Waaaay back in the early nineties – let us say pre-1993 and Doom — the PC was something of a duff gaming platform in the UK. Computers had yet to become standardised, Windows was not yet ubiquitous, and whenever somebody writes an article about those dark days they inevitably fall to reminiscing about DOS installers and IRQ settings while muttering “You weren’t there, man,” to anyone who asks why the hell they went to all that trouble when the games console renaissance was in full swing. PCs tended to be used for beardy games like RPGs and simulations since the beardy were the only ones obsessive enough to make the sodding things work. If you wanted innovation and excitement in your gaming life you didn’t buy a PC. You bought an Amiga instead.

It’d be an understatement to say that a lot of groundbreaking stuff went on on the Amiga before Doom made the PC ascendant. Companies like Gremlin, DMA, Bullfrog, the Bitmap Brothers and Sensible¹ were responsible for an abnormally large number of classics including Lemmings, Speedball, Syndicate and Space Crusade². It’s a Sensible game I want to talk about today, though; and it’s not one of their two all-time great titles – Cannon Fodder and Sensible Soccer – but instead one of the runts of their litter that everyone forgets: Mega Lo Mania.

 Of course I’m referring to it as a runt because while it was generally well-received it didn’t have anywhere near the impact that it should have, because given the state of video gaming in 1991 Mega Lo Mania was damn near revolutionary in what it was trying to do. This is how ahead of its time it was: Mega Lo Mania is an attempt to combine RTS gameplay with the epochs and tech trees of Civilization one year before Civilization was released and five years before Command & Conquer brought the RTS into the mainstream. Of course board games had been doing technology advance as a concept for a long time before Mega lo Mania, but it’s the first game I’m aware of – certainly the first game I played – that based its entire structure around it.

Since it is an Amiga game and an example of an RTS game released before anyone knew what an RTS was, the way Mega Lo Mania goes about its core gameplay is a little bit unorthodox.  You’re one of four gods vying for control of a new planet by fighting over a series of islands. Each island is split up into square territories, and once you’ve picked your starting area and decided how many men you’re taking into the battle you get teleported down to the island and find yourself staring at this charming isometric view of your first castle.

 The castle is the only early-game building you get, and at first it can do a little bit of everything in order to teach you the ropes. Men can be assigned to a number of jobs in the castle; they can gather raw materials, design weapons, or use the gathered materials to manufacture those weapons. Men left idle will gradually generate more men – this happens even if there’s only one idle man, so I assume it’s some form of magic cloning rather than some of the more insalubrious alternatives. Finally you can send men outside the castle. If they’re left to their own devices in an empty sector they’ll eventually build another castle and occupy it. However, if they encounter an enemy army – or an enemy castle – a fight will ensue. Unarmed men are clad in only a pair of underpants and are reduced to throwing rocks at the enemy, so it’s generally a good idea to arm your troops before sending them out if you think they’re going to run into bad guys.

 It’d probably be a mistake to characterise Mega lo Mania as a true RTS, though. There’s no direct control of your soldiers – they fight completely autonomously – and battles are decided by weight of numbers and the weapons each side has rather than any clever strategy³. Instead the strategic element resides in the man-management and territorial control aspects of the game, and in order to explain exactly how this works I think I’m going to have to break down how it works step-by-step.

Mega Lo Mania is broken down into ten epochs of history, with three islands to be fought over in each epoch. The first epoch is the Stone Age, and so you start the game looking at proposed weapon designs for a big rock (offensive) and a stick (defensive). However, there’s also catapults and pikes available if you have stockpiled the raw elements to build them. At first you can get weapon materials by just picking the stuff off the ground, but it doesn’t stay this simple for ever. Upon researching the catapult (level two offensive weapon) or the pike (level three offensive weapon) a sampled voice intones “We’ve advanced, a tech level!” and the visual look of your stuff updates to either the Bronze Age or ancient Rome.  Then you go and look at the enemy castle, see that they’re still languishing in the Stone Age, and promptly send your army to crush them. Level complete.

This is how the game plays until you get to the fourth and fifth epochs, which represent the medieval age, at which point things change dramatically. You’re now trying to build longbows and siege catapults rather than piddly little pikes, and the work you have to go through to get the resources to do this starts to increase. Now you have to devote time to building a mine to extract elements directly from the ground. In the sixth epoch – early industrial – factories must be built in order to manufacture cannon. And finally the eighth epoch introduces laboratories where the really destructive weapon designs can be researched.

So Mega Lo Mania gradually ratchets up the complexity of what you have to do to win – and all the time you’re researching your designs and building your weapons, you also have to play the territory game. Not all sectors have the same resources present and you don’t know what’s there until you’ve colonised it, so expansion is a good idea for three reasons: denying the computer players access to those resources, increasing your own industrial base, and adding some redundancy in case your starting territory is attacked and destroyed. This aspect of Mega Lo Mania can be shockingly fast paced (especially if you accidentally leave the time controls set to Very Fast as I was unfortunately prone to doing) and it can be tricky to juggle all the different things you have to pay attention to in the later stages of the game.

That’s Mega Lo Mania’s gameplay. It’s got some rather large holes in it – chief of which is that defensive weapons are utterly useless (with one key exception) meaning the game revolves entirely around how many of the offensive weapons you can build, and often there’s only one or two available – but it was trying to do stuff that had never ever been done together in videogame format before, so I cut it a lot of slack in that regard. What makes me especially forgiving is its sense of humour; the guys at Sensible were clearly smoking the good stuff when they were making this game, because pretty much nothing is taken seriously. The names for the islands and the elements are particularly good since they’re all words which could be the name of an island or an element if they didn’t already refer to something completely different – Aloha, Pyjama and Etcetra are examples of the islands, while elements include Parasite and Moron (the in-game icon for Moron is literally a grinning idiot). The various gods in the game all have limited voice samples for refusing/accepting alliances, not to mention the immortal advisor exclamations of “We’ve nuked them! We’ve been nuked!” according to how well you’re doing in the modern ages – which at least balance out the horror of watching most of the sectors on the map gradually get turned into smoking radioactive craters (territories are completely unusable after they’ve been nuked).

Sadly Mega Lo Mania loses it at the very end of the game. The central conceit – that of battling for control of a new world – is represented by the player being given one hundred men to fight in every epoch. You choose how many of them to take to each of the three islands in that epoch, and any unused men left over at the end are frozen in stasis and can be taken to the Final Battle at the end of time. For 1991 it’s a nice idea, let down ever so slightly by the fact that the Final Battle is complete shit. All that interesting stuff I mentioned above? The developers chucked that all away for the last level; all you can do is breed men and make more castles. The men don’t need weapons since they all come with laser pistols by default, so the very last level of the game is this incredibly tedious meat grinder where you throw hordes of soldiers at the enemy gods until they die. And then – fittingly for an Amiga game – the ending is basically non-existent⁴.

