It’s a scene which has played out so many times, in the offices and homes of game developers across the world. It’s happened many times before and doubtless it’ll happen many times again.
One dev turns to another and says “well, we’ve got this fantastic idea for a game… what about a theme for it? can you think of anything?”
“Hmm… uhh… no, not really, I’ve got nothing right now. How about you?”
“Ahh… umm… lovely curry last night… erm… bloody hell, Britain not losing as badly as usual in the olympics then… er… actually no, I’m empty too…”
“Sooo… well then…”
“I guess… it’s the usual thing then…”
(both simultaneously) “WE’LL MAKE IT LOOK LIKE GEOMETRY WARS THEN!”
And so they do .
This time the game in question is basically Geometry Wars and Gauntlet mashed up (and made to look like Geometry Wars). And that’s basically all you need to know about the design of Inferno+. Says it all really.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not in any way slagging off the actual game, it’s great fun and I’ve just spent an enjoyable Sunday afternoon blasting through its 40 levels. I’m just taking the piss a bit because it does seem to be a well worn cliche these days, making stuff that looks like Geometry Wars. And it’s all well and groovy, because Geometry Wars does look nice, but you could probably fill your ipad twice over with games that look like Geometry Wars.
So what distinguishes Inferno+ then?
Well, I’ve thought for a while that a mashup of Roby and Gauntlet wouldn’t be a bad idea, lots of shooty shooty combined with maze exploration and looting would make for a fun game (in fact if I ever do a Llamatron II it’d probably be something along those lines). This game implements that idea very competently. The controls are very good (once you go to Options and turn off the fixed control points like a sensible person) and the blasting action is fluid and fun.
The game categorises itself as “Action RPG” but I’m sorry, if this is RPG then so is Pac-Man . You play the role of a little circular space ship thingy blasting at other blobby vaguely geometric Geometry Wars type thingies. There is looting (in the form of “G” pickups which add to your score) I suppose. Basically though it plays exactly like it says on the tin: Gauntlet-style mazes you make your way round blasting away in a Geometry Wars style. Like in Gauntlet there are “doors” that need unlocked with keys you find in the maze, and there are generators that spew enemies. You have shields that get depleted as you get hit and which can be replenished by collecting + signs you find scattered around the place (bits of meat and jugs of scrumpy not looking so great drawn in a Geometry Wars style I suppose). Shoot everything, have a whistle round looking for hidden areas and to make sure you’ve completely rinsed the level, off out the exit and on to the next one.
There are smart bombs that can be found and active shields that I’ve not much used so far. Every now and again you find a shop and as you progress you are given upgrade points to spend in it. At first only a few upgrades are available but as you progress you can spend some of your score to unlock the others. And every 10 levels there’s a boss who can usually be defeated by the age old method of keeping moving and dodging stuff whilst shooting the crap out of him.
You’ll probably want to play most of the time on the hardest difficulty as the lower two are quite easy to defeat, especially with all the powerups going on. Playing medium difficulty this afternoon it was no bother to whistle through all the levels and by the time i was getting towards the end I was so hideously beweaponed that all I had to do was basically move through the maze not bumping into anything nasty and everything died for me. But there’s plenty of fun to be had playing on hard, and 4 different ship types to play though with, and you can always go for a higher score (and make the game harder for yourself) by not spending any of your score to unlock the more exotic powerups. Oh, and if you play through the game once it unlocks the + mode which does seem to be a lot harder, so there’s plenty of scope for replaying and score chasing.
So there’s actually plenty of game for you to get stuck into, and best of all you get it all for the purchase price. No “Congratulations, you’ve beaten easy mode, do you want to buy Medium difficulty?” or “Well done, you got to level 20, do you want to buy the rest of the levels?” or “Jolly good, you’ve earned the chance to upgrade, would you like to buy this nice smart bomb?” or (most heinous of all) “Game Over. Would you like to buy an extra life?” ARGH DEAR GOD DISGUSTING IAP GET IT OFF ME
None of that bollocks. It’s all there when you buy the game. SEE, PEOPLE, THIS IS HOW IT’S DONE. A nice, well made, COMPLETE game for a fair price. So definitely a gold star from this ox for Radiangames here and on the strength of this I’m definitely inclined to look out for more of their games.
(They do get one bite taken out of their pappadom of excellence though for nagging me to rate the game at the end mind. I understand the need to get good publicity but being prompted to rate stuff gives me the same vaguely uncomfortable feeling you get in the curry house when the waiter comes round one too many times asking if everything’s all right. I always feel ratings and such are worth that much more when they are unsolicited, when someone’s actually thought highly enough of your work that they’ve jolly well originated the effort of going to rate the thing off their own bat rather than just gone “eh, ok then” and pressed the “Press this button to rate now” button. This is but a minor niggle though, and I’m probably the only person to get annoyed by it, so it’s only a small bite. And they have been jolly good sports with the no IAP so an extra pint of Cobra for that. And there’s still the lime pickle).
So if you fancy scratching your Gauntlet and blasting itch I definitely recommend this fun blaster with great controls and all the parts in the box when you open it, and which just happens to look like Geometry Wars. Oh and it’s Universal too, so an extra gold star and a grunt of approval for that too.
(When it comes to roleplaying and Robotron just about the only game I can think of which could actually make that kind of a claim would be the very excellent indeed “Time Bandit” on the Atari ST. Utterly fantastic game that, lots of Gauntletty shooting’n'looting action mixed up with a complicated plot and puzzles almost like a text adventure, great fun that was. If that’s not being remade for iOS then it damn well should be. Come on somebody, pull your finger out! Get it sorted! And don’t fuck up the controls! Thanks! )
So they are saying that today is the 30th birthday of the c64. Well that’s true for certain values of “birthday” I guess. When was the C64 born? Was it back in 1981 when the designers first began work on it? Was it when it was first shown? Was it when it first went on sale?
It’d been rumoured for a while that Commodore were working on something called the VIC-40, which was to be an extension of the already quite successful VIC-20 which itself hadn’t been out in the UK all that long. And there was a weird thing in the Grattan mail order catalogues in that year which was called the Commodore Ultimax (my mum used to get those catalogues and I remember gawping at that thing and wondering what it was like. To which the answer eventually ended up being “so rubbish it was never released”. The “Vic-40″ however was a different matter…)
When it was first released in the US the first ads tried to promote the thing as a business machine. Yes – the c64 a business machine.
An error that Commodore would repeat again a few years later when they launched the Amiga – whose chipset had originally been designed to be part of a game console -as a business machine, even acting all po-faced to games developers at the time who were interested in developing for it. That’d come back to bite them on the arse quite severely when the Amiga steadfastly refused to take off compared to the less powerful but more accessible Atari ST, until they saw sense and released the Amiga 500 which was squarely aimed at gamers. But I digress.
Also look at that price. Ooyah. That’s getting on for iPad levels and that was 1982 so you’re looking at a modern equivalent of over a grand. Thank goat it didn’t remain at that price for very long.
Launch date for us UK people was still a couple of months away at this point, due out at the end of September. I was still busy building up our Vic-20 library so I wasn’t particularly trying to get one early, but in the end I did end up getting one a few weeks ahead of UK launch date. After attending our first ever computer show in June (the Commodore show at the Cunard Hotel) I’d hooked up with Jay Balakrishnan of Human Engineered Software in the US, and we’d done a deal for them to distribute some of our Llamasoft Vic-20 games, beginning with the actually rather awful Andes Attack, a Defender clone with jerky scrolling, more bugs than a Pyongyang hotel room and a ship the approximate size of a bus with handling to match).
There was another computer show due at the start of September, the Personal Computer World show at the Barbican in London. We were there pimping our latest Vic-20 games – the aforementioned Andes Attack, along with somewhat chunky and tricky to control Amidar-style game Traxx and primitive but fun unexpanded Vic bottom shooter (fnarr) Abductor – along with some fairly low-key efforts on the new Spectrum (rough ports of Rox III and Bomb Buenos Aires *cough* I mean City Bomber, and quite a nice version of Deflex, all things that were easy to write in Sinclair BASIC) and the Atari 8-bits (yet another version of Deflex; the lovely A8 version of AMC was still a few months away at that point). We probably even had a ZX81 there running Centipede, bless it.
