There are a few things I don't like about VVVVVV, not least of which is the clumsy title--I mean, who thought that was clever? A member of the band !!!, perhaps? Cripes. Your character's decidedly squirrely physics are a constant annoyance as well: he lacks any real feeling of momentum and moves a little too fast, very irksome considering the game centers on precision and repetition.
Flaws aside though, I think this is one of the best indie games of the last few years. Developed by Terry Cavanagh, VVVVVV is platforming stripped of all but the most essential elements. Your only goal is to explore the game world in order to find your missing comrades. The only barriers to your progress are the platforming challenges. Your only ability (aside from running left and right) is the gravity flip: if you're standing on a solid surface you can hit the action button to invert the pull of gravity.
Using only this bare-bones approach, Cavanagh still manages to craft an engaging, satisfying, and fiendishly challenging platformer. The genius of this game is its simplicity: the game uses but one mechanic, and takes it to its logical conclusion. Aside from exploration, there is nothing else to the game. There is nothing to confuse the player or obfuscate goals, no collecting digital bric-a-brac in order to progress. Frequent checkpoints and unlimited lives mean that the challenges come in tiny chunks, isolated from one another: you only have to worry about the challenge at hand, then move on to the next.
In fact, without that simple approach, this game would not be enjoyable. There are parts that are so punishingly hard, you have to break the challenges into small, discrete pieces. You wouldn't want to have to tackle this challenge after completing an entire level:
Did you watch that video or the trailer above with the sound on? You should. The chiptune soundtrack, by Magnus Pålsson (aka SoulEye), is absolutely incredible. You can also purchase the soundtrack album, PPPPPP, at Pålsson's website.
If you follow this blog religiously--and hey, I'm sure all of you do--you may remember a post I made back in June about the announcement of New Super Mario Bros. Wii. That announcement heralded not only the first 2D Mario game to grace a console in almost 15 years (Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island was released for the SNES way back in 1995), but also the first Mario game ever to support simultaneous multiplayer. I consider myself something of a Mario connoisseur, and to say I was excited when I heard about this game is a gross understatement.
I got the game on the day of its release, November 15, and I've had some time to take it in (and time enough to complete the game in its entirety--all the secrets, all the Star Coins, everything. 100%.) The short version of my review: hot damn, I love this game!
But there's more to it than that. For one thing, this game is pretty hard to review in the proper context. It's far better than its immediate predecessor, the somewhat uninspired New Super Mario Bros. for Nintendo DS, which it hews close to in terms of physics, visual aesthetic, sound design and other basic elements. But it also bears many similarities to Super Mario Bros. 3 and Super Mario World, and I think it's clear that this game's designers intended for it to remind players of those earlier masterpieces. Those are two of the best games ever made, and also two of my favorites--I'm not that dumb, I know I can't objectively judge something with a pedigree that means so much to me personally. What I think I should do instead is judge it based on the reactions and responses it coaxed from me as a fan, as someone who was hoping for a worthy successor to classic 2D Mario games.
And those reactions were almost universally positive. The level design, the visual design, the music, the control, the overarching vibe of the game--it all feels right to me. It feels natural, appropriate. It feels like a Mario game.
For one thing, it's clever and inventive without being too obvious about it. Other designers prefer to hit you over the head with their innovations. This is more of a slow burn: there are "wow" moments when you're first playing, but the real revelation of just how good it is comes as you begin to get more familiar with the subtleties of the game. Visually it's comparatively spartan, with simple geometry, clean lines, bright colors. It's uncluttered, with nothing unnecessary to distract you except for when the level design calls for it. Though relatively unadorned, it's a beautiful, cartoony dreamworld--inviting, unthreatening, but intriguing.
This visual aesthetic greatly benefits from the music too. For one, there are some truly outstanding takes on the classic underground theme, not to mention some fantastic map music too: subtle, playful, always perfect for the setting. The tunes are memorable, catchy, atmospheric, but they don't exactly take center stage--they serve as a complement to the scenery and gameplay. That's Mario.
The control takes a little getting used to, but it's really just as tight as you'd reasonably expect for a Mario game. Some people may not like the motion controls, but with a little practice it's never hard to do exactly what you want to. You're never caught struggling to pull off some arcane special move or frustrated by some jump that you can't quite figure out how to do. You can tell what's possible and what's not, the issue is whether you can hack it.
