It’s gaming’s oldest trick: the mute protagonist, allowing us to project our own thoughts, words and humanity onto the blank slate avatar. But Portal 2′s silent heroine Chell invites us to identify with her in deeper ways. She is the white-collar worker in all of us, awakened to the corrupt, abusive system in which she operates in the first Portal, before raging against that machine in this sequel.
That her weaponry is wits, not bullets, places her closer to us still. She relates to our menial desk jobs better than any Gordon Freeman or Master Chief ever could. Those armoured warriors are metaphors for our night fantasies, gung-ho heroes who shoot first and ask questions never, thoughtless yet cathartic lightening rods for our daily frustrations.
Chell, meanwhile, is our daytime fantasy, sticking it to the man with silent, determined quick-wittedness, watching the perverse system crash down about her as she prods at it, not content till the entire corrupt operation has been sucked into space, the void where it belongs.
Fitting, perhaps, that Portal 2 should be game of the year in which the financial systems of our world collapse about us, silent Guy Fawkes protestors staging sit-ins as the GlaDOS’s of our world lurk unseen. Portal 2 is a comedy, for sure, but it is a black one. Wheatley and GLaDOS are two sides of the same, inhumane system, wooing us with their empty promises and cheeky witticisms like so many bank adverts. But beneath the jokes and smiles, these are monsters that want to destroy us. We understand that now.
Chell allows us to turn the tables, not with guns or flames, but with portals that allow us to turn the system’s anger against itself, deflecting it away from us to its point of dastardly origin. In that way, Portal 2′s catharsis (and what is a video game if not catharsis written in zeroes and ones) is so much deeper and more satisfying than the adolescent rage of so many first person shooters.
The writing is smarter than any other video game, and the puzzles enjoy a clockwork wonder that allows us all to feel special, smart. But Portal 2′s true appeal is in allowing us all to take down our personal Aperture Science Labs, to taste the justice that we all crave. In this way, Portal 2 occupied 2012′s hearts more than any other.
Read contributions from other Eurogamer writers on the site’s GOTY here.
A hazy myth, an elegant contraption, an eccentric vision, an unforgiving mistress: Dark Souls has many sides. All bear the fingerprints of creator Hidetaka Miyazaki, who in 2011 established himself as the most interesting designer working in blockbuster games today. Not that this, sequel to Sony-born Demon’s Souls, has much aside from giant sales figures to identify it as a big hitter. In all other ways it eschews the churning mainstream, taking design decisions that are both unfashionable and, prior to its chart-dominating success, seemingly commercially unworkable.
Because it’s a game that obscures its precise systems with the fog of misdirection, whispering clues that lead nowhere, forcing you to feel out its systems and geography, absent of any handholding. For players used to explicit goals with well-furrowed roads to reach them, this feels like play with the stabilisers removed. Indeed, when it comes to your task and the route by which you arrive at it, Dark Souls has nothing to say.
Its tutorials come as paper cut admonishments; training levels that suckerpunch you back to bonfire save points with nothing to show for your troubles but some muscle memory, a bruised ego and another plan that must be torn up and replaced with something better. Dark Souls has nothing to say to players who wish to succeed simply by showing up.
The single save slot and constant recording of progress make rewinding the clock on your history impossible and as such this is a game that asks you to own your choices like no other, wearing failures as defining scars. Dark Souls has no mechanism for players wanting quick reloads that allow them to, attempt by attempt, write the perfect journey through the game.
The complex weave of non-player character storylines carries on about you regardless of your attention, and the lines between friend and foe are blurred. Favours are just as likely to be repaid with brutal backstabbing as shiny trinkets. For players used to being repaid in gold and reverence by their virtual quest-givers, Dark Souls has nothing to say.
Instead the game relies on the messages of others to give hope and inspiration. The mystified multiplayer is quite unlike anything else in games, the opportunity for voice chat barred by Miyazaki, limiting communication to messages scrawled onto the ground by other players in their worlds, and pulled into your own. “Ambush coming up,” warns one. “Shoot its tail,” instructs another. In the early stages of the game the sense of asynchronous camaraderie is beguiling, even though the deliberate down scoping of the console’s features feels old-fashioned.
Dark Souls is a game that calls to screen horrifying terrors, crocodile-skinned leviathans, fire-breathing drakes and obese executioners that pound toward you with single-minded urgency. But the most frightening demons are perhaps those it summons from within us. The petulant child gamer, who throws her controller at the wall in frustration; the irascible teenager who stops playing the moment he stops winning, all red-faced sulk. These are ghosts from the past we have supposedly matured away from, and yet in Lodran’s stony network of brutality, they are called to the surface. Dark Souls has no words of indulgence for the bruised ego. Rather, those demons must be exorcised if you wish to progress, or embraced if you wish to submit.
You can read the rest of this feature at Eurogamer.