I do recall those Barbican shows being incredibly crowded and noisy, loads of small game companies there and everyone cranking up their sound effects to be heard above the general cacophany. Our own game Traxx certainly didn’t help, being as it played the theme from Amidar constantly, loudly and gratingly off key. Continuously. Loudly. All day. You could barely move in there and it was hot and full of nerdstink, ahh, those were the days. So it was something of a relief when Jay Balakrishnan came by – he was over on a trip looking for more software to sell in the US – and he told me he’d got a present for me back at his hotel room (that sounds dodgy but it totally wasn’t!). It was good to have a couple of hours out of the show walking to his hotel where he presented me with a shiny new c64, still a few weeks before the official UK street date. Score!
It also presented us with a bit of hassle too though. It was a US machine so it needed 110V instead of 240 proper British volts, and it used the American “NTSC” (which stood for Never Twice Same Colour, an inferior foreign TV standard) system. Proper British tellies wouldn’t like that at all, so in order to be able to use it we needed a bit of extra kit (which probably ended up working out being more expensive than simply waiting a few weeks and buying a UK C64, but it gave us a little headstart I suppose and it was genuinely useful kit to have around in the years to come). Accordingly me and my dad headed off on the tube to Tottenham Court Road and bought a stepdown transformer to give us the necessary 110V (I think we still have that somewhere and it still works) and a JVC multi-standard video monitor that could handle two different flavours of NTSC as well as PAL (the Queen’s own video standard) and SECAM (only used by the French). I remember that monitor being a big old thing to be horsing about on the tube.
It was still an excellent score though since I think the only other people we saw at that show with an honest to god C64 were Rabbit Software (I believe they were importing games by “Nufekop”, whose early efforts were just about as hilariously primitive as my own).
(Speaking of the tube, the first day of that Barbican show – 9 September – was the release date for the film “Blade Runner” in UK cinemas. Consequently the tube was full of posters adveritsing the film, and it was one of those posters which game me the idea of a theme for my as-yet-unwritten new Vic-20 Centipede-style game).
Eventually we all got back home after the show and the US c64, along with the necessary gubbins to use it, was installed in my bedroom.
(Not my actual c64 in this pic. Or my bedroom)
Actual info about the new machine was still pretty thin on the ground at that time, at least in the UK, and that thin little manual was all I had to go on (and most of *that* was about teaching beginners BASIC which was of no interest to me). At least it told you where the addresses were in memory for the special chips that controlled the sprites and sound effects which were the main attractions of the new machine. I didn’t even have any kind of machine code monitor at that point so I thought as a learning exercise I’d convert one of my very first Vic-20 games, something I knew would work in just BASIC and a bit of poking and which I could hopefully use the new machine’s capabilities to tart up a bit whilst learning my way round the new stuff as I went along.
So my first ever c64 game was rather obscure and not terribly amazing but it was all done in one evening the first night I got the machine set up.
On the old Vic 20 I’d written a little game called ROX that me and my dad enjoyed playing quite a lot one Christmas.
It was a really simple game, a bit like Astrosmash on the Intellivision come to think of it, except simpler in that you didn’t move your little base at all, you could just fire up rockets to intercept falling rocks. If too many rocks hit the ground it’d make a hole and that’s be game over.
I’d added a few little things to that game and tarted it up with some UDGs and the obligatory awkward to read character set and turned it into “Rox III”:
although I’m not sure if we ever even sold it on the Vic ourselves since we really didn’t like that much selling programs written in ropey old BASIC.
However since at that time there was basically nothing at all out on the c64 I thought it might be an idea to release Rox on the 64 as a BASIC program that other users could LIST to see how the new chips worked themselves, so we did end up selling it for a while on the 64, just at a low price so that people wouldn’t think we were trying to take the piss.
It just BARELY made use of the new machine’s features, using a single sprite for the lunar module (and a right pain in the arse it was drawing that thing on graph paper and converting it into BASIC DATA statements to be poked into sprite RAM; unsurprisingly enough one of the very next things I wrote was a proper sprite editor) which would land on the lunar surface (lovingly constructed out of ropey old PET graphic blocks) to the accompaniment of various whooshing noises from the SID chip.
So my first C64 program was a pretty low-key and unassuming thing, but it was a first step on what was to be a long and enjoyable road. After I finished writing that sprite editor I began straight away using it to draw some big and crudely drawn camels, which looked more like two fat men in a camel suit…
(Nothing at all to do with the C64, just a drawing from a C&VG from around that time which I was looking through in search of old Llamasoft ads from that era. It was the only illustration in an article about PRESTEL, believe it or not. Gotta love early 80s era C&VG art style!).
When you go to the Apple iOS App Store and browse through the various apps pretty much all most users will see is Top 10 lists. And really as a user you should deliberately ignore Top 10 lists, precisely *because* they are the most visible parts of the store’s app collection.
This makes a position in that top 10 list an extremely valuable position for app creators, and critically this means that often the kind of apps you find there are apps that have been specifically created to sit in the top 10 hauling in money. Once in the top 10 apps tend to stick there, mainly because at that point they *are* the most visible apps in the store and thus most likely to get chosen.
So there’s a huge value attributed to those top 10 positions, and you’ll find companies striving hard to put their apps there, which is understandable. But is striving hard to put an app in the top 10 the same as striving hard to make something cool for the sake of making something you really believe should exist?
In discussion a few weeks ago we were talking about “what makes an indie game indie” and one of my personal criteria for that comes out of considering the motivation to make a game. I think indies tend to make games because they have a particular vision and want to create something that fulfils that vision, and they hope to make enough money to sustain the process by so doing, almost as a by-product. Whereas non-indies set out explicitly and primarily to make money, and it’s the game itself which is the by-product. And I like the games I play to be labours of love rather than by-products.
It’s much the same with the Top 10. Sure, the two categories are not mutually exclusive – it is possible for a good indie game to “go viral” or whatever and luck into that hallowed space, but by and large the stuff that you find there has been put there by people with a very specific money-making aim in mind.
You may ask “so what?”, since there are top 10s in all kinds of other fields too and the same thing applies to them too, surely? Well, yes – but the trouble with the app store is that pretty much the only way you can view stuff just by browsing is by going through the keyhole of the Top 10 lists. And the further you get away from that exalted space the more your discoverability drops away until you have a situation like it is now, where basically those in the Top 10 positions do very well and everybody else is lucky to make 50p.
There needs to be more middle ground, a way for people to be able to work off-mainstream and still be able to get a reasonable return for their investment of time and effort.
So how can we work towards this?
For a start, ignore the top 10. Simply because something is up there doesn’t automagically make it good. I still sometimes see “Justin Bieber” come up in the trending topics list on Twitter but that doesn’t mean I’m interested in him. You might find the odd gem that manages to break through up there but it’s far more likely you’ll be encountering stuff that’s been engineered to be there for the explicit purpose of hoovering up money.
Be prepared to dig around a bit. There are subcategories on the App Store that you can find with a bit of digging around (although even these aren’t super reliable; there’s actually a “Retro” category on there in the Games section and there isn’t a single Llamasoft game listed therein, despite LS having been probably the most prolific developer in that category in the last year and a half). Be prepared to spelunk around a bit in the less exposed categories deeper in the store away from the Top 10 honeypots at the entrance.
Read reviews and recommendations. Take note of the little icons underneath the app description when you buy one which indicate what people buying that game also bought; you may find a few unexpected gems there. *Give* recommendations, both in person to your mates when you like a game, and when you want to support the developer of a game you’ve enjoyed, go and give them a vote on the app store. (Doubly definitely do that if they *haven’t* nagged you to do so in their app. Those ratings mean a whole lot more when they aren’t explicitly solicited).
Be loyal to your favourite developers. Chances are if you like one of their games you’ll like most of them. Go buy the back catalogue. Keep an eye out for their new releases. Pimp them to your mates. Praise always means a lot more coming from the mouth of someone who is genuinely happy with a product than it is falling greasily from the distended lips of some self-praising marketing hype machine.
Basically try to navigate the app store in such a way as to avoid the sticky fly paper of the Top 10s dangling at the entrance. Everyone will be better off for it in the end.
