxygen required to fuel the fire (the indicators are to the left of the screen). Juggling these variables can at times be a little daunting to manage. With both cases, it’s very easy to accidentally make a wrong move and hence miss out on the opportunity to remove waste, increasing your burgeoning stockpile of rubbish. Further, the success of either method is mostly out of the player’s hands, once the fire or decomposition begin their work it’s more or less a random luck as ot how much waste is removed, going back to the woolen gloves analogy.

Since the distribution of objects (from my understanding) appears to be the similar – if not the same – each round, this creates a linear set of expectations as to when you use which device to clear waste. For example, a level may begin with toilets and jugs full of water, promptly followed by a decomposition ball; implying that you build up water and then use the ball to clear the wastage. Fair enough. From level 4 onwards, the set of expectations begins to overlap as oil drums and matches are interjected between water and absorb balls. This forces the player to untangle the distribution (relying heavily on the reserved item system, ala Tetris DS) and piece it together again as best they see fit. As I said at the start of the year regarding Zuma; the difficulty of certain games can rise enough to plateau a new series of mechanics and play styles. Those mechanics and the resulting play styles are the essence of the game. In Trash Panic, it’s that aforementioned construction of events which certifies this as a puzzle game, more so than the surface level likeness to Tetris.

trash-panic-psn

This pressure placed on the player primarily makes itself distinct on the normal “Main Dish” difficulty. Although addicted to the point of thumb blisters, level four of Main Dish is about as much as I could muster – and I tried pretty damn hard! You see, the criticisms mentioned wouldn’t be a problem if the game didn’t set the difficulty benchmark so high, preemptively forcing players to utilize such hard-ball playing tactics. This makes playing Trash Panic in a casual, non-completist manner the most enjoyable approach. The difficulty bar is frankly raised too high, too early, so jamming around on the easier settings, or even just continuously retrying stages is itself rather fun. Trying to force actual progress isn’t. It’s this major point of contention that I feel has relegated Trash Panic to the second tier of PSN elites, as the steep difficulty seems to be a deterrence for many.

This implication digs into the heart of Trash Panic. The premise of the game is about rubbish disposal and the package as a whole embodies the respective connotations. Trash Panic is in love with the mismatch and the gaudy. The music is a vigorous clash of dance and classical interluded with irresistible lines of dialogue and an overall taste for the Japanese. (Trash Panic was made by Japanese indie developers by the way). The graphics are quirky and bizarre, epitomized by the zany Mottainai creatures. The mechanics are sweet and sour with a bitter after taste. Progression begins lightly, giving you enough head space to be amused by the charm. It then uncomfortably ascends, turning previously optional strategies and mechanics into the basic requirements of play. Then it all becomes too much and a feeling of betrayal strike once you realize how demanding yet slippery the game is.

It’s a fruity concoction, and there’s a genuine creative spark streaming throughout the game which should justify the >$10 purchase. It’s all the minor sparkles, such as the clever objects, the quirky humour, the ability to shake the can with the six-axis or the way the bin (and trash) increase in size between levels — while the screen proportion remains the same — with the final level having you smashing bridges and islands against each other. On top of this the YouTube support is neat and there are some nice syncs to online scoreboards too. Games such as Trash Panic represent the area of games I’d like to further explore: games that simply detach themselves from conventions.

Additional Readings

Sound Current: ‘Mega-Alpha’s Indispensable Soundtrack to Trash Panic’

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Tags: psn, trash panic

Super Stardust HD – Fresh, Spanky and All About The Space Junk

August 7th, 2009

super-stardust-header

Really digging these summative titles rather than the generic ‘Super Stardust HD Impressions’ style of titling.

Can’t complain at $AUD3.50, can you?

A month or so ago Super Stardust HD, probably alongside other notable PSN highlights, was heavily reduced on the Playstation Store as part of a two year anniversary deal. Originally the game was $12.95 (if memory serves correctly), so paying just a fraction of that sure is incentive enough to demand a purchase. Hopefully Sony will continue this trend as other downloadable titles hit the two year mark.

Anyways, Super Stardust HD is an arena shooter in the same vein as Geometry Wars, except that the arena is mapped to the ozone layer of various planets and is hence spherical rather than a rectangular grid. The spherical format ensures that the player never has full view of the play area since the opposite side of the planet is always out of view, additionally the sphere has a visible edge along the perceived perimeter (if you look at it flat) which acts to obscure objects tapering in the distance.

Chunks of celestial matter (asteroids or comets – take your pick) land on the grid-patterned surface, floating around as obstacles. Shooting the matter will cause it to disperse, making way for both graphical and gameplay splendour as the rocks break apart, veering towards your general direction. Every now and then, once you’ve disintegrated enough space rock, a swarm of enemies will touch down and on their demise you complete the level. Repeat a few times over multiple acts to reach a final boss (which there are two predominate bosses, both themselves iterated on) before warping to the next planet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYql98tL-t4

That’s right, Super Stardust HD features a level based system rather than a single high score shoot out. Combine this level structure with a rather tame difficulty (relative to the shmup genre) which doesn’t even offer a selectable hard mode (rather you must complete the game on normal and carry through), and Super Stardust HD in no way stifles the genre’s weak point: short length.

