puzzlin’ through glow artisan

it seems like i’ve only been playing handheld games this year (esp. downloadable ones), but i’ve been busier than usual and have a couple of longer games that are taking time to finish. although it may make for less varied blog material, i rather like playing shorter games, although in general i’ve also been much less compulsive about finishing games if i know that i’ve seen everything it has to offer.

in this particular case, i recently finished glow artisan which is downloadable but like other puzzle games is virtually limitless in the amount of extra content via its level-creation features. the game had gotten great reviews on both nintendolife and ngamer, so i got the DSiware version that was released in december 2009 (although in retrospect it looks like the iphone version is $2 instead of $5 and essentially identical).

the game is very much in the same vein as picross and sudoku. in this game, however, instead of numbers the focus is on coloring squares in a certain order to make the target pattern. you can remove an entire row or column and colors mix in the way you would expect, but although the mechanics are simple it soon becomes apparent that the developers, powerhead games, have come up with a very clever puzzle system that is as robust as picross and sudoku. like both of those games, however, glow artisan has the same drawback which is that once you’ve mastered the mechanics there’s not a whole lot of variety and, for me at least, the lure of earning medals (for completing a level in the fewest moves possible) isn’t compelling enough to keep playing through all the stages. the game features an electro-chic exterior that has become the norm for puzzle games (and which frankly i’ve gotten quite bored with) and it includes a slew of tacked-on multiplayer features, but otherwise this is a good release for anyone craving a completely solid, if not surprising, puzzle game.

puzzle through these glow artisan links:
- developer’s official site
- apparently the game is available on other platforms, including windows phone and XBLA. here’s the list of XBLA achievements.
- the free version on itunes includes the first 12 levels, making it useful as a demo version

jump, presto! in maestro! jump in music

nintendolife.com has been a great resource since i first came across it, esp. for downloadable games that tend to get short shrift in other publications. i’ve been giving more attention to DSiware games lately, and nintendolife had given maestro! green groove an unusually high score so i thought i’d check it out. rather than download the truncated DSiware version, though, i opted for importing a copy of the original, only-released-in-europe DS version, entitled maestro! jump in music, since it looked like a rhythm game that i would enjoy spending some time with (FYI, i snagged a cart-only copy for less than $10 on ebay but i may have just gotten lucky).

the game is part of a growing sub-genre of rhythm games that match auto-scrolling platforming actions such as jumping and attacking enemies to a musical accompaniment. the game’s main control is novel: you steer the pink bird presto by plucking the string he’s running along up or down; stroking downwards moves him down a string, and stroking upwards makes him jump. the retail game is still fairly short: each of the 6 worlds is divided into three standard levels and a boss level. each world introduces a new mechanic (many of which, such as the circular spinning motions and tapping when circles overlap, will be familiar to fans of the elite beat agents (aka ouendan) games). the majority of the tracks are classical tunes in fairly decent and pleasant-enough MIDI arrangements, and similarly the graphics are cartoony and serviceable despite being fairly simple. the game requires you to beat all of the levels on easy before unlocking the normal and hard difficulties, but the levels are shorter than on the harder difficulties so the easy mode goes by quickly and gives you a chance to master the game’s mechanics. (the harder modes also let you sing along to jump instead of swiping, which is a mildly entertaining if not particularly practical gimmick.) the game’s biggest weakness is the boss battles. in these levels the game switches to a very basic “simon says”-type of gameplay that drag on and don’t add anything new to the genre let alone this experience.

although i enjoyed the game enough to play through the easy and normal levels, i hesitate to recommend the DSiware version since for $5 it only includes the first world (three levels + a boss fight) and replaces one of the best songs of the game, “our house”, with another classical tune (by chopin). if you’re not able to get a copy of the original or if you want to try a bite-sized chunk before committing to the full release this should be a good alternative, but i’m glad that i made the investment and went with the full release. not one of the standout games i’ve played this year, but an enjoyable rhythm game and probably the best use of classical music in a game that i’ve seen yet.

jump through these maestro! jump in music links:
- review of the DSiware release at nintendolife.com
- apparently there was/is an iphone version, but i haven’t been able to find it in the itunes store nor find much info about it online. here’s a link that has some info about that version.

gliding through nyxquest

been playing a lot of fluff, but i did finish my first steam download, nyxquest. i’d heard about the game when it was first released, on wiiware, and where it garnered fairly positive reviews (see the reviews at nintendolife and nintendo-gamer.net, although the review at ninendojo is less complimentary). since then it’s been ported to PC and mac and ipad. i opted for the steam version since it was on sale and i’m hoarding my wii points.