Developers too should ignore the top 10. My mum occasionally sends me newspaper clippings about some lucky chap whose app suddenly got popular and now they’re a millionaire or whatever – and it’s true, it can happen! And so can winning the lottery, but you’d be daft to set out to make a living buying lottery tickets and waiting for your big day. Better to build a body of work, build a reputation, work to make life sustainable on the middle ground somehow. Be nice to your users by not following the herd with hateful “monetization” bollocks and unnecessary use of IAP. Work at trying to be a good guy rather than just hoping to be a lucky one. The more of us who manage to do that the better, anything to lessen the hegemony of the Top 10.
We need diversity and sustainability outside of the current “all or nothing” way of doing things and a step in the right direction has to be – ignore the top 10!
(And yes, if one of my games ever gets to the top 10, feel free to ignore that too) .
Yes, there was actually a time when Llamasoft illicitly used the Olympic rings symbol in its advertising. Take a look at this 1984 ad:
“Hottest Games in town” my arse. Basically we relied on the firm who did our printing back in Tadley to do all our ads for us (and a bunch of the early game cassette inlays too, I am sure oldies who remember those games will recognise the style). Now they were great printers and all and did a great job of producing all our posters and inlays but I think by this time they were reaching the outer limits of their artistic abilities and it shows a bit. Not that it’s necessarily a bad ad for the time, just that the whole theme is a bit bleh and the hooking onto the Olympics thing is reaching rather a lot given that there’s nary a sports game in the bunch when it comes to Llamasoft games.
Really I’ve never been much into marketing and to this day I have a kind of cringing aversion to own trumpet blowing, perhaps to my detriment in an age where it seems the most effective way to sell a game is to yell LOOK AT ME as loudly and frequently as you can, preferably whilst jumping up and down naked and painted dayglo orange. Llamasoft always was (and still is) primarily about just making stuff that’s cool and fun. When we went to trade shows all we basically did was put out computers with all the games on them and let people come and play and judge for themselves, and also just to hang out; in the end the shows for us were more of a social thing than any kind of marketing effort. In that kind of scenario this old Olympic themed ad seems a bit out of character for us.
Luckily for me then that at one of those very shows a young chap came up and asked me if I’d be interested in seeing his portfolio of artwork. I’d not really given much thought to hiring a proper artist but I thought it couldn’t do any harm, and boy was I glad I did. That young chap was an artist by the name of Steinar Lund and the stuff in his portfolio blew me away. he’d done work for Quicksilva before I think, so I’d seen some of his earlier work, and the thought of having him produce some of his great artwork for us was pretty exciting. It also fit in with the Llamasoft way of thinking. I wanted his work in our ads not just to promote the games but also because it was just damn cool artwork.
And so the next month away went the crappy Olympic ad and in came this:
Which I am sure you will agree is a lot more memorable and pleasing to the eye.
Steinar was always an absolute delight to work with – he’d come down to discuss a new project and then go away to do a bit of research and then present us with some preliminary sketches, one of which I’d choose to be developed into the finished artwork. He’d look at the game we were working on at the time and he always managed to come up with something that was both appropriate and awesome. His artwork came to define the look of Llamasoft’s packaging and advertising throughout the 8-bit and early 16-bit eras.
Here’s one little bit of trivia that came out of Steinar’s research for that very first iconic Sheep in Space ad:
This is the actual sheep that Steinar used as a model for the sheep in that ad. He went out photographing sheep as part of his research and this one became his model. He gave me the photograph at the time and I’ve kept it framed on the wall ever since .
In which the black ox with the blue star out of Super Ox Wars recommends some of the games we actually play when we’re not busy developing.
This week I thought it’d be nice to mention one of my favourite ox-related iOS games (not that that is a huge category by any means, although with each game we release we are doing our best to rectify that).
Some games set out to do rather more than merely keep us entertained with thumb-twiddling and hi-scoring. Some games set their sights a little higher than that and attempt to educate us as well. One such game will be familiar to many a North American schoolkid who grew up in the 80s and 90s: a game called The Oregon Trail.
The game was very popular on the Apple II and was ported to a bunch of 8-bit systems popular in the US. It’s basically a resource management game intended to teach kids about the fun of managing resources (doubtless preparing them to enjoy stat-oriented RPGs and filling in tax returns later in life) whilst also teaching a historical lesson about the migration of people across the US under arduous conditions at some point in their history (as I am not a North American ox I never actually played this and so I’m not educated about where or why the actual migration took place. I just know it had oxen in).
This screenshot appears to come from a slightly posher version than the Apple II version shown before. Maybe it’s from the Apple II GS or something. Note that the ox has been upgraded and now has coloured, more shapely horns, spots, and even an eye.
You had to buy a bunch of supplies, outfit your wagon with nice oxen, and set out on your journey. Along the way you would meet various hazards and have to make key decisions. You could cross rivers which was more risky or take the longer way round which would take longer and use up supplies – you get the idea, we’ve all played these kind of games, and to be honest they can be a bit tedious. But I suppose if you’re at school being allowed or positively encouraged to play games on the computer is always a good thing even if the games are a bit po-faced. And at least it had oxen in (we’ll try not to think about how mismanagement of your resources can negatively impact ox well-being in the game). Lots of British schoolkids have rosy memories of a game called Granny’s Garden for much the same reason (but that has less oxen in. I think. I’ve never actually played it but I’ve never heard oxen mentioned. There might be a cow, I’m not sure. But anyway.)
There’s been an iOS remake of The Oregon Trail quite recently, in fact:
Just look at those posh, modern, go-faster oxen, all slanty and urgent and with sweeping horns.
However that is not the game I am recommending here, sleek modern oxen or no.
Now there’s this chap called Justin Smith and he is plainly daft as a brush. Not daft as in stupid, because he’s plainly not that; I mean daft as in Monty Python, as in very silly indeed, and he makes some delightfully silly games. After all you have to be pretty silly to take a po-faced game like the Oregon Trail and mash it up with the likes of Excite Bike (or Kikstart, if you’d prefer a more British comparison with your cup of tea). But that’s what he did, and the results are wonderfully, gloriously daft.
The game is called So Long, Oregon and in some ways it is really quite similar to the Oregon Trail, in that it does involve a degree of resource management. The objective is to take your wagon and your family and your precious oxen (who can’t actually be harmed in this game, although they can be made to grunt a lot) and set out to find El Dorado. You have a certain amount of food and various misfortunes can befall your family members along the way and you must make key decisions that can affect their fate.
Unlike in the Oregon Trail, which was just a turn-based predominantly text-based thing, in So Long, Oregon you get to drive your wagon in realtime across a scrolling terrain. You can shoot stuff too and gather the meat for your supplies. Oh, and there’s physics; completely ridiculous physics with lunar gravity.
Here rather than fording the North Saskatchewan River we’ve taken a runup at a particularly pointy mountain in order to jump over it. You’ll have to be careful landing that wagon so as not to get caught in that tricky crevice there. One family member is dead and another’s pretty poorly. The chap on a horse is a robber and if you don’t shoot him he’s likely to steal some of your stuff.
The controls are simple (and onscreen buttons are permissible here because they really don’t get in the way of anything as you play) – just “Go Faster, Oxen” and “Slow Down, Oxen” really. Whilst airborne (and you will be airborne, lots) you can use them to adjust your angle in-flight to set up for a good landing. You can also tap anywhere onscreen to fire a shot from your wagon.
Here we’ve arrived at Fort Laramie. Hooray! Unfortunately we’ve arrived upside down.
You’ll pass forts and encampments along the way where you can trade for supplies, heal sick family members and such. You may get the odd nasty surprise at these too, so you can elect to just move on by (or fly clean over whilst doing a 360 if you prefer) if your status is good. Your objective is to go as far to the left as you can and discover El Dorado. Should you achieve that then you load up your wagon with loot and set off to make your way back home. Backwards.
Now the graphics may not be ultra modern and the game may be a bit silly and the controls may take a bit of getting used to but that doesn’t really matter because it’s just funny to play. I found myself sniggering out loud quite a few times while I was playing and I tend to prefer games that don’t take themselves too seriously anyway. This game is just a proper laugh.
There’s a mode where you race as fast as you can go against 19 other wagons. It’s completely bonkers.
