News You Can Bruise for 2004 August 25 (entry 2)

(11) Wed Aug 25 2004 20:14 PST Hubristic Game Roundup: The good news is that, despite the presence of a couple of clones, this Game Roundup has some of the best ideas and some of the nicest implementations I've seen in a while. The bad news is that apart from the fabulously bizarre but lightweight Komi and the unassuming icebreaker, these games have Greek-tragedy-quality flaws--sometimes trivial flaws--that make the games not worth playing. I will start with the greatest tragedy of this roundup:

• Gearhead is a great Roguelike with Omega-like nonlinearity, excellent character development for a Roguelike, and many wacky touches like randomly generated dialogue, which throws it all away by being a mecha game. Because it has the potential to be so great and its fatal flaw is so simple, I am going to take this opportunity to make a detailed argument about UI design which you can skip if you find it boring.

  In case you came late to the party, a mecha is a Godzilla-sized robot (such as, well, Mechagodzilla) operated by a person who is usually riding in the robot. The point of a mecha game is to do a game on a large scale, where you can crunch through entire cities wreaking havoc. People who like mecha games also seem to like drawing lots of pictures of mechas (mecha? mechae?), which is not my cup of tea, but that is not relevant to this discussion.

  In your standard Roguelike game, you push buttons to control a simulated person. When you play a mecha game, you are pushing buttons to control a simulation of a person pushing buttons to control a second machine. Sometimes people have wacky ideas about what it would look like to have a video game about playing a video game. Well, here you have it. It looks like a mecha game, and it is annoying.

  It doesn't have to be this way. Mechas are, by conceit of the genre, vaguely humanoid. The best interface is therefore the one you've spent your whole life using: your own body. Forgo the buttons and use motion capture and force-feedback to tie your mecha's movement to your own, as in Fiasco. Indeed, some mechas are refered to as "suits", implying this very mechanic. In game terms, this would be implemented by letting you use the same commands to move your mecha in battle mode as you use to move yourself in non-battle mode.

  If you absolutely need to simulate additional clunkiness (eg. so you can have a notion of "current facing direction", as Gearhead does), do it by reducing the directional key controls to the Clunky Three: rotate left, rotate right, and thrust (move forward). This time-honored trio shows up in innumerable games all the way back to Spacewar, and nothing does a better job of connoting "the thing on the screen does not represent you, only a machine you control". I don't play a lot of mecha games, but this was used in the only one I ever liked--a DOS play-by-modem maze chase that Andy and I used to play.

  Gearhead, in the worst mecha game tradition, forgoes both these mecha-motion strategies in favor of a menu system. When you're just walking around with your feet, you can use the arrow keys to move. But when it comes time to stand and fight mecha-style, you can't directly move your mecha at all. Instead of letting you use the arrow keys for left, right, and thrust, there is a menu system which has options for left, right, and thrust. You use the arrow keys to select your option from a menu, and hit enter to rotate or move. It's Microsoft Mecha 98. Just don't do this! There's no reason to! Factor out the aggravation for a better game.

  Someone who likes mecha games might say that this is part of the the game; the human is subsumed into the machine and must operate it in clunkiness. I would say that misses the point. You are already interacting with a machine in a clunky way. It's just that it's a real machine, not a simulated one. Treat the player sitting at the computer as though they were the character sitting in the mecha, and you've got big mimesis wihout sacrificing usability. You can bet the character in the game is not selecting "Rotate left" from a menu; it's not that bad to drive a mecha. Take advantage of the clunkiness of the standard Roguelike controls and kill two robo-birds with one mecha-stone.

  I've picked on Gearhead enough. As I said, I pick on it not because it's a bad game but because it's a really, really good game made virtually unplayable by a bad UI decision. It's a game where talking to the world-weary shopkeeper is quick and fun, but where even small battles play at a crawl. Admittedly I have a preference for the world-weary shopkeeper type interaction, but that doesn't mean I want the battles to be slow and hard to play.

• icebreaker is interesting because of the skill with which it uses nice iconic graphics to conceal the fact that it's another Qix clone until you actually start playing. There's also a convenient webpage which details all the ways in which this game is different from Microsoft's Jezzball, pioneer of the mouse-based Qix clone.

  As previously mentioned, this is a lot better than KBounce. It has penguins--the bouncy balls are penguins and you're trying to cut up their ice floes so they can be transported to zoos or some lame excuse like that. I like the penguins, but I don't like the linear way it gets harder, adding one penguin each time.

