As the previous entries in Backlog Bonanza Month were for newer games, I decided to take a look at something older, a NES game titled The Battle of Olympus which was published by Brøderbund and developed by Infinity. The combat is frustrating, there is plenty of tedious grind, you are likely to spent half your time getting hit into pits by various forms of wildlife, and it is still somehow a very enjoyable game.
But before looking at the game itself, it may be interesting to take a glance at the publisher and developer. The developer is Infinity, best known for...well, nothing really. Infinity is a company which is nearly impossible to find any information on and any information which I could find was sparse and often contradictory, although it does seem like the vast majority of their works were only released in Japan, so The Battle of Olympus is quite the outlier. Brøderbund on the other hand is far more well-known, or at least it was, as they were the developers of the Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? series. While Brøderbund mainly stuck to publishing and developing computer games, and most of them education in nature, the list of their published NES games is overflowing with obscure delights. To name a few, the infamously maligned Deadly Towers, the loved/hated obscure/famous classic Spelunker, the impressive-for-its-time Lode Runner, the much-adored The Guardian Legend, and the also-adored-yet-way-more-obscure Legacy of the Wizard. As for The Battle of Olympus itself, it's a perfect fit for this list with its blend of impressive innovation and confusing frustration as well as its largely unknown status.
The plot of the game is simple enough as Orpheus must rescue his beloved Helene from Hades, but must first find the three nymphs which will give him fragments of Helene's love which, in turn, open the path to the underworld through the magic of NES logic. Of course, none of this is explained by the game itself and the male and female leads are both nameable without any default names in place. Oddly enough, this lack of in-game background information works in the game's favor.
The Battle of Olympus is a game which places a heavy emphasis upon exploring various locations in Greece (though Mount Olympus itself never makes an appearance) and this is where the bulk of the game's strength lies. Similar to games such as Castlevania II: Simon's Quest and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, there are various NPC's which give hints about secret locations or the effects of the many items players will collect. However, unlike most similar games from the NES era, NPC's are scattered all throughout the game and some of the ones with the most valuable information are outright hidden, which goes a long way towards encouraging players to explore everywhere. The hints themselves are also well-done as they are often somewhat vague or refer to items and places the player may not yet have encountered, but they are never overly obtuse nor outright useless; some hints even give pieces of the plot so players can gradually come to understand just what the goal is and what they have to do in order to achieve it even without the manual.
Items play a crucial role in The Battle of Olympus and are divided between weapons, support items, and items which grant passive benefits. Each area of this rather open game has one of the Greek gods in a temple and each god will either grant or sell a player something useful (they also give out passwords after you've taken their item). However, the temples themselves are often well-hidden and their entrances aren't marked, so it can take quite a bit of effort to find each god. There is no leveling up in this game either and instead players must find or buy pieces of Ambrosia to grant a hefty health boost while other passive items hidden throughout the game can do anything from helping to defend against fire to permanently doubling the protagonist's attack power. Of course, items themselves do not give descriptions and players will need to rely upon information gained from NPC's to discover just what each object even does and where to use it. The actual effects of many items are also frequently fun, such as an ocarina which summons a dolphin players can ride in order to cross water or some sandals from Hermes which not only increase jump height, but which also allow the player to outright flip in the air and start walking upside down on the ceiling.
As much fun as combat and exploration are in this game, the same cannot be said for the combat. The range of any given weapon is painfully small and Orpheus simply thrusts weapons in front of him instead of swinging in an arc, sort of like a sidescrolling equivalent of Lagoon. While there are plenty of mythological creatures, such as a harpy, a gorgon, a centaur, several cyclopes, and Hades himself, these are generally reserved as boss or miniboss fights (and their hitboxes tend to be painfully small anyway) and the vast majority of enemies instead consists of various forms of wildlife, such as bats, monkeys, caterpillars, birds which drop extremely-damaging rocks, many types of snakes, and the inevitable slime. Most of these enemies are also very small and either fly down from the ceiling or crawl along the ground, which is a problem since Orpheus lacks not only an overhead swing, but also any form form of downward attack. So, combat generally involves waiting for an enemy to either swoop down or leap up and then counterattacking right before it makes contact. This is somewhat alleviated by the Staff of Fennel, a very fun weapon which allows Orpheus to fling out fireballs in an arc which then proceed to slide along the ground, but the staff is acquired early in the game and never receives an upgrade after players learn how to fling fireballs from it, so it quickly becomes too weak to be a viable option against most enemies later on (though it always works wonders against bats). Otherwise, combat usually devolves into jamming on the attack button in a desperate attempt to land a few hits against small enemies attacking from every direction with the intent of knocking players into one of the many, many pits.
