Tower of Hanoi (1983)

Tower of Hanoi by D. Buckeye is, as the name suggests, a Tower of Hanoi game for the Commodore 64 and PET 64 computers, released in 1983.

This one is less featureful than even Glen Fisher’s version from five years prior: the number of discs is fixed at five, and the movements are not animated. The graphics are also less impressive–it’s harder to tell at a glance how many discs are on a stack, since they merge together onscreen.

This version is essentially inferior to the several Tower of Hanoi games which preceded and followed it. I do not recommend it.

Pharaoh’s Needles

Pharaoh’s Needles is a 1982 Tower of Hanoi game for the Commodore 64 by Ron Wagner & Wim (thanks to GB64 for this information).

Well, this incarnation of the Tower of Hanoi puzzle is a bit more appealing than Glen Fisher’s versions. Rather than just moving discs around, we’re going to engage in the Game of Kings! Very exciting. Of course, the rules are all the same, but you know, you’ve just got to give ’em the old razzle dazzle and what does it matter if your game’s nothing new?

Pharaoh’s Needles looks nice, and, like Hanoi, animates the moving of discs. Unlike, Hanoi, though, the animation in this game is quick. It’s much nicer, especially if you have the misfortune of choosing to play with nine discs, as the game allows. 511 moves, even quick ones, would wear on my patience long before the game was over. Still, I can’t fault the game for giving you the option.

This is the best Tower of Hanoi game, so far, and will hold that title for several years.

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.

First Impressions: Super Scribblenauts

Super Scribblenauts is a puzzle game for the Nintendo DS, developed by 5th Cell Media and released on 2010-10-12.

The gameplay is fairly simple: write words in Maxwell’s notebook to create objects, and use those objects to solve the puzzles. Sometimes the puzzles are simply of the ‘think of a word that fits’ variety, and sometimes they require a little more effort. I should say here that I’m not very far through the game, yet, so I suspect the later puzzles will generally be more challenging and less ‘name a part of car’.

You enter each puzzle from the constellation map screen. Having selected a constellation, you’re presented with a list of puzzles contained in that constellation; later puzzles are unlocked by completing earlier ones.

The stars with crowns are intended to be replayed: if you solve the puzzle three times in a row, each time with a different solution, the crown turns from silver to gold, as you see above. This is a pretty great feature, because a lot of the fun is in thinking of outlandish ways to solve puzzles, and the developers clearly knew this. I only wish I could see a list of my previous solutions, but that’s unfortunately unavailable. Probably, it would have been too difficult to make it meaningful–not only the selection of objects but also their placement and what you do with Maxwell can be important.

The puzzles are often amusing, even when they’re not difficult: you can kill the dinosaurs in the above screenshot in any number of ways–I particularly enjoyed using a black hole.

A surprisingly large number of objects are implemented, so feel free to let your imagination go wild. Super Scribblenauts keeps track of how many distinct objects you’ve created, and how many distinct adjectives you’ve used, too, so you can measure just how creative you are, if you’re so inclined. Personally, I’m keeping a list of my solutions for each level, just to see how many ways I can solve them.

Not all of the puzzles are particularly inspired, and some seem a bit obtuse to me, but in general, the game seems to be great fun. I definitely plan on finishing this one.

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.

Lab 14

Lab 14 by SuperCasey4 is a platform puzzler, though a very nontraditional one.

Alabaster

Alabaster by John Cater, Rob Dubbin, Eric Eve, Elizabeth Heller, Jayzee, Kazuki Mishima, Sarah Morayati, Mark Musante, Emily Short, Adam Thornton,  and Ziv Wities is an almost-entirely conversation-driven interactive fiction game based on the tale of Snow White.

According to the teaser on the game’s web site: “The Queen has told you to return with her heart in a box. Snow White has made you promise to make other arrangements. Now that you’re alone in the forest, it’s hard to know which of the two women to trust. The Queen is certainly a witch — but her stepdaughter may be something even more horrible…”

Excitebike

Excitebike, released by Nintendo in November 1984 in Japan, and October 1985 in the US, is a classic racing game for the NES.

Two modes are available, Selection A and Selection B. In Selection A, you race against the clock, alone on any of five tracks.

You play the red motorcyclist, and must pass the required number of laps on each obstacle-strewn track before time runs out. If you fail to beat the third place time, you lose. Since you can select which track you want to play on, this isn’t such a big deal,though, and the early tracks are pretty easy.

The track consists of four lanes, which you can switch among with the up and down buttons. In addition to changing lanes, you have the choice of the slower or faster gear for your bike. The faster gear has an obvious advantage, but also a disadvantage: as you use the faster gear, your bike heats up, and if you keep it up too long, your bike will overheat, forcing you to wait on the sidelines until it cools off again. Using the slower gear will allow your bike to cool, as will running over arrows that appear on the track. As a result, much of the strategy involves knowing when to use the faster gear and when to take it slower. Use the right gear and avoid or manage the obstacles, and you shouldn’t have much trouble until the last two tracks.

In Selection B, you still must beat the clock but there’s an additional difficulty: other racers appear on the track.

The other racers don’t seem to be intelligent–they don’t seem to try to block you intentionally, but they do get in the way, and running into them can cause a crash, costing you precious seconds. This mode is a little more interesting than Selection A, because of the added difficulty, but play is basically the same. I’d suggest playing Selection A if you’re trying to get the best possible times, and Selection B if you just want to race.

In addition to the two play modes, there’s a design mode, which lets you select from the available obstacles to make your own track.

You can try to make some interesting tracks this way, and it’s a little amusing, but the inability to save means that it’s a bit of a waste to spend much time trying to make a really good track, since it’ll be gone when you power off the console. It’s not that there isn’t a save option–it’s right there on the menu, and will happily spend a few minutes claiming to save, but it’s intended for use with the Famicom Data Recorder, a cassette attachment which was never released outside of Japan. The rest of us are out of luck.

AI: 6/10

The computer-controlled racers provide a little extra challenge, and a little extra scenery, but it would have been nice if they were aggressive and tried to keep you from passing.

Gameplay: 8/10

The game controls smoothly, and it’s really quite fun. If it had more tracks and supported two players, it might get a perfect score. Even without these, Excitebike is an excellent racing game.

Graphics: 8/10

Ordinarily, I say you should never to anything 3D on the NES, but Excitebike pulls off the 3D obstacles very well–it’s easy to see how tall they are and what slope they’re at, which is the most important thing for this game. I can’t score this any higher, though, because the tracks are pretty bland, and the most variation we get on different tracks is a palette swap. Not bad, but they might have done a little more.

Sound: 4/5

I’m only counting this half since there’s no background music during the races, just sound effects. That said, what sound exists is not bad, but a little repetitive. Like Indy 500, the main sound we hear during the race is the constant roar of the engine. Unlike Indy 500, that is actually useful since you can tell how hot your bike is by the sound of the engine. It still gets a little old, but at least it’s functional.

Personal Slant: 10/10

Whatever shortcomings Excitebike has, it’s still quite a fun old game, and I have very fond memories of it. Especially given it’s age (it was one of the first NES games, 25 years ago), I can’t really find fault with it.

Total: 8/10

Fun fact: Excitebike fit on only 24K of ROM. By comparison, this review, together with the five screenshots it contains, takes up about 23K–just about the same size as the game that is its subject! There’s certainly a lot of excellent gaming packed in such a small size. This is one game that’s absolutely worth playing, and since I understand that it’s available on the Wii virtual console we all have the good fortune to be able to play it, even if we can’t find a working NES.