61 Frames Per Second : adventure

iPod Games, You're Doing It Wrong

Derrick Sanskrit — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Like it or not, the iPod/iPhone has become a gaming platform. There are tons of statistics out there and I'm not going to bore you with them, but the fact is a lot of people are making games for the iPod and a lot of people are downloading and playing them. This post is not about educating the blog-reading public so much as a friendly word of advice to the game developers out there.

iPod game developers, remember what your platform is. No matter how Apple dresses it up or the media hypes it, the iPod is first and foremost a portable music player. The iPhone is just an iPod that also happens to make phone calls. So please, when you want us to play your games on our personal music players, do take care when shutting off our music.

Just using the examples that are currently on my iPod Touch, the biggest offender is probably Scramble Live, Zynga's Boggle clone. There is no music in the game and very minimal sound effects, so why does clicking the icon automatically shut off my music? Are you worried that listening to Nas will distract me from finding words, and if so isn't that really more of my concern than yours? Scramble is clearly designed for short bursts of casual play, so every time I play a round on the train I have my music interrupted, then end the game and go back to start my music all over again. Not cool. The same goes for THQ's de Blob. The game does thankfully use the same wonderful music as the infinitely better Wii game (sans player interaction) but it asks you upon loading the game if you want sounds enabled AFTER it has already stopped the music. Why offer sound options after turning off the preexisting sounds? Just set sounds to "on" and I'll mute my iPod if I don't like them. Or better yet, let me paint the town red to the Replacements!

Some games get away with it because the music is so integral to the gameplay, as you'd think it should be on an iPod game. Newtonica, for example, has an incredibly simple gameplay mechanic in merely flicking a sphere around to catch crystals in the correctly colored quadrants, but without the bright and lively electronic soundtrack it would be dreary and impossible to play for more than ten seconds. Radio Flare plays like a 2D side scrolling Rez by targeting up to four obstacles or enemies at a time and blowing them all up in beat with the music. Neither game has a soundtrack I'd listen to on its own, nor particularly interesting gameplay, but the play and the audio element work perfectly together to make them compelling. Both games force my iPod to stop playing music, but they would be impossible to play set to any other music, so it's okay.

And then there are the games that simply get it right. The critically acclaimed RolandoEdge, a game that I've pretty much raved about on here before, is exactly the same story. Great original soundtrack, but no problem replacing it with your own mp3s. Aurora Feint, Sway, Adventure, all great games, fun for long stretches and short bursts alike, with wonderful sound effects and the ability to keep playing your own music while you play the game. has a fantastic original soundtrack, but it's more than happy to let you listen to your own tunes instead.

With OS 3.0 coming this summer - promising access to the iPod's media library within other apps - we can look forward to greater interaction between games and the user's existing music and photos (and hopefully a legit portable version of AudioSurf), so I ask you, iPod game developers, please, think twice before shutting off my tunes. If you have to interrupt Super Furry Animals, at least make the audio component an important part of the game.

Alternate Soundtrack: Adventure vs. Adventure

Derrick Sanskrit — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:00:00 GMT

Longtime readers had to know this one was coming. Pitting the legendary Atari 2600 classic Adventure against the self-titled album from an electronic musician of the same name was all too easy. What's more, it's all too appropriate.

Warren Robinett's groundbreaking Adventure features absolutely no music and only the occassional sound effect for picking up and dropping objects, slaying or being attacked by dragons, and returning the chalice to the gold castle. There's a lot of silence, which is good for atmosphere but bad for fun. Let's see what we can do about that.

Oh yeah, much better. Adventure (aka Benny Boeldt)'s music adds a whole new dimension of grandeur to the lonely pixel's quest, and the electronic bleeps, bloops, clicks and hums blend beautifully with the bright blocky colors of the Atari 2600.

As always, feel free to leave your alternate soundtracks in the comments!

Previously:
The Original Adventure, Now Portable
Alternate Soundtrack: Noby Noby Boy vs. Daft Punk
Alternate Soundtrack: Sonic the Hedgehog vs. Ratatat

Trailer Review: Machinarium

Joe Keiser — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 15:30:00 GMT

Remember 2D adventure games in rich, 100% hand-drawn worlds? Yeah, I think the last one I played was The Curse of Monkey Island. It’s pretty safe to say that they don’t make them like that anymore.

Except for these guys, who do. And from the looks of things, they’re doing a bang-up job of it.