It is entirely possible to track down Mega Lo Mania on your favourite abandonware site. I’m not entirely sure I’d recommend playing it for more than ten minutes today since it’s two decades old and hasn’t aged particularly well (not to mention the music, which was an arrangement of Holst’s Mars theme on a loop, being done in awful early 90s DOS audio) but if you’re interested in this mutant aberration of ancient gaming history there’s far worse ways to spend those ten minutes. Certainly I think it’d be worth it simply to see a certain vital essence that’s only just making a resurgence with the recent rise of the indie game; while the consoles were locked into a paradigm of terrible platformers and gory beat ‘em ups, Amiga developers were free to do pretty much whatever the hell they wanted. The result was brave, experimental games like Mega Lo Mania; a title whose DNA keeps showing up in games released today even if they aren’t direct descendants, and which played a large role in shaping my expectations for the future. Twenty years later, gaming is only just starting to meet them.

1. Almost none of whom made the leap to PC successfully. Gremlin, Bitmap and Sensible sank without a trace, while Bullfrog released several successful games and then got lobotomised by EA. There is one notable survivor from the Amiga years, though; DMA Design released the first Grand Theft Auto game in 1997, changed their name to Rockstar shortly afterwards and never looked back.
2. Not technically a classic because I’m fairly sure I’m the only one who remembers it, but it was pretty much a 1:1 implementation of the Space Crusade board game except that it replaced Genestealers with Soulsuckers, presumably to avoid even more confusion with the similarly-monickered Space Hulk.
3. So it is a true RTS, really.
4. I really need to go back and try to find out at what point having discrete game endings became an actual thing. Today it seems jarring to be booted back to the main menu with no fanfare whatsoever, but in the 80s it was seen as completely acceptable since most games were arcade affairs with no real storyline. There must have been a period of transition between the two, and I suspect Mega Lo Mania falls into it.

The post In Praise Of: Mega Lo Mania appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

A slight scheduling snafu means today’s article isn’t quite ready yet, so I’m swapping it with Tuesday’s. Tune in tomorrow if you want to read science!

This isn’t really a genuine review of Defender’s Quest. A genuine review would outline all – or at least most of – the specific reasons why you personally should or should not buy the game. However, the existence of this excellent browser-based demo makes a genuine review of Defender’s Quest entirely pointless. (Go ahead! Play it! It’ll even let you export your demo save to the full game if you end up liking it so much that you buy it!) Instead, I’m going to spend this column space writing about why I personally like Defender’s Quest, and why it is an outstanding example of – not to mention an excellent take on – the tower defence genre.

Yes, it’s another tower defence game. It seems that you can’t move in gaming circles these days without tripping over one of the bloody things every couple of steps. Waves of enemies spawn at one end of the map, and your job is to place your “towers” in a such a way that they all die before getting to the thing you’re trying to defend at the other end of the map. Towers can be upgraded to do more damage, enemies get gradually more powerful and more numerous as the map goes on, yadda yadda yadda. So far, so conventional.

But Defender’s Quest is anything but conventional. You see, you don’t actually place towers as such. You place people; people who are based off of typical fantasy RPG tropes – fighter, archer, knight, healer and so on. They’re immobile and they have a limited range so they have the same basic functionality as towers, but they differ from towers in one important respect: every character you place is unique, with its own separately-tracked experience gain and skill tree which they level up just like an RPG character. They can also be fully customised in terms of name and clothing colour so that you can easily tell your six tiny sprite-berserkers apart in the heat of the moment.

This lets Defender’s Quest do some very, very neat things. There’s six character classes and you can have six of each, and every class fills a particular defensive niche that makes it effective against a particular bad guy. The enemy waves are pseudo-randomly generated and can have any combination of the following qualities: basic, fast, fighting, armoured, dark, ranged, water-crossing, spawn. Berserkers have a high damage output that hits many baddies at once but are hampered by a short range, so they’re best against large groups of weak enemies that can be dispatched quickly, and worst against armoured and fast enemies. To kill armoured monsters you first have to hit them with a knight’s armour-piercing attacks; this permanently destroys a creature’s armour so that other characters further down the line have a chance of damaging it when it gets to them. Fast enemies need to be countered with the ice mage’s slowing attacks; dark enemies with the healer’s Holy Light and Ether Flash spells. Rangers are a jack-of-all-trades – they do a little bit of armour piercing, have rapid attacks and a long range, but don’t do that much damage – so their job is to supplement the other fighters by taking out the odd baddie that slips through the defences and wearing the rest down by constant attrition.

All the units you can place are specialised to fulfil a specific role, therefore. However, the skill trees and rudimentary progression the RPG mechanic adds to the game allows some specialisation within that specialisation. You can upgrade a berserker to attack more quickly, but that’ll mean neglecting his extra regeneration ability – which is important when berserkers can’t wear armour. Healers can be levelled to the point where they provide a temporary damage boost to all nearby characters; rangers get the aforementioned armour piercing as well as a poisoning effect for extra damage over time, and dragons get the appropriately-named “NOM” ability which lets them instantly kill baddies who have dropped below a certain level of health.

It’s very well thought out, and means unit placement in Defender’s Quest requires a little more thought than your average tower defence game. This is compounded by the way the RPG mechanic allows the developers to approach in-battle unit upgrades. Usually it’s a case of upgrade = more powerful/quicker attack, which is a somewhat boring if easy-to-understand way of doing it. In Defender’s Quest, since the individual units are all upgrading anyway thanks to the levelling they do in the metagame something a little different is called for. A basic level one unit will have access to just one attack which hits a single target quickly. As they level in the metagame, though, they get access to additional attacks which recharge slowly, but which hit more people for more damage than their regular attack. These will be locked off when the unit is first placed on the map, but once some mana is invested in “boosting” the unit to level 2 they’re able to use a second attack. Level 3 enables a third attack, level 4 a fourth attack and so on, and the crucial thing here is that all these attacks recharge independently; a level 5 berserker will still be hitting with his basic attack at the same rate as level 1 berserker, but he’ll also be laying down the pain with four additional attacks as well.

This makes the damage difference between a basic level 1 unit and a unit boosted to the maximum level 5 far more dramatic than it would be otherwise. In fact the cost to upgrade a unit even once will be several times the amount you pay to put it on the map in the first place; this high price reflects the way they exponentially improve in effectiveness with each additional upgrade level. And thus Defender’s Quest isn’t so much a question of scraping together money to buy new towers – you could quite easily put down every single unit you owned with your starting cash if you wanted, although you’d then go on to lose the map because they’d all be rubbish – but instead it’s all about what you upgrade where and when.

This and the different varieties of enemy that can be encountered are enough to make Defender’s Quest a Good Game, but it goes further than that by adding abilities for the player to use that are actually useful (indeed, a well-timed Frenzy can make or break a level), excellent music and a plot that is, if not exactly stellar in quality, at least serviceable. I definitely appreciate that they made the effort. Best of all is that the developers have bent over backwards to make the game accessible to as broad a range of players as possible. Can’t do a level? Go back and get some experience by trying an earlier one on a harder difficulty setting. Aren’t getting enough experience? Whack experience gain up via the game options. Don’t want to sit through a cutscene? Press the skip button. There’s an amount of customisability here that I really respect; it’s a game that wants you to play it the way you want to without feeling like you’re copping out.

