Fanged tadpoles, giant turtles with tank treads for back legs, obese juggling beetles and magpies wearing pink toupees: Axel & Pixel’s rolling countryside is a colouring-in book representation of Dante’s milder cheese dreams. Settled in an esoteric circle somewhere between divine comedy and inferno, the scrapbook aesthetic combines photographic backgrounds with Terry Gilliam-esque creature animations to create something at once soothing and unsettling. The effect is heightened by one of gaming’s most exquisite ambient soundtracks, one that teeters between twee and heartbreak. This would also be an appropriate way to describe the game’s premise, which has you directing Axel, a red bereted painter and his chubby hound Pixel in pursuit of a rat that has stolen the keys to their house. Fail to catch him so before winter sets in, and they’ll freeze to death, a menacing fairytale chaser worthy of Grimm himself.
As in Samarost and other mute, ponderous adventure games of this ilk, your interactions with the game world flow through a magic pointer, used to prod at the scenery and inhabitants to trigger micro-events. Poke a berry on a tree branch and it’ll animate to life, swelling and ripening before your eyes. Click on it again and it’ll drop to the ground for Axel to collect. Click on the upturned acorn holder nearby and Axel will crush the fruit inside it, the resulting mulchy liquid then able to be used on another item in the environment as you follow the elaborate puzzle sequence to its conclusion. Much of the core game is spent investigating the four or five objects in the environment that are clickable at any one time, working out in what order to you must trigger their events in order to remove whatever obstacle is preventing Axel and Pixel from progressing through the current screen to the next.
Sometimes the logic of what you must do in a situation is clear: the water wheel that powers the windmill needed to blow your sailboat across a lake is broken. Find a way to fix it. In these cases the challenge consists of feeling out the footholds of interaction that will take you to your objective. However, a great deal of the time you’ll be clicking on objects at random, stuffing seeds into holes, blowing at dandelions, trying anything and everything in search of a clear short-term goal. That’s par for the course with this style of adventure game, in which finding the shape and contour of each puzzle is as important as solving it. But nonetheless, the payoffs are most rewarding when you work out where a logic sequence is headed before you arrive at its conclusion, rather than merely tracing the screen in search of another trigger point and hoping for the best.
Who knows what crease in Nippon Ichi’s psyche draws the developer continually back to the anti-hero. Perhaps its scriptwriters were picked on by prefects at school, or maybe the CEO was never any good at team sports. Whatever the reason, from Disgaea to Makai Kingdom, the studio has rarely cast players as anything but a demonic villain hell-bent on the destruction of everything good and respectable in its games. It’s more than just a decision to dodge the comfortable fantasy cliché of knights in shining valour. They understand the perverse delight that comes from surrendering to absolute corruption, of assuming the role of an amiable hyper-villain, especially one hapless enough to be mocked and glorified in equal measure.
Badman – as we’ll refer to it in shorthand, acknowledging that our time on this page, not to mention this earth, is limited and that a tortuously long game title is a joke that tickles just the once – is no different, at least in terms of its theme. You play as the God of Destruction, a supreme, disembodied entity charged with designing a labyrinthine underground lair, complete with its own devilish ecosystem, ready to entrap and destroy any would-be adventurers who enter it. It’s a good premise that clothes a framework that defies simple classification. Part Tower Defense-esque, part-architecture ‘em up, part ant-farm biology class, it’s a game that draws from a great many traditions, seasoning its hotchpotch systems with an 8-bit aesthetic that hammers home the premise’s subversion of RPG tradition.
Your only mode of interaction with the game world is via a pickaxe, primarily used for hollowing out the cave system that will form an underground fortress for your as-yet-unborn horde to roam. You have a few minutes to make preparations, digging chambers and tunnels like you’re on a Dwarf Fortress speed run, before one or more archetypal RPG heroes storm your dungeon with a view to murdering your minions and carrying off your main disciple, the titular Badman. If they manage to make it out of your dungeon alive, with Badman in tow, the game is over and you’ll need to start again from scratch, in an effort to build a less penetrable fortress and a more sustainable army.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here
Cigs on the Queen’s bed. Chris Donlan pointed out that this provides an excellent premise for the next Jonathan Blow game: wandering dark corridors, eating cheese, finding out your Queen is always in another bedroom…
Scribblenauts made hideous flesh:
Google turns making adding 3D buildings to Google Earth into a sort of game.