There is also the matter of the grind involved. As I mentioned earlier, sometimes items must be purchased from gods or other NPC's. The currency used in The Battle of Olympus is, for whatever reason, red orbs referred to as 'olives' and these sometimes drop from enemies. Most of the purchasable items also cost somewhere in the 60-80 olives range, which may not seem that bad. Unfortunately, even at the end of the game enemies never drop more than one olive per kill, resulting in a bare minimum of nearly 100 kills per item, but realistically 80 olives takes several hundred kills over the course of at least a half hour even at a good grind spot. Furthermore, dying (and it is very easy to die in this game thanks to all the pits) cuts the current amount of olives the player has in half, meaning players must either find a good general grinding spot and pray that they can make it to whichever NPC is selling the item they want without a bat/monkey/snake/slime/caterpillar/bird knocking them into a pit or stick to near the NPC's location and grind off of enemies which likely take longer to kill.
Despite these shortcomings, The Battle of Olympus is great choice for anyone looking for an old-fashioned action adventure game with a heavy emphasis on exploration and discovery.
The Battle of Olympus can currently be found on Amazon and eBay for as low as $2.71
The rather impressive 8-bit rendition of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor which plays in each god's temple can be found here
As has become custom, here is a link to the Backloggery
Monday, September 24, 2012
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Brilliant B Games: Legend of Zelda: Dark Dreams
A game does not always have to be 'well-made' to be 'fun'. In fact, I would argue that some of the most enjoyable games out there are some of the most poorly made. Like a good B movie, a good 'B game' fails spectacularly in one or more areas, such as in aesthetics, level design, balancing, controls, and/or writing, yet does so in a way which is neither frustrating nor boring. Thus I present Legend of Zelda: Dark Dreams, an RPG which crosses the Zelda series with the Kingdom Hearts series and fails on nearly every front; I have played it for about a dozen hours and enjoyed every minute of it.
So, how bad are we talking here? Well, this should give you an idea:
Right, so let's start with the plot. Sora, Donald, and Goofy appear mysteriously in the world of Hyrule and all come down with a bad case of plot amnesia before becoming friends with Link. Then 'Dark Dreams' appear and the group decides to stop them, but then Organization XIII show up too and then Ganondorf gets thrown in there somewhere. To say that it's a mess would be an understatement, but the game certainly does try. The writing 'quality' is where the plot truly shines though as rarely does a textbox go by without a few spelling and grammar errors ranging anywhere from the infamous 'i' to consistently using 'horrids' in place of 'hordes' and incorrectly spelling 'resurrection' no less than three times in a row with a different misspelling each time. The writing alone is likely worth playing through the game for, but Legend of Zelda: Dark Dreams has far more to offer.
Progression is completely broken. While players can walk to any dungeon from the Hyrule Fields hub, each boss gives a different 'Element' item upon defeating it which is used to open the door to the next dungeon; which dungeon the 'next' dungeon actually is is rarely indicated so this becomes a game of guess and test. But that's entirely fine since you can just skip most of the game anyway. One of the very last areas in the game is not actually sealed off and can be accessed at any point after the first dungeon so it's entirely possible to powerlevel off of the enemies in the area and kill its boss in order to simply skip over half the game. The events meant to delete boss fights are also broken, so any boss in the game can be refought infinitely simply by backtracking to its room.