If Defender’s Quest has a flaw – and I am kind of nitpicking here – it is that the presence of the RPG mechanic means that the developers haven’t had to think so much about balancing their difficulty settings – after all, no matter how hard a level is you’ll eventually become strong enough to beat it, so they obviously felt it was appropriate to stick some really, really vicious ones in there. Beating the game on Advanced requires you to – hnngh – actively grind experience in the single Endless level, while I’ve yet to finish it on Expert despite being quite sickeningly overlevelled at this point. If you haven’t got enough experience to finish a level then all the tactical placement in the world won’t carry you through it. I’m not sure I particularly agree with this approach to difficulty, but then I’m not sure how else they could have done it. The base difficulty level is at least appropriately paced as long as you don’t obsess over getting a perfect rating on your first runthrough, so while I don’t really like it I can at least live with it.

2012 seems to be the Year of the Indie Games for me. The number of worthwhile triple-A releases on the horizon is laughably small (it currently stands at four barring any surprise announcements) but given the generally dire quality of most of the games I bought last year indie games taking up the slack might be no bad thing, especially if they’re all as good as Defender’s Quest. It’s probably not the best one I’ll play this year – it lacks the brainbox genius of something like SpaceChem – but it is extremely well designed and a pure pleasure to play. And even if nothing else is released this year which surpasses it, Defender’s Quest at least ensures that I’ll remember 2012 for something.

The post Thoughts: Defender’s Quest. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

After consulting a walkthrough to find out just where the hell I should be looking for this storeroom, Cate eventually finds the entrance concealed behind a secret door activated by a hidden lever – a hidden lever in a game where pretty much everything can be interacted with in some way. I’ve heard that the designers of Ultima VII loved hiding secrets behind the curious isometric viewpoint they’ve chosen to portray the game, but I wasn’t expecting them to secrete plot-critical items (a spellbook) inside a hidden object puzzle. There is definitely something to be said for the last two decades of progress in this regard.

After wandering through the castle’s secret passages for a while Cate comes across the secret dungeon where political prisoners are locked up by Lord British. This man, for example, has been imprisoned for stealing an apple from the Royal Orchards to feed his starving family – and even he is so brainwashed by British’s regime that he’s convinced Dear Leader has no idea he’s up here and that he’d reverse this travesty of justice if only he knew about it. Really? A man who had a life-sized statue of himself installed as the centrepiece to Britain’s museum? Honestly, it’s like a peasant in the gulag asking Stalin for clemency.

Cate eventually locates the storeroom and spends a tedious ten minutes hunting through all the junk items in her backpack to try to uncover the key. After this I vow to keep my party inventory in slightly better order and dump all the pointless documents I’ve been given on Spark and – with some misgivings – hand off the party’s food supplies to Iolo. With the aid of some more bags to further organise things I should be able to cut inventory-rummaging times down to a mere minute or two of battling the horrible UI. Cate swipes a pretty natty pair of magic boots and a new shield, and then leaves the castle to try and find this boat Lord British said he’d given her. It is at this point that I realise I have no idea where the docks are. Perhaps this sign post will have answers?

Oh, thanks very much, Origin. Writing all the signs in this bizarre fantasy rune-language may be thematically consistent but it’s not particularly helpful. Cate finds a number of things whilst blundering around Britain trying to find the docks: a museum with a Cate exhibit, a very bad injoke referencing the Wing Commander series (also by Origin) and this lecherous piano player called Shamino, who promptly attaches himself to the party. And when she does finally locate the docks, the shipwright she’s supposed to isn’t even there since it’s late evening by this point and he’s buggered off to do something far more interesting than wait around for errant PCs.

Taking a cue from the shipwright, Cate also heads off to do something more interesting. I have her wait around on the road outside Britain and then, when an hapless wayfarer happens along, I activate the combat AI for Iolo, Shamino and Spark.

The wayfarer is dead less than two seconds later without Cate even having to lift a finger – and to think I was worried that combat in this game would be overly complex! After stripping the corpse of his shiny chainmail armour Cate continues on down the road to hunt for some more victi- I mean, “bandits”. Unfortunately her life of crime comes to a premature end; the blood-crazed pack of NPC characters is let off the leash once again but before they can make contact the screen flashes red once, twice, and then fades to black. Guess I should probably have looked up how to get the Avatar to fight rather than having my party do everything for me. Oh well, I suppose that’s the end of Cate’s story. Nothing more to see he-

Wait a minute, she’s still alive? And not only that, she’s been abducted and taken to Minoc by the very people she was hunting: the foul murderers Elizabeth and Abraham! Oh, they say they found her bleeding out on the road and brought her here to recuperate, but this is just a ploy meant to lull her into a false sense of security. The moment her back is turned she’ll find herself staked out on the floor and cut into parts just like that poor blacksmith. As and when Cate finds Elizabeth and Abraham she’s going to have to pre-emptively do unto others before she’s done unto herself.

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Sitting on my desk just across from me is my copy of the original Civilization manual. It’s a relic of a bygone age: 129 pages long; written in a single language meaning all 129 pages are relevant; and just chock-full of information about how best to play the game. Twenty years ago this is what manuals for complex strategy games like Civilization had to be – while the game had what was for the time a very advanced in-game encyclopedia and tips system, dedicated interactive tutorials that taught the player to play as they played were not yet a thing. They couldn’t be; games came on a couple of floppy disks and computers and development philosophy were not yet mature enough to implement that sort of advanced feature.

This set the barrier to entry at a fairly high level. Strategy games like Civ were only truly accessible to those willing to put in the time and effort to read a 100-page manual, and who also had no problem with being crushed in their first few games as part of a bracing learning experience. There are people who look back to these days with a kind of wistful longing. It was a time when – since insane Grognards were the target market rather than a fringe group that it is assumed will buy the game anyway – games were more complex, more demanding, and far more unforgiving. You have to work very hard to make a fundamental error in a modern Civilization game; if you don’t start on one of the harder difficulty settings off the bat the game straight up won’t let you. Back then, it was par for the course.

I don’t agree with those people, even if I do feel a slight twinge of unease when I watch Battlefield 3 play itself for ten minutes and when 2K Software trumpet the inclusion of a “1999 mode” in Bioshock Infinite where the player doesn’t instantly respawn on death as being for hardcore players. Experiences with games like Dwarf Fortress have convinced me that a Matterhorn-like learning curve is not necessarily a good thing, and that there is absolutely no reason why a game shouldn’t be as accessible as it possibly can. So I endorse interactive tutorials and in-game help; they’re an important step forward for games development as long as – and this is the important part – as long as I can turn them off. This ties into the way modern games implement difficulty settings, but at the end of the day I want to be able to play a game in the way that I choose. Not the developer. Me. I bought the damn thing, and I’d like it to pander to my idiocy when I’m learning how to play it but also provide a challenging, enjoyable experience that’s not a walkover once I’ve got the basic concepts down. I don’t want to be playing a game that caters to the lowest common denominator all the time, which is where a lot of modern games go horribly, horribly wrong.

But I’m getting off topic here; that’s a separate argument for another day. With the advent of interactive tutorials game manuals have shrunk down to next to nothing. In most boxed games I buy these days the only documentation included – apart from leaflets with the inevitable preorder DLC codes printed on them – is a small sheet of paper telling me how to install the game on my computer. It’s expected that once I’ve booted it the program itself will take care of the nitty-gritty of teaching me how to play it. And this is all fine and good from a pedagogical point of view – desirable, even – but after the disappearance of the old manuals I’m feeling that today’s games are missing something extra that they provided. It’s a wider background; a sense of context both in terms of the game and the game design.