• Freebooters: Lovely nonsensical name disguises a game that is more atmosphere than game by a wide margin. It's set in the Caribbean region, and who's to say but that certain piratical impulses might be indulged in the course of the game. That's what it promises, anyway. What it delivers is a game where you, a legitimate businessman, go from port to port buying and selling rum and other commodities (in a welcome deviation from realism, there is no slave-running). Occasionally you run into a pirate ship and have it out, but the having-it-out action scenes have weird controls and look like boats fighting in a bathtub. It reminds me of a nautical version of North And South, but not as good. Great graphics in the non-real-time parts of the game, though.

  This game is a clone of "Pirates!", one of Sid Meier's pre-Civilization games. There was a real chance here for the clone to improve on the original, but it just plays like early Sid Meier, the kind of game that would be fun if it were the late 80s and similar, better games didn't exist yet.

• Komi is not actually a Qix clone, but I can't shake the feeling that it's somehow homomorphic to Qix. You are a frog with an arbitrarily long tongue, a frog who lives in a swamp--of madness! Alien spaceships and vicious robins patrol the air, protecting the yummy fireflies that are your food. To retrieve these morsels you must dare to expose your tongue to the alien/robin joint assault for as long as it takes to move your tongue up the screen and then back down--but wait! The water itself teems with vicious herons who will peck at you, and fish that will gobble you up! I'm taking liberties as to what the sprites are supposed to be; they don't look like herons or fish or fireflies (but they do look like alien spaceships). The web page says you are a "space frog", which might explain things even as it makes things more confusing. Anyway, it's very hectic and it's fun for a while.
• Laby: Fun roguelike, very customizable with skillset. Has a kind of SNES feel to it. Hard to find items, instant death got me twice. Really feels like there's something missing in terms of game balance, but I still want to play even though I know I'm just going to die. A little work could turn this into a classic.
• Dead Mobsters has a great idea (mobsters come back from the dead in a Marley-esque quest to undo the damage they did while alive... okay, it's not quite that good) and excellent funny graphics, but it's way too hard. The undeath factor explains the old video-game conundrum of how you can take ten bullets to the chest and still live, but it doesn't explain why your un-undead opponents have the same ability. It's doubly frustrating when your opponents can fire off those ten bullets all at once, while you're stuck with the crappy one-bullet-on-the-screen-at-a-time gun they issued you in Mobster Hell. Fix this, and you've got a fun shoot-em-up.

Comments:

Posted by George Gesslein II at Thu Aug 26 2004 01:23

There are way too many rogue clones in this world.
I don't want to play rogue anymore.
My favorite harmless game series is King's Quest by Sierra.

Posted by anonymous at Thu Aug 26 2004 06:30

GearHead has an option for using the standard movement keys for controlling the mecha. From the control menu, select Options Menu/Combat Settings/Mecha Control and set it to "roguelike".

Posted by Leonard at Thu Aug 26 2004 08:31

Woo hoo! All my complaining was for nothing!

Posted by Joseph Hewitt at Thu Aug 26 2004 13:17

The menu system used for controlling your mecha in GearHead is a direct descendant of the menu system used in "BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception" (Infocom,1989). This style of control was also used in Mechfight, Titans of Steel, and a number of other mecha games from the late 80s and early 90s.

I'm not saying this to defend the menu interface, I just want to make sure that I'm not the one blamed for creating it.

Early in development, the menu system was a whole lot easier to program than the keyboard interface. The reason why it's still there is that I personally enjoy using it. I certainly hope that you like playing the game more now that you've found out about the interface switch.

Posted by Leonard at Thu Aug 26 2004 14:41

Joseph, thanks for your work on GearHead. It's a great game and I'm sorry to belabor the mecha interface but it really frustrated me. I'm really glad to hear there's another choice.

Posted by Nick Moffitt at Thu Aug 26 2004 19:42

Is that a human toasting a robot?

Posted by Leonard at Thu Aug 26 2004 20:06

Aye... a robot pirate! With a hook where once he had a titanium grasping unit featuring five degrees of freedom!

Posted by Nick Moffitt at Thu Aug 26 2004 21:14

No, he's still got the grasping unit. That be no hook!

Posted by Nick Moffitt at Thu Aug 26 2004 23:19

Also, judging by the human hand, I'd say its owner obviously never did a day's labor in her/his life.

Posted by Leonard at Fri Aug 27 2004 12:16

Hey, toasting robots is hard work!