And for all its daftness So Long Oregon does contain an actual game that’s challenging to play, and you’ll find yourself coming back to it until you’ve successfully got yourself back home again, and then coming back again to try to do it without actually killing most of your dudes and to try to get a decent score.
You can get this daft masterpiece at the following link:
And I note from that website that it’s also out on Android too by the looks of it. Jolly good.
If like me you enjoy Justin’s style then you should probably take a look at his other games – Justin Smith’s Realistic Summer Sports Simulator is a perfect antidote to all the Olympics bollocks and wankery that is in such full speight right now, and actually made beer come out of my nose when I first played it down the pub. And I’m not even going to attempt to describe Enviro-Bear 2010.
Despite finding this I didn’t come across Parintins.
(Ox- and grunt-related factoid: in the Minotaur Project games all the minotaur grunts are in fact the ox grunts from So Long Oregon. I asked Justin and he kindly let me use his ox grunts).
It’s difficult enough finding the good games out there given that there are so many things being released. It’s hard to know what to even look at. But I figure if you’re reading a Llamasoft blog page then you might enjoy some of the games that I enjoy (apart from the ones I make, obviously. You should buy those without hesitation and without the merest shadow of a doubt. Go on, go and get them all if you haven’t got them yet).
So I thought I’d start a new blog category in which the black ox with the blue star out of Super Ox Wars recommends some of the games we actually play when we’re not busy developing. If you’re stuck for something to buy (and haven’t bought every last one of our games first, of course) check the Caprichoso Arcade category for some ox-tastic reviews and recommendations.
To kick things off here’s something that’s been spending way too much time on my iDevices…
Pinball Arcade (Farsight Studios, for iOS/OSX/PC/X360/PS3/Android)
Back when I was but a young ox at university I used to spend a fair bit of my time in the student union arcade, as you might expect given what I ended up doing later in my life. I survived on a healthy diet of cheap imitation Jaffa Cakes and cans of Coke and directed a steady stream of loose change into Galaxian, Space Invaders, Tail Gunner and Asteroids. If I’d've paid as much attention to my studies as I did to the diving Galaxian Flagships and sphincter-puckering “little bastard” Asteroids saucers then perhaps I wouldn’t've been kicked out after only a year.
Video games weren’t the only things lurking in the student union arcade and halls of residency bars though. Many of us were held equally in thrall by the booming voice and mighty nipples of the fine gentlebeing you see above, who told all and sundry in no uncertain terms that his name was GORGAR.
Gorgar, Black Knight, Future Spa, Star Trek, Nitro Ground Shaker (which one frustrated and drunken student actually decapitated in a fit of rage one memorable night) – these were all pinball tables. Back then pinball had pretty much an equal footing with videogames in arcades (and in fact doubtless looked on the upstart videogames as mere whippersnappers, since the history of modern pinball goes back at very least to the invention of the flipper in 1947). Most of the students at university would have grown up being familiar with pinballs from seaside arcades and suchlike – rattling and clanging great electromechanical beasts which, although fun, did seem a bit quaint and primitive when compared to the new delights of Space Invaders and Galaxian.
The pinball industry didn’t take this lying down, however, and the same microprocessor chippery that powered the videogames started to appear in newer, more complex pinball tables too, and these found their way into the university arcade alongside the videogames and were played just as keenly by us students. I didn’t know it at the time but Gorgar’s booming voice and racing heartbeat were created by a pinball designer at Williams Electronics by the name of Eugene Jarvis – who would go on to create some of the best and most memorable arcade video games of the early 80s.
Pinball is an excellent game, and satisfying in quite a different way to the videogames, although the objective is the same – get the highest score. Pinball seems more present in the real world than videogames, controlled as it is not simply by flipper button presses but also by the wholesale shaking of the machine. To have a good game takes a degree of luck as well as skill, and it’s very accessible to players of all experience levels – a good player can have a bad ball, and a novice can have a great ball, so (except in the case of real pinball wizards) usually everybody has a chance of doing well and winning a game.
It’s not easy to have a real pinball table at home, though – a table is an expensive and substantial piece of furniture, and the complex electromechanical innards need care and regular servicing to keep working properly. So through the years there have been various attempts to create videogame versions of pinball.
The earliest attempts on early game consoles and early home computers were primitive affairs, often so crude as to bear almost no resemblance to the game they were trying to recreate. But as the years went by processors and graphics chips got powerful enough to sustain games that provided a recognisably pinball-y kind of experience to videogame players.
Some of the best videogame tables took advantage of their virtual nature to provide tables full of active targets and animated playfields which could never have been achieved in the real world. One which me and my mates got very addicted to was “Alien Crush” on the excellent PC-Engine game console of the early 90s.
This was a two-level table with fast and fluid gameplay marred only by the somewhat jarring flick-scroll between the top and bottom halves of the table. Make the correct shots and that brain would split open and monsters would come out to be hit by the ball. Bumpers rearranged themselves on the table as you played and some shots led to mini-tables upon which bonus games took place.
Even better was the sequel to Alien Crush, also on the PC Engine, called “Devil Crash”.
This table was three screens in height, and the whole table scrolled smoothly to follow the ball as you played. There were even more bonus games to find and play as you worked your way through the targets on each level. Getting the ball into that lady’s head caused her to gradually transform into a giant lizard (David Icke would have loved it). We spent many a fine weekend huddled around the PC Engine playing endless games of Devil Crash.
The videogame tables were all well and good but they were definitely more videogame than they were real pinball. It wasn’t until the mid 90s that it became possible to attempt the kind of real-world physics modelling that would make possible convincing simulation of tables that existed in real space. The first such simulation I encountered was the excellent Eight Ball Deluxe for PC.
I’d just moved to the US at the time this came out, and another mate of mine had moved there 6 months earlier and we used to meet up and hang out in the evenings. Many of those evenings were spent in front of the PC obsessively playing Eight Ball. It seemed inpossibly difficult at first, way more demanding than the more videogamey efforts we’d played before; but just like with real pinball, practice yielded results and we had some great evenings challenging one another’s highscores in front of the old 486.
Sadly these days the physical pinball table is in danger of becoming extinct. There’s only one manufacturer still making new tables; pubs and arcades rarely have any pinballs, and increasingly the only tables to be found are those in the hands of enthusiasts and collectors. There’s a whole generation of gamers growing up who might never have seen or played a real pinball game at all. Luckily for us though there are still some very good videogame pinballs to be found, and one company is undertaking a project which sets out simultaneously to preserve in simulated form some of the very best classic pinball tables of all time, and to provide a lot of pinball fun to us gamers as they do so. And so we have Farsight Studio’s excellent Pinball Arcade.
This is available on just about everything, as detailed above. I have had the iOS version for the last few months and I’ll be picking it up on the PS3 and Vita when it comes out on those machines later this month. $10 gets you the game with 4 tables included – Tales of the Arabian Nights, Ripley’s Believe it or Not, Black Hole and Theatre of Magic. Buying the PS3 version gets you the Vita version for free.
This is my favourite table of the initial four, Black Hole, as seen on the iPad. It’s an older table than the rest, and has considerably less table clutter in the form of ramps and toys than you see in more modern tables, but that’s part of the reason I like it so much; the table is very open and gameplay satisfyingly fast and challenging (it takes quite a degree of effort just to get the table to multiball compared to some of the modern tables that hand out multiballs like candy). You can shoot balls down into a lower mini-table – the Black Hole of the title – and even start multiball on both table layers at once.
Here’s a view of Black Hole on the ps3 – the additional power of the game console affords the tables more complex dynamic lighting, something I’m looking forward to seeing when the ps3 version comes out.
This is the table select screen on the iPad. As I mentioned this is an ongoing project to preserve a multitude of classic pinball tables and Farsight are offering them to players at the rate of two a month as DLC, and plan on continuing to do so for the next two or three years! The pricing of the DLC is very reasonable, at less than the price of a pint for both tables; I look forward to collecting a huge library of classic tables to play whenever I fancy a quick flip of my balls.
I’ve already been reunited with one of my old friends from University – the mighty Gorgar, with whom I have been very much enjoying getting reacquainted. Black Knight is due out later this month too (although it won’t be quite the same as the one we had at uni, which for some reason spoke French and kept ranting in a robot voice about “CHEVALIER NOIR”).