And the level design, always the beating heart of a Mario game, is great here as well. Whether it lives up to the lofty standards of creativity set by its predecessors is up for debate (I think it does), but the key qualities are all there: a gentle difficulty curve, consistency, and intuitiveness. No level is so wildly different from any other as to make it inscrutable, and even the most fiendishly well-hidden secrets are hinted at through the placement of obstacles, environmental hazards, items, coins, or enemies. The really challenging parts leave you eager to try again ("Oh, I can do that!"), not discouraged. You can see and understand your path, always: these are unmistakably Mario levels.
Here are some of my favorites. (If you haven't played the game yet and don't like having surprises ruined for you, don't watch these--especially the last one!)
Another great reference, this time to 5-6 from Super Mario Bros. 3
8-7
Be still, my heart.
9-7
This level is deliciously brutal, probably the hardest in the whole game.
Bowser boss fight
And then there's the multiplayer. The game's marketing has highlighted this feature, but really the (simultaneous!) two- to four-player mode is just the icing on the cake, and what delectable icing it is. Appreciate it fully, because it is both very fun and an entirely new way to play Mario. It takes getting used to, and can be challenging (I think it makes the game harder in a number of ways), but it is a pleasure not to be missed. With the exception of a short minigame in Super Mario Bros. 3, previous Mario games allowed virtually no interaction between players. No more taking turns and waiting to play now, and interaction has gone from minimal to constant. The the dynamic of a multiplayer game vacillates between cooperative and competitive with delightful ease too--you will curse your friends and loved ones and enjoy doing it very much. This is new, and I don't know if it feels like Mario to me yet, but it works. Trust me.
I think this mode also allows less skilled players to enjoy the game more, since as long as you're not out of lives and there's another surviving player, when you die you come back in a bubble, safe until another player pops it (you can enter a bubble at will too). It doesn't diminish the challenge, but it makes dying not as catastrophic. Given this aspect of the multiplayer and the Super Guide feature that's present in single-player mode, it's possible for even neophytes to see a good portion of the game.
Which brings me to the difficulty. Like all Mario games, New Super Mario Bros. Wii isn't meant to be intimidating, not even in the later levels. It is easy overall, perhaps too easy for some people's tastes, but it's also flexible enough to allow you to get really, really good. You can do much more than is apparent at first: the game is intended to be experimented with, to be mastered at higher and higher levels. The "Super Skills" videos that you can unlock as you progress through the game are explicit examples that the game is intended to be "pushed" in this way by the player. They say, "See what you can do in this game? I bet you never thought of trying this!" Exploiting the game in non-obvious ways is one of the hallmarks of Mario, and this game not only delivers on that, it provides tutorials.
As far as I know, this is a recording of live play. With enough practice, you and three other people could conceivably do this too.
Even the "Star Coin" and "Secret Goal" videos show off some cool tricks and skillful playing. The game actually goes out of its way to teach you the heights of mastery that can be reached. It shows you where to go, and getting there is fun. It's Mario, and it feels fantastic. Hot damn, I love this game.
Today, I got an email from one Ami Dar, and in honor of that individual's highly improbable name, I decided to make a quick post about Konami's 1981 arcade game Amidar. It's nothing special, just another entry in the maze-game craze that Pac-Man had set off earlier in '81, but it's an enjoyable game, kind of a combination of Pac-Man and Taito's Qix, an interesting mix in and of itself.
Each level is an uneven grid, and you have to color in the boxes outlined by that grid while avoiding enemies, the titular Amidars. There are two types of levels: one, more like Pac-Man, has you freely collecting pellets for points, coloring in the boxes when all the bordering pellets have been collected. The other, more like Qix, dispenses with the pellets and restricts your movement more: you still have to color in each box, but you have to progress by coloring in adjacent boxes, progressively expanding your "conquered territory" as it were. In these levels, each box gives you a point reward once colored in (bigger boxes yield bigger bonuses).
Also, coloring in the four corner boxes on any level gives you a brief period of invulnerability in which you can kill the Amidars for points, just like power pellets in Pac-Man. There's also a jump button, which you can use three times per level, but it actually makes your enemies jump, an unusual design decision even in 1981 when jumping was still not firmly established as a common gameplay mechanic.
There is also a bonus level you get to play in between levels, featuring, guess what? Bonus fruit, of course.
As I mentioned above, this game is nothing special, but I think it's fun, and it's worth a try if you like maze games or early '80s arcade games.
Tower of Greed is a straightforward score-oriented platforming game, made by Epic Shadow, with one very clever twist.
