Play Impressions (14/4/10)

April 14th, 2010

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Meteos

Meteos is a neat match-three puzzle game for the DS which involves dragging blocks vertically to match with same coloured blocks, either horizontally or vertically, which sends them flying past the top of the screen to a neighbouring planet. A stream of blocks continuously rain over you (hence the name Meteos, ie meteors) until you’ve lodged enough blocks into  outter space to blow up the respective planet. There’s a bizarro narrative linking all this craziness together, but don’t dare ask me about it.

Meteos‘ simple match-three mechanics is lengthened out into a full game with stages that vary up the gravity of the skywards-moving blocks and, as referred to in the Lumines series, skins for the various stages. These alterations have no bearing on the core mechanic, and, as such, Meteos‘ sole asset feels stretched beyond its scope. Sora Ltd attempts to flesh Meteos out with a ridiculous story and locked bonus content, however, these additions, much like the changing skins and minor physics changes are artificial at best. New stages, bonuses and other extras are just distractions which impede the experience more than enhance, particularly when the block designs animate and become incongruous with each other.

I got many good hours of gameplay out of Meteos‘ enjoyable match-three mechanic alone, which suggests that the self-sufficient gameplay is better suited to a downloadable format with an infinite mode and clear block designs. This is an awesome game with frivolous additions to meet the retail release.

Donkey Kong Jungle Beat

How can one not enjoy the unashamedly bombastic nature of Donkey Kong Jungle Beat? It’s a game that I haven’t the energy to finish over a regular duration, so I’ve decidedly been hitting the bongos every couple of months for the past few years now. Not quite a ritual, just something worth pulling out on occasion.

Donkey Kong Jungle Beat is one of those games where the visual presentation matches the gameplay really well. Gameplay is a patchwork quilt of set piece 2D platforming concepts (riding animals, using the parachute and fans, the boss battles) stitched together around the surprisingly excellent bongo-based platforming. The standard platforming constitutes the majority of gameplay, as does the environmental/elemental-based theme within the visual presentation. As frequently as DK switches to a new mode of play, does the visual style pertain some sort of individualistic flair (which may not adhere to the rest of the style guide). Detailed textures and neat technical effects are mashed in amongst plain textures and simple modeling. The gameplay is as diverse as the visual showcase, consolidating the game’s irreverent style.

As a brief conclusion, the fact that Nintendo can create a supremely enjoyable platformer with two buttons and a clap technique is a testament to their ingenuity.

Final Fantasy: Rings of Fate

In contrast to how I usually comment on games, I haven’t didn’t play Rings of Fate for very long and am already writing about it. After an hour or so of playing (and confirming impressions with my brother who completed this game years ago) I decided that it wasn’t worth my time to play Rings of Fate. It’s simply hack and slash filler, that’s all. From the onset, Rings of Fate seems like a great kids game, but the story is so condescending and the voice acting so ear piercingly awful that I was forced to preemptively give up. Players loathe games which make them feel stupid and adore games which make them feel intelligent, and this was a game that looked down on me, so I have no sympathy for it and neither should the children.

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Attempting to Understand Everyday Shooter

April 11th, 2010

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Everyday Shooter is a game which has touched me profoundly. I can’t believe that I’d be saying such things about an arena shooter, an unassuming, independently-developed one at that. In regards to my former post on games as art, Everyday Shooter excels at bridging the mechanical and contextual while never breaking equilibrium. As someone who despises the pontification of games like Flower in lieu of constructive analysis, I’m going to try my best to provide some sensible commentary on the inner-workings of this title. I’m pretty weary that I’m about to fail though as, despite the fact that I’ve been stewing over Everyday Shooter for the past year that I’ve been playing it, I’m afraid that I still can’t quite wrap my head around what makes it work. It’s really simple, I’m sure but it hasn’t hit me yet, so let’s make a go of it anyways.

General Gameplay

Everyday Shooter is a twin-stick arcade shooter in the vein of Geometry Wars. You use one stick to move your ship, a pixel, and the other to blast threats in any direction. Your movement speed decreases when doing both actions at the same time, facilitating tactical defense and escape strategies.

