January 7th, 2013...it is half past the 18th hour as I write this. The physics midyear rises in the distance like the sun behind a mountain range. To gaze upon it now...to see it in its monstrous, omnipotent splendor...to think it was here the whole time...and only now am I beginning to acknowledge its presence...
Earlier today, I stumbled upon a game called Apoch. A simple top down 2D shooter. as the grey, hopeless menu screen enveloped my visage...my very soul...I knew what I had to do. I had limited time and willpower...I have even less now...but still, my path was clear. I had to play this game, and I had to review it for the world to see.
My heart filled with resentful joy, I set out on my journey. The first thing that caught my eye illuminated my soul with such a bright pleasure, I felt like I might survive the night after all. Could it be? After all these games...one after another committing the cardinal sin of game design...I finally saw it. So simplistic in its rectangular shape but so heartwarming in its message. A button...written in it the words "Load Game."
This is it, I thought. I've finally found it. I've finally found a true, honest-to-God save feature in a Digipen game. I fought back the pristine and salty river overflowing in my eyes. The tears would blur my vision, and I wanted to gaze upon the beauty in front of me without obstruction.
Reluctantly I pulled my cursor away from the "Load Game" button. This was the first time I had played this game, so there was nowhere to start but "New Game."
Once I clicked the mouse button I began my journey through the maze-like level, mowing down the undead sprites that stood in my way. I couldn't tell what the .png monsters represented...it looked to all the world like one of them was pissing crystalized shards of urine at me, but I didn't care. I had the freedom to quit the game and come back to it...that was all I could ask for. How naive of me...
I didn't even care that the movement speed was something akin to a turtle in a tar pit and that since the goal of the game is to exterminate all the monsters in a level, missing one early on would have me slowly trekking back to the beginning of the stage to pop some lead in my targets.
I didn't care that the game has some kind of deep-seated phobia that the player will run out of ammo such that bullet cases are haphazardly strewn about the labyrinths so frequently that any strategy other than emitting a stream of hot metal from both barrels is inefficient, negating any challenge the game might have had as well as rendering the tertiary bullet system obsolete.
I enjoyed the terribly designed game for a while before hitting the quicksave button and exiting. It was nary half an hour later that I decided to boot it up again, once more gazing upon the glory of the save feature. I clicked the "Load Game" button...then it happened.
A white box appeared before me, delivering a message that drilled into my very being, making me sick to my stomach. "Apoch.exe has stopped working" it read. Before my very eyes, the window that held the game retreated into the unreachable depths of my start menu. It was gone...the hope I had in the future of game design...in humanity...escaped me.
It is now approaching the 19th hour...my future looks dim.
Links
https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=26136
Monday, January 7, 2013
Aphotic Ascent
Well, I suppose can thank this game's title for making me think for a fleeting moment that 9th Grade Ecology actually wasn't pointless.
Unfortunately, that's about all I can thank this game for. It's not a fundamentally broken game like A Series of Tubes or AEther, but rather it's a functional string of design flaws, one after another.
The most obvious of which is that this game literally requires a mouse to play. See, I play all my games on a laptop, so if I didn't happen to have a mouse on me, I'd be SOL. Wouldn't one of the primary purposes of having a free Game Library be to make your projects accessible to all who wish to experience them?
The controls are floaty as root beer on the Fourth of July. Sometimes the jump carries the character no higher than a few feet and other times he rockets into orbit at the slightest touch of the "space" key. The inertia is way too high, making you feel like this dark, ostensibly rocky terrain is actually an ice rink that's been covered in oil.
The graphical style is fine. In fact it looks like something you'd by in the indie section of Steam or the XBLA (which might not sound like a compliment but when its competition is Animalien it's like a gold medal).
The music is very atmospheric and immersive but quickly becomes annoying, probably because it's accompanied by what I'm about to mention next.
And of course, we get to the biggest design flaw of all. I wonder if I'm boring people at this point (if I had an audience to bore, that is...har har). Yes, it's that old game design favorite of mine...everyone sing along...
There's no. Damn. Save. Feature.
You know what? I can accept that in a game like Animalien because that game is more about the challenge and mastery of the controls, so you can use the argument that it's supposed to be a gauntlet to be conquered in one go...kinda like Contra or any of those other old arcadey titles. Aphotic Ascent on the other hand seems to build itself around the story with it's Limbo-esque graphical style and "slow revelation" narrative format. It is simply impossible to be immersed in a story if you have to start from the beginning every time you put it down. Anyone remember that one scene in The Catcher in the Rye where Holden has to keep reading the same sentence over and over because his douchenugget friend keeps distracting him? Well, the lack of a save feature is basically the equivalent of that friend.
Maybe this game is short enough to justify the whole "one go" mentality but the length of a game has to take back seat to the overall feel. Even if the game is only 15 minutes long, the irresponsible level design makes it frustrating; and nobody wants to put up with a frustrating game. When I fall down 500 stories, watching helplessly as my progress unfolds around me, I want the security of knowing I can ragequit and return to it later.
Alright, I think I'm all out of rage for now. Tune in next time and keep your hands off my cookies.
Links
not Limbo: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=25899
Unfortunately, that's about all I can thank this game for. It's not a fundamentally broken game like A Series of Tubes or AEther, but rather it's a functional string of design flaws, one after another.
The most obvious of which is that this game literally requires a mouse to play. See, I play all my games on a laptop, so if I didn't happen to have a mouse on me, I'd be SOL. Wouldn't one of the primary purposes of having a free Game Library be to make your projects accessible to all who wish to experience them?
The controls are floaty as root beer on the Fourth of July. Sometimes the jump carries the character no higher than a few feet and other times he rockets into orbit at the slightest touch of the "space" key. The inertia is way too high, making you feel like this dark, ostensibly rocky terrain is actually an ice rink that's been covered in oil.
The graphical style is fine. In fact it looks like something you'd by in the indie section of Steam or the XBLA (which might not sound like a compliment but when its competition is Animalien it's like a gold medal).
The music is very atmospheric and immersive but quickly becomes annoying, probably because it's accompanied by what I'm about to mention next.
And of course, we get to the biggest design flaw of all. I wonder if I'm boring people at this point (if I had an audience to bore, that is...har har). Yes, it's that old game design favorite of mine...everyone sing along...
There's no. Damn. Save. Feature.
You know what? I can accept that in a game like Animalien because that game is more about the challenge and mastery of the controls, so you can use the argument that it's supposed to be a gauntlet to be conquered in one go...kinda like Contra or any of those other old arcadey titles. Aphotic Ascent on the other hand seems to build itself around the story with it's Limbo-esque graphical style and "slow revelation" narrative format. It is simply impossible to be immersed in a story if you have to start from the beginning every time you put it down. Anyone remember that one scene in The Catcher in the Rye where Holden has to keep reading the same sentence over and over because his douchenugget friend keeps distracting him? Well, the lack of a save feature is basically the equivalent of that friend.
Maybe this game is short enough to justify the whole "one go" mentality but the length of a game has to take back seat to the overall feel. Even if the game is only 15 minutes long, the irresponsible level design makes it frustrating; and nobody wants to put up with a frustrating game. When I fall down 500 stories, watching helplessly as my progress unfolds around me, I want the security of knowing I can ragequit and return to it later.
Alright, I think I'm all out of rage for now. Tune in next time and keep your hands off my cookies.
Links
not Limbo: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=25899
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