“Most people would assume it’s the money that hurts most and yes, the entire thing made us question whether we would be able to support ourselves financially moving forward. But that isn’t the main blow you take when your game is cloned. It’s more abstract, more fundamental than that…”
Cloning – the practice of reverse engineering a video game and releasing one’s own version for profit – is nothing new to the games industry. In 1976 Ralf Baer, designer of the first commercial games console, the Magnavox Odyssey, settled out of court with Atari following allegations that the company stole the mechanics, aesthetic and half of the title of his rudimentary tennis game, Ping-Pong, to create the seminal arcade hit, Pong.
Then, in October, a Californian court began preliminary hearings in a case between publishing giant Ubisoft and OG International, the former claiming that the latter’s Nintendo Wii title Get Up and Dance uses “nearly identical” game design, avatars and instructor visuals to its own hugely successful Just Dance series.
In recent times, following the rise of the App Store where, thanks to low costs and shorter development periods, studios can be far more responsive to popular trends, claims of game plagiarism are becoming more commonplace – and it is not only limited to the blockbusting behemoths.
Far from being a minor setback, the news that your game has been cloned can have a huge impact for a small developer. Indeed, for Rami Ismail of Vlambeer Games, who discovered the company’s popular webgame Radical Fishing had been reverse engineered, re-skinned and released on the App Store by Gamenauts as Ninja Fishing, the news was nothing short of devastating.
“We became demotivated us to the point where we had to delay everything we were working on for months,” he says. “Seeing someone copy and release something you worked so hard on to create, something you put so many hours and thoughts and so much research into, something you tweaked for weeks … it’s painful. It stifles your ability be creative because your mind wanders to ‘those guys’ taking the credit for your hard work. It’s an odd feeling.”
As is often the case for developers finding out their game has been remade, Vlambeer was altered to the clone through Twitter. “We were at the office, working on Serious Sam: The Random Encounter, when we noticed there were 40-something new tweets mentioning us on Twitter. They were all from our fans, furious about the trailer for Ninja Fishing that had just been posted online.
“We decided to take a step back and check the trailer to see how much of a clone it was before speaking out publicly. We went through one segment of the trailer frame-by-frame to see if the upgrades they had available in the game were similar to ours. They were identical. That’s when we realised this wasn’t coincidence. But we still decided to wait and see if the cloners would contact us to explain what had happened.
“When we heard from them, they offered us all sorts of things, but we told them that we wouldn’t want to implicitly condone cloning. We said we’d prefer for them to just change their game so that credits or money wouldn’t be necessary. When it became clear they weren’t going to do that, we proposed that they’d delay their game so that our iOS version of the game (which was still in development) and their clone would release on the same day, giving both games an equal chance in the App Store. They replied with a really short mail back that basically said: ‘We can’t do that and we’re releasing tomorrow.’ ”
While finding out that a rival company has plagiarised your hard work may sting, there is little legal recourse for developers who believe their game idea has been appropriated. The issue is that video games are creative in both visual and aural terms, but also in purely functional terms, and the laws that govern these elements are fundamentally different.
Alex Chapman, a lawyer at Sheridan’s specialising in games, says: “Generally speaking there is no copyright in a game mechanic or the functionality of a game (or indeed any other type of software). Copyright will protect the visual appearance of the game to the extent that it is original – such as by protecting the graphics, screen layouts and art assets. It will also protect the underlying software code. However, it will not protect the functionality.
“Most games are derivative of something else. Think of the first game of its type and you could say that all games that followed it are clones. This is why the functionality is not protected by copyright. A great deal of skill will generally go into making a lawful game with a similar mechanic to another. The unlawful ones tend to be highly derivative of the original and in those cases there is often something that can be done.
“For example, there may be a case in unfair competition if the consumer looks at one game advertised on the App Store and is deceived into believing it originates from another business who may have a reputation in a type of game. But in terms of the core idea? If developers weren’t allowed to copy functionality then we wouldn’t have Call of Duty or Fifa.”
Indeed, while Gamenauts CEO and founder Stanley Adrianus is happy to admit that his game was inspired by Vlambeer’s title, he is also quick to point out that it is far from an “exact copy”.
“We openly acknowledge the fact that Ninja Fishing was inspired by Radical Fishing,” he says. “But Ninja Fishing is not identical. We implemented many gameplay tweaks, changing the shooting mechanic from the original game to the sword slicing one in our version in order to require more skill of the player. We also closed some gameplay loopholes with the addition of underwater mines (in the original, you can just stick to the side walls).
“One can also see that we are aiming for a totally different demographics with the 100% new and different art direction that caters to the more casual and family players. The original had a lot of gore and blood in it, while ours is really much more family friendly.”
For Ismail and the team at Vlambeer, “owning” a game mechanic isn’t the answer. “Allowing the industry to patent or copyright game mechanics would be a disaster,” he says. “We don’t want to imagine a world in which Vlambeer will need to pay royalties to some company we do not know because they just happen to own the patent for something as generic as ‘any method to travel the player avatar between objects on which the player can stand in a two or three-dimensional game’.
