Towers of Hanoi (1980)

In 1980, according to GB64, Brookfield Software released an updated version of Glen Fisher’s Hanoi, including limited color.

This newer version is substantially similar to the first release, including the same animation and interface, and very limited color.

As before, there’s nothing in particular to recommend this version, so let this brief review stand as testament to the insignificant nature of the differences between the 1978 and 1980 versions of the game.

Crystal Defenders R1

Well, it’s been more than a year since I posted here–not because I’ve stopped writing, but because I’ve not yet managed to finish any posts to my satisfaction. I’ve been writing some fairly in-depth, multi-post reviews of several games, but since I didn’t want to publish any of the individual posts until they were all complete, in case revision was necessary. As a result, no posts for a year. Well, let’s change that.

I recently completed Crystal Defenders R1 for the Wii, a Final Fantasy-themed tower defense game by Square Enix, released 20 April 2009 in North America.

Crystal Defenders R1 is grid-based, and the enemies move along a fixed path, while your units are placed elsewhere on the screen. There are a variety of units available–soldiers, archers, black mages, and others–each with their own strengths and weaknesses. For example, soldiers are very strong, but have limited range and cannot attack air targets. Some enemies may be resistant or immune to physical or magical damage, so black mages or archers, respectively, may be needed to deal with them.

Each area in the game contains two stages, with the same map, but different waves of enemies. Each time a stage is played, though, the waves are the same, so it is possible to learn what enemies will come, then play a stage over, in order to use resources more efficiently, and maximize the score.

As is usual for a tower defense game, the units cost money to place, which money is earned by destroying enemies and surviving waves. Units can also be upgraded to do more damage or have greater range.

Early in the game, resources are quite tight, so it’s necessary to be as efficient as possible with unit placement and upgrades, in order to survive. Here, a criticism: it is more efficient to build a bunch of level 2 units, rather than upgrade the ones you have, so the winning strategy, early on, is to place a dozen or more level 2 soldiers and archers, and just let them take care of everything while the money rolls in. You can always upgrade a few or just place more with all the money you save by not upgrading units.

Worse, though, is that late in the game, the rogue becomes available. These allow you to gain extra money from destroying enemies, if they’re in range. Once rogues show up, the new best strategy becomes to spend as little on units as you can manage, until you’ve upgraded your rogue completely, then just kill everything immediately by upgrading things with the thousands of spare gil you’ll have. Resources become a non-issue, and all you really have to worry about is whether you’re placing the units efficiently in terms of space–not a big worry.

Basically, Crystal Defenders R1 is a very standard, and fairly easy, tower defense game. Getting a perfect on every stage may require more than one try (particularly the final stage, unlocked by getting perfects on each previous stage), but shouldn’t prove very challenging for anyone familiar with tower defense games. It’s fun, and you may get a few hours of play out of it, but I’m not sure it’s really worth the 800 Wii Points, considering how many excellent free tower defense games there are.

I’ve included the Japanese trailer for the game below–there is a trailer in English, too, but it’s not nearly as cool, and anyway the words aren’t terribly important.

IFComp 2010: East Grove Hills

East Grove Hills by XYZ is an entry in the 2010 interactive fiction competition, billed as “an interactive anecdote” about some events in the life of an antisocial high school student.

(This post contains spoilers. Read at your own risk.)

EGH is rather heavier on the ‘fiction’ than the ‘interactive’. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it does require some care to keep the attention of the audience. I don’t think that it really succeeded, unfortunately.

First, the good: the game really feels like it could have been written by and about a high school student. If it wasn’t, that’s pretty impressive. The interactions between the characters and the flow of events was more or less believable, with some exceptions. But then, there’s the other side of the story…

High school students are usually annoying and boring. The game gets that right, too. Plenty of time is spent whining about how socially underdeveloped the PC is, and reminiscing about arguments about who had fewer friends, and so on. A very large chunk of the game (or perhaps it’d be better to say ‘story’) is spent drilling into our heads that the PC is a social outcast that no one likes, and it’s pretty obvious why. Of course, there’s no reason that the PC must be likable, but if he isn’t, then the game has to work harder to keep me interested.

Also, as I mentioned, the game isn’t terribly interactive. Most of the interaction is only in the form of the conversation choices, and even examining things doesn’t usually yield anything interesting. Also, unless you choose the right things to examine, the game will whisk you away to the next scene before you can get the crucial details about the characters. You’ll have other opportunities, but the first scene is the best time to learn these things. Besides the normal criticisms I might give such a non-interactive IF (“Why not write static fiction?” and so on), the lack of interactivity worked against EGH in one important way: by the time I got to the critical scene in the school (the third scene in the game), I was convinced that since it was a memory, I wouldn’t be able to do anything but stay on the rails the game had set me on, so I didn’t try to do anything, and I gather that I missed some important things because of this.