This isn’t coming completely out of nowhere. This is Amanita Design, the same team that gave us the beautiful Samorost games. Those weren’t meaty enough to constitute anything more than plush diversions, however, and I remember thinking at the time that we should be so lucky to get a full game from the team. It is extremely surprising to me that we are actually so lucky:

Oh, man. Rusty, adorable robots. A painterly junkyard world. The warblings of a stuttering, broken synth. Push my geek chic buttons harder, Amanita. All you need to do is include one steampunk flying contraption and I’m yours forever.

There is one cause for concern, though: one part of the trailer shows your character unleashing a robo-kitty. The last time I unleashed a kitty in an adventure game, the world collapsed and everything died. So, that’s something to watch out for.

Related Links:

Overworld: Syberia
Indie Dev Moment: Gravity Bone
The Thirst For Adventure, Pointing At Things, and Not Knowing What to Say

The Original Adventure - Now Portable

Derrick Sanskrit — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:00:00 GMT

The Atari 2600's Adventure holds several special places in gaming history. It was the first game to allow the main character to carry and use objects without entering a menu or command, it infamously featured gaming's very first easter egg, and, as the title implies, it was the first ever action-adventure game for a video game console, paving the way for The Legend of Zelda and countless others.

Well now the first ever action-adventure video game is available for the iPhone/iPod Touch. And its free. Go experience some video game history right now.

The game is tilt-controlled and you touch the screen to drop whatever item you're carrying. Gameplay is smooth and the flat pixel graphics are perfectly crisp. It's hi-def lo-fi portable retro gaming. You can even adjust the dragons' behavior and turn on and off a rumble function in the application's settings. My favorite feature, though, is that gameplay does not disrupt your iPod's audio playback, so you can create your own soundtrack to the classic game (and we all know how much I love doing that).

Of course, my test session with Adventure was backed by Adventure's 2008 album Adventure...and it was divine. Try it, I implore you.

Illustration taken from my friend Dave Roman's hilarious comic strip interpretation of Adventure. Read the whole thing here.

Related Articles:
The Videogame Ages Part 1 & Part 2
Chiptune Friday: Leeni's 8 Bit Heart PLUS Music Video for Adventure's "Ultrazone"
Ports That Need To Be Made: iTouchRez
Newtonica Brings iPhone Gaming Into The Realm of Awesome
Sega CD on iPhone: I Like Where This is Going

Whatcha Playing: The Thirst For Adventure, Pointing At Things, and Not Knowing What to Say

John Constantine — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 23:49:00 GMT

Amidst the cavalcade of blockbusters, handheld eccentricities, and Rock Band I’ve been indulging in over the summer, a grand season now a mere two weeks from being officially dead, I’ve been getting a crash course in one of gaming’s most respected and forbidding forms: the adventure game. Though I started playing games during the genre’s heyday, I’ve always been somewhat less than literate when it comes to the many point-and-click and text-commanded classics crafted by Sierra and Lucasarts. My only real experiences came from visiting my aunt Donna. At the ripe age of seven years-old, she introduced me to the wonders of Kings Quest and, er, Leisure Suit Larry. Yeah. It’s not that I didn’t have fun with these eye-openers – they certainly expanded my vocabulary – I was just more interested in walking from left to right, jumping, and shooting when it came to videogames. I always knew that I was missing out on something, listening to friends chortle over playing Space Quest and even later, as a teenager, looking at lush screens of Grim Fandango. I’ve only gotten around to them recently thanks to three conditions working in concert. One is that there are new, easy to access (read: on Wii) point-and-clickers being released with regularity by folks like Telltale Games. Two and three regard vintage software: Nerve is equipped with numerous PCs capable of running things machines in my home twenty years ago could not, but also (and most importantly) I have a guide.

It’s easy to approach Telltale’s Strong Bad games because they move at a brisk pace and they work on a very simplified version of classic point-and-click language: see something, point at it to interact with it. Got an item? Point at it, click, then point the item at what you want to use it on. Repeat playings of King’s Quest V left me acclimated to both the process and the occasionally obtuse logic at work in these sorts of games, so it’s been a painless process and a reminder of the genre’s charms. Playing through the first two episodes of Strong Bad’s Cool Game For Attractive People (more on Episode 2 when I’m allowed to talk about it) has, however, made it abundantly clear that adventure games are not inherently relaxing in comparison to more action oriented fare. Nothing on earth is more frustrating than wandering around not knowing what the hell you’re supposed to do. In a platformer, if you keep losing, you know it’s because the challenge is a difficult one, tasking your reflexes and timing. If you keep dying in a shooter, it’s because you aren’t shooting the things shooting you fast enough. When you get lost in an adventure game, you’re just plain missing something and, unlike when you lose your keys or you forget what you’re doing when you walk into a room, the answer isn’t always right in front of you. You are at the whim of a designer’s train of thought, your agency stripped away. The problem is even worse in older adventures where you literally have to talk to the game.

