Shovel Knight

Ahhh late! Late again. Sorry, so sorry. I was just so busy playing shovel knight that the Monday deadline became a distant memory. Shovel knight is a modern game that is altogether SNESlike. It sports a rather fetching restricted colour palette, a chip-tune audio track and some bloody good retro gameplay to boot. I found myself rather fond of the game for the most part. It has a lovely sense of humour and genuine character that is rare in the modern shit maelstrom of games on steam.

The game requires you to play through well designed platforming levels, using your shovel and wits to down-attack your way to the evil .. castle. I don’t remember its name. Does it matter? Leave me alone I’m tired!

I found the controls really quite excellent and the different unlockable spells really make you feel like you’re making choices and playing the game your own way. Levels introduce new mechanics frequently enough to prevent the game from becoming stale and boss encounters are enjoyable and unique (if sometimes a little bit clichéd).

The check-pointing in some levels needs work. I found a lot of checkpoints were placed in such a way that I had to do a fair bit of faffing before I could get to the bit of the level I was failing on. It’s something Super Meat Boy got right and I was surprised that I hit shitty checkpoints quite so frequently. I also found that the punishment for death (losing money) is overly severe. You can reclaim your money Dark-Souls-style by picking it up from where you died but dying several times in a row means that it’s lost for-fucking–ever… goddamn I’ve lost so much money in this game. It’s really an odd choice for a death mechanic and one which doesn’t really fit. It’s a modern concept shoe-horned into a retro game. I don’t understand the reasoning for punishing players in this way instead of just… letting the money accumulate endlessly, it’s not like money is a finite resource, you can easily just replay levels and accrue what you need with minimal grinding. The floating bags of money are a distraction and the loss of money is adding insult to injury, particularly in later more tricky levels.

It feels like the game is much too short and more emphasis is placed on increasing player punishment with the hopes of pleasing completionists (and masochists). Personally, I would have preferred a greater RPG focus, and more places to go, things to see and ways to spend the money. Most of the map encounters are merely a one-off duel, and I’m sure they could do more with the inter-level dream sequences.

I feel as though I’m digging into the game to much here, it really is quite fun to play and people who don’t nitpick and tear games apart will easily be able to ignore these gripes and embrace the warm blanket of nostalgia that the game wraps around you.

If you liked platforming in the late 80s and early 90s, I’d definitely dig deep into your pockets and give this game a go.

Tiny tower: Vegas

One day I hope to review a game called Tiny tower: Blackpool. You’d be able to stir in some really unique mechanics and aesthetics. Think of the gameplay opportunities:

• Upgrade lamp posts with modern sculpture illumination to provide the local seagulls with somewhere classy to shit
• Entice stag/hen parties to keep irritating families away
• Install blue/UV lighting in public toilets to deter heroin addicts from mugging stags and hens
• Discard all town waste into the sea, nobody will notice the difference and you’ll save a lot of cash
• Repaint the tower to commemorate something, it’ll take a few years and cost a fortune but it will look slightly different so it’s worth it

Just a few ideas.

Instead of that realism you’re encouraged to create a Vegas casino to entice tiny plebs to spend money. Snoozepocalypse.

FREE PLAY! Or pay £0.79 to avoid waiting 45 minutes until you can play again!

Construction of your tower isn’t particularly engaging. The tiny gamblers spend their virtual life savings and booze money at your casino and you use that money to buy new floors and fruit peddlers to entice gullible punters. Outside of commissioning new floors your duties extend to restocking and acting as a bellboy to your guests, ferrying them between floors for tips. I suppose that’s a mechanic in that you perform an action and something happens. It does seem a little half-arsed considering people often demand to be taken to floors which are still under construction.

What little gameplay there is, is dragged out between purchases. You ordered a floor to be built? 60 minute timer until it’s done. You ordered more fruit? 10 minute timer. It’s like playing Theme park except you can only build one thing every 30 minutes and the only thing you’re trusted to control is the price of the fries. Obviously, this is a free game so you can opt to speed construction up with “bucks” but these accrue slowly without paying real money for them. You can’t do that though, that means that the terrorists have won.

The pay-to-do-things-now business model ruins the entire pace of the game. Management games like Theme Hospital and Rollercoaster Tycoon got it right because you’re never waiting, you’re actively trying to manage payroll, customer happiness, profits, entertainment, cleaning, safety, finance and geography. You’re very rarely short on things to actually do or get involved in. Even if you’re some kind of sadist who creates rollercoasters that end in nothing but death.

Conversely, Tiny tower leaves you with nothing to adjust or alter or tinker with. There’s no managing or  … fun. You simply build things, then wait until you’re bored enough to return to the game and build more.