Pinball Arcade isn’t perfect – there are occasional problems with the camera views, a couple of the older tables are simulated rather than emulated which can lead to some small inaccuracies compared to the real thing (but most of them are pretty accurate since they actually emulate the CPUs of the original games and run their native code). Issues are generally being addressed pretty quickly and updates are frequent, and anyway such little glitches as there are rarely spoil a table entirely. The release of tables on the game consoles tends to lag behind those on iOS and Android, primarily because of the significant lead time on the certification process for the console platforms (that stuff is way easier on iOS/Android). And for some inexplicable reason Steam don’t want to take it for the PC. Nudging is a bit hit and miss on iOS but is apparently much better on the consoles.
It may not be perfect yet but it’s getting better with each iteration, there’s a long list of classic tables on the way, and I’ve already had way more than my money’s worth of fun so far with the iOS version. Really looking forward to having it on the ps3 and Vita too.
Best of all by buying Pinball Arcade you’re supporting an ongoing project that’s preserving great games that are becoming increasingly rare in the real world, and offering them up for gamers everywhere to continue to enjoy. And it’s very good value; you’re getting an awful lot of pinballing fun for not very much money.
Very highly recommended by this ox.
More details available on Farsight’s website (watch the video about how they model the tables!) at the following link.
As you probably know sometimes during the Minotaur Project series I like to visit genres that Llamasoft has never tackled before in all the years we’ve been doing games (GoatUp was an example of that being Llamasoft’s first ever attempt at a platform game). So this time I thought it might be nice to tackle a vertically-scrolling shooter, being a popular genre that I’ve never touched before.
My first exposure to vert scrollers was encountering Xevious whilst on holiday many years ago in France. Me and my mates would sometimes escape the heat of the hot summer days by retreating to a nice little arcade full of coinops and pinballs and there they had a Xevious machine into which many a 10 franc coin got lobbed.
Probably my favourite example of the genre was encountered on a different holiday, to the Greek island of Thassos, a few years later. In a beach restaurant there lurked an approachable yet challenging vertically scrolling shooter called Star Force.
This was a somewhat faster paced game than Xevious and featured a small white ship zipping over a tiled surface. Squadrons of enemies would fly down in distinctive formations, larger structures waited to be destroyed on the surface below. Levels were punctuated by larger end-level bosses (which were pretty minimal as bosses go, being just a Greek letter in a square flanked by a couple of turrets) and the difficulty level was just right: challenging without being overwhelming, and with plenty of good long levels to get stuck into. It was a fun blaster, and its basic design informed a lot of other games that came out on various systems. Over the years I’ve enjoyed dipping into these, games like “Astro Warrior” on the Sega Master System:
- a game which displays its Star Force inspiration rather obviously, but which is in fact a much simpler game, having only three levels (although the end level bosses are a bit more complex and aggressive than those of Star Force); and on the Atari ST the little-known gem “Plutos”:
which, despite having a small play area in only a part of the screen, was a rather fun reworking of Star Force which allowed two-player simultaneous gameplay.
Star Force went on to inspire namy more games, some of them semi-official sequels like the Star Soldier series on the PC Engine, which also saw a fair bit of my attention during the time of that excellent system.
In latter years the vert scroller continued to evolve, in particular into the Japanese style now known as “bullet hell”. These games tend to have shorter levels but feature an absolute crapton of enemies and in particular the spectacular geometrical sprays of bullets which give the style its name.
The original Star Force had a much simpler graphical style than the later bullet hell shooters (which often feature some really lovely Japanese spritework and backdrops). And so, in keeping with the spirit of the Minotaur Project games, I thought it’d be nice to pay homage to the old master and do a vert scroller very much in the style of the original Star Force.
Here we are right at the start of Alpha-Area (stage 1). Turrets and targets are scattered on the tile plane below while enemy ships fly in patterns above.
The main part of the game’s design draws its cues directly from Star Force, with crap on the ground to shoot and crap in the air to shoot, much of which shoots back at you.
I needed some kind of theme for the game, and also something to add a bit of a wrinkle to the gameplay, so I turned it into a very mild variation of what is known as a “polarity shooter”, a subgenre of vert-scrollers. In a polarity shooter there are two key colours that can apply to enemies and player alike, and different things happen according to which colour you and the targets are.
A more fierce example of the polarity shooter is “Ikaruga”. Enemies and shots can be either black or white, and you can flip your ship between the two states. Bullets of your own polarity can be absorbed with impunity (and in fact add to your weaponry). Enemies shot with opposite polarity bullets sustain more damage, and choosing to be the right colour at the right time contributes to a chain bonus mechanic.
Now Ikaruga is a fantastic game but it’s really, really difficult, so much so that although I love it I don’t actually find it terribly relaxing to play. It’s one of those games where your sphincter is in an almost constant state of pucker and it’s almost a relief when you get killed because it’s just so tense while you’re playing. I like my games to be a bit more of a romp than that, so for Super Ox Wars I decided to have a simplified version of the polarity thing. Only your ship and weaponry is affected by it and there isn’t any “wrong” polarity that’ll cause you to die if you’re the wrong colour. The polarity affects the gameplay in a more subtle way that I’ll explain as I go along.
But first I have to explain how it became “Super Ox Wars” and how that fits into the design, and to do that we have to take a digression into Amazonian tribal folklore.
A few years ago an idle ox-related Google search led me to a fascinating essay about a little-known cultural event in Brazil called the Amazonian Ox-Dance Festival. (You can read the whole essay here).
Basically, on a small island in the Amazon river, in a town called Parintins, once a year (next weekend, in fact, it being the end of June) two rival teams of dancers meet and compete in a themed dance festival – the “Boi-Bumbá” – in which a tale is told of the death and resurrection of a precious ox.
The ox is the central motif of the tale, and also the identity of each dance team. “Boi Caprichoso” is represented by a black ox with a blue star on his forehead;
and “Boi Garantido” by a white ox with a red heart on his forehead.
(I herd you like Boi Garantido so I put a Boi Garantido on your Boi Garantido)
Over the years both the story and the scale of the festival have evolved. Whereas the original tale of the ox had its origins in stories brought from Europe and Africa, it has now been elaborated to include stories and celebrations of the “caboclo” culture of the people of Parintins, displaying their pride in their multicultural origins and in the unique place in which they live through amazingly elaborate dance routines featuring astonishingly complex and beautiful props, animated characters, costumes and scenery. Each dance troupe is 3,000 people strong.
The tale of the ox ties it all together, and the performance climaxes in a sequence where the beloved ox (the Touro Amado), who was killed by a farmhand desperate to get some meat for his pregnant wife, is resurrected by the tribal shaman, much to everybody’s delight; dancing and partying ensues.
The thing is that this festival is absolutely huge – eclipsed in size only by the infinitely more famous Festival of Rio. Even within Brazil it’s not that well known and you’d be hard pressed to find anybody in Europe who’s even heard of it.
The festival lasts for three days and takes place at the last weekend in June. More than 70,000 people converge on a specially-built arena in Parintins called the “Bumbodromo”, to watch the festivities. Fleets of red and blue boats travel 24 hours down the river from Manaus – Parintins itself not being connected by road – bringing supporters of the rival oxen to the party.
“Bovine matters” are taken very seriously by the supporters, and Parintins itself is divided into areas of red and blue, Garantido and Caprichoso. Wearing the wrong coloured t-shirt in the wrong area is considered very rude. Supporters of one ox don’t even speak the name of the other, referring to them only as “o contrario”.
(And Parintins is the only place in the world you can get a blue can of Coke. Loyalty to one’s ox is taken so seriously that no Caprichoso fan could possibly be seen drinking from a red can of Coke – so Coke actually sell blue cans of cola there).
Fascinated by this tale of possibly the most ox-centric town on the face of the planet, and this massive festival that hardly anybody has ever heard of, I looked up “Caprichoso” on Youtube and the first thing I found was this:
Which gives some idea of the scale of it.