Ability and gear progression is equally as broken. As a nice touch, there is a new subweapon to be found for Link in just about every dungeon. However, these subweapons can only be used in combat and are utterly useless as the abilities Link learns through simply leveling up are significantly stronger. Link's abilities in general are a mess though as ones which are learned earlier and cost lower amounts of MP frequently deal far more damage than supposedly stronger skills. Sora gets an absurd amount of keyblades to wields, probably at least as many as all the weapons the other three party members get combined, and some of these have interesting gimmicks attached to them, such as having a chance to double the party's experience or granting an increase in gold drops, but many of the gimmicks are also worthless, such as ones with extremely low damage and an element attached to them. Sora also spends a good chunk of the beginning of the game being nearly worthless, but he becomes astoundingly useful at level 25 when he learns Wind Raid, the first and only multi-target skill the party will have between them for quite a while. Donald has an absurd amount of skills with three spells for just about every element, all the healing spells in the game, and multi-target versions of every single status ailment for a grand total of 34 spells; Donald learns all ten of his status ailment spells at the same time when he hits level 30. In contrast, Goofy barely gets any weapons at all, though his weapons grant an extremely useful boost to his defense, and learns all of six spells throughout the game, all of which are damage-based, so thre is never any reason to use an older spell once Goofy learns a newer, stronger one.
You may be wondering about just what you're looking at in the picture above. Well, let me introduce you to the joy of basic design in Legend of Zelda: Dark Dreams. The Minish Cap sprite of Link is easy enough to discern, though the back end of his cap magically wraps around to hit him in the face while he's walking around, and Sora's sprite is fine too, but where are Donald and Goofy in all this? Well, the very blue man wearing yellowish-brown shorts is Donald, presumably because Donald tends to wear blue, and what looks to be a zombie soldier is, in fact, Goofy, presumably because pale green skin is the equivalent of wearing a green shirt in the world of this game. Ah, but where is this very square, vaguely demonic, and somewhat cave-like place with doors in front of doors and some questionably-attached stairs? Why, it's the inside of Hyrule Castle of course! Yes, the map design is frequently nonsensical in this game and more than once I had no idea what I was even looking at as floor tiles and objects are flung about haphazardly. Dungeons are generally very short, usually consisting of only about three to five rooms, and just about every room in the game, dungeon or otherwise, is a giant, mostly empty square with objects and treasure chests thrown about seemingly at random. Dungeons are also very formulaic as almost without exception they will have a narrow bridge near the end with a very easy miniboss fight consisting of three slightly strong-than-usual (though on some occasions far weaker than usual) enemies and after defeating the boss of a dungeon players will be teleported to a very empty field where they will encounter and immediately fight one of the many members of Organization XIII. It's atrocious and repetitive level design, but is so astoundingly mesmerizing that it becomes outright amusing.
Combat is broken, but in a way which is actually quite fun. Even the earliest bosses in the game tend to have skills which can one-shot a party members or even outright wipe out the whole party. However, this is balanced out by the fact that, aside from some bosses near the very end, any status ailment will work on just about any boss. Does the boss have an attack which can slaughter the entire party in one round? Just have Donald cast Blizzard on it for a chance to Freeze it for several rounds and have Sora and Link use their respective skills which have a chance to inflict Stun to ensure that the boss never gets a chance to do anything at all. Does the boss have several hundred thousand health? That's fine too, just have Donal use Mass Venom on it and it will lose about 10% of its maximum health per round while your party focuses on defending and healing. Nearly any physical skill in the game can one-shot party members, but Full Tonics both revive and heal to full and are quite cheap while Donald's second resurrection spell states that it revives an ally with 75% health, but really rings them back with full health anyway. Late game fights unfortunately devolve into everyone spamming their strongest skills while Donald constantly full-heals the party, but until that point there is a surprising amount of odd, horribly broken depth to the combat as bosses and normal enemies with cheap skills must be countered with equally overpowered abilities in order to stay alive.
Lastly, this game actually has quite a bit of stuff to do. For example, there is a blacksmith which can upgrade shields and weapons into much stronger pieces of gear as long as you've found the appropriate crafting materials. There is also the pyramid arena, which consists of nine set of ten fights; completing the most difficult of these sets grants access to the Expert set and, upon beating all ten rounds of this one, players can access to a miniature dungeon filled with great treasure, high-level enemies, and an optional boss. There are even several (often broken in one way or another) sidequests scattered throughout the game and three very challenging (unbalanced) optional bosses which can be fought at any time. Furthermore, finishing the game grants access to the massive 'Cave of Remembrance' which contains rooms related to each of the dungeons in the game, stronger versions of every dungeon's boss, and literally dozens of new bosses as well as four different boss rushes.
The final thing which really skyrockets this game into the realm of B game perfection though is something not even within the game itself. The site which this game can be found on only has one review for it. Said review is titled "Good Game!", the reviewer gave it an 8 out of 10, and the review in its entirety reads as "This game by far is probably one of the greatest i've played". Said review is also marked as being submitted by Duncanrpg2011, who also just so happens to be listed as the developer of this game.