Halfway into Borderlands’ development, Gearbox Software changed everything. A game that started out a dour shower of browns, greys and post-apocalyptic shadows was fed through the Crackdown filter and came out a blaze of SEGA blues, Mario shine yellows and Jet Set cel-shading.
The visual rewrite has done more than merely distinguish the game from its nearest rival, Fallout 3. It also accentuates the Mad Max humour of planet Pandora’s inhabitants and scenarios, turning grisly headshots into party-popper exclamations while, to be frank, making the world a far more pleasant place to be. Any tourist of a science-fiction planet overrun by rag-wearing sand-bandits acknowledges the risk of having one’s balls torn off by a pet rabid mutant hyena. So why not balance the dark risks with some bright, happy vistas?
Twisting graphical conventions isn’t Borderlands’ only novelty. From its unique concoction of ideas plucked from varied influences, Gearbox is hoping to birth an entirely new sub-genre, the RPS, or “Role-Playing Shooter”, as they’re calling it. In truth, this is really just a catchphrase way of articulating a more general trend in action games that has gained momentum in recent years: combining first-person run-and-gun combat with player-defined character progression.
As with Fallout 3, your character earns experience points for every kill and mission completed. At level-up, you earn a single skill point that can be spent on one of 21 ability upgrades, increases to accuracy, fire rate, weapon magazine size and suchlike. As you spend points on those areas that best suit your own play style, so a gently unique character of your own making emerges.
You can read the rest of this play-through of the game’s first five hours here.
Now 60 years old, Dave Gibbons has been writing and drawing comics for over half his lifetime. From his formative years working on British institutions such as 2000AD and Dan Dare, Gibbons became best known for his collaboration with Alan Moore on the seminal 1980’s graphic novel Watchmen, the work that single-handedly legitimized a medium previously dismissed by mainstream culture as childish.
In the early 1990s Gibbons was invited to dip into another ostensibly immature medium, that of videogames, by way of a collaboration with Charles Cecil, founder of Revolution Software. Together the pair fronted the creative direction of one of adventure gaming’s most enduring point and click classics, Beneath a Steel Sky.
Now, fifteen years later, the pair has regrouped for last week’s release of Beneath a Steel Sky: Remastered onto iPhone. Eurogamer met with both men to discuss the parallels between their chosen mediums, and to pick over at the past, present and potential future of each man’s work in his respective field.
Eurogamer: How long have you been friends?
Dave Gibbons: It’s been a long, long time – in fact someone sent me a photo today of Charles and I from… was it 15 years ago Charles?
Charles Cecil: It was. Frightening.
Dave Gibbons: In the interim our hair has receded while other things have grown, but I think we must have known each other for probably the best part of 20 years.
Charles Cecil: I got in touch with you when I was at Activision and I left that company in 1989/1990, so yes, about 20 years. Our friendship came about because I was a great fan of Watchmen and thought it would be great to work with Dave in some capacity. Soon after I approached him the old Activision collapsed leading me to found Revolution. I’ve maintained a friendship with Dave ever since.
Dave Gibbons: One of the things I’ve always loved about comics is that you get to collaborate with like-minded people who share your enthusiasm. It’s really the best way in the world to try and make some money. In Charles’ people at Revolution I found that a group of dedicated and enthusiastic, and so I was immediately attracted to that.
Eurogamer: Dave, how did you feel when you first got that offer to work on a videogame? Were you interested in videogames at the time, or did you view them with disdain?
Dave Gibbons: Well, my son at that time was probably about 10 years old and I brought home a computer thinking that I would do the accounts on it, or whatever it was we thought we’d use computers for back then. But in reality I’d spend most of the time looking over his shoulder or playing things like Harrier Attack on the Amstrad.
Although they were only in their infancy I could see that games were going to become something super interesting and just the kind of area where someone with my skills in drawing, writing and conceptualising could prove useful. So I was really pleased to be able to get a toe in the water when Charles called me up.
You can read the full interview over at Eurogamer here.
Fascinating Reddit Q&A with a victim of Scientology. Made me think that exploring the parallels between Scientology and MMO-style leveling would probably make for a useful explanation of its appeal.
Thought the Daigio parry vid was the pinnacle of 3rd Strike showboating? It has competition. 6:00-7:15 in particular.
Michael Moschen performs The Triangle. Dude must be something pretty special when it comes to Peggle.