“There’s no legal or moral ambiguity in game cloning. If it’s assets that are being cloned, it’s legally wrong and morally wrong. If it’s game design or ideas that’s being cloned, it’s legally OK and morally wrong.”
But trying to establish the line between inspiration and plagiarism is difficult. It’s a question the team at Vlambeer has carefully considered. “The most important thing in a game to us, is the gameplay,” Ismail says. “In other words: the way you interact with the game and what those interactions the player do and feel. That’s the thing that makes games different from paintings and music and movies: games have gameplay.
“Game design, traditionally, is about asking a question and then trying to find an elegant or enjoyable solution to that question. That’s prototyping, where you create a lot of possible answers and see if they work. Sometimes the first prototype is the right thing, sometimes it takes months or years or the answer never even comes to you.
“Finally, you end up with an answer. The answer is the way you solve your specific question within the context of your specific game. If someone takes the answer without caring at all about the question, that’s cloning. Basically, if they do not care about why a game is fun, or why it works, or why it does what it does – but only care that people think it is fun and try to monetise that, that’s cloning.
“The only reason that happens is because it saves cloners a lot of time and money spent on that prototyping phase – they can just see what game is popular, take it, add generic graphics to it and outsource it to some overseas company to produce. It’s an optimal way for them to function from an economical perspective but it also takes the creativity from game design and endangers the companies that do want to create novel, creative things and do need the time to pioneer.”
Lawyers rarely deal in such abstracts, however. For Jas Purewal, a games lawyer at firm Osborne Clarke, there is no theoretical line between inspiration and plagiarism.
“It always depends on the facts of each case and an application of the legal tests,” he says. “For example, graphics are protected by copyright law and the relevant legal test is whether a rival’s graphics have copied ‘all or a substantial part’ of your graphics. A game title is best protected by trademark law, which has different tests altogether. In other words: you have to compare the two specific games closely to establish their similarities and differences before you can decide whether one copies the other illegally.”
Part of the issue is that many of the developers finding their game ideas and execution stolen by rival companies are too small to foot the legal bills in pursuing the issue through the courts. When Capcom released ‘Splosion Man clone MaXplosion earlier in 2011, ‘Splosion Man developer Twisted Pixel’s CEO Michael Wilford said: “We’re definitely not going to pursue legal action. While I think the similarities are pretty nauseating, we’re too small to take on a company like Capcom. That, and we owe them one for inventing Mega Man, so we’ll let them slide. I just hope they’re not counting on the fact that indies can’t fight back.”
Capcom declined to comment on the matter.
For others, legal proceedings demand time that cannot be spared. “We understood that in essence, a judge will look at the game and decide whether the ‘total impression’ of the games is ‘substantially similar’ in deciding the verdict,” says Vlameer’s Ismail.
“We decided that there was nothing to gain and a lot of time, money and effort to be lost on what is basically a gamble based on the judge you get assigned. Besides, we’d rather not spend time on companies that live by stealing the work and time of others. We’d rather make new games.”
Gamenaut’s Adrianus believes it’s a question of simply having faith in your own product. “[Before the Ninja Fishing controversy] we had a hit PC game called Burger Rush which was the first merging of ‘match-3′ and ‘time management’ gameplay. A few months after it was released, another developer carbon copied the game as Coffee Rush. Our reaction to this was the total opposite of Vlambeer: we pretty much didn’t do anything and ignored it.
“The reason is we have absolute confidence that our original version of the game was the better one. We placed our faith in the ability of the fans and customers to choose the game that they like the best. We didn’t bother to create seek any attention to the issue because we’d rather focus on creating more quality titles. We understand that cloning is a complicated part of the gaming industry and rather than spending our time hurling insults, rallying fans/friends to vandalize the game, we’d rather just focus on more positive and productive things such as working on new projects.”
In the case of the App Store, this situation places Apple in the role of moral arbiter, deciding whether to pull titles on grounds of being clones. While Apple declined to comment on their internal practices for this article, Ismail believes it’s not because the company doesn’t care.
“Apple cares, not in the least because offering a healthy development eco-system is crucial for the existence of the App Store,” he says. “We realise that gatekeepers, such as Apple, are in a difficult position. They do not want to have draconian entry barriers that discourage creativity.
“But I think that maybe they could implement a check to see whether certain games generate public outcry for being a clone or rip-off before featuring them and investigate by playing said games for 30 minutes or contacting the creators each week. If they’d do something like that before featuring a game, cloning would be a far less interesting route to take for upstart developers.”
There are some in the games industry who disagree that cloning is a negative force thing for the industry. “Many would argue that it is essentially just market forces at work: if you don’t get your product on all markets as soon as possible (eg, across all mobile platforms or from PC/console to mobile), then someone else will,” says Purewal. ” Looked at it in that light, I think game copying can be seen in a more ambiguous light.”
