A quick look at Miner Wars

I don’t normally like to talk about games prematurely. I prefer to let a game be released and have the hype cool down before I take a look at it. I also cannot stand MMO’s. So it’s a little unusual that I come to you to discuss an unreleased MMO.

The game is called Miner Wars, and it looks fairly interesting. The overall framework appears to be similar to classic space trading games like Elite or Freelancer, but the emphasis is on mining. Mining in space games is has been criminally under-represented: Mining is usually nothing more than shooting little rocks and then beaming up the debris.

Not so in Miner Wars. Asteroids are massive, and fully destructable. The player can use their ship to actually dig networks of tunnels into these planetoid-sized rocks to look for resources and probably fight other miners. This feature alone sounds really cool. I hope the development team, Keen Software, can follow through with a great execution.

FATE

• Made by: WildTangent
  
• Cost: $20
  
• Where to get it: WildTangent Website

The gaming industry is one that loves to take the innovative ideas of others and bludgeon them to death with their own shoddy implementations. After Halo introduced the automatic-refilling health meter, for example, every game had to jump on the bandwagon. Earlier, when Sonic the Hedgehog showed the world that ugly cartoon animals could have ‘attitude’ and kids would love it, every single game developer had to make their own, culminating in the amazing brilliance of a duck with an extension cord sticking out of it’s arse.

FATE proudly continues this tradition by not just ripping off one or two key points, but the entire design docs of Diablo and Diablo II. More precisely, it takes ideas from both of those games, mixes them together and adds a few innovations. This kind of thing would be unacceptable were it not for 1) the fact that the Diablo series was brilliant and 2) FATE executes all of these concepts perfectly and sometimes even a little better than its predecessors.

You create an adorably diminutive character, choosing a name, gender and look and start in a village that happens to be right next door to a curiously massive dungeon. You’re given the task of going deep into the dungeon and taking out some baddie that lives there, presumably minding it’s own business. You delve into the dungeon, kill monsters, gain levels, collect loot and work your way towards being an unstoppable monster-slaying midget. 

If this sounds a lot like Diablo, that’s because it is. The inventory system is the same, the controls are the same, even some of the sound effects are very similar. 

Okay, so you know that it’s similar to Diablo. What sets it apart? Why should you pay 20 dollars for it?

FATE has a couple of neat innovations that I wish were in Diablo as well. The most significant addition is your pet. In a nod to NetHack, you can choose either a cat or a dog to accompany you in your dungeon delving. In the beginning, your pet is more powerful than you are and will help in battles tremendously. It also has an inventory, and you can load it up with loot and actually send it up to town to sell it all and return to you with the earnings. This helps cut out some of the back-and-forth drudgery that dungeon-hacking games tend to have. You can also feed fish to your pet that you catch to change it into different beasts, making it more powerful and giving it special abilities. 

Another innovation is the lack of character classes. As a feature that is surprisingly deep for a ‘casual’ title, skill points are used instead of classes to define your characteristics. You’ll spend them on magic abilities, melee skills or other aspects of your character. You’re free to spend your points in any way you see fit. I made a dual-sword-wielding summoner and it was fantastic: I ran around the dungeon with two massive Orc cleavers and six Olwbear minions following me and attacking everything in sight. The flexibility available with this system is impressive. 

There are many other cool little things about the game, like character retirement and the unusual way the game handles death, but I’ll leave them for you to discover. One of the best dungeon-crawler games ever is an indie game. If that is your kind of thing, this will be like heaven.

Bit.Trip Beat

• Made By: Gaijin Games
• Cost: $6
• Where to get it: Wii Shop Channel

Bit.Trip Beat is a perfect example of why indie games are so great. A large publisher would never release a product like this game, rightly deeming it too risky and not profitable enough to bother with. To a small developer like Gaijin, however, this kind of small, focused project is what they thrive on. A larger publisher would, by their nature, spend too much money on art assets and overall game length, and then would have to charge around 15 to 20 dollars or more just to get a return on their investment. Gaijin keeps the game small and tight and is able to charge a mere 6 dollars while (presumably) still maintaining a profit. Without indie developers, fun games like this simply wouldn’t exist.