the consensus seems to be that the game is enjoyable, atmospheric, and looks great, but is on the short side. although i agree that the game is stylish and successfully depicts a barren wasteland setting, i personally found it to be fairly weak as far as platformers go. the game starts off focusing on jumping and gliding but soon shifts to more motion-controlled (or in this case, mouse-controlled) gameplay involving picking up and moving objects and, later in the game, drawing paths with the pointer. all familiar territory for people who have been playing wii and DS for years, and in general the gameplay offers very little in the way of surprises. as you progress the game’s look evolves nicely as the day turns to night (although it doesn’t give rise to any change in gameplay and i agree that the darkness makes platforms unnecessarily hard to see), but there’s not a lot of enemy variety and despite acquiring powers from the gods during the course of the game, the powers themselves don’t lend themselves to many unique gameplay ideas. also, i find mouse-and-keyboard controls to be a bit awkward in general, and i suspect that the game would play more naturally on wii or even the ipad.

not much more to say. the developers, over the top games, from spain, certainly deserve to be commended for the level of polish in their work, but in the end the core experience wasn’t unique enough to keep me engaged. hopefully they’re still continuing to develop games, though, and i’m definitely interested in seeing what they come up with next.

glide past these nyxquest links:
- official site
- postmortem with the developers, at gamasutra
- entry at wikipedia
- forum page for the game at steam
- entry for the wiiware version at nintendo.com

the angry birds slot machine

[edit: apparently i'm not the first person to liken angry birds to slot machines. ah well. in any case, here's an interesting follow-up blog post written by the same person that analyzes the game further.]

despite my less-than-stellar initial foray into iphone gaming one game that i felt i should spend more time with, at least for research purposes, was the mass hit angry birds. there’s an 18-level free edition, aptly titled angry birds free, so it didn’t require any monetary investment, and i wanted to get a closer look at the game that in its various incarnations has apparently been downloaded 400 million times and generates a million bucks a month from in-game advertising. (it’s interesting to compare those numbers to the list of best-selling video game franchises, which has our good friend mario sitting at the top with an estimated 262 million games sold, although of course there’s a big difference between a video game sale and a free or $1 download.)

for those who somehow don’t already know, the game’s concept is extremely similar to wii’s boom blox (which i quite disliked), but in 2 dimensions instead of 3. basically you throw projectiles (in this case, birds) at towers in order to knock them down as well as hit certain targets (pigs). the shift to 2D itself makes the game much simpler and thus more enjoyable, but the ability to quickly and easily restart a level is what really elevates this from a mere “physics puzzler” to a hypnotically addictive experience, particularly when trying to reach high scores and earn the 3-star ranking possible for each level.

the game is well designed (although the sound effects are somewhat annoying) and has a solid physics engine. it’s too casual (i.e. mindless) for my taste, but what really prevents me from enjoying it more is that the balance between requiring “brains” vs “dumb luck” skews far too much in favor of dumb luck, so much so that at times i felt like a glassy-eyed slot machine player in vegas, thinking, “surely this time i’ll hit the jackpot and finish this damn level so i can move onto the next one.” this is especially true since in the majority of levels the only way to earn the highest score is to knock everything down on your first hit. there is definitely a sense of pleasure in finding the weakest part of a structure that, when hit at just the right angle, causes the entire thing to come crashing to the ground, and there’s no doubt that the game is better than boom blox in every way. still, after playing the angry birds slots for a couple of days i’m glad to be free of them and won’t be eager to get back to them anytime soon. and it’s a good thing this edition is only 18 levels and that you don’t have to pay for every play, because otherwise i have a feeling we’d have a lot more people in rehab for gambling, i mean gaming, addiction.

feelin’ lucky? how about some angry birds links?
- angrybirdsnest.com is apparently the best resource for all things angry birds and includes a store, video walkthroughs and the achievements list for angry birds free, as well as guides such as “How to Transfer Angry Birds Progress Between iOS Devices”. i’m also somewhat gratified to see that they consider 4-2 of this edition to be “probably one of the hardest levels in Angry Birds history”.

line runner and mr. ninja: on the value of games, part 1 of 2

as a hardcore gamer i’m always on the lookout for great gaming experiences, and although i still have almost zero interest in actually owning a smartphone i recently decided to spend a bit more time getting acquainted with the games available on it. i’ve watched friends of mine play games that look completely pointless and stupid, including an assortment of generic pinball and match-3 games, cube runner, and the mammoth hit angry birds. regarding the latter, it’s not surprising that i have little interest in it since i hated the similarly physics-based wii game boom blox, but in any case despite my misgivings i tried to approach the exploration with as open a mind as i could under the circumstances.