But for Ismail and the team at Vlambeer, the issue couldn’t be more serious and the need for consumers to take a firm stance against clones is crucial to the ongoing creative health of the industry.
“In an ideal situation the consequence for cloners wouldn’t be a legal one so much as a moral one, with consumers choosing to take a stance, Ismail says. “Games are being hit hard by this issue and if that continues, game companies that create novel games will be forced to close down resulting in a market with only highly optimised business structures that can’t create new games, only recycle old ones.
“If people don’t want Angry Ninja Wordfight Shooter RPG vs Zombies II: The Tournament Edition to be the most original thing they can pick from in a few years, we need the industry, the press and the gamers to stand up for originality. One thing to come out of this ostensibly negative experience for us was realising just how much our fans and fellow developers care for a healthy and original ecosystem of games.
“The outcry on Twitter following the revelation of the clone was an overwhelming support for us. One specific article, written by Chris Donlan of Edge Online summed it up well. He wrote: ‘when you have no originality in your games, you can have no history, and you can have no personal quirks. You’ll end up with customers, perhaps, but not genuine fans.’
“The realisation that thousands of people appreciate us for what we do and are willing to sacrifice time or energy to stand with us in our attempt to create new, novel and creative things has made all the difference.”
Sega is a shadow of its former self. Its star developers are scattered to the four winds while treasured series hang cracked and dry from so much tireless, often unsympathetic milking. The company is perhaps the greatest casualty in the collapse of the arcade scene, once the fertile breeding ground for its most daring ideas and brightest designers.
Nevertheless, Sega still has one jewel to its name: its fans. Sega’s devotees are loyal and tenacious – and many are also talented and industrious. Nowhere is this fact more evident than in this remake of Sonic CD, a lavish, widescreen production that puts almost every other Japanese publisher who is remaking yesteryear’s classics, from Treasure to Nintendo, to shame with its generosity. It was, in large part, made by a fan.
In 2009, after a number of somewhat disappointing iOS ports of classic Sega titles, the publisher put out a call to fans asking which game the community might like to see re-released next. Australian coder Christian Whitehead responded not with a wish list but rather with a YouTube video showing a proof-of-concept port of the classic Mega CD title Sonic CD, created with his own Retro Engine Development Kit.
The demo differed from the usual type of emulation seen on the ‘jailbroken’ market, as the screen had been carefully scaled to fit an iPod Touch, while the game itself ran at 60 frames per second. At the time, few emulated versions of the game ran at much more than 20.
Whitehead, a huge fan of Sonic CD, had created an entire SDK specifically for porting the game, in the hope that his work might inspire Sega to revisit what is widely regarded as the strongest title in the Mega CD catalogue. However, after a few weeks, Whitehead’s website was taken offline, as was the YouTube video he released to show off his work. It seemed as though Sega’s lawyers had issued a cease-and-desist and ordered his work to be scrapped.
Two years later and an official Sonic CD release surfaces bearing Whitehead’s name. Sega had done what few multinational companies of its size, age and resulatant inflexibility could have: made a fan a creative asset.
Whitehead’s engine is notable for its performance, which renders the Mega CD original with effortless accuracy. The window onto the action has been expanded for widescreen televisions, rather than stretched, ensuring the game feels as though it was designed for Xbox Live Arcade rather than awkwardly pulled apart to fill it. Both the original Japanese and American soundtracks are included (the latter replaced the Japanese original on US launch, much to the consternation of many fans), and the range of options runs deep and wide. But Whitehead’s exemplary work extends further than mere aesthetics.
The RSDK also gives its designers the chance to tweak and refine levels as well as the underlying code. As such, the sometimes shoddy collision detection of the original has been fixed, while the control scheme of the Mega Drive’s Sonic 2 replaces the less precise Mega CD game (although, of course, you have the option to switch between both). The new menu screens use the same fonts and assets as the originals, and at every turn this feels like the most sympathetic and conscientious re-release of a 20-year-old title yet seen on the digital platforms: a new benchmark for others to aim for.
That the game is being sold at 400 Microsoft Points – a price point long abandoned in the XBLA marketplace – is further evidence of Sega leading the way with this release in terms of offering more for less.
You can read the rest of this review at Eurogamer.
Much as the molten core of its world swills deep below its grassy topsoil, so Minecraft the game is buried somewhere deep beneath the crust of Minecraft the phenomenon. This is no great surprise.
An independent web-game written in an outmoded language and drawn with rudimentary blocks and 16-bit colours that finds unprecedented financial success will confound the wisdom of most video game critics, consultants and publishing mavens. So it’s inevitable that discussion of the “what” will be smothered by discussion of the “how” and the “why”.
