Tag: games

Categories
Debated Enjoyed

For The Love Of PixelJunk Racers

The first significant pack-in with a video game system was the Atari 2600’s Combat.

Combat is fairly ugly, and has simplistic gameplay. You are a tank (or biplane, or jet). Pressing Up on the joystick moves you forward; pressing Down moves you back; Left and Right turn. The Fire button lives up to its name and fires your cannon. The goal: shoot your opponent before they shoot you.

What made Combat interesting is that it wasn’t merely one game type – which it easily could have been, given the space constraints of the time. Instead, by making slight variations to the rules of the world, Atari crammed twenty-seven different game types in. A mode where bullets reflected off walls, or you had more than one vehicle, or you couldn’t see the walls.

Combat allowed deep variation through slight changes to the environment.

Nearly thirty years later, we arrive at yesterday’s release of PixelJunk Racers, a $6.99 downloadable game on the Playstation Network from PixelJunk.

In a generation full of gorgeous games, PixelJunk Racers is not the prettiest game in the world. IGN dismissed the graphics as “crisp, but unfortunately the backgrounds are horribly bland and static.”

PJR, like *Combat*, has simplistic controls. You are a car. L2 or R2 are the gas. Left and right on the directional pad change lanes. That’s literally it. Most people will pick it up in about thirty seconds.

PJR becomes interesting for the same reason Combat is: slight changes to the environment provide endless gameplay variations. The game features thirty-two game types that are all created through slight variations to the rules and physics. You’re fast, everyone else is slow – pass as many cars as you can. You’re slow, everyone else is faster – don’t get hit. You’re fast, but slowing down – run into someone else for another energy boost. And so on.

Plenty of games offer customization; it’s easy to give a gamer a bunch of sliders and controls and let the gamers figure them out. Combining these rules in interesting ways should be a challenge for the developers first, and the gamers second. Too many games cop-out and provide laundry lists of options. Developers should strive to provide many varied preset combinations of rules – and if you allow users to define their own, let those combinations be saved and, even better, shared between users.

(PJR, interesting, not only combines the rules of the world into different pre-defined game types, but then combines the different gametypes into sets of three to create pre-defined party modes. Result: party games that stay fresher longer.)

Back to PJR: the game is addictive, challenging, and flat-out fun. Yes, ultimately the mechanics are simple. Yes, the game is made up of slot cars. But isn’t that what we’re all supposed to be into these days – simple, easy to pick-up games? Casual games? PJR finds the balance between the simplistic and the complicated, the shallow and the deep, the meh and the addictive. It can appeal to the hardcore gamer who loves to grind high scores as well as the casual gamer who just wants a quick five minute distraction.

With ten tracks, offline multiplayer for up to seven, online leaderboards, and a progressive tournament mode, you’re looking at a pretty robust game for a very small cost. I highly recommend PixelJunk Racers for anyone with a PS3.

If you’re interested in other deep-variation-through-slight-change games, I invite you to investigate the Halo series (specifically the multiplayer), Airburst Extreme (for variations on a theme), and MLB 07 The Show (the “My Sliders” feature).

Categories
Recommended

Piyotama: Hands On

Sony, in what may be either a stroke of brilliance or a moment of blindness (or possibly both), allows Playstation 3 owners to create PSN accounts in any country they so desire. And by making these accounts, you can get into stores for other countries. Freebies like *Mainichi Issuo* are easily downloaded and marveled at from American shores.

Purchasing from foreign stores, though, requires a credit card in that country or a prepaid value card.

As luck would have it, I have a connection who was willing to buy me a few cards. After buying PS1 hits like *Silent Bomber* and the amazing *Bishi Bashi Special*, I was left with 800 yen – just enough to buy today’s new Japanese-only PSN release, *Piyotama*.

Of course, my XMB is now a mess with betas, PSN games, foreign PS1 games, and some random demos. But it’s worth it in the name of science. I love having weird, obscure shit on my console.

Anyhow, Piyotama.

Like most puzzle games, I can’t say Piyotama has much plot – and if it does, my inability to read Japanese isn’t helping my understanding of it. (The on-screen interface, thankfully, is in English.) But there seems to be some benevolent chicken named Mama, who sit on some sort of log and lays eggs that look like fruit – and your job is to get rid of them.

Gameplay wise, I can’t say I’ve really played another puzzle game exactly like it before. So you have a hexagon-ish grid with the round egg pieces, and the goal is to get 4 of the same color in a row. But rather than drop pieces (ala Columns) or rotate them (ala Hexic), you move them from side to side. Three pieces sit off the game field, which you can rotate the order of, and then you push it back in and pop the three on the opposite side off. I can only think to describe this movement as “threading”.