Legend of Zelda: Dark Dreams can be found at rpgrevolution.com here
The working download for the newest version of the game can be found at RapidShare here
A fight I recorded against an optional boss can be found here
So, how bad are we talking here? Well, this should give you an idea:
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| Cropped to perfection |
Progression is completely broken. While players can walk to any dungeon from the Hyrule Fields hub, each boss gives a different 'Element' item upon defeating it which is used to open the door to the next dungeon; which dungeon the 'next' dungeon actually is is rarely indicated so this becomes a game of guess and test. But that's entirely fine since you can just skip most of the game anyway. One of the very last areas in the game is not actually sealed off and can be accessed at any point after the first dungeon so it's entirely possible to powerlevel off of the enemies in the area and kill its boss in order to simply skip over half the game. The events meant to delete boss fights are also broken, so any boss in the game can be refought infinitely simply by backtracking to its room.
Ability and gear progression is equally as broken. As a nice touch, there is a new subweapon to be found for Link in just about every dungeon. However, these subweapons can only be used in combat and are utterly useless as the abilities Link learns through simply leveling up are significantly stronger. Link's abilities in general are a mess though as ones which are learned earlier and cost lower amounts of MP frequently deal far more damage than supposedly stronger skills. Sora gets an absurd amount of keyblades to wields, probably at least as many as all the weapons the other three party members get combined, and some of these have interesting gimmicks attached to them, such as having a chance to double the party's experience or granting an increase in gold drops, but many of the gimmicks are also worthless, such as ones with extremely low damage and an element attached to them. Sora also spends a good chunk of the beginning of the game being nearly worthless, but he becomes astoundingly useful at level 25 when he learns Wind Raid, the first and only multi-target skill the party will have between them for quite a while. Donald has an absurd amount of skills with three spells for just about every element, all the healing spells in the game, and multi-target versions of every single status ailment for a grand total of 34 spells; Donald learns all ten of his status ailment spells at the same time when he hits level 30. In contrast, Goofy barely gets any weapons at all, though his weapons grant an extremely useful boost to his defense, and learns all of six spells throughout the game, all of which are damage-based, so thre is never any reason to use an older spell once Goofy learns a newer, stronger one.
Combat is broken, but in a way which is actually quite fun. Even the earliest bosses in the game tend to have skills which can one-shot a party members or even outright wipe out the whole party. However, this is balanced out by the fact that, aside from some bosses near the very end, any status ailment will work on just about any boss. Does the boss have an attack which can slaughter the entire party in one round? Just have Donald cast Blizzard on it for a chance to Freeze it for several rounds and have Sora and Link use their respective skills which have a chance to inflict Stun to ensure that the boss never gets a chance to do anything at all. Does the boss have several hundred thousand health? That's fine too, just have Donal use Mass Venom on it and it will lose about 10% of its maximum health per round while your party focuses on defending and healing. Nearly any physical skill in the game can one-shot party members, but Full Tonics both revive and heal to full and are quite cheap while Donald's second resurrection spell states that it revives an ally with 75% health, but really rings them back with full health anyway. Late game fights unfortunately devolve into everyone spamming their strongest skills while Donald constantly full-heals the party, but until that point there is a surprising amount of odd, horribly broken depth to the combat as bosses and normal enemies with cheap skills must be countered with equally overpowered abilities in order to stay alive.
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| Yes, the entrance to this 'pyramid' is marked by cacti |
The final thing which really skyrockets this game into the realm of B game perfection though is something not even within the game itself. The site which this game can be found on only has one review for it. Said review is titled "Good Game!", the reviewer gave it an 8 out of 10, and the review in its entirety reads as "This game by far is probably one of the greatest i've played". Said review is also marked as being submitted by Duncanrpg2011, who also just so happens to be listed as the developer of this game.