Released long before it was finished, Minecraft has no in-game tutorial, no instruction pages and few explicit goals. November’s update moved the game from its extended beta into full release by introducing an endgame, but players are still forced to adventure outside of the confines of the game in search of YouTube videos to explain how to make one’s mark.
The basic rules are otherwise inscrutable, and, for players brought up on to-do list play, the passage of time largely aimless. And yet, in a few short months, Minecraft made its creator, Swede Markus “Notch” Persson, a multimillionaire, and revealed its player base to be one of the most creatively motivated in video games.
Why? In truth, the answer to the why is hidden inside the what.
Put aside Minecraft the phenomenon for a moment – the excited whispers of Lego deals, the unlikely merchandise, the endless industry awards snatched from the fists of Goliath blockbusters – and the in-game story of Minecraft is essentially the story of man: survival, hunting, community and, eventually, hubris.
The world is uniquely yours. All players share the 1×1 blocks that comprise its mountains, valleys, lakes and clouds, but their arrangement is randomly assigned to you alone. Day one and your goal is mere exploration, charting the terrain around you, a carefree sort of cartography as you feel out the contours of your domain, marvel at the scenery and build a mind map of natural landmarks to set your bearings by.
Then night falls and monsters rise; dead-eyed zombies, skeletons and camouflaged creepers, whose kindergarten path-finding AI has them pursue you with night-terror single-mindedness.
In a flash you spring from tourist to tormented, your goal shifting to a quest for survival as, using the action button, you begin to dig a cave with your bare hands in search of shelter.
Your interactive skillset may be limited to destroying blocks and rebuilding them, but soon you learn how to build tools from the materials around you. After the first night the rhythm and structure remains constant – work during light, shelter during night – but the next day’s objective is largely one of your own making.
You can choose to turn your cave into a castle, the urge to survive making way for the desire for comfort as you venture back out to gather the raw materials needed to laminate the floor of your home, build a bathtub and a stove onto which you can cook your meat.
For some, constructing a shack in the shire is adventure enough, and Hobbit-like they leave the game happy to have made a house a home. For others, ambitions aren’t so easily met, and they embark on a project to build a scale replica of the Taj Mahal, or the Starship Enterprise, or even to use sand and water to create logic gates that fire a giant rudimentary computer scrawled into the landscape.
Your creativity may be bounded to the resources that surround you, but dig deep enough and you’ll find everything you need to replicate on-screen that which sits in your imagination.
Once you have exhausted your self-made goals – added that extension, converted that garage, scaled your own Tower of Babel – Minecraft’s multiplayer servers allow you to venture forth to the community. Here you’ll find collaborative projects that dizzy the mind with their scale or pedantry, a thousand stubby arms chiselling at metaphorical pyramids, slaves to naught but their own aspiration.
In recent months, Minecraft’s makers have sought to take what is, in essence, a playpen of wild potential and mild peril, and mould it into a more formal video game structure. Achievements point you toward light goals, RPG levelling provides an abstract numerical read-out for your progression, while an end boss offers a conclusion for the kinds of players who need to “beat” a game rather than merely play one.
But these feel like half-hearted, tokenistic designs intended to bring some form of closure to the Minecraft phenomenon’s aimless evolution.
At its worst, the full-fat, full-price 1.0.0 Minecraft release is conflicted. A hotchpotch of game design clichés awkwardly stapled onto a wide-open space of joyous creative potential.
But those recent, orthodox game features can be roundly ignored and their presence does not diminish the wonder of the true core of the player-defined experience.
By offering us the tools we need to express ourselves, and by constructing the world from 1×1 blocks, video game atoms that can be arranged in every imaginable combination, Minecraft is perhaps the closest we have to a true god game.
And yet, it is also a game that indulges the instincts and aspirations of man, from lighting that first candle in a cave in order to ward off monsters, to building a tower to the stars. And beyond this, Minecraft has irrevocably changed the landscape of gaming, even as we have irrevocably changed its landscape in kind.
This review was first published at The Guardian here.
Of the great many pock-faced star warriors of the Locust horde, none could make for a more enjoyable playable antagonist than General Raam: nine feet tall, mute (which, when you have Epic’s writers putting words in everyone’s mouths, is a significant bonus) and wielding a serrated sword and a swarm of weaponised bats.
Two minutes in his ogre-ish boots, and Marcus Fenix and the rest of the Delta Squad seem like plimsoll-wearing hipsters. He is a brute with bulk that a steroid-hooked Gears soldier could only dream of, and as such, playing as Raam amplifies the power fantasy of Epic’s shooter to an unprecedented level.
With a sweep of the right analogue stick, you order his attendant cloud of Kryll to eviscerate human soldiers ducked behind upturned taxis with the vigorous bite of a flock of piranha fish. Clumps of glistening man-stuff drop to the floor like so many butchers’ offcuts. Flanked by Mauler and Theron Elites, you swagger through the human capital Ilima City, fixing two golden eyes on humanity’s meagre achievements as they crumble all around, spurred on by the encouragements of your plum-voiced queen.