I think the Microprose manuals are the best way of illustrating this because it’s something that they particularly excelled at. Many manuals included oodles of backstory and other assorted fluff, but few of them displayed the clear passion for the game’s subject area that Microprose did. Microprose manuals were littered with neat historical facts that were relevant to the game. Microprose manuals invariably had a couple of pages of notes written by the designers at the end explaining the thinking behind certain features being implemented (or not). Microprose manuals had reading lists just in case the player was sufficiently enthused by the game experience to venture down the same avenues of research the developers did. This more than anything else is what endeared them to me; the manuals for Microprose games were documents that assumed the person who had bought it was both intelligent enough and interested enough to want to know what the developers thought was particularly neat or important about the game they’d spent the last year of their lives working on. They presented video games as a mutual hobby shared by developer and player alike, not as a series of disposable products designed to fatten up the publisher’s bottom line.

The end result of this approach was that I read those manuals cover to cover several times. Most of what I know about pirates I learned from Pirates! Gold and its manual. Most of what I know about the colonisation of the Americas I learned from Colonization and its manual. And while the development of the railways in the 19^th century was one of the modules for my A-Level history course, most of what I remember about that period I learned from Railroad Tycoon and its manual. Civilization taught me about concepts like feudalism and organised labour. Darklands gave me an encyclopaedic knowledge of dark age German society and medieval weaponry. This is an aspect of games that I think has been lost in the quest for a more interactive, more immersive experience; their ability to peripherally educate the player in areas other than gameplay mechanics – never mind that by doing this they could easily make the experience more immersive than all the whizz-bang scripted cutscenes in the world by giving the player’s actions some much-needed context.

And of course it’s not just limited to learning history by osmosis; there’s also the insights into what the game designers were thinking when they implemented feature X that can come with a properly-written manual. To demonstrate why this sort of thing is useful I’ll use the example of the last game I bought with a truly comprehensive manual: Civilization 4. The vast majority of it was a curiously joyless set of instructions on how to play the game — which seemed rather redundant in the face of the elaborate in-game measures intended to aid the player in doing just that – but nestled away in the back were five or six pages of small, neatly formatted writing penned by the lead designer on Civ 4, Soren Johnson, where he briefly summed up how the game had evolved out of the relative failure of Civ 3¹ and set out the case for the changes they’d made. I found this a fascinating insight to the design process and it really gave me a new appreciation for the game — on subsequent forays into Civ 4 and its expansions I was able to look at what they’d done with it and say “Yes, that makes sense,” instead of thinking “What the hell is this doing here?”

Old-style game manuals are never going to be brought back. Not only has the packaging of boxed games changed to the point where they cannot handle a large manual, but much of the content that used to be included – such as the various gameplay tips that used to be sprinkled throughout – are monetised as strategy guides these days, or else used as part of the game’s marketing campaign in the run-up to release. Games are big business now, and you can’t turn back the clock. But since the process of teaching the player how to play the game has made its way into the game itself, I see no reason why the detailed background information that used to be included cannot do so as well. Civilization has been doing this for years with its Civilopedia (although the Civilopedia in 3 and 4 was absolutely dire in the way it was formatted) and the Total War games make probably the most respectable attempt; I’ve happily whiled away several hours flipping through Shogun 2’s interactive encyclopedia of units, buildings and technologies. For a fictional example, the Mass Effect games have a very comprehensive codex that explains the backstory behind the game’s universe, although – again – it’s terribly presented and a chore to sort though. Nevertheless these games prove it can be done, and it’s a very easy way to build up the player’s imagination as to what’s really going on behind the scenes.

This is why I’m somewhat surprised that most games just don’t bother, instead ending up as paper-thin narrative experiences that the player isn’t invested in at all. To take a random example from last year’s games: Relic’s Space Marine makes almost no attempt whatsoever to explain to the player the wider relevance of their actions or what might be at stake. Its sole concession to this is a line in the intro which basically says THIS FORGE WORLD IS PRECIOUS TO US before chucking the player into the thick of  it. Perhaps I could have ignored this if it was the prelude to a well-written, compelling story, but unfortunately Relic forgot to include this. And it might not have mattered too much if the gameplay had been pulse-pounding, frantic excitement, but unfortunately Relic forgot to include this also. A Mass Effect-style codex explaining just what I was doing on that planet in the first place wouldn’t have saved Space Marine from being a bad game, but perhaps it would have saved me from developing a nervous tic in my right eye from all the wincing I was doing as I played through the game’s single-player campaign.

(And then there’s Sword of the Stars, the developers of which wrote a detailed and actually fairly interesting backstory for each of the playable races – explaining their biology, their culture, their history, their approaches to technology – and then, utterly inexplicably, didn’t bother to include any of it in the game. They didn’t even include it in the manual. If you want to read that stuff you have to go to the fan wiki. This is an act of unbelievable stupidity that ensures the empire management parts of the game are a stunningly dry and sterile experience.)

So if one of my nine readers happens to be a game developer² then this is what you should do. First, make a game which implements a direct port of the Necromunda tabletop rules from the late 90s. Second, don’t skimp on the manual. If you don’t want to use it to tell the player how to play the game, then you can at least use it to gain their undying respect by telling them what it’s about, whether in virtual form or no.

 1. I’m sure Josh will take umbrage at this, but until Civ 5 was released the third game was by far the worst received in the series.

2. No, Kenti, you don’t count.

The post In Praise Of: Microprose Manuals. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Just one thing before we start:

GORG! AAAAAAAHHH! HE IS THE UNSTOPPABLE!

Right, now that’s out of my system we can get on with the review.

Unstoppable Gorg is a puzzler-cum-tower defence game with an awesomely cheesy retro 1950s sci-fi flavour. I put the puzzler part of the descriptor first because that’s what Unstoppable Gorg is, primarily. All tower defence games have some sort of puzzle element to them, but they’re distinguished from true puzzlers in that they usually give you the freedom to work towards your own solution, Gorg on the other hand can best be described as a puzzle game with some light tower defence elements.

How did this happen? It’s down to Unstoppable Gorg’s main gameplay conceit, which is that it is set in space. Other tower defence games give you vast swathes of land upon which you can plan and build your defences. In Gorg, there is no land. All the game gives you are a few hotspots on a series of orbital rings surrounding whatever you’re trying to keep the aliens away from. Consequently, missions where you’re able to build more than five or six offensive towers are incredibly rare.

This robs Gorg of what little free-form nature it might have carried over from its tower defence heritage. Instead of trying to find a rough combination of towers which works, you’re trying to find the single tower which will crack a mission wide open as well as figuring out when exactly to build it. And the game doesn’t allow any room for error, either; given the way resource gathering is set up you often only have enough money to build/upgrade a couple of types of tower when a certain wave turns up, and if you choose poorly you can kiss goodbye to your planet/spaceship/space station. I very much got the impression that there was only one “correct” solution to a level, and that if I deviated from this solution even slightly the game would punish me with failure.