This is why I’ve needed a guide. Pointing and clicking are fine for me, but when it comes to text interfaces, my illiteracy becomes a barrier too high to overcome. Pete Smith urged along my education in adventure, insisting I start with Conquests of Camelot and Quest for Glory. I played Quest for Glory for about twenty minutes before quitting. I spent the majority of this time swearing at everything I could interact with (hey, it worked in Leisure Suit Larry.) But even when I tried to get going, I couldn’t figure out what words the game wanted me to use to accomplish anything. I watched the Quest for Glory and Conquests of Camelot played instead of playing them myself and, now, I feel that I could comfortably tackle an adventure game with a text interface again. But if I hadn’t had someone playing the whole thing in front of me, explaining how to actually play the game at every step, I just wouldn’t have taken the time.

That inability to progress has got me thinking about what happens when you try to go back and play vintage games. Gaming has aged to the point where a modern player isn’t equipped with the language and experience to even play a lot of older software. I see my experience with Quest for Glory mirrored in the online testimonials of people playing Bionic Commando Rearmed, staggered by its difficulty and the demands that type of game makes of players. While games are finally entering an era of preservation through services like Gametap and the Wii’s Virtual Console, how do players get around this sort of cognitive dissonance? Let me know your theories in the comments.

(Yeah, I know. FAQs. But who wants to use a FAQ?)

Related links:

WiiWare: Nintendo, Babe, It Just Isn’t Working Out
Quickies: Homestar Ruiner
Unsolved Crimes and the New Setting
Lucasarts Classics on Nintendo DS?

Chiptune Friday: Leeni's 8 Bit Heart PLUS Bonus Music Video!

Derrick Sanskrit — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 16:30:00 GMT

Two things are certain in listening to Leeni's "Perfection Interrupted":

1 - This girl has some strong opinions about popular media.

2 - She must really dislike whoever this song is about.

Nonetheless, it is a beautiful example of a finely crafted pop song composed with the Game Boy's nanoloop.

If you enjoyed this sweet li'l jam, you can grab Leeni's 8 Bit Heart album from CD Baby or iTunes and learn more about Leeni on her website.

Also, it seems the hipster tastemakers over at Pitchfork.tv just keep on keeping on with the chiptune love for the fourth week in a row. First a music video by Truckasauras, then two weeks of the Reformat the Planet documentary, and this week they bring us a video from Baltimore musician Adventure for his single "Ultrazone":

Adventure openly admits that he is not trying to be a part of the chiptune scene, especially since he uses a midi keyboard and not video game hardware, but much like VHS or Beta and the dancepunk scene of the early aughts, the sound is so similar to what others are doing at the same time that its hard not to get lumped into the group.

Related articles:
Chiptune Friday Special Edition: Watch Reformat the Planet RIGHT NOW!
Chiptune Friday: Little Nemo the Dream Master PLUS Bonus Music Video!
Chiptune Friday: Little Sound Disko
Chiptune Friday Friday Friday with Truckasauras!

Quickies: Homestar Ruiner

Derrick Sanskrit — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

While we were all ridiculously pumped for Bionic Commando: Rearmed last week, there was another highly-anticipated downloadable game to tide us over for the first half of the week: Telltale Games' point-and-click WiiWare adventure Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People Episode One: Homestar Ruiner. Odds are good that if you're on the internet you're already somewhat familiar with the world of Homstar Runner and its brash luchador masked star Strong Bad, and, if you're anything like me, you were with them from fhqwhgads and quit right around Cheat Commandos. A quick glance through the Toons section of the site shows that, like The Simpsons and Family Guy, I'm probably better off for having missed the past few years of redundancy. How does this bode for the first official H*R video game?