If Gears of War 3, for all its impressive refinements, had become predictable, the chance to play as this final boss in this downloadable add-on is anything but.
Temporally, at least, Raam is a somewhat awkward fit with Gears of War 3, the character having been defeated by Fenix at the end of the first game in the series, in 2006. A prequel of sorts to the trilogy, Raam’s Shadow winds back the clock to five hours before Kryllstorm engulfs Ilima, where Zeta Squad is responsible for evacuating citizens from the city.
Broken into five chapters, evenly spaced an hour apart, control switches between Raam on the side of the Locust and redneck Michael Barrick and the other members of Zeta on the side of the COG, offering two distinct viewpoints on the events that led up to the beginning of the Gears of War trilogy.
Ilima is a bright, tall city that bears a striking resemblance to Washington DC. As the story begins, just as the Locust invasion starts, the city is in uncharacteristically good shape for a Gears game, bright, colourful and quite unlike the brown-and-grey locations seen in the main series. Fighting through banks and empty schools makes for a welcome change of scenario and, thanks to the limitations imposed on the developer by yoking the DLC to a single city, the set-pieces fizz with creativity.
You can read the rest of this review at Eurogamer.
Puzzle games that trade in honeycomb hexagons crowd the gaming landscape. But Fractal: Make Blooms Not War (from Auditorium and Pulse developer Cipher Prime) shares only a few strands of DNA with the tired match-3 genre, instead asking that players clear seven like-coloured hexagons in a game of block shunting of often confounding complexity.
The rules are disarming in their simplicity – but it takes time before you begin to feel out the boundaries of possibility and strategy. You must clear a set number of hexagons by tapping on empty spaces on the grid. Doing so pushes the adjacent tiles outwards by one space, creating new hexes in the displaced spaces. Create a grouping of seven hexes in the ‘push’ and they disappear in a particle-spewing ‘bloom’, moving you seven points closer to the total to clear the level.
The campaign is spread across 30 levels that scale in difficulty faster than most puzzle games of this ilk. Before you make it out of the first third of the game you will be juggling multiple colour hexes on the grid (only like-coloured hexes can be matched together), while the introduction of mines and a lightning tile that clears all connected tiles of the same colour introduces an element of semi-unforeseeable randomness to keep things dynamic and unexpected.
Cipher Prime works hard to inject what might otherwise have been a somewhat staid and cerebral experience with arcade fizz. Bombastic messages streak across the screen as blooms trigger, while the discrete outputs aggregating towards your score in any single ‘push’ stack on screen in a pleasing read-out. Knowing how many turns you have left before you run out of ‘pushes’ allows you to plan ahead and set the board for sweeping chain reactions, and the thrill of knocking these down and watching the domino effect more than makes up for the sense of inscrutability you feel while learning the basic game and developing early strategies.
Beneath the blustering overlay, Fractals is a beautiful game, marrying the elegance of its arithmetical visual logic with a colour palette delicately pipetted from nature: washed-out sunset oranges blend with noonday yellows, while fuchsia pinks and sub-zero blues edge each hexagon. The play area is focused in the centre of the screen, the surrounding empty space giving you room to think. Its expanse is interrupted only by the odd stylish font indicating how many ‘pushes’ you have left, or how many tiles you have cleared.
Five years in the making, indie platform game Fez is finished and set for release on Xbox Live Arcade in the New Year. While playing on gamers’ sense of nostalgia with its pixel graphic style and thematic nods to Nintendo’s 16-bit classics, it’s a game that also trail blazes with a unique perspective-shifting puzzle elements.
As the game enters certification with Microsoft, creator Phil Fish’s role is shifting from that of creative vision-holder to evangelist. I caught up with Fish at the recent GameCity event in Nottingham, England, where the designer was manning a dimly-lit Fez lounge in which attendees were invited to sit back in a comfy sofa and lose themselves in his creation.
In a candid interview, Fish reveals the toll the game’s development has taken on his life, offering advice to other indie devs who might find themselves in a similar situation. Here is an excerpt of the full interview, published on Gamasutra earlier this week.
Simon Parkin: What happens next for you, when Fez is out the door?
Phil Fish: Well, I mean I’ve been having game ideas for years but I couldn’t act on them. So I have this big pile of ideas, I just need to decide which one I’m going to use. But I know that whatever I’m doing next is going to be purely game-based, not content driven at all; it’s going to be Geometry Wars, it’s going to be Asteroids. Like a screen, something moves, you get points, and there isn’t worlds and worlds of different art styles and details and objects that I have to make.
SP: Because you’re burnt out with that style of game?
PF: I’m burnt out, period. Like literally I’ve been in burn out for years now. Like I’m always a little bit sick, I’m always a little bit depressed, I’ve lost interest in everything, and I’m always tired. It’s horrible. It really sucks.