Since then I’ve become quite a fan of the boi-bumbá myself, following the fortunes of boi Caprichoso. Well it’s a hell of a lot more entertaining than football in my opinion . I had originally planned that after finishing Space Giraffe we would book up a trip to actually go and see the festival live – it must be an absolutely fantastic experience to see it all live. Unfortunately our reward for finishing Space Giraffe ended up being financial destitution instead of any kind of commensurate remuneration, and these days where you basically have to keep working flat out and are expected to sell your games for pennies I can’t imagine that I’ll ever get to actually go there. But still I love the Festival, and I like to listen to the music and follow the fortunes of Caprichoso every June.
Anyway – back to my shooter, needing a theme and some kind of polarity gameplay; my thoughts turned to Caprichoso and Garantido, and so the game became Super Ox Wars with the two oxen as the main theme.
The silly story told (in what I hope is typical arcade-ese) in the attract mode tells of the planet “Parint” where the people revere two oxen, and how each ox represents particular characteristics. Parint was invaded by the Marcabians (blame L. Ron Hubbard for that) and now, as ever, it’s down to you, the last pilot, to take off and strike against the invaders, just like in all shooters; but drawing on the powers of the two oxen to repel the invaders. The polarity comes in due to the fact that you can assume the polarity of each ox by shooting and collecting items of their respective colour on the planet surface.
Here we are entering the second stage “BETA-AREA”. Notice that the ship is shooting blue stars (and is in fact tinted a bit blue) – this means you are currently in Caprichoso polarity. Look underneath the scores and you’ll see two oxen, one red and one blue, pushing against each other. This indicator shows how deeply you are invested in whatever polarity you’re in. Here the blue ox has pushed the red one back over to the right, indicating that you’re currently fairly well invested in Caprichoso mode.
The more items of one ox’s colour you collect, the more deeply you are “in” that polarity. Picking up items of the opposite polarity quickly moves the balance back towards the other side.
Here we are coming to a part of BETA-AREA where there are 4 Caprichoso-shaped ground turrets. These will fire at you more if you are in Garantido polarity (as here; notice that the ship is firing red hearts).
So what’s the reason to take any notice of the polarity at all? Well, you needn’t if you don’t want to; it’s perfectly OK to just play the game as a normal shooter, flying along merrily shooting the crap out of everything that comes along and picking up every collectible. You can have fun that way but you won’t get the most points or get the most out of the ship’s weaponry.
The more you collect items of one colour, the more strong you become in that polarity, and the more likely you are to find extra lives and pickups in the shape of the symbol of that polarity (blue stars and red hearts respectively). Gathering these pickups grants firepower powerups in a specific style for each polarity – here the ship is in Caprichoso polarity and towing four stars, each of which is itself firing, yielding the satisfying bullet stream you can see here.
These heart-shaped shockwaves come from picking up spinning heart coins whilst in Garantido polarity.
And here towing red hearts while in Garantido polarity yields onion-like layers of bullets that flow in a cardioid trajectory around your ship.
Each polarity also has an intrinsic property which strengthens the more deeply invested you become (and much more so if you are also towing hearts or stars) – a Caprichoso-oriented ship repels enemy shots, and a Garantido-oriented ship can push enemy shots away with its own shots.
All this may sound a bit complicated but what it basically boils down to is “stick with one colour for a while, and score/firepower/protection blessings will accrue to you”. Which colour becomes your favourite is down to your own personal preference .
Each level contains numerous items of both colours, making it relatively easy to build up a chosen polarity, or collect towards a change if desired. If your ship is destroyed it will return just barely in its previous polarity.
Notice also that there are actually three scores! Everything you shoot with your blue stars gets added to the Caprichoso score, and everything you shoot with the red hearts gets added to the Garantido score. Certain items such as the bonus tiles add to their polarity score according to their own colour instead of that of your bullets, but these are generally small point values. Basically if you’re blue you’ll score blue and if you’re red you’ll score red.
Again, this isn’t anything you need necessarily concern yourself with if you don’t want to. You still have an overall score for your game, which is the total of your Caprichoso and Garantido scores.
So why bother with having separate polarity scores at all? Firstly to encourage you to explore different ways of playing the levels – if you’ve aced a level in one polarity, try playing through with the other. Your overall hiscore on a level is the sum of both best polarity scores, so by doing so you can improve your Restart Best standings for a given level.
Secondly it’s a bit of fun and allows for separate leaderboards for fans of each polarity as well as the overall leaderboard for combined score. There are some achievements given for being “loyal” to one particular polarity over the other.
Which is kinda in keeping with the theme of the two rival oxen .
Memories of Plutos!
So that’s it then – a nice vert scrolling shooter themed around two rival oxen and those pesky Marcabians. I hope you’ll enjoy it! It has the usual Llamasoft features – Universal app, excellent controls, iCade compatible (there’s provision in the iCade controls to play it “old style” by rattling the FIRE buttons for that authentic oldschool feel. Albeit with the option to switch in the autofire if your hand gets tired). We’ve switched over to pure Game Center now (there was a lot of overhead of stuff we never used in Openfeint, good though it was; all I ever really needed was leaderboards and achievements, and it seems to make sense to just get those from GC, since it’s right there baked into iOS).
Here’s a couple of videos showing the game in motion.
Here it is being played on iCade (and note that although as many have noted the background music *is* excellent, it’s not a part of the game. I’m guessing that would be a major problem as it *is* Xevious music. However if you really like it it’s simple enough to do what I did, download the music and play the track on the iPod app in repeat while playing Super Ox Wars).
And here it is being played with my dirty great finger just to show it’s perfectly playable that way. It’s nice too on the iPhone.
Right then, that’s it for now. I’ll report back once the app’s on sale, soon hopefully .
5 A Day is out now and receiving some nice reviews – it’s quite unusual in style and quite different to Gridrunner, so I’ve been interested to see how it’d be received. I’m happy to see that the answer to that seems to be “pretty well” so far.
“…Then, there is the music—a chilled-out, Tantric, meditative outer-space drone that pulls you deeper into this place built of absurdity, causing you to take it seriously, as if you were approaching a Hindu temple, even though there are cucumbers floating around… when playing Five a Day, I don’t become addicted to a numbers game. I’m not driven by a compulsion to act perfectly and win completely. Rather, I’m in it for my own sake: to see, and hear, and touch something mysterious—not because I’m hooked, but because I want to know what comes next.”
Meanwhile Gridrunner continues to get a lot of love, with people clearly loving the oldschool arcade vibe of it.
“Super-duper highly recommended. All hail llamas!” – Classic Game View video review; watch right here.
“Minter’s vision remains 100 per cent crystal clear, even after programming his way through three tumultuous decades of technological advancement. The fact that Gridrunner is just as addictive and challenging as any shooter you’ll find on the App Store – if not more so – is testament to the man’s talent.”
Gridrunner is also Editor’s Choice in the new issue of Tap! magazine, and garners a five’star rating and some very nice comments: “Out and out the best arcade shooter for iOS… . The shoot ’em up equivalent of juggling on a roller-coaster, Gridrunner strips back the genre, squashes you into a confined space, and then sneakily lobs regular surprises at your face, giving you a sensory assault and adrenaline rush.”
So yeah, pretty pleased all round with those!
And now it’s time for me to have another ALMIGHTY WHINGE about IAP abuse!
I’m not against all IAP. In principle it should be a useful inclusion allowing a player to purchase extra content for a game he’s already got. If used sensibly, I’m all for it.
An example of good IAP is in the excellent Pinball Arcade. You get a decent pinball table for free and the option to purchase extra ones via IAP, with new tables being released over coming months. Once you buy a new table it’s yours to play forever. This is a great use of IAP – the price you pay for a new table is really very good value given that in return you get an excellent simulation of a classic pinball machine that’s yours to keep and play whenever you like. I love pinball, so accumulating a library of great tables I can play on my iOS devices is something I value, and I’m happy to pay for. As soon as new tables come out I’ll be happy to hit the IAP button with a smile on my face.
The app is universal too, so all the tables automagically appear on my iPhone too. Jolly fair all round and I never feel like I’m being gouged for the sake of it. I’m buying something of value to me for a decent price. That’s how it should be.