Robert Kirby, string arranger for Nick Drake died this week. This is one of my favourite pieces of his:
A couple of weeks ago things at Boing Boing’s Offworld fell quiet. Here’s the story (or half of it, at least) from editor Brandon. ☹
Sumo Digital are more Sega than Sega these days. “I’m looking for some sailors. ON THE RACE TRACK”.
Sufjan’s as yet unreleased ‘Joy to the World’ makes everything a little brighter.
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Flipbook animation x 1000 (sorta). Coming soon to an ad agency near you…
Republic Heroes is the very worst sort of licensed videogame: functionally inadequate, creatively redundant and artistically bankrupt. Marketed to parents as a safe Christmas option and aimed at children in the hope of drawing them into a 30-year-old IP in order to secure the next decade’s worth of dead-eyed spin-offs, there are few thrills to be found amongst its dim stars and weary wars. In contrast to its joyous LEGO-based cousin, Republic Heroes is persuasive evidence that many videogames have no ambition beyond mere product, existing merely to expand a brand without enriching it, to widen a mythology without deepening it. It’s cynical, tiring and sells our children short of what they should expect from a publisher with as much experience and expertise as LucasArts and its associated developers.
Based on the anime-through-a-Nickelodeon-lens series of the same name, Republic Hero’s story and visuals are at least consistent with those of its inspiration. Divided into a sizeable three-act campaign, missions are generally no longer than 10 minutes apiece, dividing play between characters such as Anakin Skywalker, Ahsoka Tano and Obi-Wan Kenobi to provide multiple perspectives on the unfolding drama. As fan service to Clone Wars aficionados there are numerous references to plot points from the cartoon series and all of the characters share their sound-a-like TV voice actors, ensuring that the premise at least is not without some niche merit.
In mechanical terms, the structure is little more than a device to allow play to switch between the lightsabre-wielding Jedi and the gun-toting clone troopers, the two main character types found in the game. This helps to keep the basic combat from feeling more immediately repetitive than it is. When playing as a Jedi-style character, you wield a lightsabre and enjoy a Force ‘push’ move to stun or shunt enemies around environments, off ledges and so on. Character animations lack basic fluidity, thereby defying the encouragement of a score multiplier to attempt stringing together combos. The result is a stilted flow of combat that lacks either the smooth acrobatics of The Force Unleashed or the solid workmanlike unfussiness of the LEGO Star Wars titles.
You can read the rest of this review over at vEurogamer here.
Beaterator, as a piece of serious music software masquerading as a videogame, is not without precedent. In 1999, Codemasters’ Music introduced a generation of PlayStation gamers to the world of digital music sequencing and, apocryphally at least, was in part responsible for launching the careers of Dizzee Rascal and The Streets. Beaterator, like Music before it, approximates the form and function of professional mixer packages such as Propellerheads’ Reason, Apple’s Logic and even ProTools, supplying a bevy of Timbaland-endorsed loops alongside the tools to write and even record your own music. The result is an extraordinary piece of diminutive compositional software, one that’s primarily limited by user imagination and perseverance in mastering its somewhat labyrinthine menus and options.
For musicians familiar with the Nintendo DS’ Korg DS 10 package, Beaterator offers a significant upgrade in terms of features and raw potential, despite its somewhat cartoonish frontend. At its core sits an 8-track sequencer allowing up to eight audio channels to be filled with loops of music and then played back simultaneously to create a song. The ‘Song Crafter’ interface will be familiar to anyone who’s dabbled with digital music-creating software. Time’s represented on the X-axis, divided into bars and subdivided into 16th beats. On the Y-axis you’ll find eight rows, each of which can be assigned to a different instrument. By adding loops to these channels you build up your song, adding texture and form layer by layer.
To begin with, the simplest way into Beaterator composition is to pluck ready-made loops from its library of thousands of premade samples. You can search this brimming database by genre or by instrument and, generally, unless otherwise marked, everything is written in the same key as everything else in order to loosely fit together. So, on the first channel you might cue up a drum and bass drum pattern, before adding a dub-style bass on the second channel, a classical guitar on third and so on. All of the loops match to the .bpm of the song template (which can be easily changed at any time) and so, in next to no time, even beginners can have a rhythm and melody up and running.
Of course, while the stock loops are great for finding inspiration, if you want to start making unique creations you’ll need to get stuck in writing your own loops and patterns. This is done via a standard Midi editor tool, which for melodic instruments presents you with a few octaves of a keyboard and then allows you to write in notes by hand along a rudimentary stave, right down to 16ths of a bar. Here you can set the length of each individual note and its associated volume and thus begin to write your own melodies. Once you’re happy with your melodic ‘loop’ you then drop it into the mixer as you would any premade loop.