Your goal is to rack up a high score by collecting gems as you climb a tower. You also collect trophies by meeting certain requirements as you play, such as killing a certain number of enemies, or reaching a certain score threshold. Forced vertical scrolling means that you have to be moving constantly upward--fall too far below the bottom of the screen and your game ends. The obstacles are standard fare for platformers: tricky jumps, a small selection of pesky enemies, and environmental hazards like spikes and disappearing platforms. All these can kill you, but what will do you in most often is your own greed--and this is what makes the game so ingenious.
Unlike other high-score games, you don't just play Tower of Greed until you die. As you climb the tower you will periodically be presented with a door. You can exit the tower through these doors, thus saving your score and any trophies you were awarded in that game. If you die before exiting the tower, your score and trophies are lost. In other words, you have to weigh the risk of continuing on for still more booty against the reward of getting out with your "earnings" intact.
There are a few other elements to the game, like several items that you can pick up and use, but this risk-benefit analysis, this constant temptation to climb ever upwards for more gems, is what the gameplay centers around. It's no accident that, as you see a door, there is invariably a bonanza of gems just above it. The game's designers consistently use the layout of the levels to say, "Hey, you don't really want to stop now do you?" It's very clever, very inventive design.
I was only able to find one video of Tower of Greed in action, and it's sped up (starting at around the 0:10 mark), but it should still give you a good idea of what the gameplay is like:
It's not only very addictive, but it's reasonably deep too. There are a whopping 64 trophies to collect, and floor sequences are randomized based on a difficulty-scaling algorithm, so not only can the game employ meticulously-constructed levels, it's also never exactly the same twice.
Its chiptune background music is pretty nice too, if repetitive.
I tagged this post as racing, but as you can see from the title, I don't actually think it's a racing game. But that's its best fit in terms of a broader genre, and categorizing it at all is somewhat futile: Out Run stands alone. There are other games that play similarly but considered in total, this game is unique.
Sprung from the mind of brilliant and prolific Sega wunderkind Yu Suzuki, Out Run runs on the same basic hardware as a number of other Suzuki-directed arcade hits, including Hang-On, After Burner and Space Harrier, and it uses the same "Super-Scaler" sprite-scaling technology that gave those games their distinctive look and pretty convincing 3D feel (for the time anyway). As with these other games, Sega tried to make Out Run a more engaging gaming experience than its competitors with the cabinet design. Like some Super Hang-On cabinets allowed you to sit on a simulacrum of a motorcycle and actually lean into the turns, like some After Burner cabinets had a rotating cockpit, Out Run appeared in cabinets that allowed you to sit in something resembling the red Ferrari Testarossa from the game. One version featured a simple car that just rotated left and right, but the "deluxe" cabinet had a cosmetically fancier car that was actually hydraulically actuated: it moved side to side, up and down, even jostled you when you crashed.
But such gimmicks are deceptive. The key to Out Run's appeal is the mood it sets, the vibe, and eye-catching though the ostentatious cabinet may have been, it was the gameplay that provided the ambiance.
Which brings us back to the title of this post: Out Run is about driving, not racing. It is not about tense competition or white-knuckle action, though it does demand skill and precision. It is not about compiling good lap times or practicing the best line on a sequence of curves. What it is about, as the Wikipedia article so deftly puts it, is "luxury and relaxation."
You're racing against a clock, and the game is pretty challenging, but from the start the clear implication is that you're doing this for the enjoyment of it all, the simple thrill of speed and the open highway. For one thing, you do not control a helmeted expert driver strapped into a Formula One race car or something similar; you control a dude in sunglasses, with a leggy blonde in the passenger seat, in a presumably road-legal Ferrari, with the convertible top down so you can enjoy the wind in your hair and see the sights that much better.
That "sightseeing" aspect is really the most important element of the gameplay: Out Run, very unusual for a car-centric game, really focuses on exploration more than anything else. Like the industry-changing Super Mario Bros., part of Out Run's appeal is that as you play the game, you continually open up new areas, you see new, novel things on your way to your ultimate destination--and reaching that destination is your main objective, more so than achieving a high score. Being an arcade game, Out Run didn't de-emphasize the high-score aspect of gameplay as much as Super Mario Bros. did, but still, it is exploration that primarily motivates the player. You're not just doing the same thing over and over like in Asteroids, and you don't just play the same levels again and again in sequence like in Donkey Kong. You're trying to see what's in the next stage, and hopefully see what's at the end goal, before the clock runs out and prevents you from doing so. The point is to successfully arrive at your destination, to complete your exploration, to "close the frontier," as it were. You can in fact tell that this was a deliberate decision by Suzuki and his design team: at each checkpoint, where you get time added to the clock, you are also presented with a fork in the road. Every stage branches into two others, and with a total of four checkpoints in each route, that gives the game 15 unique stages--each with its own scenery and distinct feel--as well as five different "finish lines" to reach, each with its own unique ending sequence.