Legend of Zelda: Dark Dreams can be found at rpgrevolution.com here
The working download for the newest version of the game can be found at RapidShare here
A fight I recorded against an optional boss can be found here
Monday, September 10, 2012
Vexx: A Poorly-Paced Product of Its Time
I may have played the Playstation 2 version of Vexx, but everything about it screams 'early Xbox'. During the early 2000's there was an odd trend in the industry where everyone seemed to want to make 'edgy' platforming protagonists, sort of like with the endless Sonic clones back in the 90's except with a bit more of a 'mature' feel to the humor to make them more appealing to adults as well as kids. The Playstation 2 tended to get protagonists which leaned more towards whimsy, such as Jak and Daxter or Ratchet and Clank, while the Xbox got the more 'twisted' characters such as Blinx and Voodoo Vince.
Vexx is a game which tries so hard to be edgy that not only does it have two X's in its protagonist's name, but every single letter ends in a sharpened edge whenever possible. Vexx himself never speaks a word, but the basic plot is one of revenge and Vexx's weapon of choice is, of course, a pair of ever-so-edgy claws. Of course, all this edginess is, for better or worse, watered down by the fact that very little in the world of Vexx is 'edgy' with tasks even early in the game consisting of things such as fighting a giant sumo wrestler on top of a giant tree and playing a game of Breakout on a giant 'not-Xbox'.
At its core, Vexx is a Super Mario 64 clone. Players gradually unlock new worlds, each of which contains eight to ten 'Wraithearts' (stars); it comes as little surprise that one Wraithheart in each world is obtained by collecting 100 fragments (coins) while another in each world always appears after finding six jars containing ancestral spirits (red coins). Unlike stars in Super Mario 64 it doesn't matter which one the player selects to go after as the only thing which changes is a set of arrows which help point the way towards the selected heart. The clues for hearts are also written in the form of four-line rhyming poems which sometimes are clever, but which usually feel forced and hilariously bad.
Vexx can perform some very basic ground and air combos, but he never learns new attacks and the enemies rarely pose much of a direct threat (the threat of being knocked into a bottomless pit is almost always present though). Vexx can also fill up a sort of 'rage meter' by performing air juggles and this will let him briefly move much faster and shoot projectiles, but since the game itself focuses far more on platforming than upon combat, it is rarely useful and even less so as it takes a second to activate, meaning any combat-intensive situation would likely lead to Vexx simply getting hit while entering this state. This isn't to say that Vexx never gets any new abilities at all as he gets two, both early in the game; a molten armor upgrade(metal Mario) can be used for a few seconds after stepping on certain pads and makes Vexx very slow, but invincible and able to rapidly build up momentum while a flight upgrade (flight cap) lets him fly for a few seconds. Neither upgrade is particularly fun to use, but it hardly matters as they are used for a combined total of only slightly over half a dozen times throughout the game anyway.
Otherwise, Vexx has a fairly standard array of platforming protagonist abilities, just as wall jumping (so rarely used that I forgot it existed for most of the game), long jumping, high jumping, an aerial kick which serves as a sort of double jump, swimming (there's quite a bit of swimming in Vexx, but the controls are surprisingly decent after a while), and, of course, climbing. Yes, Vexx must absolutely love slowly climbing up walls and hanging from ledges as the game constantly has players climbing up one thing or another without anything in the way of danger. While the odd obsession with 'verticality' in the video game industry didn't truly take off until later on with games such as Assassin's Creed and Uncharted, the beginnings of this trend are clear to see in Vexx as aside from the excessive amounts of tedious climbing, platforming tends to move in an upward spiral far more often than not. Yet, Vexx could have been a fairly decent Super Mario 64 clone if it wasn't for one overarching issue - the pacing.
In a previous article, I discussed how pacing is an important element of games which is easy for developers to overlook and which often leads people to describe games which handle it poorly as 'just being bad' without quite being able to place what it is about the game which makes it that way. Such is the case with Vexx as it fails at pacing in quite possibly every way possible.
The plot is one of the more obvious, though also one of the least important, examples of something which suffers from poor pacing. Vexx opens with a longwinded cutscene which nevertheless rushes to explain how Vexx's peaceful village was attacked, the villagers were forced into slavery, how Vexx's grandfather sacrificed his life so that Vexx could escape, and of how Vexx stumbled upon the magical 'ancient edgy claws' and seeks revenge; it probably would have made sense to let the player actually play through some of this instead of cramming it all together in a giant glob, but oh well. However, after this cutscene and the tutorial, there is another brief cutscene, then another at the halfway point of the game, and one more after the final boss battle and that's it. While one might say "But Super Mario 64 had even fewer cutscenes than that", that game also had previously established characters in a more lighthearted and simplistic world and, most importantly, still had various NPC's to interact with from time to time while Vexx contains less than half a dozen NPC's in its entirety, none of which get more than one line of dialogue, and this results in the world feeling completely dead and lifeless.
