Attractive Ape – Page 4

A Dark Room remembers that idle games are supposed to be games

October 6, 2015 by soap

As of right now, A Dark Room is the only idle game which I’ve ever played to completion. I’ve played a decent number of idle games mind you, I’m not speaking from ignorance here, it’s just that the genre is awful. Seriously, it’s alarming to me that people are enjoying these in a humorless way. We all had a good laugh when Progress Quest came out: “Ha ha,” we said, “the game plays itself, giving you the thrill of victory and upgrades and progress with none of the work. There’s probably a lesson to be learned from this clearly ironic spoof on the way in which people are currently wasting their time.”

Confusingly, horrifyingly, the lesson that seems to have been learned was: games should have less of that annoying “playing” in them, it only gets in the way of a constant stream of rewards and positive attention. Let’s cut that part out and give everyone a pat on the head while they sit still and do nothing.

::sigh::

That’s another topic to write more about later. A Dark Room manages to stand above most idle games in a few ways, but primarily: it’s not just an idle game. As you progress through it the game changes in mood and content and play style. It’s pretty slick how this happens and I’m not willing to spoil it, but play at least until you get the compass in order to see what I’m talking about and what the game is really offering.

Of course, being adverse to spoilers presents something of an obstacle to talking further about the game, but I will say that I admire its sense of scale. It’s starts very humble and grows to something much greater as your progress through it. It’s a commonly used device, but seldom done very well.

Also unlike most idle games: A Dark Room can easily be completed in a single day.

The Marriage – a game without audio and only the barest minimum of visuals, it’s intended to be expressive purely through gameplay

October 4, 2015 by soap

The Marriage was developed expressly to be Art. It isn’t fun, exactly, though like any work of art there’s some pleasure in experiencing it and discovering what it means to you, as well as guessing at the intention of the artist.

There’s a lot to say about it, but I’m not going to be able to say it any better than the developer does on the game’s web page. Read it and give it a try, it’s not a long game.

I will say something about the circumstances surrounding the game though: the idea of an “art game” might seem boring now, what with plenty of well publicized games having taken the concept and driven it into the dirt, but back when this was released in 2007 the idea that video games were an expressive medium had spent the last several years being challenged over and over again in court by a number of grandstanding individuals, and in particular by a lawyer from Florida named Jack Thompson. Many people who play and work with games saw this as a preposterous situation – how do you prove that water is wet?

Rod Humble, who developed The Marriage, took this in another direction though: what is it about games which makes them uniquely expressive? The Marriage takes the assumption that games are an art form and explores it by trying to express something using only that which is unique to games – interactivity. In other words, the rules of the game are themselves art.

Thompson was disbarred in 2008 and the public controversy surrounding games has died down a lot since then, and there have been a ton of artsy fartsy games released since that time (a few of which are pretty good) so this doesn’t seem like a big deal anymore. The Marriage had some modest significance when it was released though, and it continues to be interesting as an exploration of the medium. Most games still emphasize fancy graphics or moody audio when they’re trying to make a point, a reductivist game like this one shows us what it is that makes games special.

QWOP showed us how much fun it can be to be really bad at something

September 29, 2015 by soap

There have been a bunch of goofy games over the last few years about attempting to do some simple task using ridiculously difficult controls. e.g.: Surgeon Simulator, Where is the Button for Love?, Realistic Kissing Simulator, Soccer Physics, etc. This all started with QWOP. In it, you are a sprinter running the 100 meter dash and getting to the finish line is your only objective. There is nothing in your way and you have no competition, nor any time limit. Literally all you have to do is not fall down, and it is really difficult.

QWOP gets its name from it’s controls: keys Q and W flex your thighs and keys O and P flex your calves. This makes a sort of sense on a QWERTY keyboard, and makes you wonder why every game isn’t controlled by flexing individual muscles. It’s so obvious.

QWOP gets its charm from your own fumbling ineptitude. It’s bizarre how much fun it is to be terrible at walking, but turning something so ostensibly easy into an almost insurmountable barrier allows you to laugh at your own inability without the shame of failure. It’s clear from the outset that you’re not supposed to be good at this, or even competent, and freed from any expectation of success you can enjoy some pratfalls and goofy fun.

Nethack – the roguelike which you must play if you want your opinion on roguelikes to count for anything

September 27, 2015 by soap

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while, of course, but there’s just so much to say about it… It’s intimidating. I’m not going to try to extol all of the many virtues of this game (you’re welcome to read about them here), but I will say a couple of things for the none of you out there who haven’t heard of Nethack:

First, if you’ve heard of roguelikes but you’re not entirely clear on what that means, “something something procedural generation… something something permanent death…” Well, this is the game you play. Of the major roguelikes, this is the one which sticks closest to the rogue formula. Think of Nethack as the core which defines the roguelike genre. So why this and not Rogue? Setting aside the pedantry that Rogue is not a roguelike, the reason is simply that Rogue is old. It was released in 1980 and its last feature release was in 1985. There were some bugfixes and ports in 2006/2007, but it’s basically the same game that it was thirty years ago. Good for its time, and that’s about it.

Nethack, meanwhile, has been under continuous development for twenty five years. It is, and I say this without hyperbole or exception, the deepest and most complex game there is. There’s a staggering amount of interactivity here – you will be playing this game for years before you’ve exhausted it all. The principle reason to play this over Rogue is that you will enjoy it more.