On the whole this isn’t a particularly promising recipe for fun, but Gorg tries its best. Since you’re building satellites instead of towers you can rotate individual orbital rings to change the positions of satellites at any time. Tracking an incoming wave with a powerful turret by manually moving it round the station is one of the hallmarks of the later missions. It’s also this more than anything else that makes it resemble a puzzler, as other satellites you’ve put down on the same ring will also be moved, often screwing up your carefully-planned defences.  Not only do you have to place your turrets in the right places to intercept an incoming wave, but you also have to place them in such a way that moving one of them won’t leave you open somewhere else

This makes Unstoppable Gorg far more trial-and-error-y than other games of its type, and while the orbital rings and the ability to move them are what distinguishes Gorg from its competitors gameplay-wise I think they end up hurting the game more than they help it. For example, there’s about eighteen types of satellite in the game, roughly half of which never get used because there is so little margin for error you can’t afford to. Some of these are just plain useless, like the sweeper and the gas missile. Others are the “support” satellites that would otherwise form the lynchpin of a successful defence – the slow turret, the tripwire turret, the turret that boosts all other turrets in range – and in no situation is it ever worth taking one of these over something with the capacity to shoot back at the aliens. And believe me, you need to shoot back. You want as much direct firepower as possible firing as continuously as possible because many of the alien ships are insanely hard to kill even for the weapons they’re supposed to be weak to.

Unstoppable Gorg features three alien races. The Sunbots are weak to energy weapons but strong against physical damage. The Brain Riders are strong against energy weapons but weak against physical damage. And then there’s the middle-of-the-road Gorg… people, who are not particularly strong or weak against anything.  This is supposed to induce the player to construct a cunning defence network that consists of both types of damage in order to efficiently dispose of each alien race, but since building space is at a premium – and effective building space even more so given the way the rings are set up – and as mentioned the player is often constrained in what they can build at any particular point in the mission by their budget, it’s far more cost-effective to have multiple turrets that can hurt every alien race instead of one or two specific counter-turrets for each. What I would like to have done was spam as many missile launchers as possible since those were the only weapon that was truly effective against all ship types, but often I simply couldn’t afford to do this and had to slum it with something cheaper and worserer.

I’m not sure if this is good design or bad design in the context of what Gorg ended up being. Sure, it prevented me from using the same strategy to win every map, but on the other hand Gorg already does enough to tie the player’s hands. Having to deal with the currency restriction on top of everything else was immensely frustrating at times, and it’s probably the major factor in my saying Gorg only has one correct solution per level – when a certain wave arrives, you have X amount of money that has to be spent on Y turret placed in Z spot or else you will fail the level, and the game consists of trying to find Y and Z for each successive wave. This is reasonably engaging, but it’s nowhere near the meaty strategic experience tower defence is supposed to offer because there’s no flexibility.

So Gorg is perhaps not that great a game. It is solid, it is respectable, but I would definitely hesitate before calling it good. Which is sad, because the thing I enjoyed most about Unstoppable Gorg had sod all to do with the game itself; the entire thing is packaged in this 1950s Flash Gordon-esque box, complete with cutscenes where wobbly saucers suspended from clearly-visible wires assault Earth ships shaped like the classic Flash Gordon rocket with a sparkler jammed up its ass. This did much to endear Gorg to me; I laughed out loud when Radiant Sunbeem first popped up on my screen – a reaction rarely induced by anything – while the frequent news reports contain plentiful treats for those like me who are fans of reading the small print of fake TV newspapers (some of them are actually quite topical considering what this blog has talked about in the past). There’s a constantly-palpable love for the period and the style on display throughout; it’s something that developers often bang on about all the time but which rarely ever comes through in a game after the publishers and marketers are done with it. Its presence makes the game enjoyable in spite of its many, many flaws, and I can’t help but think it deserved a better vessel than the ultimate mediocrity that is Unstoppable Gorg.

The post Thoughts: Unstoppable Gorg. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

Never have I been so disappointed on entering a building as I was when Cate went inside the National Branch. Rather than a bank filled with all sorts of stealable valuables, it turns out instead to be Scientology Central where the head of the Fellowship, Batlin, lives.

Talking to him is predictably boring, but Cate does get one useful bit of information: Elizabeth and Abraham, two cultists – can I call them cultists yet? – who deal with the organisation’s money and who were up to entirely unsuspicious activities in Trinsic the night before the murder, have passed through Britain en route to somewhere else called Minoc. Next stop Minoc then, I guess.

But of course Cate isn’t going to leave Britain without visiting some of the tacky tourist traps every capital city sets up to part the unwary visitor from their cash. This fake plastic castle, for example, which is exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to see in the Medieval quarter of your favourite run-down theme park.

Cate chats to some of the staff, who are either paid actors or else are doing an astonishingly good job of impersonating a startlingly inbred family of servants. Communism always seems like such a good idea until you actually meet the proletariat, after which the petit bourgeoisie suddenly doesn’t seem that bad. There’s also a few bright-red gargoyles who seem to function as this subhuman caste of untouchables, proving that Britannia is in fact an awful imperialist dystopia.

And at its head Cate finds the culprit; the cause of the all the land’s woes; the Richard Garriott self-insert himself: Lord British.

British proceeds to vomit forth so much exposition. A new island has risen to the south, magic is failing, moongates no longer work yadda yadda yadda. He recommends that Cate mingle with the proles in order to find out the cause of these unexplained phenomena, Lord British apparently being too good to do it himself. He also gives Cate a boat, much in the same way a corrupt Russian oil oligarch would give his favourite dog a yacht. But I don’t want to talk about that. Let’s talk about the horrible Mary-Sue fantasy that is Ultima’s backstory instead.

Lord British, Iolo and the rest of the ruling class aren’t Britannia natives. They travelled to Britannia years ago along with the Avatar, found they had acquired superpowers – i.e. magic – and then promptly took the place over. They all seemed to acquire astonishing longevity to boot; it’s been two hundred years in Britannia time since Cate last visited and everyone is still alive, although some of this little band of would-be kings seem to age faster than others. Lord British in particular hasn’t aged a day, making him in effect the immortal god-king of Britannia. So you’ve got this situation where a group of white men from an advanced civilization travelled to a backwards, superstitious land and used their advanced knowledge and innate betterness to set themselves up as gods. Does this sound familiar to anyone?

Wait no, I mean this:

Eurgh. I can only hope that Lord British and the rest of his cronies get the gruesome comeuppance they so richly deserve. Happily he has left plans for ending his reign just lying around his castle, so hopefully I’ll get to put them into effect at some point.

Lord British’s dickishness does not stop at third-world dictatorship; not by a long shot. He tells Cate he has a cache of her old equipment hidden somewhere in his fake Disney World castle, but that Cate has to find it herself as part of a “game”. I then spend the next half hour dragging Cate around the castle in an increasingly desperate and frustrated attempt to find this secret storeroom. Ha ha ha, Lord British! You’re such a hoot! Hope you’ll still be smiling when the peasant’s revolution storms these flimsy fibreglass ramparts and sticks your head on a spike over the gate.

Just before I give up and shut the game down in disgust, Cate meets the first likeable character in Britannia so far.

