Faith vs. Sonic

Aside from their looks, I think Sonic the Hedgehog and Faith from Mirror's Edge have a lot in common. Why, then, do I admire the latter far more than the former? I tried to answer that question this week on PopMatters.

Part of it stems from design. I started thinking about this after reviewing Sonic CD: Poor Sonic always finds himself environments that aren't conducive to his success. Sonic's a race car that gets thrown into the middle of an obstacle course. Instant deaths and unforgiving platforming segments wouldn't be so irritating if they fed into the traits that make Sonic unique. Is it any surprise that a game built around speed starts to feel off when things slow down?

Mirror's Edge suffers from similar problems, but at least Faith has a wider variety of abilities on which to fall back. It's exhilarating to sprint across the rooftops, but the game is as much about careful jumping and climbing as it is about racing. If you're willing to push through the difficulty, the non-running segments of Mirror's Edge will still reward you by showcasing carefully constructed facets of the game.

I also think my recent re-discovery regarding the importance of a game's presentation pushes me in Mirror's Edge's direction. It's an obvious thing to say, but Mirror's Edge is a novel game. First-person parkour games are in short supply, while cartoonish sidescrollers are a known entity (anyone remember Bubsy?). Mirror's Edge still has many of the same problems that plagued older games, but these problems are easier to excuse thanks to the fresh perspective.

Of course there's also the nostalgia factor. I don't have the history that some do with the Soinic franchise and it's hard to go home to a place where you've never lived. One player's flaw is another's cherished quirk. All things being equal, if I have identical gripes about two games, I'll give the benefit of the doubt to one that's taking chances.

Subjective as this all is, I had a good time conducting this little thought experiment. As always, there's no accounting for personal taste, even when it comes to my own.

EXP IndieCast #10: Gods, Cats, and Clones

Scott and I have returned with another selection of independent games that deserve your attention for more than a few reasons. We begin with two browser-based MMO's, the first a bullet-hell RPG the other a surreal cat roleplaying game, both of which will tickle your... fancy feast (YEAAAA!) We round out the show with a more serious look at Triple Town, Yeti Town, and the dangers of clones and patent laws. You can find links to all the games in the show notes below along with a few articles of interest. As always, we encourage you to leave your thoughts in the comments section below.

To listen to the podcast:

- Subscribe to the EXP Podcast via iTunes here. Additionally, here is the stand-alone feed.

- Listen to the podcast in your browser by left-clicking here. Or, right-click and select "save as link" to download the show in MP3 format.

- Subscribe to this podcast and EXP's written content with the RSS link on the right.

Show notes:

- Run time: 39 min 55 sec
- Realm of the Mad God, by Wild Shadow Studios
- Chatchat, by Terry Cavanagh and Hayden Scott-Baron
- Triple Town, by Spryfox
- Yeti Town, by SixWaves/LoLApps (and allegedly Spyrfox)

- "The Bulldog and the Pegasus," by Ian Bogost via Gamasutra
- "Attack of the Clone Attackers," by Jamin Warren via Kill Screen

- Music provided by Brad Sucks

iOS Revisited

I am a mobile gaming naysayer. I have been given too few reasons to believe my iPhone is somehow the messiah of the medium. The games on the app store lean towards brevity and shallow storytelling in general and consistently leave me feeling unsatisfied or even manipulated. However, I will begrudgingly admit to playing an excessive amount of a few iOS games of late that I believe deserve your attention.

Super Crate Box

Initially a PC release, this frantically paced shooter/platformer recreates the enthralling masochism of Super Meat Boy in a tiny package. In one room, with just a few platforms to navigate, enemies of various size, speed, and deadliness stream from the ceiling while you snatch up randomly spawned crates. Each crate cycles out your existing weapon for another, sometimes giving you an advantage and other times cursing you with a pea shooter when all you really wanted was a rocket launcher. Death comes frequently and inevitably, but another try at beating your crate box high score comes just as quickly. While the game relies just a tad too much on luck for my taste, and the touch-screen controls still make me cringe, Super Crate Box delivers  bite-sized portions of frenzied play.

Where's My Water

Disney built a surprisingly rich physics-based puzzler with Where's My Water. The game wraps a silly story about a bathing crocodile around seven themes stages. Like Angry Birds and numerous games like it, each stage adds a particular spin to the gameplay and unlocks an additional stage upon completion. Using the touch pad, your goal is to carve a path through dirt such that water falls into a drain pipe. Even with the addition of contaminating purple sewage, rampant mold growth, explosions, and acidic goop, delivering clean water to its destination is seldom difficult. However, capturing every rubber ducky along the way without losing a critical mass of water can demand some quick fingers and smart thinking. With too few competitors in the physics-based puzzling genre, Where's My Water easily floats to the top.

Puzzlejuice

The above games are great, but Puzzlejuice is the real star on the iOS for me. The game is a wonderful combination of Tetris, a match-3 game, and Boggle. It might sound strange, but when playing Puzzlejuice its  simplicity beautifully locks everything into place. Like Tetris, your goal is to strategically place assorted blocks and make them disappear before they fill your entire screen. However, instead of vanishing, lines of block only turn into letters. The blocks are all variably colored, and by clicking on three or more contiguous pieces of a color, these too turn into letters. Only by tracing your finger across letters to spell a word can you clear the board. The skills for one aspect of Puzzlejuice do not fluidly transfer to another, so you will find yourself constantly shifting between ways of thinking, trying to suss out the logic of a match-3 game while scanning a wall of letters for a big word, absolutely twisting your brain into knots. The game aptly states it will "punch your brain in the face." After getting my own mind thoroughly beaten, I can only imagine the great combinations of genres that might surpass even Puzzlejuice's commendable efforts. Physics-based, platforming, crossword puzzle anyone?