Inspired by Every Extend Extra, Everyday Shooter employs a combo system whereby destroying certain objects will cause a chain reaction of explosions. The combo system varies from stage to stage. In the first stage (the name escapes me now), explosions from destroying satellite-looking creatures remain on screen for a period of time where the player can temporarily fuel the blast will bullets, any fodder which touch the blast radius add to the combo.

Most enemy types leave a small pellet after they’ve been hit which your ship can collect (pellets have a mild magnetism to your ship) for points. After reaching a certain score, you gain a life and the threshold for the next 1up increases. These pellets can be later used as points to extend the default lives count of your pixel. It is intended that players will have to play the initial levels continually to slowly earn enough points to afford the necessary number lives to crawl their way to the final stages.

Since you’re constantly replaying the same levels to nudge yourself a little further and add credits to the bank for starter lives and an increased chance of breaking into the next stage, one might assume that Everyday Shooter is a repetitive experience, however each stage reacts organically to the player’s success. If you’re scoring well, more enemies will spawn, they’ll spawn additional little factories to spawn more units and flood you. Although the overall template is the same, because you never play two games exactly the same, your experience on each replay differs significantly.

Visual Significance

Each level plays out like an interactive piece of art pertaining a sense of narrative through the patterns of the procedurally-generated shapes. The shapes are sometimes representative of real life objects (birds, bugs, tanks) and sometimes metaphoric. No matter the representation, the shapes act as cogs in the piece’s overall pattern. Although the underlying themes of some levels are more obvious than others, the 8 pieces leave a wide window of interpretation for the player to relate to. Since the designer, Jonathan Mak, is a programmer and not an artist, all of the art in the game is procedurally-generated which contribute to the strikingly natural and organic appearance.

EverydayShooter-tranquil

And the Magic…

It’s the thread that ties these two worlds together which is most important. Each level in Everyday Shooter is a dual layered system: a combo and chaining system which corresponds to the visual and aural system. The arena shooter is the interface for you to commandeer the artwork. Your ship is your brush and the bullet fire the ink, so when you play the arena shooter you channel the artwork and the artwork creates a mood which draws you back in to the arena shooter. These two halves have a striking, self-sustained unity. The aural and visual landscapes not only convey information to the read, they’re rich and palatable to the senses, they convey an emotion which the player subsumes and becomes enveloped in. The shooting itself is organic and challenging and the presentation is meaningful and informative so the two halves work together to create a very dense type of game. On completing a round of Everyday Shooter I feel an emotional weight in my chest, and I think that this is how it happens.

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Resident Evil 2 – Level/Puzzle Design Discussion

April 8th, 2010

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I’m a bit stumped on how to discuss Resident Evil 2. Make no mistake, this is a fine game and I’d sure as hell like to probe into the design, however, the most attractive part of this title (the construction of puzzle elements) requires micro-level analysis. That is, analysis of pre-supposed routes, the respective associations of the “puzzle pieces”, the ordering of environmental hints and notes, the positioning of safe and danger zones and how all of these parts work together to guide the player. As you can imagine, for me to deconstruct Resident Evil 2 at this level, I’d basically be reverse engineering large chunks of the game and that’s an enormous undertaking. So instead of printing off maps and scribbling all over them, only to share my esoteric analysis, I’ve decided to just talk generally about the puzzle and level design.

The Spencer Estate and Onions

I wish I had a better memory of Resident Evil 3 because of what I can remember it strayed away from the mansion-orientated design pertinent in Resident Evil 0 through to Resident Evil 2. In Resident Evil, the design of the Spencer estate works like an onion. The player remains in a solitary place, peeling off layers of access (via the solving of cryptic puzzles) until they reach the core. The puzzles are designed around exploiting one iteration of the mansion, peeling back a layer, gaining some new items and mining further into new areas or taking their new-found tools and re-applying them to the newest iteration. (Iterations, for example when you leave the mansion to go to the graveyard and come back in, enemy placement is different and you have new tools to use within the environment).