The more serious pacing issues reside within the gameplay itself though. Vexx is not a game which is particularly fond of anything resembling a checkpoint. It will checkpoint players when they enter a structure in one of its levels (i.e. anything which requires a loading screen), but not at any other time. As I mentioned before, Vexx is a game which loves the concept of verticality and this quickly becomes an issue as it also loves excessively long platforming segments filled with traps designed to knock the player off of ledges. These segments can go on for anywhere from five to ten minutes and, while most games with such segments will aline the platforms in such a way that being knocked off of one simply drops the player down a single layer, Vexx is a game where such 'passive checkpointing' is nearly unheard of and instead players will find themselves constantly either knocked off of ledges into instant-death pits or onto a ledge at the very bottom even after making it to the final stretch. Narrow ledges and quickly-spinning platforms which force the player to move at a slow pace in order to not fall are also extremely common and needing to repeat these segments over and over is especially tedious.
The issue of a lack of checkpointing is compounded by the other pacing issue of excessive load times. Never before has a game made me realize just how truly impressive the nearly seamless world of Jak and Daxter was for its time, especially since Vexx came out a few years later. When starting up Vexx, a player must sit through the usual developer and publisher logos before the title loads up, then players must load their actual saved game to be sent into the hub, the hub is a bland and small circular room so players must then sit through yet another loading screen as they choose which world to go through and, since most Wraithearts are hidden inside of structures, players will often need to sit through yet another loading screen a short time later as they enter a structure within the world; at one point there is a cube which must be rotated to enter it through each of its six sides and solve short platforming puzzles and there is a loading screen for each side. Just in case anyone still thinks this is a tolerable amount of loading, getting a Game Over sends players all the way back to the Activision logo so that they can sit through the entire process all over again. These frequent, long loading times and the almost complete lack of checkpoints makes the more challenging later areas of the game simply painful and not even remotely fun to play through.
Boss fights are, of course, also not untouched by pacing woes. Vexx has a whopping four boss fights, two of which are against the aforementioned sumo wrestler. Since this is a game which at least tries to have some sort of combo-based fighting system, one would think that these boss fights would at least be intense and would involve making use of fast reflexes and stringing together combos. Instead, every boss fight is yet another exercise in tedium as, without exception, they are of the 'waiting' variety. In other words, every single boss in the game is impossible to hit for most of the fight, but will occasionally use an attack which will leave it vulnerable for a few seconds; the sumo at least needs to be attacked repeatedly to push him off a ledge, but the other two only allow Vexx to get in one hit before restarting their patterns. The final boss in particular is a nightmarish accumulation of everything wrong with Vexx as his first phase generally lasts for about five minutes and consists of nothing except him sending wave after wave of weak enemies at Vexx and occasionally tossing some fireballs; Vexx can finally directly attack him in the second phase, but he takes off a third of Vexx's health with each hit and it takes a long time to land the five hits needed to enter the third phase (which is, of course, filled with instant-death pits). Dying at any point in this excessively long boss fight will naturally place players all the way back at the beginning.
In the end, Vexx could have been a decent platformer, but the plethora of pacing issues present within it makes the whole thing a chore which starts out 'ok' and which only gets less fun to play as it goes on (the camera's also not so great either, though still infinitely better than Herdy Gerdy's). While Herdy Gerdy is a flawed game which still may prove enjoyable for some, the flaws in Vexx turn it into an entirely miserable experience beyond the first half and it would be hard to recommend it to anyone but the most persistent of players.
Vexx can be found on Amazon or eBay for as low as $0.99 and is available on the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube.
As usual, to celebrate Backlog Bonanza Month, here is once again a link to the Backloggery.
Vexx is a game which tries so hard to be edgy that not only does it have two X's in its protagonist's name, but every single letter ends in a sharpened edge whenever possible. Vexx himself never speaks a word, but the basic plot is one of revenge and Vexx's weapon of choice is, of course, a pair of ever-so-edgy claws. Of course, all this edginess is, for better or worse, watered down by the fact that very little in the world of Vexx is 'edgy' with tasks even early in the game consisting of things such as fighting a giant sumo wrestler on top of a giant tree and playing a game of Breakout on a giant 'not-Xbox'.