SP: Yay indie game development!
PF: [laughs] You know I’m in very poor health these days; I’m completely out of shape. I feel like I’m going to have to basically kind of rebuild my life, because everything is just gone to shit. Other than Fez, I’ve had to neglect every aspect of my life to get this game done. Like I haven’t paid my bills in months, I haven’t done dishes in months, I’m just like messy. I’m a terrible friend. I don’t see my friends ever because I’m always busy. And when Fez comes out, regardless of what I end up working on next it’s going to be like: ‘Alright, but first who are you? What are you going to do about everything that’s wrong with you?’ Like begin to rebuild some kind of social life, or something like that.
SP: Is there another way? Like does it have to be the way that you’ve done it? I mean because you sound, obviously you’ve got this amazing product, but like everything else you’re quite negative about. Does it have to be that way?
PF: I hope not; I think it’s just me. I’m just kind of a messy person to begin with. Like, our programmer is balanced, healthy, he’s got his shit together. He’s does not panic and have meltdowns ever. And I am just like constantly freaking out and my, you know, anxiety and neuroses and all that. But we’re the odd couple; we’re completely different. Like he’s managing everything perfectly well and he’s happy with his life, he’s living with his girlfriend, and his apartment is not a complete mess. I know friends that manage well; I think it’s just me. Like I was not ready for this or just too much bullshit happened. Not just with Fez, but just my life in general it was Yeah, at some point it was just like okay, I can’t do anything else but work on Fez. Like I’m so deep into it that it’s the only thing my brain is good at right now is just like making these levels, making that art, and everything else just kind of fell by the wayside.
SP: So what do you think you’re going to take away from this project? If you could like sum it, boil it down to a single lesson, what’s positive that you got from the last few years?
PF: I don’t know. I feel a lot of pride that we actually did it, like it took everything that was really, really hard. We had every reason to just give up and so many obstacles to overcome, it took five years but we did it. Like I made my game and the final product is really close to the original vision that I had, and I more or less accomplished what I wanted. And I realized it, but I feel like I don’t really realize it yet. Like today I was just looking at people play it and I was like: ‘I made all of this!’ Holy shit, like that’s quite an achievement. I’m trying really hard to be positive. Because good things are happening to me in the game right now, and I’m lucky to be doing what I’m doing, and I’m lucky to have all these things happen to me.
But at the same time I’m so burnt out and tired, and I just want to get it over with and have a life again. I don’t know, like honestly I’m trying to be positive. If you would’ve asked me a year ago, like what’s your advice for people who want to get into indie games, it would’ve been ‘Don’t’. Just don’t do it, it’s not worth it, it’s going to ruin your life, it’s going to fucking kill you, it’s going to take away your health and your happiness, and it’s going to cost you every meaningful relationship that you have in your life. Your girlfriend’s going to leave you, your friends just like become distant, and it’s not worth it; don’t do it. Just get a real job and make games on the side like as a hobby thing. But now, I mean I still feel like that a little bit, but like it’s starting to actually pay off now. But I don’t know, is it actually worth it? It’s hard to say now.
…………………………………
Fish is one of the core developers featured in the forthcoming, Sundance-nominated film Indie Game: The Movie. Here’s the trailer for those who are interested.
Why 7? There was never a Mario Kart 6 or a 5 or even a 2. Chronologically, of course, sequel has followed sequel with that dependable Nintendo plod. But the company has always chosen to brand each game as a discrete entity, never a numbered notch on an implied arc of evolution.
Super Mario Kart, Mario Kart 64, Mario Kart DS, Mario Kart Wii: all games tethered to and defined by their hardware. So why not Mario Kart 3DS, then? Perhaps Nintendo is no longer trying to pretend that it’s reinventing a formula that it perfected long ago – or perhaps, as Shigeru Miyamoto suggested, it’s just because 7 is a lucky number.
Whatever the reason, Mario Kart 7 proclaims to be a sequential advance in a series that has always struggled to evolve from the masterful blueprint laid down by its Super Nintendo debut. In fact, in structural terms, little has changed since August 1992.
True to recent form, Mario Kart 7 offers 16 new courses and a further 16 classic courses, cherry-picked from the series’ now rich heritage. We are back to just eight characters to choose between initially; while Balloon Fight and Coin Collecting mini-games prop up the eight Grand Prix cups, this is a game that is largely short on extras.
There are, however, a number of tweaks and additions to the core, some welcome, others contentious. Now you are able to custom-build your kart before each championship, choosing the body, the wheels and, finally, a set of ‘wings’ used to glide back to the ground from special propulsion ramps. Each option offers different benefits and drawbacks, asking you to sacrifice top speed for acceleration, for example, or trade handling for heft. The flexibility is an improvement over previous games’ rather straight options, allowing for a far greater number of permutations of vehicle, and it’s one area where Nintendo has expanded scope in a meaningful way.
