Tim’s Playlog: April 2019

We’re in the throws of indie season and thus April brought a swath of incredible titles — new, ported and remastered. Here are some thoughts on the handful of titles I played.

Cuphead

Few feats of passive media fascinate me like those of 30’s era Walt Disney(/Ub Iwerks) animation; you’re talking(reading) to the guy who has a sketch of Mickey’s iconic Steamboat Willie whistle pose hanging on his wall. As such, I’ve coveted Cuphead ever since its reveal. Studio MDHR captured the aesthetic and tone of the formative era of Western cartoons picture-perfectly, frame by frame. With the game finally finding a new home on Switch, I finally had the chance to play it. It lived up to my hype.

I typically wouldn’t be one for a back-to-back fiesta of inanely challenging bosses but Cuphead’s difficult is vastly overstated. It’s not so much a platformer as it is a puzzle game. Each boss phase is its own puzzle that once cracked becomes quite easy to breeze through in order to solve the boss’ next puzzle. Get them all down and, with a bit of technical-execution-muscle-memory, it’s lights out. As you play further, you start to develop optimization strategies: do you save up your special attacks to unleash ultimate destruction on a particularly tricky phase? Which two weapon types best suit an encounter and when do you switch between them? (It’s pretty much always the standard pea shooter and auto-aimer for me). The satisfaction of winning is less one of overcoming adversity as it is downloading your foes. This sneaky bit of design hides accessibility behind what appears to be an intimidating exterior, and makes players who may struggle at a schmup or other reaction-based shooter feel empowered. Because again, Cuphead is not a difficult game; it only appears difficult.

One of the smartest design choies Studio MDHR made was omitting a health meter for bosses. You’re essentially shooting in the dark, hanging on that last bit of health in the final phase, hoping each bullet will be the one to slay your foe. But then there’s a brilliant catch: upon death, you’re shown just how close you came to beating the boss. In a game where you’re dying more than you’re not, this progress indicator acts as a motivator; dying stops being failure and instead indicates that your progress through each phase are small successes.

But not all is dandy in your quest to pay off your debt to the devil. I was amongst those disappointed when it was made known that the game wasn’t a traditional platformer, but perhaps ironically the platforming levels that were added to address such woes are the weakest part of the game. It’s obvious that the game wasn’t made with run-and-gun gameplay in mind. In the levels I’ve encountered in the front half of the game, the platforming can be hard to judge and one level in particular where you’re running up a hollowed-out tree makes shooting awkward as your gun is pointed right at the sloped floor. It’s not all bad: I thought a segment of a level where you’re flipping gravity to run along the ceiling was well-executed, even if such a concept has been explored in practically every platformer ever (only slight hyperbole). It’s hard to complain too much since they aren’t required to beat the game but I can’t help but wonder if the effort put into these could have been better spent on a few new bosses.

But that small grievance aside, Cuphead is unequivocally one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played. The painstaking detail put into every frame of animation must have been grueling but it paid off.

The near-perfection of Cuphead makes it unfortunate that another Switch-exclusive boss rush game I was excited for had to release a mere two weeks prior…

Mechstermination Force

As a fan of Bertil Hörberg’s previous work on Gunman Clive and its sequel, Mechstermination Force was a must purchase for me. Comparisons to Cuphead aside, it’s pretty solid! Comparisons to Cuphead made, it’s hard not to be a bit critical in retrospect.

Fighting Mechstermination Force’s robotic giants is a more dynamic experience than Cuphead. While the specifics vary from boss-to-boss, you’re essentially climbing the mechs Shadow of the Colossus style to beat away at their giant red life-cores. The concept works, but losses often feel less like your fault given that the scaling mechanic and dodging attacks can be unwieldy. Sometimes it feels like you’re unraveling a puzzle phase-by-phase as in Cuphead but at others you’re beating your head against inconsistencies. In other words, errors often feel more like your fault than they do in Cuphead. This is somewhat alleviated by a greater allocation of health but that feels more like a band-aid.

That said, most of the fights in Mechstermination Force feel colussus in scale and are satisfying to overcome… except the final boss (so, spoilers for that below). One of my biggest game design grievances is uprooting the game skills players have honed at the end of the game for an “epic moment.” Throughout Mechstermination Force you’re fighting on foot, but for the final boss you take control of an unwieldy spaceship against an unwieldy amalgamation of a boss. What’s supposed to be a big finale ends up a deflating exercise in frustration. It achieves the opposite of the developer’s intentions and leaves the player off on a sour note. A final boss should be about a player using everything they’ve learned to overcome extreme diversity.

All of this paints a poor picture of Mechstermination Force but in actuality I enjoyed more of the bosses than I didn’t. It’s just a shame that it will go overlooked because bigger and (if we’re better honest) better big daddy of boss rush games took the spotlight out from under it.

Pan-Pan

On paper, Pan-Pan’s gameplay loop rocks no boats. You explore a weird little game-designed world, completing not-very-difficult environmental puzzles. Each puzzle opens a new area/grants an item that allows you to progress to the next puzzle, repeat, repeat, end. In other words, it’s a microcosm of the Zelda formula condensed into a 2 hour max experience. However, none of this is what makes Pan-Pan noteworthy.

The simplicity and low difficulty barrier of Pan-Pan allows one to instead soak themselves in a fascinating environment of unspoken history. It’s an ancient world of ruins, an aura of lost history hanging every crevice. Its few inhabitants are those who live a life of hermitage. Foreboding monuments tower over you as if they’re watching (like, the monuments literally have eyes). Pan-Pan is not about its gameplay but about its tone, its ambiguous environment, and questions you may have that are never answered. I’m unsure there’s much in the way of an actual backstory to uncover but I’d argue that only works in its favor. It’s an experience with no narrative, only the narrative you give it.