Samples in the library can all be individually tweaked, adding reverb, phase, and delay effects and you can even go into a waveform editor to, say, reverse a drum loop for style. Of course, you’re fundamentally limited to just 8-tracks of simultaneous audio, so compositions can never become too complicated or layered, but as a pocket sketchpad for ideas, or even a tool for learning the basics of production and music composition, Beaterator is peerless on console platforms. Indeed, almost all of the lessons you’ll learn in piecing together music are directly transferable to the aforementioned desktop programs, so would-be producers can be sure that they won’t pick up any bad or superfluous habits.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.
Infinity Ward is a liar. An excellent liar with a clutch of fantastic, irresistible lies, but a liar nevertheless. Through its Modern Warfare titles it claims to present players with a glimpse of professional conflict’s future, a virtual replication of the horrors and thrills that will soon buffet our soldiers in service to their particular nation’s greater good. And we swallow the story. Who knows if, like many of Hollywood’s action movie producers, Call of Duty is part-funded by the US military? It would certainly be money well spent. As an army recruitment tool the series is unrivalled: how many young men have been drawn to real battlefields, inspired to enlist by their glories on those virtual ones?
But Modern Warfare’s relentless firework display of mortar fire and corridored, Michael Bay-esque set pieces are, in truth, little more than a theme-park approximation of combat. The slick drama, that flows largely absent of reality’s upsets, is more military-themed rollercoaster than sober training tool. As a result, in some far-flung theatre of war, a gamer soldier today lies facedown in the sod, his friends dying all around, no mission checkpoint markers to guide his advances or soft-save his progress, cursing the day he swallowed the lie. Codemasters sidles up alongside him, drops to one knee and presses Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising into his wounded hands, whispering: “If it was truth you were after, soldier, you should have played this.”
Mission 7: Bleeding Edge. My four-man squad is huddled close to the battle’s edge, but not quite close enough. It’s a long walk to the first objective: an enemy AT team blocking a road that must be cleared out before our vehicles can advance. If there’s one thing you’re going to be doing a lot of in Operation Flashpoint, it’s walking. The game’s much-touted 35-mile draw distance may be an excellent back-of-the-box boast, but you’ll rue the scale when you have to trek across it. As a simulation, even these fit marines tire soon enough when running at full pelt, the frantic pulse of their hearts soon vibrating loud through the controller. Moreover, take a stray bullet to the leg and you won’t be running anywhere in a hurry.
As such, I order the team to a nearby armoured vehicle: two in the back, one on the mounted gun; I drive. The road is clear ahead, the de-saturated, next-gen screed of greens and browns uninterrupted by the wobble of enemy movement. Foot down, I move to call up the overhead map to take point but, before the input registers, there’s a *thwap* and the screen falls black. In Operation Flashpoint, like war, there are no archangels to soundtrack the transition from this world to the next. Death is instant, usually unexpected and never vainglorious. I didn’t even get to see my mind splatter on the windshield, or the cold smirk of the twitching sniper who, 2km away, took the shot.
When it comes to military simulations, console gamers have been poorly served in recent years. The Ghost Recon series’ transition from Xbox to Xbox 360 shifted the game from military sim to military rollercoaster, thus doing away with one of Xbox Live’s most popular serious multiplayer war-games. It’s this long vacant niche that Dragon Rising steps into, its business primarily frowning over huge maps, plotting paths through enemy patrols before inching forward through the undergrowth, breath baited, knees a-knocking.
Through a single player campaign of eleven missions you take control of a four-man squadron of US marines, taking on the Chinese army in an effort to free a Russian island taken over by the PLA. Each mission is divided into a handful of objectives, which you are free to make your way towards in pretty much any fashion you see fit: direct, as the crow flies through enemy machine gun emplacements, or via sweeping detours around the island.
The emphasis on realism means that, despite the contemporary weaponry, you’re not guaranteed a headshot just because you lined one up perfectly. For players mollycoddled by recent FPS military titles this will be a rude awakening. Want to switch from an assault rifle to a bazooka and you’ll have to sit through a painstaking ten second animation in which you lay the weapon on the ground before uncasing a rocket and gingerly loading it in. As such, every manoeuvre has to be carefully plotted, closing distance before attacking, making use of terrain and the islands copious foliage cover, thinking like a soldier rather than an action game hero.
You can read the rest of this review over at Eurogamer here.
