Fun for Five Minutes: Crash Commando

December 12th, 2008

Obviously life over here in Shanghai is consuming my time by the bowl fulls. I do have the intention of keeping this place as regularly updated as possible, but given the circumstances I’m not sure how much more toothpaste I can squeeze out the tube. In anycase, I have a terrible cold at the moment which has opened up the opportunity for a few days downtime admits the Christmas rush. As such I want to jump back into things with an almost PR-worthy piece plugging this awesome trailer that I just watched. Losing my credibility? Nah, not yet.

Okay, so that trailer I just saw was for Crash Commando for the Playstation Network. You might recall hearing about it last E3, it’s very much like a high definition Contra, with characters the size of ants and microscopic laser sights. It looks like a neat, inspired offering with a few new generation assets included

The trailer – while cliché in parts – is admittedly pretty cute. It takes the ethos surrounding its inspiration and churns out something pretty entertaining and humourous. Usually these intentionally over-the-top rips at flamboyant humour grow quite tiring, but this one made me giggle. I think it’s because the writing is probably better than most and not so jerky.

I honestly don’t believe that Crash Commando will be a particularly brilliant title, but hey that’s my engrossing for five minutes. I’ll try to get myself to write something more wholesome over the weekend. Likely something related to Quake, which I finished a few weeks ago.

Play Impressions (5/11/2008)

November 4th, 2008

secret santa

Merry Gear Solid

Being smaller, less riskier endeavors, indie games often surprise us with humorous jabs at the medium itself, because they can. Some of these games push mild insights into the developers opinion, others base themselves solely around the art of parody. Merry Gear Solid does the latter.

Merry Gear Solid as the name suggests is a Christmas themed parody of the Metal Gear Solid franchise. Likening itself to the classic 2D Metal Gear games, Merry Gear Solid plays like a small, half hour episode from the series, wrapped in the Christmas décor. You, Solid Santa must infiltrate a house full of children to plant your presents under the Christmas tree. Along the way you will obtain a series of items, all throwbacks to the series mainstays which allow you to progress through the cleverly designed household

It’s very surprising to see just how much care has been taken in developing this title. The sprites and animations all look perfect and would fit in nicely with the Pokemon games. The writing is superb and consistently strong with clever puns and jabs at series staples as well as Christmas culture. The level designs are also excellent and utilize multiple strings of problem solving. The whole package is just top notch and it maintained my interest for the whole pay session. With this game as a template, I think that the potential of an independent installment of the series could easily be done, that I would love to see.

Magical Toy Chest (Demo)

Having developed educational software for children before I can understand the challenge involved in designing a game for this market. The trick is trying to keep the accessibility and difficulty in equilibrium so that the child can grasp the concept of the game easily and then remained engaged for the length of the experience. This means thinking hard about how to introduce the game, what language to use, how to layout the menus, when to provide tips, when to let the child explore on their own, when to throw some education at them etc. This is a tough job to keep up. Magical Toy Chest by Graduate Games in this regard fairs quite well, probably about as well as I did, although that is obviously biased.

Magic Toy Quest is another one of those popular physics based games which require you to orientate objects in a 2D environment to see what happens when you set everything off. These games make you feel like the king of your own small world, self-indulgently lining up dominos and watching them fall over.

magic toy chest

I started off talking about educational games and indeed Magical Toy Chest is one of those. What I most like about the game is how it implements the learning elements. In order to get the toys into the chest you need to first set up a path for the target toy (the toy that you want to get into the box) to travel. This requires placing set pieces (other toys as selected from a side menu) in the environment and then using another toy (yeah it’s all toys!) to nudge the target toy into the right direction. This all amounts to a lot of problem solving and experimentation all of which become pretty engaging.

The game is intended to represent cleaning up your room but feels more like having fun considering that you need to use have to get more toys out to knock the more into the box.

In fact the idea of cleaning your room by creating more mess is contradictory. You’ll occasionally need to start by picking up the keys in the environment to open the chest, despite this you can’t just pick up the toys and put them in the box. Overall it isn’t very organic game design and I found it to form an initial hindrance.

Once you get over these things then the game starts to kick into its own and becomes really quite enjoyable. There are a few hitches like this, mainly to do with those issues of balancing to the audience but at it’s core Magic Toy Quest is fun, and has plenty to offer. It’s hard not to recommend this title as it excels in most areas.

Metal Gear Solid 4 – Smoking Metaphor

October 6th, 2008

metal gear solid 4 act 1

I’ve been thinking about Metal Gear Solid 4 again, sorting through the game’s many metaphorical elements to discern a connection to other something article worthy. I think I’ve got one, I’m sure that I’ll have a few more in future, here goes.

Spoilers, of course, including the game's conclusion.

Throughout the Metal Gear series, smoking has always been significant, to a certain degree. There’s obviously a connection between cigarettes and the ‘grizzled soldier’ stereotype of Solid Snake (main character) . Quite often the cancer inducing product is cleverly melded into the gameplay too. Such as in the original game where smoking slowed down the timer of a bomb, prompted to detonate, giving our hero a greater chance of escape.

In Metal Gear Solid 4, the role of cigarettes represents a crucial piece of Snake’s fading identity, in a world which has succeeded him. As the game’s introduction puts it “war has changed”, war in MGS4 is no longer about training and experience, it’s about manufactured output. Something that Snake has a hard time dealing with.

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Tags: metal gear solid 4

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