This failure did lead to what I felt was the game’s greatest success, however unintentional I suppose it was. When the PC is hiding out with Yue during the shooting (And wasn’t it a bombing earlier? Never mind.), he pulls her along and then you’re presented with a conversation menu with four options: three variations on “are you okay?” and the ever-present “Say nothing”. It’s reasonable that this is all the PC could think of at the time (and another point in favor of the game’s verisimilitude), but what struck me was that after exhausting the other three options, all you get presented with is the option to say nothing for twelve turns. Twelve awkward turns of the PC being frightened and unable to say anything while hiding from the horror that’s going on so nearby. This felt, to me, like a real triumph of realism–what else could the PC do? How else could he possibly have acted? I really liked it.

Now, I gather that you have the option of acting during that time, when I assumed that you were trapped in the conversation while the events took place, and what I took to be a great indication of the PC’s powerlessness may have been merely a result of a poorly used conversation system and my own misconception about the mutability of the past events. No matter, though–I still liked that moment.

Sadly, that’s pretty much all I really liked about the game. Oh, I thought that the messages about not remembering exactly how things had been were nice, rather than just seeing the standard library messages, but they were really a thin veneer on the shallow implementation. I couldn’t really sympathize with the unlikable PC, so the emotional impact was rather muted. The ending was weak, if realistic, in an “a poorly adjusted teenager might recount events like this” sort of way.

So I rate the game 3/10. I didn’t like the game generally, wasn’t impressed by anything it did, and didn’t feel like it made any important points. It gets a little bonus for the scene I mentioned above, even if I suspect my appreciation of it is somewhat misguided, and for the realism of the writing, but I can’t rate a game I didn’t enjoy very highly.

(One note unrelated to the game: I’ve added a cut before the spoilery text of this review. I usually dislike having to click through to read things, but I guess in the case of comp games it may be warranted. Cuts don’t seem to work like I thought. Still: if you have strong feelings either way, leave a comment and I’ll take it into consideration for future posts.)

IFComp 2010: The Chronicler

The Chronicler by John Evans is an interactive fiction game entered in the 2010 interactive fiction competition. You’ve been sent to investigate a research colony that’s lost contact with the rest of humanity. What has happened to them?

(This post contains spoilers. Read at your own risk.)

The central mechanic of the game is traveling between two time periods–changes in the past affect the future, and you can move some objects between time periods as well. I like games with time travel (for example, I think Day of the Tentacle is excellent) and the use of time travel in The Chronicler was pretty good, though simple–the idea of bringing a future object to the past so you have two copies is a little too obvious to make a good puzzle, I think.

However, The Chronicler is an incomplete game, and it shows. The implementation is very shallow–few scenery objects are implemented, and there’s a severe lack of synonyms. Too, the behavior of the device that transports you between time periods isn’t entirely consistent–it takes you to different rooms depending on where you use it, but it wasn’t apparent where the boundaries were, so I got stuck since I didn’t think to use it in the hallway, assuming it would take me to the Transfer Room. Finally, there’s no satisfying ending. I stumbled across both endings quite by accident, but they leave everything unresolved.

I like the idea behind The Chronicler, and I hope to see a finished version of this some time. If it were more deeply implemented and had a more satisfying ending (and a little better testing–I did discover a bug while playing), it would be a fun piece of short IF. The current version has potential, but that’s not quite enough. 5/10.

IFComp 2010: Under, In Erebus

Under, In Erebus by Brian Rapp is an interactive fiction game entered in the 2010 interactive fiction competition. You’ve accidentally boarded the wrong train, and when it stops, you’re in a dark and unusual place. How will you get home?

(This post contains spoilers. Read at your own risk.)

Erebus is severely under-hinted. I solved very few of the puzzles without using the hints. Actually, I didn’t even figure out that the booths were used for spelling out objects until I read the hints. It wasn’t even entirely clear that you were trying to escape. For all I knew, you were supposed to make friends with the cyclops and learn his secret of eternal life.

Some of the puzzles felt positively obtuse. Spelling out PUB in order to get a drink? Was there some hint that I missed? Making a cup and a tub were pretty obvious, but that’s pretty much all I managed alone. And the ending puzzle is absolutely impossible to guess, as far as I can tell. “You could use some assistance in escaping from Erebus. A student who will follow your instructions would be ideal.” Why would I even consider that?

There were some other problems, too. It was necessary to repeatedly travel around collecting ingredients (or, rather, letters) to try out puzzle solutions. Every time I needed a pea I had to go get one, open the pod, then use it. Eventually I just collected a big stack of bees and peas and dropped them near the booths, but I still had to make trips for the tea, ewes, and eye. I get that, from an in-game perspective, there should only be one eye at a time (though it reappearing sort of ruins that), but there could have been a whole flock of sheep I could herd to the booths, and I could have poured a small amount of tea out of the tub, leaving it little diminished. It was also a pain to have to take things out of the pack repeatedly. I’m of the opinion that if there’s no good reason to restrict the player’s inventory size, you shouldn’t do it–I believe players will forgive at least that failure of realism in service to playability.