As for how you should go about doing that: Well there’s a guidebook, if you feel like doing some reading. Here’s something that’s a little more succinct, albeit out of date now (it’s still pretty much all accurate).

What I’m linking here is the official unmodified release. There is no audio, other than some system beeps, and no graphics, other than ASCII characters. A lot of people have trouble with that aspect, and many roguelikes have started introducing tilesets in response. Myself, I think this is a mistake. Bad graphics are much worse than no graphics, and the ASCII characters really get the point across well once you learn to interpret them. Bring your own soundtrack though.

To the left we see a new level one player (@) fighting a bat (B), the player’s loyal dog (d) is coming to help and should the player survive this encounter there is some money ($) lying on the floor in this room, waiting to be collected.

I learned to play on the unmodified release, but there are many variants available for those of you who must have graphics or don’t like the way that the inventory is handled (I can sympathize with this one). There’s a reddit thread about these here (from which I took the title of this post). However you choose to play it, just bear in mind that all roguelikes involve lots and lots of failure and death. For this reason they’re often described as difficult, and that’s true in a sense, but it’s really just a different type of game. Once you learn to embrace that dying is how the game is played, it stops being so frustrating (mostly).

Taking something difficult and keeping it that way: The Attack on Titan Tribute Game

September 20, 2015 by soap

I posted Rick and Morty’s Rushed Licensed Adventure recently and while on the subject of games based on TV shows we might as well talk about Attack on Titan. Like Rick and Morty I highly recommend the show, though it’s a completely different style and subject. A post-apocalyptic fantasy, where the world is overrun by human-devouring giants and the remnants of humanity are left living in a small area behind enormous walls. It’s extremely violent, but the attention-grabbing part is its high degree of unpredictability – we’ve seen a great deal of media involving humans on their last legs, but it’s the feeling that any horrible thing could happen to any person at any time which really conveys a sense of danger.

There’s a good explanation for the odd title of the show here, but it does contain some spoilers. The short answer is that “Attack on Titan” was the imperfect-English subtitle for the original Japanese comic, the full title being: “Shingeki no Kyojin: Attack on Titan.” Even though it doesn’t make much grammatical sense, they decided to keep it for the English version.

All right, so that’s all well and good for the show but how does this translate into a video game? Well there are a couple visual novels offered as pack-ins with the blu-ray releases of the show, but only one full-fledged licensed action game so far, released for the 3DS. As with most licensed games the answer is: poorly. It translates poorly, reviews of the the 3DS game have been almost universally negative. The dull and overly simplified combat being a common complaint among the reviewers.

Now, if you’ve seen the show this should be a disappointment and possibly a little confusing: combat in Attack on Titan is anything but simple. The characters move around by means of high powered grappling hook mechanisms that they wear around their waists and attacking the giants means getting up very close and cutting out a portion of their necks using swords. It’s fast and acrobatic and dangerous and movement involves coordinating many things at once. This has all the components of a thrilling and very challenging game and the idea that the developers would dumb that down to the point where movement is a couple of button presses and attacking just means a rudimentary quick time event… It’s disappointing.

Disappointing, but probably shouldn’t come as a surprise: the whole point of a licensed game is to cash in on audience enthusiasm. The developer pays a lot of money for that license and needs to appeal to the broadest audience possible, that means avoiding a complicated and difficult movement system in favor of something more accessible.

So what happens if you start with the same idea but the game isn’t made by someone who needs to make a return on the license? Say, by a fan? Just doing it because they like the show? You get the Attack on Titan Tribute Game. It’s bare-bones, graphically simple, but it doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to the source material: moving and fighting in AoT Tribute Game is damn hard and it’s a skill which you must develop as you play. Mastering something like this is both a chore and very rewarding, I am nowhere close but I’ve had little moments where it’s come together for me – little flashes where I’m not thinking about the controls and am instead soaring from building to building, flying around corners and working my way behind the horrifying giants. It’s a wonderful feeling.

One thing that’s missing and which I would like to see, but which might be difficult to implement: actual physics-relevant wires. As it is, the wires which pull you along are just graphical dressing – they clip through buildings and they can’t bend or otherwise be used to whip around the aforementioned corners. It’s a significant mechanic in the show, but I can see why it hasn’t been implemented here. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

If you’ve watched Attack on Titan and you’ve said to yourself, “Holy crap, that’s awesome. I wish I had grappling hooks like that, and also a city which didn’t mind that I was constantly poking holes in its buildings.” Well this is as close as you’re going to get.

The Teen Titans do leg day

September 19, 2015 by soap

Teen Titans Go! is a silly show about a group of super heroes doing mostly un-heroic things. Like any super heroes, they need to stay in shape – here they are schooled on the importance of leg day. Nothing profound here, just some silly fun.

Two things: this was the only link to watch the episode that I could find which didn’t cost money and wasn’t illegal. I had some trouble with it though – many layers of awkward javascript and some nonsense about a login. It’s not available on Netflix or anywhere else that doesn’t charge on a per-episode basis. I apologize in advance if you struggle with it, the show is good despite the Cartoon Network’s head-in-ass syndrome regarding media distribution.

The other thing is that I had originally posted this to reddit, not thinking of it as something for the site. Because… it’s not a video game? Bleh. I started the site partly in acknowledgement that good media comes in many forms from many sources. Expect more of this.