The coin-collecting concern of the original game also makes an unusual return. Mario’s loose change litters the tracks and can be collected in order to unlock new kart bodies and add-ons. Simplicity is the watchword for Nintendo EAD, however, and there’s no shop to speak of. Rather, you unlock a new, pre-set item every time you collect 50 coins.
It’s a suitable if basic system that adds a secondary objective to each race beyond simply winning – although the decision to cap the number of coins that can be collected to just 10 per stage in order to artificially control the rate at which you unlock new items is an uncharacteristically weak one.
With the first game in the series, Nintendo not only imported the key characters from the Mario universe into a racing game, but also the very essence of his world. That’s still true in Mario Kart 7; pea-green hills undulate under mellow yellow skies, while the game’s all-new power-ups (the Fire Flower, the Super Leaf, the Lucky 7 and the Tanooki Tail, which allows you to swipe at enemies when they come too close) are all plucked from Miyamoto’s various Mario myths.
But the pool of creative influence has opened up to include other Nintendo properties, too. Wii Sports Resort’s Wuhu Island makes more than one appearance as a new track in the game, while the Pilotwings hang-gliders provide the most striking addition to the formula.
Launch your character from a special ramp and they’ll glide down, allowing you to either pull back in order to gain height and fly over opponents and obstacles, or push forward to gather speed in a dramatic swoop. The mechanic introduces true verticality to the series, as well as a new strategic layer: sometimes it’s best to drop from the sky as quickly as possible, while elsewhere gliding above the pack is preferable. Nintendo has even gone back to retrofit many of the 16 classic tracks with glider ramps, showing its unflinching belief in the addition – one only the staunchest traditionalist will reject.
This article was first published on Eurogamer here.
It’s all in the wand. This tool of mystical power may be threaded with a phoenix feather in J. K. Rowling’s ubiquitous mythology, but here, in the latest of Traveller’s Tales’ similarly successful mash-ups, its core is pure brick.
Create and destroy. These twin, conflicting concepts have fired Lego’s success for over 60 years: the joy of building a plastic house only to knock it down again; the wonder of being able to rebuild a spaceship as a handgun or a robot as a kitten. The wand presses this same power into our palms.
A purplish glow hovers around clumps of bricks on screen as you point. Squeeze the button and the bricks hover and swirl before assembling themselves into a meaningful shape: a bridge, a staircase, a statue. Meanwhile, another button unsheathes the wand, not as a the tool of a creator, but as the weapon of a destructive god, firing magical bullets that disassemble those same objects into a dozen pieces, spitting out coins to collect.
Traveller’s Tales may have established the fundamental mechanics in the Star Wars universe, but it’s in Harry Potter’s world that the concepts really click into place. A Jedi wields the Force of creation in a palm and the force of destruction in a lightsaber. In Lego Harry Potter, it’s all in the wand. As such, there is a harmony of idea and expression that envelops the game.
This isn’t the only happy correlation between the ideology of Lego and the mythology of Potter that helps make this the strongest of the developer’s games. Rowling’s world is held together with a mixture of magic and logic, the two key ingredients to any video game in search of fathomable wonder.
Broomsticks and cars can fly, but people can merely levitate; Chimneys offer warp points, but if there are none around, you must take the stairs or catch a lift. Green spells cause cloying vines to retreat, opening up new pathways or releasing objects, while white spells scare away ghouls. Harry Potter has an unflinching game logic, all keys, locks and hard-and-fast rules that can be written in C++. As such, in the right hands, this written world is ripe for turning into a video game.
A less straightforward challenge is steering a story through three books’ worth of plot, all of which take place within the shifting structure of Hogwarts School. As with the previous Lego Harry Potter game, the structure is surprisingly complex and forward-thinking. There are, in effect, two hub worlds to explore, each leading into the six discrete levels that comprise each book’s story.
The first, Diagon Alley, is where new characters are purchased, cheats are unlocked, videos are re-watched and previous levels are accessed. The second nested hub world is Hogwarts itself, a mystically mechanical building filled with shifting secrets that changes dynamically as you progress through the game. You follow a ghoulish guide through its corridors towards the trigger point for the next level, uncovering its own secrets en route as you gain access to new spells and abilities over the course of the adventure.
These environments have been reworked from the previous game, with new angles and details ensuring freshness for those who mined Years 1-4. Changes are also evident in the darker, more mature aesthetic (mimicking the same shift in the movies).
The core rhythms of the game are consistent with all of the Lego titles: short, sharp levels that require different character abilities to be used in order to progress, while a host of collectibles beg your distraction. But you are now able to cast spells freely without needing to sweep a reticle around the screen for a lock-on, while a clutch of new spells, puzzles, characters and a smart, dramatic duelling mini-game layer on micro-evolutions to keep what is now a very familiar formula interesting.
This article was first published on Eurogamer here.