Two decades later and her work is not yet done.

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For anyone born into the heady days of the early nineties, playing Sonic 4 is kind of like returning to your family home after a long absence only to find it populated by complete strangers. They say they know you. They say they’re your family. They say please put the knife down, you’ll hurt yourself. And then they say BLEEP BLOOP as you cut away their human-looking exterior to reveal the unfeeling robot automata beneath. Sonic 4 is a clinical, emotionless replica of the original games, an experience utterly devoid of any warmth or vital spirit. It’s the sort of game you’d expect to see if there was a race of intelligent aliens out there who had quixotically decided to make a Sonic sequel fifteen years after the last “true” instalment in the series – all the parts are there and they’re all working as you’d expect, but the end product is fundamentally wrong on a level so subtle you can’t define it.

Or maybe I’m just getting old.

I’m sure if I went and talked to the developers of Sonic 4 they’d tell me that their game is an affectionate homage to the originals. That may be true. To me, though, it looks like a cynical effort to lure players with fond memories of the originals back to the fold¹. The four zones on offer are lifted wholesale from Sonics 1 and 2; Splash Hill Zone is the classic Sonic starter zone so I’ll let that one go, but Casino Street Zone is a shameless reproduction of Casino Night Zone while Mad Gear Zone and Lost Labyrinth Zone are amalgams of the Chemical Plant/Scrap Brain and Labyrinth/Marble Zones.

This presents Sonic 4 with much, much bigger problems than if it had struck out into new territory and come up with some original level designs. I was constantly drawing unfavourable comparisons between the stages I was playing and the zones that begat them in everything they did, from graphics to structure to music. For example, compare and contrast the classic Green Hill Zone music with the equivalent in Sonic 4, Splash Hill Zone. The latter sounds like something I’d expect to find in a mediocre piece of PC shareware from 1995, for god’s sake². Twenty years of advances in technology and graphics and Sonic 4 still looks inferior to the charming pixel art of its antecedents, with the detailed renders used for Sonic himself being particularly soulless. I don’t know how they’ve done it but they’ve managed to find the uncanny valley for an ambulatory blue hedgehog in running shoes.

The special stages are replicas of the ones from Sonic 1; these happened to be the best out of all of them so Sonic 4 gets a pass there. Worse are the boss encounters³. I only made it to two of these but they were both directly lifted from Sonics 1 and 2. I kept running into feature after feature that had been copied from the original games, but copied in such a way that it felt like an inferior knockoff version. It was actually kind of a shame, because Sonic 4 does try a few new tricks – some of them, like the torches in the Lost Labyrinth, feel rather gimmicky, but I liked the dynamite and the minecart rides in the same zone. If Sonic 4 had used new technology to do new things instead of tiresomely attempting to reproduce old things with a new coat of paint I would have at least acknowledged the effort, and I probably would have been predisposed to like it a lot more than I did.

It’s ironic, really, because it’s not even like I take Sonic that seriously. While the first two games are treasured childhood memories I have played through them again as an adult and I’m very much aware of their flaws. I’ve barely paid attention to Sega’s demolition of the Sonic franchise over the years by repeatedly hitting it with entirely unneeded elements like 3D graphics and plot. I don’t have that much investment in what is, at the end of the day, a hedgehog that continually runs across the screen from left to right. Unfortunately what Sega have done here is beyond the pale, even for me. Fans of old games continually ask for remakes of old games just so, with nothing added or removed and very little tinkered with. It’s the sort of thing that’s always sounded like a good idea in theory, but the execrable turd that is Sonic 4 proves that things aren’t always so simple in practice.

(I never even mentioned the worst thing, which is that they’ve reverted Dr. Robotnik to his original Japanese name, Eggman. That’s just sick and wrong.)

1. It sadly worked in my case.
2. There is one track that’s actually not all that bad. Mad Gear Zone Act 1 evokes a definite glimmering of the immense Chemical Plant theme, while still being inferior in almost every way.
3. And while we’re comparing music, see if you can spot any similarities between the Death Egg music from Sonic 2 and the final boss music for Sonic 4.

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After being harangued by the Voice of God for taking the wrong exit out of Trinsic, I get Cate’s map of Britannia out to try and find out where she should be going. The map isn’t immediately helpful but, operating on the assumptions that the big built up area is Britain, that it’s reachable without having to get on a boat, and that Trinsic doesn’t appear to be in the middle of the desert, I conclude that she is currently somewhere to the south of Britain and that she should start heading northwards. This is a skill called orienteering long thought lost in this age of dynamic map markers and fast travel.

Unfortunately by the time I’ve figured this out the sun has started to set, and unlike most games I discover that you cannot see a goddamn thing at nighttime in Ultima VII. To make matters worse Iolo and Spark are both constantly complaining that they’re hungry. After some fiddling I manage to get Iolo’s inventory open to see if he’s got any food on him.

MOTHER OF GOD. Those are the creepiest eyes I have ever seen. Or maybe it’s just the way I have the two equipment screens arranged so that he appears to be making a squicky come-hither expression at Cate. Whatever. The inventory system in Ultima VII is quite comically bad in that it functions exactly like a real bag: fill it with too much stuff and you have to go digging through it to uncover whatever’s languishing at the bottom. After some preliminary excavations Iolo turns out to have some mutton and a loaf of bread, while Spark is carting around some grapes and sausages. I shove the meat-based products down their gullets before heading to the local inn to stock up on provisions. The innkeeper sells food as expected but attempts to gouge me horribly on the local delicacy. Cate does not fall for her ploy and instead buy fives legs of mutton at three gold each. We’re on a budget here, people.

Sadly she is unable to avoid forking out twenty more gold pieces for a room for the night as I don’t really want her to be blundering around in the dark with only a creepy old man and a street urchin for company, and I also want to see what the shops of Trinsic have to offer now that Cate’s actually got some money to spend. Iolo promises to watch Cate while she sleeps, which does no favours for his creepiness factor. In the morning I am somewhat dismayed to learn that the shops sell equipment which is no better than what Cate & co. stole from the various houses around Trinsic. It seems there’s nothing else to spend my vast fortune on except more combat training. That is, until I talk to the stablekeeper.

Who sells me a horse. A horse. It’s barely quicker than walking but who cares, I’m on a horse. This is travelling in style.

Leaving Trinsic from the north gate this time, and the Voice seems pleased. “YES, AVATAR, THAT IS THE PROPER DIRECTION!” it booms. You just wait till I find you, pushy narrator guy. We’ll see if you can still offer patronising commentary with a dagger rammed down your gullet. A couple of minutes hard riding brings Cate to what I assume is Britain from the way a very tinny rendition of “Rule Brittania” starts playing as soon as she enters the city limits.

Iolo and Spark immediately start grumbling that they’re hungry again after going all of six hours without food. Honestly, they’re worse than my cats; I’m starting to dislike the game for lumbering me with an old man and a small child as my first companions. Cate shows them some tough love by keeping a tight grip on the party’s food supply, and the group starts casting around in search of the two murderers from Trinsic. First stop, something called the “National Branch”. Sounds like a bank. If we don’t find the murderers in here we can at least rob the place, I guess.

Everyone remember where we parked!