When you get four in a row (occasionally horizontally, mostly diagonally), the pieces highlight, but they don’t disappear immediately – you have a bit of time to keep threading back and forth and try and match more rows up, which leads to a bigger combo and thus more points. Eventually, all the matched pieces turn to eggs and hatch into fruit birds.

That’s right. Fruit birds. Adorable little buggers. The graphics in the game are certainly a delight – rich colors, well drawn backgrounds, and nice animation. The birds collect around the screen as you release them, and I’ve caught a few of them napping when I was having trouble making a chain.

There are also a couple of special pieces that allow you to clear all of one color at a time (which you can chain against multiple colors to clear the board), as well as a “heavy egg” that blocks you from moving that row. These up the challenge a bit. There’s also a slight degree of Sixaxis integration, allowing you to nudge the table to fill in gaps, as well as force matched eggs to hatch if you’re running out of time and space.

While the game is certainly easy to pick up and play, and it allows you to zone out and continue to do well (like so many other great puzzle games), Piyotama is missing that extra ounce of addiction that would make it crack-like, where I’d be begging to play just one more round.

Part of the problem: it’s a bit lacking in modes. You have “Limited”, which gives you a short time limit; “Endless”, with no time limit; and “2P Battle”, which is local play only multiplayer. And that’s it, really – unless you consider watching demo movies or checking the online rankings a mode.

It’s a shame the multiplayer is local only, because like many color-matching puzzle games, it has some promise. It’s neat to watch the birds fly back and forth as you match pieces.

At least the game does have Internet Ranking, I guess.

Ultimately, you’re left with a charming puzzle game with lots of personality, but lacking in modes. Ironically, this is the exact opposite of the recently released Go! Puzzle, which is mode-rich but without charm or an identity. I can only dream of the sort of offspring you could get by merging both games.

While I realize most people reading this aren’t going to have the ability to buy it, I can recommend it for people looking for a unique puzzler that doesn’t necessarily have a lot of replay value. Otherwise, you should probably look elsewhere.

Categories
Endured Recommended

Wrong, Wrong, Wrong

It is a rare day where I doff my hat in awe of someone who can create a game that redefines the word “sadistic”, but today is one such day.

As part of a large order from Amazon UK I mentioned in the [earlier QI post](https://vjarmy.com/archives/2007/02/a_bit_obsessed_with_qi.php), I ordered the [QI Interactive DVD Game](http://www.amazon.co.uk/QI-Interactive-Stephen-Fry/dp/B000BHZ1FG/). I’ve spent some time playing it over this terribly long weekend, and I have been both shamed and humbled. The game is terribly, terribly evil, and I wish to illustrate why.

The point of the game is to collect the seven letters hidden on the disc and anagram them into the appropriate word, can then be entered into [the appropriate spot on the QI website](http://qi.com/game/) to be redeemed for a prize of some sort.

I like using OmniGraffle, so I figured the best way to explain how the game works is through diagrams. These little fluffy clouds represent our seven letters.

Each letter is associated with a “door” on the DVD. Each door contains a path which contains fifty multiple choice questions. Each question has four to eight possible answers. So in our diagram, we’ll connect our start point to the end point with an arrow that contains fifty midpoints.

Merely struggling through 50 questions would be tedious but not *interesting*, so to spice things up, some questions have more than one correct answer. A right answer is treated like a right answer – Stephen Fry congratulates you and likely gives you some trivia about why or how your answer is right.

But herein lies the catch. While more than one answer can be considered right, some of them are considerably less *interesting*. And if you choose a less than interesting answer, you will be led through a number of different questions in some other direction to eventually be told that one of your previous answers were not the most interesting, and so you are being unceremoniously dumped *back to the beginning of the leg*.

These are being added to the diagram as red paths ending in pitchforks – although, again, they are not any different from the regular branches in look or feel.

Of course, these multi-answer questions don’t merely appear in the regular track – they appear once you’ve gone off the beaten path as well. Let’s add these in blue:

Oh, yeah, and you have to do this seven times:

Again, this is a simplified diagram – I have no real way of knowing how many false branches their are per path.

So, cheers to the QI elves for probably the most frustrating game since [Takeshi’s Challenge](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqV7e5xLERU). I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.

EDITED TO ADD: There is also a fair chance that I’m just bad at these sorts of things and/or have rotten luck. Katie managed to trounce her way through two straight paths without a single misstep. She is an impressive lady.