Gated Learning in 'Rayman Origins'

My latest PopMatters article is now live: Gated Learning in Rayman Origins.

One of my biggest complaints about Super Mario Brothers Wii was how absolutely unfriendly the game was in multiplayer. I also wrote about flawed multiplayer in Donkey Kong Country. I get that some people really enjoy painfully difficult platforming and feel that newcomers either pick up the pace or get out of the way. As I see it, a good multiplayer experience makes room for players with various skill levels without making them feel absolutely useless.

If you play wither others from the very beginning, the gated learning system Rayman Origins implements can handle a lot of the multiplayer hangups of difficult platformers. While the skilled player could risk life and limb pursuing hard to reach lums (Rayman's version of coins), the second - or third, or fourth - player can traverse the map per usual. These secondary players may also feel valuable when the skilled player, trying to grab some hard to reach lum, falls to their death and has to be popped by the less skilled and inherently more cautious player. The large lum that temporarily increases the value of smaller lums can also comfort secondary players who can pick up any overlooked lums the skilled players miss.

The gated learning system is a remarkable and transparent learning tool. When Origins becomes truly difficult, it still may not be enough to maintain the commitment and interest of players unfamiliar with the genre. I hear three and four players can also get excessive, with the ability to attack other players becoming immensely frustrating. Since many of the multiplayer conundrums facing platformers are arguably behavior based, it would be interesting to see developers teach good multiplayer behavior with the same finesse they teach mechanics. This can be said regarding most multiplayer experiences for that matter. I have a feeling actual high school teachers might have a great deal to teach the games industry about wrangling players and fostering cooperative learning environments.

EXP Podcast #158: Listener Mail!

This week's podcast is brought to you by...you! We solicited questions from readers and listeners and received a great batch of topics. We touch upon a huge variety of issues, including region locking, games with historical settings, and the different approaches to games criticism. This was a fun show to record and we'd like to do it again, so keep those questions coming via email, twitter, or singing telegram. Thanks for your questions and thanks for listening!

To listen to the podcast:

- Subscribe to the EXP Podcast via iTunes here. Additionally, here is the stand-alone feed.
- Listen to the podcast in your browser by left-clicking here. Or, right-click and select "save as link" to download the show in MP3 format.
- Subscribe to this podcast and EXP's written content with the RSS link on the right.

Show notes:

- Run time: 39 min 50 sec
- Krystian Majewski on Mass Effect and Batman: Arkham Asylum
- Music provided by Brad Sucks

Bedazzled by Bejeweled

I'm only half joking when I say that, after an hour or so of playing any game, I start to filter out a game's aesthetic layers. If you could somehow record a real-time feed of my brain, you'd see what looks like a high-level Quake player's view: wire frames, textureless polygons, and the sound of silence. I tend to place heavy emphasis on a game's systems, so this isn't anything surprising. However, every once in a while I discover (in the most recent case, re-discover) a game that reminds me just how important video game aesthetics can be. All this is just an overly-elaborate way of saying that I love Bejeweled.

This all started when I found an HTML5 version of Bejeweled in the Chrome store. I apologize to those of you who clicked that link; I hope you enjoyed your productivity while it lased. At its core Bejeweled isn't that different from its great granddaddy, Shariki: Like all match-three games, it taps into that primal urge to group similar things. Bejeweled is special because of its production values. Does it need its slick animation, crisp sound effects, and ridiculous Mortal Kombat-esque announcer? It depends on what you think the essence of Bejeweled is. Strip away all of its slick style and you'd still have the same basic game systems, but you would lose Bejeweled's personality.

As silly as it sounds and as tired as the word is, I can't help but describe Bejeweled as "epic." It's flashy animation and dramatic music build a magnificent facade around its very simple rule set. It's hard to describe something so intangible, but the fact remains that Bejeweled aesthetic compels me to revisit it whenever I need my match-three fix. There is something aesthetically pleasing about the way the gems shatter, how the lighting pieces crackle, and how huge combos seem to line up with crescendos in the game's frantic soundtrack. I want to succeed not only to achieve a high score, but to embark upon mini match-three journeys, one minute at a time. Without, all the flamboyant effects, I simply wouldn't care as much.

For mechanics-focused folks like myself, it's important to remember that aesthetics are often powerful enough to affect the way we interact with game systems. The way the camera subtly zooms and bobs during a swan dive in Assassin's Creed still elicits a tingly feeling in my stomach. The drive to seek out this feeling is as powerful a motivator to climb the game's many towers as any of the strategic gains such actions grant me. Similarly, in Flower, picking up petals in specific sequences yields pleasant musical tones. Even though this doesn't add to any kind of "high score," the experience affects the way I play the game. I learn how to navigate more precisely, testing the limits of the control system and my reflexes not only to collect the petals, but to hear the music they make. It's an aesthetic cue that leads to a aesthetic reward, but serves to deepen my knowledge of the game's systems.

Trite as it may be to say, there's a reason we call them "video" games. Were it no so ungainly, we would more accurately call them "audio/video games". When searching for the essential features of a video game, its powerful multimedia aspects shouldn't be ignored.

Speaking powerful, the irresistible force that is Bejeweled beckons. If the podcast doesn't go up this week, send help.

Mail Call!

Hey everyone! Jorge and I are interested in doing a "mailbag" show in which we take questions from listeners. Of course, for this to work, you all have to be interested as well!

So if you want to hear us jabber on about a particular topic, feel free to send us an email (experiencepoints AT gmail dot com), message or reply to us on Twitter (that's @JAlbor and @sjuster), submit a comment on this post, or dispatch your trained hawk to one of our homes.

Thanks for listening!