The game's structure not only emphasizes exploration, but also makes exploration and aesthetic novelty ("Hey, what's in this stage that I haven't been to yet?") the main factor in the game's great replayability. For a driving game that was released in arcades in 1986, that is incredibly innovative.
The game's attract mode highlights this as well. Most arcade attract modes will show a little gameplay, then the high score table, maybe a public service message, and then another gameplay sequence. Out Run shows some gameplay from the first stage, then pauses to show the high score table, then continues the same gameplay sequence--it doesn't show you some isolated gameplay examples, it shows you an extended gameplay session. In fact, it shows you an entire playthrough of the game: where the finish line would be, the attract mode just slides back into the first stage and continues. It's saying to the potential player, "Look, it keeps going!" It shows you that it's not just about driving by the occasional tree or rock sprite, progressing along a nondescript road--no, there's exciting, uncharted territory to be explored, and you can do it in style. Look at this game. Don't you want to be in that red Ferrari, next to that babe, cruising along that seaside road?
And as innovative as the gameplay is, as cool as the varied scenery is, perhaps the most important element in setting the mood for the game is the excellent music composed by Hiroshi Miyauchi. You have a choice of three different jams, and each brilliantly augments the exotic and adventurous feel of the race/road trip. Take a listen:
Try watching the mostly silent attract mode and you'll see that the game is not nearly as compelling without the music. Even the tune that plays over the name entry screen, "Final Wave," is amazing, perfectly complementing the accompanying image of roadside palm trees silhouetted by the sunset. It turns something as mundane as entering your initials into a pleasantly soothing dénouement to the little adventure you just completed.
Out Run is not so much a video game as it is a vacation.
Note: this ROM may not work with the latest version of MAME, I'm not sure. If it doesn't work for you, just grab "outrun.zip" from a recent MAME set--torrents are easy to find.
Canabalt is a neat little flash game (and free, as flash games tend to be). It's similar to Dino Run, one of the best flash games I have ever played, in that you just run to the right, trying to get as far as you can. Canabalt is simpler than Dino Run, and is even simple by the standards of flash games: you play as some kind of escapee (this is never fully explained, although the silhouettes of giant robots you can see moving in the background may have something to do with it), and you must jump from rooftop to rooftop in your attempt to skedaddle. Your character runs to the right and accelerates automatically--all you have to do is jump, and avoid falling between buildings. That's it.
Hazards come in the form of objects you can bump into that will slow you down, objects that suddenly fall from the sky to block your path, buildings that begin to crumble as soon as you set foot on them, and buildings whose rooftops are out of reach, forcing you to jump through a window instead. There is a minimal element of strategy, like sometimes you want to hit obstacles on purpose to make sure you don't accelerate too much, but mostly the game is just about quick jumping reflexes. Scores come in the form of distance traveled--no time component, no bonus points, no nothing. Just keep jumping, and get as far as you can. From what I can tell, the level layouts are generated randomly, which is nice: it makes the game purely about reflexes, with no memorization component.
Given its very simple nature, Canabalt is not much more than a diversion, but it's still a quality game.
Trust me. That katakana does say Toilet Kids. And it's not just a clever title; the introductory sequence shows a young lad being whisked into the toilet for a fantastic fever-dream adventure. It's Little Nemo meets, well, sewage I guess.
The game is a decent shooter, nothing special, with Xevious-style gameplay: a number of enemy patterns in this game are taken directly from Xevious, but even more noticeable are the air-to-surface bombs that you have in addition to a forward shot--hence the cross-hairs in front of your character--which is a mechanic that Xevious pioneered.
It's also similar to the TwinBee series (which was itself a Xevious derivative) in that power-ups fall down the screen towards you, and you can juggle them with shots. Actual gameplay aside though, this game is entirely unique. It reminds you at almost every possible interval that its title is indeed Toilet Kids.
Some enemies shoot farts at you.
The three levels of difficulty are Easy, Medium, and Heavy. Um...
The first miniboss is a trio of spiders with what appear to be enormous butts.