Last night I downloaded a game for my Vita. Already the asking price was a bit more than I am accustomed to paying on iOS, but hey, it’s the Vita, that’s to be expected. Download, play, it’s quite a nice dexterity game with trippy graphics, looks nice on the awesome Vita screen (can’t help but think the touch-play mechanic would be better on a bigger device like an ipad, but hey). Play a few levels, have to retry a few as I get the hang of it, standard kind of thing.
Then out of the blue after I fail a level a “skip” button appears (not seen that before) and I accidentally hit it at the end of a level when I’d meant just to restart. The previous level disappears and I just think “oh poo, must remember not to hit skip next time it appears” as I’m happy enough to, you know, practice the failed level a bit and actually learn to play a bit better. That is, after all, how gaming works.
But then instead of the next level appearing I hear the PSN store lift music start playing. What? And then I find it’s taken me out of the game and I’m in the PSN store and it’s asking me for 79p to “buy” the ability to skip a level.
Excuse me?
You want the ENTIRE COST OF GRIDRUNNER just to switch on a single in-game option?
There is absolutely no reason at all for this. You’re not asking me to pay extra for something that it’s taken someone a while to produce and which adds worthwhile new content to the game. You’ve just deliberately disabled an already existent game option specifically so you can hassle me about it and wave the begging bowl under my nose. That isn’t adding value, that’s just arbitrary, graceless gouging.
Even the way it’s done is calculated to catch you out. There’s no “Are you sure you want to go to the PSN store?” warning if you should accidentally press the button, you’re there with that lift music playing before you know what’s happened. And there’s no “Fuck off, and never ask me about this again” option either, so I assume that skip button is going to be there forever now, even though I’m never going to use the damn thing. There should be an option to remove it if you don’t want it, but even if there were such an option they’d probably be asking 79p to do *that*.
It’s completely unnecessary and really annoying. I’m not sure I even want to play that game again knowing that the creators felt it necessary to resort to that kind of thing. Paying for decent extra worthwhile game content is fine. Releasing a game with little bits and pieces of it deliberately disabled so you can hassle me for 79p here, 79p there – fuck off.
Another abuse of IAP is offering players to pay to cheat at games. Example: in Words With Friends you can spend money to buy the ability to effectively look in the bag and see what letters are left yet to be drawn out in a game, something that’s against the actual rules of the game. But if you really wanted to cheat at WWF, well, you’re on your iPad, it’s a matter of a few finger pokes to the Internet where you can look shit up and cheat your little head off for free. But what’s the point? If you don’t play WWF with a straight bat then there’s no point in playing at all. The whole point is that you and your opponent agree to play by the same set of rules. One of my regular opponents is way better than me and routinely beats me hollow, but would I ever dream of paying to cheat against him? Of course not. Getting beaten by a stronger opponent is just part of playing the game. Playing people better than you is how you improve. When I do beat him I feel that I’ve genuinely done well. If I’d paid for an unfair advantage I’d just feel a bit shit.
Pay-to-cheat IAP is something that, far from enhancing the value of a game, instead offers the player the opportunity to spoil the game instead. Decent scores and wins should be earned by improving your skills, not by chucking 79p at a greedy developer.
You’d have to go some to beat EA though, who have outdone themselves with the veritable gouge-a-thon that is Tetris on iOS.
Now you’d think it’d be hard to ruin something as beautifully elegant and pure as Tetris with IAP, but they sure had a damned good go.
Consider: it’s EA, they are already fantastically rich. They could do the decent thing and release a nice version of Tetris for 79p, and everyone loves tetris and would like a nice iOS version so I am sure they’d still make plenty of money. Dev costs should be cheap because hey, it’s Tetris, it’s not rocket science. Hell I’d probably even pay £1.50 if it was a nice version.
However.
For starters it’s $6.99. That’s seven Gridrunners.
Oh, and that’s Tetris ‘HD’. ‘HD’ on an iPad game is basically code for “you’re going to have to pay extra if you want to play it on the iPhone too” (and you do, although for some reason it’s only a dollar on iPhone). So maybe we’re getting some fancy extra visual whizzbang for that extra six bucks? Not according to the screenshots, no. The game looks nearly identical on both devices and I can’t see any reason in the world that it’s not universal.
That’s just the start though. EA set the game up to try their best to squeeze cash out of players long after the initial purchase. There’s the usual sly trick of having certain gameplay elements require “purchase” via in-game credits which are doled out painfully slowly during normal gameplay. Want to get them at a decent speed? Better get your credit card out.
There’s even a “subscription scheme” where you have to pay them $3 a month in order to receive the credits at a more realistic rate. Apparently joining the subscription scheme also makes the game boost your stats – reporting that you’ve cleared more lines than you actually have – in order to boost your online ranking.
Isn’t that just flat-out cheating though? Surely for any kind of ranking system to be worthwhile it has to accurately reflect the abilities of the players being ranked. The person ranked higher than me should be there through dint of being a better player. If he can get there through having been mug enough to cough up a subscription fee to EA then “ranking” becomes meaningless as it is no longer an accurate indication of a player’s skill.
There’s no avoiding it: pay-to-cheat IAP destroys the value of things like online leaderboards. If someone pays to get an in-game advantage then they shouldn’t be on the same leaderboards or ranked alongside non-financially-augmented players. If they are then the whole thing becomes pointless.
It’s a shame that they’ve seen fit to add this dog’s breakfast of awful IAP nonsense to Tetris, a game whose excellence stems in part from the fact that it’s a beautiful, elegant, simple game that doesn’t need a bunch of bells and whistles and subscription modes and tacky wallet-draining incentives tacked on. But hey, EA obviously aren’t rich enough or huge enough so let’s ruin a classic with a bunch of hateful “monetization” to screw the punters for even more, eh.
I really wish developers would simply release a good game for a fair price and be done with it. Yes, offer us extensions and extra content as IAP if they are genuinely worth it, like the pinball tables in Pinball Arcade – that’s totally fine. But charging extra for individual game options, allowing pay-to-cheat, making game features depend on stuff like in-game currency that’s doled out painfully slowly unless you get your wallet out – that’s a twat’s trick. For fuck’s sake stop it. Earn your money properly, by making good games, rather than attempting to extort it with such insulting, annoying crap.
And gamers – next time you see these shitty tricks being employed don’t just take it on the chin and pay up; that’ll only make matters worse. Go play something else instead, something created to satisfy you as a player rather than something created to squeeze even more money out of you in dribs and drabs by annoying you into submission. You’re a gamer, not a cash machine. Demand proper games with all their bits intact and don’t accept crippled crap you have to pay extra to make work decently.
OK even I am finding it a bit weird that I am turning out new games so fast. Gridrunner is still pretty recently out (and still garnering excellent reviews; Tap! magazine called it “Out and out the best arcade shooter for iOS” and gave it 5 stars and Editor’s Choice).
But there’s no rest for the impecunious, not ever, so here I am again.
Five A Day? I am sure some of you are wondering. I know it sounds like I’ve given up all the shooting things and branched out into some kind of namby pamby healthy eating fad diet app in a final desperate attempt to actually make a living out of this whole malarkey but that isn’t actually the case.
If anyone was reading my blog a couple of years ago when I first started to play around with iOS programming they may well remember that one of the little prototypes I knocked up and one day swore to return to was a Time Pilot-esque thing which featured lots of flying around, shooting things, and collecting bananas.
So a month or so ago I started playing around with that idea again, beginning with the same ship and bananas as I’d had that first time round (completely different code though, that old framework isn’t in use any more). And it should’ve just progressed into a good old banana-oriented shooter as originally intended but by accident it sort of went all New Age and ambient. While still actually retaining the characteristic of actually being any good, of course. It didn’t just turn into a useless ageing hippy of a game that lies around smoking weed and listening to Steve Hillage and burbling on about auras and crystals without ever doing anything useful. Redolent it may be of joss sticks and wind chimes but it’s still jolly good fun and will kick your arse quite handily on the higher levels, just you wait and see.
Here, take a look at this video. It shows the first five levels (to the point where the first extra life is awarded for “Five A Day”) and hopefully you’ll see what I mean.
I mean yes, gongs and clouds and ambient stuff and the tinkling of temple bells, but also a whole bunch of different kinds of fruit, grunting minotaurs and lots of lovely shooting. You can even defeat the end level bosses by slapping them around with your bananas. Later on you get to shoot the floating head of Kevin Toms right in the ear while battering him with bits of melon. This is no pacifist of a game despite the lingering whiff of joss sticks that the audio evokes.