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It may be difficult to believe in this age of Halo and Halo and yet more Halo, but Bungie Software used to be in the business of making some very, very good games. That these games have only achieved a cult following rather than the recognition they deserve is mostly down to two things: Bungie’s acquisition by Microsoft in 2000 in order to use Halo as a flagship title for the then in-development Xbox, and that Bungie started out as a Mac developer at a time when the iPod was a tiny, tiny glint in Steve Jobs’ eye. The latter meant that three of their best games were released on a format that no-one was really paying any attention to – as with today, the Macs of the early nineties were for artists and writers, not gamers – while the former brought them massive public attention at the cost of everyone conveniently forgetting that they’d ever existed as a separate entity to Microsoft. I’m going to spend the next two of these columns trying to turn back the clock by explaining just why Bungie’s old games are so fondly remembered by those who played them.

Part One: Marathon.

Bungie’s first ever game¹ was the first person-adventure hybrid Pathways into Darkness. This is an odd game that looks like it’d be kind of painful to play through today, which is why it’s a good thing that somebody has already gone to the trouble. Even this first effort – flawed though it was and which existed as a kind of prototype for a small company that was just stretching its legs – showcased Bungie’s greatest strength: their ability to turn something that might otherwise be unremarkable by the standards of the time into a compelling experience through the addition of a well-written and well-told story. Pathways is all about a special forces team dropped into an alien pyramid in the South American jungle. Their mission is to descend all the way to the bottom of the warren of tunnels that lies beneath it and detonate a nuclear weapon in order to stop the awakening of a Cthulu-esque dead god. This is a very good premise even if you don’t like Lovecraft because it allowed Bungie to do some rather interesting things with the adventure game format; for example, on your trek through the tunnel system you find the butchered remains of other pyramid explorers who can nonetheless be talked to post-mortem using an alien crystal. Piecing together what happened to the previous expeditions and avoiding the traps and monsters that killed them forms the bulk of the game’s storytelling, and it’s an effective way of creating an oppressive, bleak atmosphere – even leaving aside the inherent nihilism of talking to the dead years after they have perished, the player is constantly confronted with evidence that the pyramid is dangerous and will kill them if they’re not careful.

Pathways was a moderate success that gave Bungie the funding they needed to start work on a second game. This began as a sequel to Pathways but, after the spectacular success of Doom (released just after Pathways), it switched track and became a true first person shooter: Marathon.

Contrary to appearances — and at first glance they look very, very similar, with space marines toting futuristic weapons attempting to avert an invasion from an outside source — Marathon was not one of the legions of Doom clones attempting to cash in on the sudden FPS frenzy. Marathon made an attempt to take the genre in a new direction. Where Doom simply said to the player “Here is a gun, now fight your way through the infernal legions into the very maw of Hell,” Marathon tells a full-blown and intricately detailed story – a story that was so good they went back and shamelessly plundered elements of it to use in the Halo franchise.

The titular Marathon is a vast colony ship (built by hollowing out the asteroid Phobos and hurling it at the stars) which has recently arrived at its destination, the star Tau Ceti. The player is a security officer out on a routine shuttle mission when suddenly all hell breaks loose: an alien ship warps in and boards the Marathon, attempting to take it and the newly-built colony by force. To make matters worse one of the three AIs running the Marathon, Durandal, is in the advanced stages of rampancy (a neat Bungie concept where an AI becomes exponentially more intelligent as it ages, but also increasingly unstable in terms of sanity) and appears to be masterminding his own agenda. The player has to follow instructions from Leela, the sole surviving AI still on their side, in order to take back the Marathon and free the colonists.

Marathon’s gameplay is almost pure Doom; it includes a few new features like the addition of NPCs that are on the player’s side (the other colonists) but otherwise it’s functionally identical — this is no bad thing, mind, because the gunplay and the level design is on par with that of Doom, which was excellent. With the bleak post-apocalyptic FPS wasteland created by scripted cutscenes being some years distant, Marathon opts to tell its story via a series of in-game terminals that can be accessed by the player.  These are the medium by which the various AIs in the game communicate with you: Leela, attempting to coordinate a desperate defence of the Marathon; Durandal, alternating between taunting the player and offering dubious “help”; and finally Tycho, the third AI which has been subverted by the aliens. The plotting, scheming and mutual recrimination amongst the AIs takes up most of the terminal time, but Bungie also put in various bits of backstory that hint at why the aliens are there, why Durandal became Rampant, and why the player is capable of murdering legions upon legions of cybernetic monstrosities with barely a scratch. They even find the time to paint a picture of the situation back on Earth and the reasons for launching the Marathon in the first place. Not bad for a game that uses the mechanical equivalent of e-mail² to tell its story.

Marathon was a big hit with the Mac-owning community – the staff of Amiga Power were particularly taken with it – and Bungie duly started work on a sequel, which was released on Mac on 1995 and PC in 1996. This was Marathon 2: Durandal, a game which focused solely on the sociopathic, manipulative Rampant AI from the first title. Durandal is helping one of the alien slave races rebel against their former masters for reasons unknown, and to do this he’s kidnapped the player at the moment of victory in the first game. After spending seventeen years in cold stasis the player is rudely awakened, handed a gun and set loose on the alien slaves’ occupied homeworld to decimate the garrison there. The aliens themselves are massively, massively pissed that that their original force was defeated so completely, and not only do they wipe out the survivors of the Tau Ceti colony but they also send a full battle group of ships after Durandal’s captured alien scout vessel accompanied by an angry and vengeful Tycho, still smarting over what was done to him in the original game. As the story unfolds the player character is caught between the two warring AIs as he desperately attempts to unravel the mystery of the ruined homeworld. 

Durandal did everything that Marathon did, only better – it had more levels, more enemies, better audio, new environment features such as water, and if you ask me it really nailed the feeling of being an explorer on a dead alien world. The story is absolutely cracking too; the capricious character of Durandal never wears out its welcome and there are some amazing moments as the vendetta between him and Tycho progresses to its natural conclusion (WARNING SPOILERS). If the player has been paying attention all the way through Marathon and Durandal the last line of the final screen hits like a punch in the gut. Unfortunately the PC release was largely ignored thanks to the release of Quake three months earlier; nobody was interested in 2.5D shooters after that, and after the release of the third game in the series – Marathon: Infinity³ – the series faded into relative obscurity.

However, Bungie still had one card left to play. Noting that the PC release of Durandal had been something of a flop and concluding that they probably weren’t going to sell many more copies, they released the source code for it in 1999. This allowed the reverse-engineering of the free Aleph One open source engine to which all three games were eventually ported. That along with the staggeringly in-depth (and now rather venerable) Marathon Story page ensured that the series retained an ever-growing cult following, which eventually led to the release of the second game on Xbox Live Arcade in 2007. It’s nice to see Marathon finally getting some of the recognition it deserves, although it’s also somewhat bittersweet to think that the Halo series is as close as we’ll ever get to a modern successor.

So, go and download the freeware versions (which finally hit version 1.0 last December after a decade of development work). Give them a whirl. If you don’t feel like playing through the games themselves you can still read through the terminal screens that tell the story – and it’s definitely a story worth reading. It’s not often a series like Marathon is lovingly preserved in the way it has been, and it’s only possible because of a rare collusion between developers (who released all three games for free in 2005) and dedicated fans (who came up with the Aleph One engine that allows the game to be run on modern versions of Windows).

