Sat Feb 04 2006 23:46 The Games They Are A'Roundup:
Now with babbling about game design problems and death!
- Miller's
Quest is a game you can just let run and it does the dull
repetitive things for you. If you are a Windows person you can play
its ancestor, Progress
Quest. Written by a guy who I think used to write Segfault
stories, though I can't prove this. Basically a non-bad Segfault story
in game form.
This game is written in Ruby, and it has a bizarre attitude towards
generating colored text, but I'm probably the only person who will
notice. I have been thinking about writing an MMORPG in which all the
players are scripted robots, but the idea keeps running into
problems. I've also been thinking about mentioning in the Ruby
Cookbook the bizarre curses-less colored text hack used in this
program, but I don't think I want to encourage this kind of behavior.
- Enemy
Lines wins many points for extreme literalism (your enemies are
lines) and its castlezzt.net-type presentation. It foolishly squanders
them all by being kind of like Missile Command. Bah!
The author has also put out three
other games with the same name, only some of which are like
Missile Command. The best-looking one is #4, which has a great
cyberpunk Zaxxon look.
- You'd think a game whose file is called "todoom" would be
"To-Doom", an action-packed slaughterfest organized around the
principles of the Getting Things Done productivity philosophy. But
it's actually a Roguelike game called Tower of Doom. Pretty good, not
great. All your characters are various lowlife types (because the
Tower of Doom is a punishment). Peculiarities: no enemy spawning and
complete knowledge of all enemies on the level.
Hmm, since I downloaded this game, the project seems to have
undergone a freakish metamorphosis! It's now called Warp Rogue and is much
different. That's what I get for writing reviews of ancient copies of
games found on my hard drive while I have no Internet
access. Developing...
- Zoid's Quest is potentially a really good side-scroller game like
Jill of the Jungle. It has an excellent, original fighting
mechanic, and good first-level music that reminds me of NES games like
Faxanadu. But this game makes many of the tiny mistakes or
misalignments that ruin so many NES-like open source games. I should
make a big list of these and do a cookbook on how to avoid them, so
here are a couple:
- Jerky or disproportionate character movement. Zoid's Quest has
pretty smooth character movement, but as in almost all of these
platform games, the speed of the character is much slower than the
character dimensions would indicate. A good rule of thumb is that I
should not be continually jumping from place to place because it's
faster than running.
- Ladder behavior. When you jump and grab onto a ladder, your
horizontal motion should stop or be absorbed by the ladder. The ladder
is not a strip on the wall that lets you defy gravity; it's actively
supporting you.
The ladder is not a hole. It's bolted to its platform; it doesn't
bisect it. You should be able to walk on top of a ladder square.
If you stop moving on a ladder you should stay clinging to the
ladder, rather than falling off of it.
- Jumping and gravity behavior. First, you should be able to jump
more than one square in height. This overlaps somewhat with
disproportionate character movement. Maybe you think it's cliche that
your character should be able to jump as high as Mario, but Mario
jumps that high for a reason: jumping games aren't fun when you can't
friggin' jump.
Before dropping down below the edge of the screen, you should have
some way of seeing whether or not a drop is infinite. You either need
to provide some kind of "look up/down" facility, or design the level
so that the player has a chance to experience the lower levels before
the higher, or design the level so that it all fits on the
screen. (This is actually in the Zoid's Quest TODO, as a magic spell.)
- Enemies. You must have more than one kind of enemy, and each type
of enemy must have different behavior, and in particular the first
level must have more than one kind of enemy. I know your game is in
development, but just make another kind of enemy for us.
- Okay, that's enough for now. You get the idea.
- Holotz's
Castle is the first game to ask, "What the hell are doing all
these keys here?" But it never answers it. Instead, it disguises
itself as two games with identical mechanics. In one, you must gather
keys to escape the level. In the other, you must gather gems
to... escape the level. After Zoid's Quest, the movement in this game
felt perfect, and your characters gradually become faster and able to
jump higher. Nice cut scenes use the game engine and have a somewhat
juvenile Nintendo of America-approved sense of humor. The only
problems: one touch of an enemy's hand kills you, and it's possible to get stuck in the corner of a block. And there's a big ol' cut scene
cliffhanger. (though I should check a newer version; maybe it's done a
Tower of Doom).
"How do you know what I think?"
"I KNOW EVERYTHING!"
- The other day I was laughing about the classic Rounded-up game Apricots. Specifically, I was recalling the
limerick I'd written about the hilarious deaths which are impossible
to avoid in that game. Sumana said I shouldn't talk that way online
about death, because it might be read by someone who's thinking of
committing suicide and it might give them the idea that suicide is
somehow fun or that I approve of death in real life. Well, I'm here to
tell you that suicide is not fun and that death is a bunch of
crap. And there's no better game to tell you this than N.
N is a game with a wonderful physics model and a million
deaths. Your character is a greedy ninja with a lust for gold--and not
being killed! Unfortunately you get killed a lot, usually in
hilarious ways that top even the deaths in Apricots. In Apricots you
might crash your plane into a tiny island in the middle of a
lake. Explosion. In N you might do a ninja leap right into an active
death ray. Your body plummets the length of the screen and splats on
the ground. Then your wireframe corpse bounces around for a bit and
hits a mine, which blows it into its little wireframe parts. The parts
themselves will bounce around and get into all sorts of trouble:
setting off more mines, being shot around the game board by
trampolines, being zapped by zap-robots, and so on. It's the most
morbid game with the simplest graphics I've ever seen, and I've seen
at least five.
But it's not fun to die, because that means you've got to
start the whole frustrating Lode Runner-esque level over again instead
of going to the next cool level. Which, under Nietzsche's theory of
eternal recurrence, is basically the same thing that happens in real
life. So I guess I'm saying it inculcates a healthier attitude towards
your own, actual death than Apricots.
It's also one of the best games I've ever seen on my Game Roundup
scale of game-liking: "a flexible set of techniques to use towards
your goals, and lots of random variation within well-defined
parameters." Except it's not random here; varity here comes from a
huge number of well-designed levels. There are also many user-created
levels that simply use the player's (non-dead) body as a pinball in
the machine of the board, bouncing you around narrowly avoiding
rockets and zap-bots and all sorts of horrible fates.
Oh, I should mention that it's composed of Flash and it's not open source. Good game though.
Filed under:
games:roundup 