So how did it get like that? Quite accidental really. Firstly I spent a bit of time putting in the clouds, and they came out so fluffy and nice-looking that they must have put me into a subconsciously New Age frame of mind. It could well have been one of those times when Giles sometimes burns a joss stick in his room. Perhaps some patchouli-laden odours wafted through to me here, displacing my more normal thoughts of super powerups and large particle explosions. Who knows.
It started relatively slowly at first, with just fluffy clouds and the addition of a rainbow trail behind the spaceship. Then I needed some audio and headed out to a site called Freesound, where you can download snippets of stuff and use them in your projects. You can search by keyword so I put in “Space”, and that was it, game was doomed from that point on. All manner of floaty synth sustains, whale noises, chimes and gongs, page after page of them. Once I started putting one or two of them into the game, the game more or less began to shape itself. By the time I got to the first shower of bananas and enumeration of the first end of level bonus the audio was already heading firmly in the direction of “epic New Age”, and that’s how it ended up.
Actually I’ve rather enjoyed doing it. After the pure 80s arcade sound stuff from Gridrunner, doing something really quite different (whilst still making a plainly and unapologetically shooty game) has been a load of fun.
Anyway, let’s take a look at the game in pictures.
Here’s the title screen, such as it is. Actually there isn’t really a fixed title screen at all. The game runs a continuous demo along with a brief text description of the gameplay, followed by the hiscore table and credits. What they used to call back in the day an “attract mode”.
And here’s the basic essence of the gameplay right here. Your ship is in the middle of the screen, and the sky, clouds and everything else scrolls by as you fly. You can fly in any direction. The controls are about as simple as can be – firing is continuous, and you just use one touch to guide the ship. It’s simple and fluid and I swear if anyone moans about the controls I am going to seek them out and slap them around a bit with a large leek. But I am sure somebody will; one of the great certainties of iOS development is that somebody *will* moan about the controls. Jesus Christ Himself could come back to Earth, somewhat peculiarly to do a bit of iOS game app development prior to getting on with the Eschaton, and he could implement the most perfect control system possible, one designed for him by his very dad, and still someone would moan about the controls, call him a twat and vote his app 1 star. That’s just how it is.
Anyway there’s also tilt controls for those who prefer them. Game works pretty nicely on small or large devices.
Notice that the bees in that image are carrying bananas. Now technically those bananas actually belong to the bees. There are special squadrons of fruit-carrying bee brothers whose mission it is to collect the bananas, and I am sure if they were left peaceably to do that that’d be an end of it. But you’ve decided that bananas like that are just too good for alien bees to be having, so you set out to hunt down the fruit brother squadrons, destroy them all, and steal their bananas.
It’s not always bananas. In fact on each level it’s a different fruit – here it’s lemons. Notice that the sky is darker in this image too – as you play through the levels the sky colour changes depending on the time of in-game day. Each day is divided up into five sections – Haytime, Crunchtime, Nicecupofteatime, Currytime and Sheepenumerationtime. On each successive day things change and you get to meet new enemies (and blast the crap out of tem and steal their fruit and veg).
They don’t take all this shameless fruitnapping lying down, mind, and so as you progress you’ll see various kinds of other baddies apart from just the Fantabulous Flying Fruit Brothers squadrons. Here a jellyfish attempts to intercept and disrupt your shameless corncob heist.
No shooting game would be complete without some pink blobby things, and here a chain of them in the form of deadly mines has been dropped in your path by that little green chap. The clouds light up purple as you manoeuvre desperately to avoid crashing into them, potentially losing your way to your 5 a day. Someone has thoughtfully fired a homing missile at you too.
Notice the little line of fruits at the bottom of the screen – if you manage to bring at least one fruit to the end of the level it gets added to your store at the bottom of the screen, and when you get five of them you are considered to have been eating healthily and you get your Five a Day, just like in all those ads on telly and the little notices they put in the fruit section at the supermarket, and you get an extra life.
It wouldn’t be a proper game without some minotaurs in rainbow jumpers, and you will also encounter enemies towing minotaurs behind them instead of fruit. You can do yourselves and the minotaurs a favour by blasting these enemies, releasing the minotaurs, who thank you politely. If you then subsequently manage to collect the minotaur it emits a grateful ring of shots, the more shots the more fruit you are already carrying behind you. This can be very useful to clear nearby baddies, or to smack the end of level boss around with.
All the enemies that tow stuff behind them on those glowing tow line thingies also gradually reel in whatever they are carrying. If you don’t shoot them and release the payload before they suck it completely up, then they mutate and turn green and start pursuing you rather more enthusiastically whilst uttering an increasing barrage of shots and homing missiles. It behooves you to deal with them before that actually happens. Here you can see two minotaur-carriers that have sucked up their minotaurs, turned green, and come after you with a bunch of homing missiles. Eek.
Getting hit by shots or missiles, or running into enemies, depletes your ship’s shields. Fortunately collecting fruits and minotaurs restores them quite handily, so as long as you keep doing that you can take a few hits and carry on. Always try to fly into open space when you can, as on later levels with all kinds of baddies and shots flying everywhere it’s all too easy to get rattled around like a pinball.
Suck up too many hits though and this will be your fate – careening down to a fiery explosion with your melons scattered to the four winds. You still get a chance to pick up any floating fruit with your next life if you’re quick, although you usually can’t get away with that more than once. If you survive to the end of the level but lose all your fruit and bring home nothing then you’ll suffer the humiliation of losing your progress to 5 a day.
The game ends in an appropriately fruity manner, with “Game Over” spelt out tastefully in fruit and veg, and your stats and score displayed.
I’ve had a lot of fun doing this game, particularly doing the audio design, that was great fun and I think it’s worked out rather well, producing a game which is at once shooty, chilled-out *and* good for you as part of a healthy diet and lifestyle. In fact if there’s one thing I regret about doing such short projects it’s that I don’t get as much time as I’d like to spend on some aspects of things, everything has to be thought of, implemented and finished almost before I’ve had a chance to do any experimentation. I’d love to spend a bit more time noodling around with synthesisers and doing more complex audio design myself one day, for example; there’s so much more that could be done. But short projects are all you can do when you haven’t got any money, and there’s no room for R&D. Oh well, at least it means people don’t have long to wait till the next game.
I don’t understand people like the Angry Birds people who keep making the same game all the time. If I had a game that made me millions I’d be thinking “excellent, now I can make WHATEVER THE HELL I WANT” and be gleefully trying out all kinds of mad ideas and having fun without having to worry about being commercial. It’d be *ace*. But their response to the same thing seems to be just to keep making the same game again and again. Which is odd. I’d be quite the opposite.
Anyway, here you go. Submitted to the app store today so all being well it should be out within a week. I hope you’ll all enjoy it. In the meanwhile before I start the next game I really have to sort out my Mac. I think the disk is dying and the last week of development of this was characterised by at least 10 xcode crashes per day, and even xcode isn’t usually that flaky, so I think a bit of sorting out is necessary before something dies completely. Also the optical drive seems to have gone south which is strange because it’s basically never been used. I see a bootable USB stick somewhere in my immediate future.
More to come. It’s looking like this is the best received of all the iOS games so far, which is nice. I’ll post more review links as they come in.
Meanwhile I’m already halfway through the next game, which is coming along rather nicely and has developed quite a particular style that surprised even me …
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. You play the role of a little circular space ship thingy blasting at other blobby vaguely geometric Geometry Wars type thingies. There is looting (in the form of “G” pickups which add to your score) I suppose. Basically though it plays exactly like it says on the tin: Gauntlet-style mazes you make your way round blasting away in a Geometry Wars style. Like in Gauntlet there are “doors” that need unlocked with keys you find in the maze, and there are generators that spew enemies. You have shields that get depleted as you get hit and which can be replenished by collecting + signs you find scattered around the place (bits of meat and jugs of scrumpy not looking so great drawn in a Geometry Wars style I suppose). Shoot everything, have a whistle round looking for hidden areas and to make sure you’ve completely rinsed the level, off out the exit and on to the next one.
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