Resident Evil 0 and 2 diverge from this formula, but only a little. A large section (generally close to half) of each title is spent in an area akin to the Spencer estate (the Umbrella Training Facility and the RPD Police Station). This estate is then connected by a linear path to smaller “estates” with fewer layers of puzzle-solving (sewers, factory, water filtration plant, Umbrella labs). Resident Evil 0 and 2 diverge by the way of chopping up the mansion and spreading it out over several interconnected areas.

Resident Evil 3, if I remember correctly, mostly eschewed this design in place of a very fragmented, linear design on the streets of Racoon City. There were a couple of smaller “estates” (the clock tower and the RPD Police Station), but they were much more open-ended. I might be completely off my mark here, but I remember Resident Evil 3 being far more linear than prior games, substituting this freedom in the form of the run or die choices occasionally presented when faced against Nemesis.

Posing the Question of Playability

A few weeks back, I discussed how the Ecliptic Express section preluding the Research Facility at the start of Resident Evil 0 worked as a good tutorial to ease players into the experience. Besides a brief skip through the Racoon City streets at the beginning of the game (part of the only time you actually experience the city outdoors), Resident Evil 2 begins just as Resident Evil did: by dumping you in a large house with riddles to solve—there is no tutorial. On my first play session of Resident Evil 2 though I played for several hours straight, constantly making progress throughout this time and, in fact, only ended my play session because the hours were rolling past midnight. Contrary to Resident Evil where I was frequently drip-fed on a FAQ. I enjoyed Resident Evil 0 and 2 because they made me feel intelligent without sacrificing challenge, however Resident Evil was simply a lesson in frustration. It constantly made me feel stupid. The strange thing is that Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 both start off on the same foot, design-wise, so how is it that my play experiences were so radically different?

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To answer the question generally, I think Resident Evil 2 has a much clearer, obvious design than Resident Evil. In Resident Evil 2, the logic puzzles are—surprisingly enough—based on logic. If you have a crank handle, it goes in a hole. If you have a red gem stone, there will only be one spot where putting that gem stone would seem appropriate. If you have materials for explosives, a note will tell you explicitly that if you put those items together you will make a bomb. While not exactly obvious, Resident Evil 2′s puzzles are far from cryptic; they actually give the player a fighting chance at solving the problem for themselves. In Resident Evil, you’re often presented with items which have no context within the areas you’ve just visited (stones, dragon heads) and clues tend to be more confusing than helpful. In contrast, almost every time I found an item in Resident Evil 2, I knew exactly where I could apply that item and if I didn’t, the item was practical enough for me to assume where it could possibly be used later in the game.

Perhaps not even incidentally, Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 are cryptic and practical, respectively, for good reasons. Resident Evil is cryptic not only because it’s a “remake” of Sweet Home (which had arcane puzzle elements) but also because of the established of George Trevor plot arc. Trevor was intentionally hired to design the mansion on behalf of Umbrella head Ozwell E. Spencer because of his expertise of crafting puzzles, traps and secret doors. Resident Evil 2, on the other hand, is set in a suburban town, so the items available are practical commodity items and the puzzles are thereby more straightforward than the traps Trevor dreamt up.

The other point worth considering is the avenues open to exploration. Both Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 dump you in a large house and leave you to your own devices. Resident Evil leaves the player stranded with two floors with doorways leading all over the mansion. A gunshot steers the player in the general direction. In the Police Station in Resident Evil 2, access to the higher floors are cut off, there are three doors on the ground floor, one of them is locked and in Leon’s game, a police office lets out a scream which explicitly indicates that the layer best investigate. Once you’ve explored the respective room, you’re locked out, leaving only one other avenue to go down. So it’s very clear where to go next, yet it doesn’t dumb down the experience.

Conclusion

Resident Evil 2 breaks the mansion design into several linearly connected areas and in doing so streamlines the overwhelming nature of the original game. Due to the suburban setting, Resident Evil 2‘s puzzles focus on practicality over arcane mystery and as the crux of the title therefore improves accessibility greatly. Overall then, these factors help make Resident Evil 2 a more user-focused puzzle experience which explain why such a title is so highly regarded.

You know, now that I think about it, if I were a FAQ writer, I probably could have quite easily followed through with my original idea.

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