i downloaded two games completely randomly and picked two that the iphone app store had on their “most popular” list and were free at the time. line runner is apparently by an austrian outfit called djinnworks and according to their site their games “have been downloaded more than 25 million times” and they have “produced many games ranking constantly in the top 100 paid worldwide”.

the game itself is exceedingly simple and easy to pick up. a little stick figure runs continuously to the right at a fairly good speed and you have to make him dodge obstacles as he goes. your only two controls are to jump by pressing on the left side of the screen (you can hold longer to jump longer), and roll by pressing on the right. there are ten courses, but there don’t seem to be any differences to them in terms of the pacing or the goals, just varied layouts of the obstacles.

after giving the game a decent chance, i was left exceedingly unimpressed. a minimalistic game like this could succeed if everything were spot-on, but i found that the main problem was with the basic setup itself. [i'm going to take a moment to indulge into some gameplay analysis, so feel free to skip the following paragraph.] there are three options when dodging: rolling to duck, jumping, and long jumping. the latter two are very distinct in terms of making your way through the course, but the gradient between what is a “short” vs a “long” jump doesn’t at all justify making that action exist on a continuous scale (which is dependent on how long the player has been holding down the control). it would have been preferable to have the two mapped to two distinct actions. but actually the crux of the problem is that at the pace the game plays out the decision between when to do a short vs a long jump itself is needlessly complicated as it is, and getting rid of the long jump entirely would have made the game much more playable.

aside from my armchair critic analysis, the bottom line is that the game just isn’t fun to play. the graphics are serviceable for what it is and the lack of music is an acceptable design decision, but even given the game developers’ minimal effort there are so many small additions that would have gone a long way to making for a more enjoyable experience; even something as simple as indications illustrating progress (e.g. whenever you reach another 100 points) would have helped. as it is this is a game that i’m astounded that people would want to play for the amount of time it would take to achieve the world’s top scores, of which there is a perhaps not surprisingly long list.

in my random sampling i also tried out a game called mr. ninja by a japanese company called ponos. now here’s where things get more interesting: the game is actually very well made. the premise is simple (check out gamepro’s glowing review for details), and it’s simple to pick up and play. the “theme and fun” is good (ninja vs aliens; what’s not to love?), and the graphics, music, and gameplay are surprisingly polished, and i can’t fault it for being what it is: a quick diversion that only costs a buck. however, the game still feels utterly disposable, and i don’t feel like my life has been enriched in any significant way from playing it.

which brings me to the whole question of the value of games and the future of handheld gaming. nintendo CEO satoru iwata has discussed the issue several times and i think this excerpt from nintendo’s financial briefing from april 2011 is worth reprinting in full:

As I emphasize again and again, if there was a causal relationship, there would be a significant difference between Nintendo DS users who play social games and Nintendo DS users who do not play social games, or a significant difference between Nintendo DS users who play games on smartphones and Nintendo DS users who do not play games on smartphones. For example, if we discover that users who play social games are not playing with Nintendo DS as much anymore, or if there is a decline in how many games they buy in a year, we would need to start believing that there is a causal relationship because, no matter what I think, we would have actual proof, but if we cannot find any proof, the assumption that there is a causal relationship may not be correct.

I have mentioned that we are researching the gaming population in Japan and the United States, and at the same time, we have also researched whether respondents play social games, have smartphones, or play games on smartphones. As for the use rate of Nintendo DS, we have not found any significant differences. I can not say that no one said, “I recently stopped playing Nintendo DS because I am now playing games on my smartphone,” but statistically, there was no significant difference.

as iwata says, the media repeatedly claims that the rise of smartphone gaming is going to threaten or even obliterate the handheld gaming market, but based on my limited experience i don’t see that happening anytime soon. the gap between these smartphone games and the ones that i want to play is so tremendous right now that core gamers at least will continue to keep the gaming market afloat, even in the handheld market space. i think it remains to be seen if casual users will end up preferring “disposable” games to deeper experiences, but the question may become moot as more devices take a hybrid smartphone/gaming console approach like the upcoming PS vita.

in any case, it’s definitely an interesting time in video game history. coincidentally, while i was exploring smartphone gaming (which, incidentally, i haven’t completely given up on) i was also playing a set of similarly simplistic games that also made me really appreciate high-quality game design and the value of games. more on that in my next post.