The good news is the game is really funny. Much like their past efforts with Sam & Max and Bone, the team at Telltale Games has really paid close attention to their source material and delivered easily the funniest and most thoughtful Homestar Runner cartoon in years. The bad news is that this is a game, not a cartoon, and all the parts where you're not just kicking back watching the characters be incredibly rude to each other are... well... less than fun. In traditional point-and-click tradition, you, as Strong Bad, must collect all sorts of objects around town which you will use elsewhere to solve puzzles and progress the story or otherwise goof off. The entire game (episode 1 of 5) takes about two hours to play through, and much of that is wandering about trying collected items on different objects in the chance that it will cause something to happen. That's not to say there aren't a few fun sections of actual gameplay. I was particularly smitten with the goofy "stealth" section, and "The Race To The End Of The Race" was a pleasant blend of problem solving and action minigame, still, there is not much to justify Homstar Ruiner's existance as a game rather than a really well-produced cartoon.

Perhaps what is most troubling is the cost of the game. PC users, Telltale's primary demographic, can pick up each episode for $8US or subscribe to the full season of five for only $35 while Wii owners pay $10 for each episode, though I didn't notice much Wiimote integration. Buying all five will cost the same as a brand-new copy of Mario Kart Wii, Super Smash Bros Brawl or most any other AAA Wii title except without any of the fancy packaging to show it off. Additionally, SBCG4APE1HR takes up more space in the Wii's internal memory than any other WiiWare game to date. Add to this the fact that several players have reported a game-freezing glitch and that I myself noticed numerous graphical glitches and this does not feel worth the price. A $10 downloadable console game these days is Bionic Commando: Rearmed, PixelJunk Eden or Paper Mario. In the past, Telltale has been nice enough to produce a disc version of their Sam & Max seasons for customers who purchased all of the individual episodes and I would feel more inclined to continue supporting this series if I knew SBCG4AP would get a similar treatment for Wii since I'm paying full price already. It's certainly more fun so far than Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law, which itself was little more than an animated movie with occassional breaks for pointing and clicking. It's a shame that none of these new point-and-click Wii adventures are nearly as engaging as Zack & Wiki...

Related articles:
Bionic Commando is Love: Bionic Commando Rearmed is Out. It Matters.
Unsolved Crimes and the New Setting
LucasArts Classics on Nintendo DS?

You're a Filthy Cheater! ...Right?

Nadia Oxford — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 01:01:00 GMT

It's like yin and yang, light and darkness, vanilla and chocolate: wherever there are rules directing life, there is a means of going against those rules. Since video games' conception, enthusiasts have proved themselves champions of cheating and game-breaking.

But it's not as if cheating at video games is as simple as being cheap about tag-backs or peeking during hide-and-seek.

I wrote an article for 1UP that looks at the long, twisted history behind game breaking. I'm putting the link up here because I'm a pimp, but also because I find the subject matter pretty fascinating. It's very difficult to draw a line between "Cheating" and "Okey-Dokey" with video games because there are so many variables to consider. Is it "cheating" if you use an in-game trick like the exhalted Konami Code? Or is the term reserved for third-party peripherals like the Game Genie and Gameshark?

How about the exploitation of game mechanics? Put Mario Kart DS and "snaking" in the same sentence on any game-related message board to launch a war.

Gamers are often rewarded when they (to quote Miss Frizzle) take chances, make mistakes and get messy. Consider Adventure, the grandfather of console RPGs. By meeting certain requirements and going off the game's beaten path, players revealed the text "Warren Robinett", the name of Adventure's lead programmer. Not an impressive trick by today's standards, but it was an early indication that there was more to games than meets the eye...and that contrary to what Atari wanted people to believe back then, video games were programmed by human beings, not robots.

Players began to wonder: "What else do games have in store for those of us who think outside the box?" Thus began the sport of banging on buttons and keys to see what kinds of rewards would be yielded. Most of the time it was a trip to the return counter with a busted game, but as games became more complex, efforts became more fruitful.

My favourite Game Genie memory is finally taking down the wretched Thunderbird that lorded over the Great Palace in Zelda II: The Adventure Of Link. Zelda II not a forgiving game; the path to the Great Palace was hell, but it was a trek through Eden compared to the Palace itself. So what if I cheated a titch and employed the Genie? In the end, Hyrule was saved and I got a kiss from the original, somehow-not-mummified Princess Zelda. That's what counts, right?

...Right?

Psht, if Ganon had a Game Genie, you know he wouldn't hesitate to give himself eternal life and totally wreck Link.