Bit.Trip Beat is a rhythm-action game that combines concepts from Pong, Activision’s classic Atari game Kaboom!, side-scrolling shooters like Gradius and R-Type and Sega’s whacked-out musical shooter Rez. Now that you’re thoroughly confused I’ll explain it in better detail: you hold the Wii remote NES-style and then tilt it back and forth (like the old Atari paddle controllers) to move a very Pong-like paddle on the left side of the screen up and down. It’s very intuitive and responsive. In classic scrolling-shooter style, pixels will fly from the right side of the screen to the rhythm of the music and it’s your job to knock them back.

It starts off really simple, with pixels just following the 4/4 beat, but it only takes about a minute before the designers start throwing completely counter-intuitive patterns at you (in a good way). Pixels will come at you in various formations and you must use a combination of reflexes and pattern memorization to make sure nothing gets past your paddle.

Your goal in this is to achieve a high score. Get enough consecutive hits and the game goes into ‘mega,’ a state in which the music becomes more dramatic and consecutive hits add to a point multiplier. Miss too many and you enter ‘nether,’ a monochromatic state that you must crawl your way out of in order to start scoring points again. Too many more misses in the ‘nether’ state will end your game. Trying to maintain a high multiplier is a heart-attack inducing experience and, along with the pumping tunes, is the main draw of the game.

All this musical action is accomplished with some truly wicked 8-bit chiptunes. A curious genre that didn’t exist 10 years ago, chip-style music works best in a situation like this, a self-referential ode to a bygone era. Modern style and synthesis has been mixed in with the old, making for a very stylish and cutting-edge sound.

There are only three levels, but like the old Atari games that it’s based on, the challenge lies not in the length, but in developing absolute perfection with what is given to you. According to Alex Neuse of Gaijin Games, this is the first in a series of retro-themed music games, so be on the lookout for the next ones. If you have a Wii, buy this game and support the indie scene. It’s games like this that make that scene so cool.

Procedurally-Generated Content Vs. Handcrafted Content: an Editorial on Game Design

When The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess came out, I bought it immediately, as it was a game that I was looking forward to for a couple of years. I’ve been a die-hard Zelda fan since the NES days and I’ve loved every single game in the series since. Some of my fondest gaming memories come from Ocarina of Time, Link’s Awakening and the more recent Wind Waker.

A strange thing happened while I was playing Twilight Princess, however, that never happened to me with a Zelda game before. I got bored. I got to this prison level and everything suddenly just felt like a chore. I was going through the motions of solving the usual series of well-crafted puzzles but not enjoying any of it. I couldn’t really name anything in particular that was bad about the game; the dungeons were engineered to perfection (a point which will be important later on), the music and atmosphere that I love about Zelda were present. Yet the experience was awful. I couldn’t play anymore.

What happened? Had I suddenly grown out of Zelda? Was the game itself just badly designed? This was the same team that made Majora’s Mask and Wind Waker, so that couldn’t be the answer. For a long time I thought that maybe it was just that the Zelda formula had gone stale, and everything I was doing was just a retread of previous games. That would explain why I was bored with it. This has been a source of near-constant debate between me and and a fellow Zelda fan who can’t seem to understand why I would suddenly not enjoy something that is clearly fun.

Although I think that maybe the series needs a bit of a re-imagining, I don’t think that was why I couldn’t stand it. I think I’ve discovered what the reason is, and it has to do with how the content of a game is built, and it sheds some light on game design in general.

Recently I discovered Spelunky, an indie game I reviewed here. It mixes the procedural, randomly-generated level design of, say, Diablo or the legendary NetHack with vaguely Metroid-ish platforming. The key to this game is the fact that it’s randomly generated every time. Each level is completely different. Sure there are recurring elements that pop up: Golden Idols that trigger a huge rolling boulder when picked up, damsels in distress that need to be carried to the exit, gold and gems to collect, and upgrade items to discover, etc.