The shoot ‘em up genre was born in the arcades, and as such the genre was designed with the arcade mentality of suckering as much money from the player while still keeping them at arm’s length from the end game. The most obvious device for achieving this was difficulty. By making a short game ultra difficult, developers could exaggerate the lastability of their titles while spending less in development. It’s because of dogged loyalty to these masochistic philosophies that the genre hasn’t survived very well in today’s mainstream.

Geometry Wars was a breakthrough in design as it cleverly disguised it’s length in a very organic fashion. There were no levels hence no real perception of repetition, rather than have the environmental scenes change with progression, the contents of the environment (ie. the enemies, their attack, spawn and swarm patterns) changed. This placed the endgame somewhere comfortably near infinity – a place where no player (or computer!) could ever reach.

Just by selecting the ‘Planet Mode’ mode, Super Stardust HD reveals its wares straight out – you can see it, 5 levels! Foolish indeed. Whether you gawk or admire this decision will depend on your faith to genre, I suppose. It’s a divergence, which can be rather refreshing.

‘Fresh’ and all like words spring to mind when describing Super Stardust‘s vibe. Surprisingly for a title of it’s age it retains a wonderful sense of said freshness, where the presentation and gameplay operate in unison. This is achieved through multiple design concoctions. The graphic design operates on two tiers. The first is based on general design sensibilities. The grid pattern and assortment of three primary-coloured, uniquely animated weapons all follow a very deductive approach to design. They’re simple, and as such are designed to be as visually useful to the player as they are attractive. This is very much in line with genre sensibilities.

The second element to the design mixture is the new-gen, the breaking and shimmering of glorious space junk. The space rock (in all three flavours) possess the most gorgeous sheen. With the amount of superfluous gloss added to neo-retro titles on the downloadable front, Super Stardust is commendable for being glossy, yet tastefully measured. More impressive though is the breaking apart of space rock. The transition from huge chunk to debris is almost unnaturally smooth and seamless. It’s simply wonderful to watch.

The deductive elements of the map, lasers and so forth meld beautifully from the spectacular mess of asteroid pieces floating around the ozone. Tidy + mess; it’s a particularly complementary design which wonderfully encapsulate the feeling of the game. That feeling being strung by the tightness of the core mechanics and variable unpredictability created by the debris.

super-stardust-hd

Due to the tangible progression of separated levels, Super Stardust HD‘s core gameplay has a level of required sophistication that separates it from Geometry Wars, making it feel a little more fully fledged. (That is, no sophistication, no meaningful justification for levels). As for those mechanics…

As I briefly mentioned before, your ship has access to three elemental types of lasers, each one respective of the different classes of space rock that come hurtling your way. The zappy, green pulsation of ‘Rock crusher’ is obviously good at hmm…crushing rocks, the flamethrower ‘gold meter’ melts away gold asteroids (why don’t they just collect the gold?), the nippy blue ice splitter is effective against ice. The three lasers represent the disparity between stages which fluctuate between the different types of rock. Level progression is therefore something like; rock level, gold level, ice level, mixed level #1, mixed level #2.

Bonuses such as laser upgrades, shields, ships and points mix things up a little too. Upon creating space debris or hitting certain objects these little trinkets spawn, operating as another variable to watch out for. Boosting, also is a neat trick and allows you to escape confrontation or simply smash right through it, about as gratifying as it is possibly lethal though, be cautious. It’s usefulness in the later stages make it a continually relevant draw card.

The culmination of laser and rock types, bonus trinkets and boost attacks (combined with the level-by-level progression) give Super Stardust the set up of something more than a one tick pony. Unfortunately what the game does exert itself in won’t last for long, which is why I found the $3.50 price point so delightful. ^_^

Leader boards and DLC packs are nice and all, but new modes approaching old content with an unsubstantial difference is not a selling point. Also, leader boards are an artificial lengthner which most people never fall for anyways. (Super Stardust, like Geometry Wars, can be troublesome with the mess of on-screen busyness, so applying myself here doesn’t feel particularly rewarding, considering) No, I’m not fussed about split screen multiplayer, survival or time attack modes, nor the new soundtrack, particularly when they demand such a premium. I mean, the difference between an ‘endless’ mode and playing the game from normal through to hard and beyond is negligible, surely.

I think that ore or less covers everything I’ve wanted to say about this title. With Bionic Commando Rearmed, Trash Panic and Wipeout Fury all at various levels of completion, I obviously have plenty more to discuss on PSN soon. Sorry ’bout the lack of updates too. I’m working on.

Additional Readings

Q&A: Housemarque’s Kuittinen on Maya Pipelines, No Producers, and Super Stardust HD – Gamasutra

Govt Awarded Finnish Game Companies €10 Million – EDGE Online

Super Stardust (Amiga, DOS) Screenshot Gallery – MobyGames

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Tags: psn, super stardust

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