Rolando Royal Edition

In 2009, at the ripe age of 15, I got my start as a professional writer working for mobile gaming website Slide To Play. It was a time when mobile gaming was a hotbed for experimentation and trailblazing (what I’d consider the “Golden Age” of mobile gaming). The advent of microtransactions saw this era come to an end and ngmoco — the publisher of Rolando — cancelled the franchises’ third game in pursuit the golden goose of free to play. ngmoco is now defunct and with them went any hope of the neglected Rolandos being updated to work on modern iterations of iOS.

The introduction of free to play into the mobile market dealt a fatal blow to most of mobile gaming’s indie development scene because their traditionally-priced model simply couldn’t compete with those that cost people no money from the outset. This in turn saw the death of the beat press focused on the platform. Fewer small-development projects — many of which saw developers directly interfacing with fans — meant a dwindling community, and a dwindling community meant fewer and fewer readers. Affiliate links could only go so far, especially when advertiser interest was drying up. Most websites that once flourished died slow deaths. Slide To Play officially closed this year, though had been in a state of inactivity and disrepair for years. Any existing sites are struggling to stay afloat, very much at the mercy of reader donations. It’s a sad epilogue to a platform that has lost its creative spark to the few (mega-publishers) making more moola.

I had come to terms with the fact that I would never play one of the games that inspired my career ever again until developer HandCircus dropped a bombshell: they had the rights to Rolando and had remade the first in glorious 3D/HD.

Apple used Rolando to tout the gaming capabilities of its platform, noting its finely-tuned tilt and touch controls that played off one another harmoniously. It was great then, and it’s still great now, still innovative a decade later. Royal Edition stands as a reminder of the scant few glory years where mobile gaming was a truly exciting prospect, and a sad reflection of how most modern games on the platform have stopped trying to push boundaries as Rolando and others of its time did.

Some things are truly timeless. I haven’t had a nostalgia blast like this in a very hot minute. And confirming we live in an era of righteousness, HandCircus told me more Rolando is planned. Just play it!

Baba Is You

Baba Is You. You are Key. Wall is Death. Baba is Defeat. Game is Hard.

Like, really hard. Baba is You is essentially a block-pushing puzzler where you re-code the game by reassigning properties to assets. So, for example, if you need to get across a body of water, you can assign Baba (or whatever you happen to be controlling) the ability to float. The levels quickly expand beyond such simplicity and become the definition of extreme difficulty. A lot of times this comes down more to the block-pushing aspect than the actual coding, and though that’s the game design’s foocus, spending enormous amounts of time to solve a given level is well beyond fun for me. I stopped playing when looking up hints online became necessary for my pea-brain, but even if it may not be the puzzle game for me, it’s a brilliant concept that the right type of game-player will eat up.

Islanders

If the mere thought of Civilization and its ilk’s systems overload makes you yawn yet you crave a city/resource building strategizer, Islanders is for you. Make no mistake, there’s plenty of complexities in this for those who want to pre-plan their islands and aim for top scores. But I’d argue Islanders works mostly because of how tranquil the base act of placing units feels.

Spinning your structures to perfectly fit into the crevices of procedurally-generates islands is an innately satisfying act. Rotating the unit just right so it squeezes into a tight spot and racks up sizable points makes the dopamine flow freely. With a moderate level of game-sense that the player easily picks up on after a few rounds, you’ll be building sufficient cities borderline mindlessly. Truly mastering the game requires forethought of placement so your island can support larger, high-point late game structures, and this was likely what the game designers intended players to strive for. But those looking for such a challenge would be better served by the 4X genre; Islanders probably wouldn’t hold up long after finding the optimal strategies.

But for relaxing into a seamless gameplay loop I’ve played few games recently that so masterfully achieve bliss like Islanders. This is the strategy game version of meditation.

Super Smash Bros 3.0 (Level Editor)

Super Smash Bros’ 3.0 update is its biggest yet, adding in Joker from Persona 5, a video editor and a stage builder. Joker feels as faithful as you can get for a character arriving from a game on the extreme opposition of the systems spectrum. I haven’t touched the video editor and I haven’t seen many others do so and it mostly serves as a reminder of Smash’s lack of a video capture feature (it’s probably a licensing limitation but damn was that a missed opportunity for viral content).

But even as a massive fan of the Persona series, what I was anticipating most was the stage builder. The builders in the previous two iterations of Smash Bros were fairly primitive and limiting, and despite the new approach Ultimate took where you can draw out platforms on the touch screen, it fell into an entirely new set of trappings.

Essentially, what Smash’s stage editor has become is an artistic tool. People are (impressively) recreating iconic characters, title screens, and you name it with their finger-pencil. Few of these actually translate to fun gameplay, though. You’re either on a flat platform with the art in the background or playing on top of the creation, which is a whole lot of nothing. It’s not practical and has mostly served for social media sharing and YouTube compilations. Accompanying art projects are the endless me-too copies of “Smashketball,” a game mode where you knock your enemies into barrels that shoot them into the blast zones; it’s fun for maybe 10 minutes, if that.

Even with the few more impressive levels I’ve found, I still question why I’d play them over the beautiful, dynamic levels crafted by the developers. That will likely always be the Achilles heel of Smash stage builders. Regardless, it’s great to see Nintendo continue to offer significant (and free) post-launch support for their games. I can’t wait to see what they add next. Please let the rumor of Erdrick from Dragon Quest be true.

And that’s that! I’ll be writing monthly posts summarizing games I played like this alongside others that dive deep into topics of game narrative, design, and everything in between. (I’ve also got other projects in the works, but it’s not quite time to talk about those.)

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