If I were Blackpool council I’d catapult this giant turd into the local drinking supply where it belongs.

 

Crazy Taxi

I remember playing Crazy Taxi in the arcades of my hometown of Blackpool. It was great, beating the clock was a challenge and I was separated from my ill-deserved pocket money and thus prevented from buying anything I could use to hit people. The game had a physical wheel and gearstick too so there was an element of tactility and real driving skill involved. True fact: during my driving test, I tried to drive the wrong way down a one way street and the examiner had to take the wheel off me. Driving on roads isn’t fun anyway.

I can swipe to change lane but I can’t swipe away my tears after having my childhood memories shat all over.

Crazy Taxi for android is the same brand as the arcade game but a fundamentally different experience which has been crudely jammed into a format to which it doesn’t belong.

Direct free roaming control of your taxi has been dropped in favour of swiping left or right to change lanes or occasionally participate in a ludicrous scripted handbrake turn. Admittedly, phones are shit at emulating interactions that don’t involve swiping or tapping but that’s too bad. There’s probably no better way of doing it but I don’t award points for good intentions. The driving is shit.  You also don’t get to fart around as you please, instead you get linear missions. the number of which you can play at any time is now limited by ” fuel ” which can be bought for actual money and dignity.

There are some rather fun tank missions where the goal is to smash into as many cars as you can. The clever clogs developers realised they could flip around their awful controls and encourage you to plow into as many cars as possible . Irritatingly, they also realised that this mode was a lot more fun and made sure to monetise it. Well, they tease you with the odd freebie but if you want to play the fun part of the game more than once every 5 hours, you can unlock more  by buying some gems.  Fucking Gems. They couldn’t even be bothered to fucking contextualise it for fuck’s sake. What a load of shit.

Also, the arcade game had a feverish pace. You feared the clock, you swore at customers and hissed at traffic. The android game is a sorry cash-in which tries to tickle money out of your teats the same way every other free piece of dross does.

I’d only watch that video if it was the developers being eaten alive by vultures.

I’d be less harsh if the game had a price and wasn’t a butchered version of a game I loved and didn’t sit at the back of the bus smoking gem cigarettes, throwing push notifications at peoples heads and laughing. Sadly, it’s a game that makes me want to vomit into the developers eyeballs.

Subway surfers

This game was the first in the list that I would play by choice. It’s got bright colours, vandalism, fat cops and teenagers being hit by moving trains.

The aim of the game is the timeless quest to obtain as many gold coins as possible. You do this while sliding between 3 sets of train tracks while dodging obstacles and collecting power-ups. It’s not going to win awards for ingenuity… Or maybe it has? I don’t want to check, just in case it has and I wallow into a pit of endless despair.

I’m currently playing the game while enduring public transport, for authenticity. The smell of sweat and poverty definitely enhance the experience. We haven’t hit any teenagers yet, but not for lack of trying on the drivers behalf. The bus is full, I’ve looked around for fellow android gamers. There are none, but I can smell them. I get the feeling that the bus is not the place for twitchy gaming, the cornering ruins gestures for one thing and people complain when you crank the audio to hear coins being collected.

“Skullcrusher, maul this pig.”

To nitpick about the game’s name (as per tradition), the game isn’t set in subways. You don’t surf the train tracks or even the trains, you run, jetpack and roll but you never surf. This might not mean much to anyone else but it should. You could just call your game “Solar farts adventure” or “Pickled nipples” or “Sodbucket twats a shithouse” if the name doesn’t even relate to the game.

I really enjoyed it though actually. Vandalism IS fun. I once spray painted on a wall in Huddersfield, it wasn’t really vandalism because it was one of those ones that the local council say that you’re allowed to paint on. But it was almost as thrilling as the crime itself, much like the game. It doesn’t give you an adrenaline rush but it’s something to do to distract yourself from the monotony of the boring town you live in.

As I write this, there is a BEE in the bus. SHIT. Why did I distract myself? The normal rules for dealing with bees have failed. Sitting still is just making it angrier as the movement of the bus keeps punting it clumsily into the window. Should I announce the bee and try to get off the bus? I can hear the news now: “Society has started to collapse after an apprehensive 26 year old man warned a bus load of innocent people that a bee had entered the bus, initiating unstoppable waves of chaos and panic”. Okay, it’s managed to bumble out of the window. CHRIST.

I find it a little easier to write negatively about games so this one is a disappointment because it’s not terrible. You bastards, how dare you make a reasonably enjoyable game. Do you want to turn games reviewers into paupers who have to take the bus everywhere because they can’t afford a car? Oh…. I made myself sad.