Next week: Bungie turns their attention to the strategy genre and makes one of the best fantasy RTS games ever.

1. That is, developed and published as a full company. Their real first game was an adventure game involving the Cretan labyrinth and the minotaur that was developed by one of the founders while he was still at university.

2. Interspersed with gorgeous digital art heading up the chapter screens, several of which can be found adorning this post.

3. This was something of a misstep for the series if you cared about the single player, as Infinity was a title that largely focused on the popular multiplayer aspect of the game. The single player campaign was subcontracted to a different development house, and it shows.

The post In Praise Of: Bungie Software, Part One. appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

In some ways I suspect a proper review of Dustforce is redundant. People will look at a gameplay video or two and immediately know if they’re going to like it, because it’s just that sort of game – the kind that has a visceral appeal to a certain type of mindset, but one that will repel others in exactly the same way – and whatever I write here is going to be unlikely to change that. But Dustforce may just be an exception to that rule, seeing as my own reaction to it surprised me quite a bit.

Dustforce is one of those bastard hard platformers in the vein of Super Meat Boy or the venerable N. You take control of one of a team of what is best described as ninja cleaners and your job is to run through a series of levels cleaning up the rubbish that inexplicably adheres to every surface. The more rubbish you clean up and the more efficiently you do it, the better a rating you’ll get at the end. However, there are several subtle features of the game (and one amazingly clever one) that make Dustforce a very distinct beast from the games that have come before it. I can probably sum their overall effect up by saying that I didn’t like Super Meat Boy very much – like LIMBO it seemed to be a game that took perverse pleasure in seeing me fail – but that I am nevertheless very much enjoying Dustforce when I really didn’t expect to.

For starters the various cleaners are ludicrously agile. There’s no tedious unlocking of abilities or characters here; you get the full whack from the very start including double jump, dashing, wall-running, wall-jumping and even ceiling-running. The control system is deceptively easy to get to grips with: you simply hold the direction you want your cleaner to move in and they will do their best to accommodate you. It has a sticky system similar to that of the Assassin’s Creed games that works far better because of the 2D nature of the levels; run into a wall by holding right and the cleaner will “stick” to it, and can then run up it by pressing up. This is a much better way of approaching movement and control than other games of its type, not least because you’re never stuck there wondering if there’s something the developers are holding back that you need to complete a level. You have all the tools; it’s up to you to use them properly.

At first getting around the various obstacles seems like simplicity itself and you’re left wondering where the challenge is. But Dustforce is just warming you up and letting you get to grips with the controls before hitting you with some of the best level design I’ve ever seen in a platformer. It’s not until the later levels that I really started to appreciate what the developers have done, but they’ve made the proper completion of many of them dependent on conserving your character’s momentum. It wasn’t often that I encountered a jump that absolutely couldn’t be made unless I went into it just so, but wasting time faffing around doing it the slow way meant that I was more likely to break my dust combo chain and lower my final level rating. The levels have been tuned, for lack of a better word, and they’ve been tuned in such a way that most of them allow a middling player to at least get through them after much trial and tribulation, but a good player who can read the various obstacles and knows what their character is capable of can tear through it sickeningly quickly.

This is as good a time as any to mention the really clever thing Dustforce does. Say you’ve just unlocked a new level and you’ve gradually found your way through it, dying many times (Dustforce gives you unlimited lives and is generous with its checkpoints, with the caveat that every death will, as ever, lower your level rating) but eventually struggling your way to the end. A scoreboard will pop up telling you how your pathetically awful run through the level compared with everyone else’s, and displaying the top ten fastest completions. That’s par for the course in a game like this, and since the first run of a level is invariably very bad the usual result is to make the player feel small and insignificant compared to the 2,000 players who completed it more quickly than they did. However, Dustforce doesn’t want you to feel small and insignificant. Dustforce doesn’t ever want you to look at an obstacle and think “Well, how the hell do I do that?” And so its solution is to turn the scoreboard into a valuable learning tool. Other games would let you view a replay of your own woeful performance just to rub in how terrible you are. Dustforce lets you view replays of every other player on the scoreboard.

I really can’t understate how tremendous this one single feature is. It completely changes how the game works. No longer does playing a particularly hard level make you feel like you’re trying to smash through a brick wall with your head; if you’re having difficulty, you just look at the #1 player on the board to see what they did. They’re usually preternaturally good at the game and faster than you can ever hope to be, but just looking at their runthroughs is invaluable for learning the various tricks for getting through levels quickly and successfully. Dustforce may be rather difficult at times, but at the end of a day it is a game that works with the player, not against them, and one which genuinely does want you to improve your skills so that you can tackle the really hard job of getting a perfect double S rating.

Dustforce rates your level performance in two areas: Completion and Finesse. Completion is a simple matter of how much rubbish you sweep up; getting every last speck of dust in the level will result in an S rating. Finesse is the awkward one because it’s a measure of how well you do this. Every bit of rubbish swept raises your dust combo meter. Go too long without sweeping rubbish and the combo meter will reset to zero, lowering your finesse rating. Getting hit by enemies, touching spikes, falling down bottomless pits etc. will also lower your finesse rating. Getting an S rating in Finesse requires a run where you never break the combo meter and you never get hit. Getting a double S rating therefore requires a terrifying level of precision, but it’s usually something that you feel is almost within your grasp after a few runthroughs. And this is a good thing, because it’s here that we come to the one element of Dustforce’s design that has a question mark hanging over it.

Dustforce is based around a typical level hub with a number of doors leading to the various levels. The game starts with about twenty of these levels accessible to the player, with the rest being locked up tight with either silver or gold locks. Getting a perfect score on one of the base levels awards a silver key, which unlocks a silver door, which leads to a harder level. A perfect score on that grants a gold key, which gives you access to levels that have apparently been designed by Kafka. I have to say I’m not entirely comfortable with a game that requires perfection before it will let you progress. I understand the developer’s argument that getting a perfect score on a base level is about as difficult as simply completing a silver level (and they are correct in saying so) but I think what this means is that, for all its attempts to accommodate the player and make their lives easier, Dustforce has a difficulty curve that is still a little too steep. I was able to finish many of the silver levels and I even got SS ratings on some of them, but the gold levels were completely beyond me even after viewing several successful playthroughs. Perhaps what was required here was an intermediate level between silver and gold that could be accessed by getting AA ratings on the silver levels; this would keep the player striving for perfection while rewarding them for coming up just a bit short and training them to cope with the increased challenge found in the gold levels.

Nevertheless I’ve had a lot of fun with Dustforce. That’s not bad going for a title I knew nothing about and bought purely on the basis of its art and its insane premise of ninja sweepers (also because the baddies kind of reminded me of Jet Set Willy). It’s by far the most accessible platformer of its type that I’ve played, so if you enjoyed Super Meat Boy at all – or even if you found it somewhat mean-spirited, like I did – it’s probably worth giving it a go; if not now, then when it inevitably goes on sale for pennies. It’s a fine game and an outstanding example of the genre.

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