What makes it all so fantastic is how unpredictable it can be. I’ll pick up a damsel and be on my way to the exit of a level and come across a Golden Idol; the dilemma being that you can only carry one thing at a time. How do I go about getting both to the exit? Or maybe the Idol-triggered boulder plows through and destroys the platform necessary to get safely to the exit? Then I have to think creatively about how to get there with what’s left. I hated the poison dart traps until I discovered that I could lure bats into them, or throw a rock past it to set it off. I found a teleporter device that could zap me around to different areas in the level, but of course, only while I was carrying it. How can I use it to get a damsel to the exit when I can’t carry both of them at the same time? How do I get through a level if I run out of rope or bombs? Because you never know how all the different elements interact with each other, each game session forces you to think your way around corners.

But Ben, you say, Zelda games force you to do the same thing. That’s what solving puzzles is all about! Ah, but there’s a key difference between the ‘puzzles’ of a game like Zelda or a point-and-click adventure game or Prince of Persia or even Half-Life and the situations that you get into in a game like NetHack or Spelunkey or (occasionally) the Grand Theft Auto games.

When I blow a hole in the floor with a bomb to get into a lower chamber in Spelunky, I did it simply because I was using my problem-solving skills. When I do the same thing in a Zelda game, it was because I figured out that the designers were in some way telling me to do so. When I was a kid, solving a puzzle was immensely satisfying because I really had to wrap my brain around new concepts. Now that I’ve been playing games for over 20 years, I’ve seen so many puzzles and their solutions that I can just about see through them all, and see the skeleton of the designer’s logic wrapped inside. I can see behind the curtain, so to speak, and view the wizard for the man that he really is. I get immediately bored when this happens. I can’t help it.

I don’t mind it so much in, say, Half-Life, one of the most blatantly scripted games in existence because 1) shooting things is inherently fun even when done badly, 2) The combat in Half-Life is actually quite unpredictable and 3) the absolutely incredible atmosphere and story win me over. Half-Life is a game of shooting and cinematic experience. It is not a game of exploration.

When things are randomly built and arranged, I’m forced to think my way through it. I am truly on my own. If a boulder destroys the platform to the exit in a Zelda game, the player is assured that the designers put in something else to get you to that exit, and they think, okay, where is the alternate route they put in? Not so in a game with procedurally generated content. The player has to make an alternate route, and no FAQ or simple game-designer logic can help them.

To me, a game with truly great procedurally generated content brings back the wonder and excitement of exploring new places that I had when I was a kid. This is why I love games.

You could argue against procedurally generated content. You could say that it is difficult to make content that is consistently challenging and interesting, or that nothing randomly generated can come close to the value of a handcrafted scenario, built by a designer. But what some forget when making this argument is that the levels aren’t completely randomly generated. If that were true it would be a mess. The computer is given certain conditions, laws and materials and content springs out of that. The Earth is merely a set of randomly gathered minerals following the laws of gravity and Newtonian and Einstenian physics and now we have beautiful things like mountains, lakes, a weather system, trees, animals, supermodels, Doritos, Brent Spiner and videogames. Look at the Earth around you and never again underestimate the potential of procedurally generated content.

Spelunky was created by one guy. Imagine what a whole team could do when building an unpredictable system.

There is certainly nothing wrong with handcrafted content. One of my favorite genres, old-style adventure games, is nothing but a series of handcrafted puzzles. And I most certainly don’t believe that procedurally generated content has any place in a Zelda game (maybe a Zelda spin-off…?) If you’re going for something cinematic, like Half-Life or God of War, obviously the content needs to be engineered meticulously so the experience is just right. But I can’t wait for the day when a developer makes a huge-budget exploration and problem-solving game where the world and it’s challenges are procedurally generated.

So what is my conclusion in all of this? I still think Zelda is well-designed and there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. I’m writing this because I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who’s been bored with most games these days, and I’m convinced that it has nothing to do with older games being better. There were just as many crap games in the old days as there are now, you just don’t remember them as well.

If you find that you have gaming ennui, then this might be the reason. Just keep checking out the new and innovative games and maybe something will grab you and stay with you, like Spelunky did for me.