Erebus wasn’t all bad, though: there were some nice responses; the various ‘bonus’ words you could make were amusing–though not amusing enough to make me want to make them all, given the painfully large amount of work involved in making just one word; the changes in the response to examining yourself were nice; the fact that the backpack became a wristpack was a nice bit of attention to detail.

I guess there were some things I didn’t explore. I couldn’t work out how to explore the pit, though the ten points I got for making it would seem to indicate there’s more to it. Maybe I should have tried “TILT”? But it’s too late now, and I don’t think I’ll ever go back to it.

I regret that Erebus‘s shortcomings so outweighed its successes. The environment seemed like it might be fun, and I do enjoy wordplay–Ad Verbum is one of my favorite games. But everything I did in Erebus just felt like slow work. With better hinting and an easier way to create the words, Erebus could be a pretty solid game. As it stands, though, it’s just more trouble than it’s worth.

First Impressions: 75 Bingo

A horrible slots game by Sachen, the company that gave us Tasac and other gems.

I don’t have much to say on this one, since I don’t see the point of these games that are totally luck-based gambling simulations.

Verdict: Like other Sachen games, and other gambling sims, just don’t bother.

First Impressions: Brickout!

A foray into other consoles with the Intellivision’s ‘Brickout!’. It’s clear just from the name that it’s a Breakout clone, but is it a good one?

Short answer: No.

It’s very simple. You get 20 lives, you move the bat along the bottom of the screen, the ball destroys the bricks it hits. This wouldn’t make it a bad game, by itself; it would only make it an overly simple one. The problem is that this game has such bad collision detection that the ball will slide through the corners of the bricks occasionally. It will get stuck in a row and take the whole row out. Not bad things, right? They make it easier, yes? They do, but I’d prefer some challenge.

But the game does provide that. Since the game is old (I suppose), its controls are somewhat lacking, and the framerate is just bad. The ball is minuscule in comparison to the bricks or the bat, so it’s not that hard to lose track of it. It’s not too clear, when the ball is moving at a shallow angle, where the ball will be when it is on a level with the bat. Now, perhaps these things are minor, and I am just bad at the game, but either way, I won’t soon play this again.

Verdict: Arkanoid is better in every way. Play it instead.

First Impressions: 3D Block

A falling blocks game, which appears from the title screen to be an adult game. Is it? See inside:

I’ll answer now, to spare you any anxiety: if it’s an adult game, no one will ever know, because it’s impossible to get anything done.

It’s not too hard to rotate the shape when it’s at the top, but once it gets further down it’s nigh impossible to tell how it’s oriented. Furthermore, it’s very hard to tell at a glance what the levels below the top are like.

And what is that box on the lower right? Is it supposed to help me guide my blocks? It shows four blocks per level. There are sixteen blocks per level in truth. I don’t know how this is meant to help, but it’s about as useful as dictionary with every other letter missing–you know there’s more to it, but it doesn’t do you any good.

With all these faults, the only thing that let me complete the first level was the the blocks fall slowly–painfully slowly. You can press start to drop the block all the way, but there’s no way to move it down just a bit. When the second level comes, though, this isn’t a problem. Where the first level was far too slow, the second level is impossibly fast. The blocks fall completely in about a second, which is nowhere near enough time to orient them, much less position them accurately. So, we get this:

And the game is thankfully over.

Verdict: This game shows why 3D should not be done on an NES. The 2D Tetris games are pretty good on the NES, so if you want falling blocks, play those instead.

First Impressions: Tasac

Tasac is a vertical scrolling shooter by Sachen, and it sucks.

The title screen looks pretty cool, so one might expect the game to have decent graphics, or something. Most of your in-game time is spent in a position like this one:

There’s no real challenge in this part, except that the laser-like weapon you start with sucks, and the upgrades suck even more. When you get to the end, the boss appears.

But you can’t kill it yet. In fact, you can fly right over it. Why is the boss there before you’re able to interact with it? I don’t know. But the game carries on just as if the boss weren’t there. In fact, it carries on the same way even once you can fight the boss–the random enemies keep appearing, there’s just a boss on the screen at the same time.

Although the boss shoots a pretty large number of projectiles at you, they’re not hard to dodge. If the weapon weren’t so stupidly slow and hard to use, they boss wouldn’t be even slightly difficult. As it is, the boss just takes a little longer than it ought to.

The second level was just like the first. I think that the boss was slightly rounder, but I don’t really care to recall.

Verdict: Pointless. It’s just a below average vertical scroller.