At its core, Vexx is a Super Mario 64 clone. Players gradually unlock new worlds, each of which contains eight to ten 'Wraithearts' (stars); it comes as little surprise that one Wraithheart in each world is obtained by collecting 100 fragments (coins) while another in each world always appears after finding six jars containing ancestral spirits (red coins). Unlike stars in Super Mario 64 it doesn't matter which one the player selects to go after as the only thing which changes is a set of arrows which help point the way towards the selected heart. The clues for hearts are also written in the form of four-line rhyming poems which sometimes are clever, but which usually feel forced and hilariously bad.
Vexx can perform some very basic ground and air combos, but he never learns new attacks and the enemies rarely pose much of a direct threat (the threat of being knocked into a bottomless pit is almost always present though). Vexx can also fill up a sort of 'rage meter' by performing air juggles and this will let him briefly move much faster and shoot projectiles, but since the game itself focuses far more on platforming than upon combat, it is rarely useful and even less so as it takes a second to activate, meaning any combat-intensive situation would likely lead to Vexx simply getting hit while entering this state. This isn't to say that Vexx never gets any new abilities at all as he gets two, both early in the game; a molten armor upgrade(metal Mario) can be used for a few seconds after stepping on certain pads and makes Vexx very slow, but invincible and able to rapidly build up momentum while a flight upgrade (flight cap) lets him fly for a few seconds. Neither upgrade is particularly fun to use, but it hardly matters as they are used for a combined total of only slightly over half a dozen times throughout the game anyway.
Otherwise, Vexx has a fairly standard array of platforming protagonist abilities, just as wall jumping (so rarely used that I forgot it existed for most of the game), long jumping, high jumping, an aerial kick which serves as a sort of double jump, swimming (there's quite a bit of swimming in Vexx, but the controls are surprisingly decent after a while), and, of course, climbing. Yes, Vexx must absolutely love slowly climbing up walls and hanging from ledges as the game constantly has players climbing up one thing or another without anything in the way of danger. While the odd obsession with 'verticality' in the video game industry didn't truly take off until later on with games such as Assassin's Creed and Uncharted, the beginnings of this trend are clear to see in Vexx as aside from the excessive amounts of tedious climbing, platforming tends to move in an upward spiral far more often than not. Yet, Vexx could have been a fairly decent Super Mario 64 clone if it wasn't for one overarching issue - the pacing.
In a previous article, I discussed how pacing is an important element of games which is easy for developers to overlook and which often leads people to describe games which handle it poorly as 'just being bad' without quite being able to place what it is about the game which makes it that way. Such is the case with Vexx as it fails at pacing in quite possibly every way possible.
The plot is one of the more obvious, though also one of the least important, examples of something which suffers from poor pacing. Vexx opens with a longwinded cutscene which nevertheless rushes to explain how Vexx's peaceful village was attacked, the villagers were forced into slavery, how Vexx's grandfather sacrificed his life so that Vexx could escape, and of how Vexx stumbled upon the magical 'ancient edgy claws' and seeks revenge; it probably would have made sense to let the player actually play through some of this instead of cramming it all together in a giant glob, but oh well. However, after this cutscene and the tutorial, there is another brief cutscene, then another at the halfway point of the game, and one more after the final boss battle and that's it. While one might say "But Super Mario 64 had even fewer cutscenes than that", that game also had previously established characters in a more lighthearted and simplistic world and, most importantly, still had various NPC's to interact with from time to time while Vexx contains less than half a dozen NPC's in its entirety, none of which get more than one line of dialogue, and this results in the world feeling completely dead and lifeless.
The more serious pacing issues reside within the gameplay itself though. Vexx is not a game which is particularly fond of anything resembling a checkpoint. It will checkpoint players when they enter a structure in one of its levels (i.e. anything which requires a loading screen), but not at any other time. As I mentioned before, Vexx is a game which loves the concept of verticality and this quickly becomes an issue as it also loves excessively long platforming segments filled with traps designed to knock the player off of ledges. These segments can go on for anywhere from five to ten minutes and, while most games with such segments will aline the platforms in such a way that being knocked off of one simply drops the player down a single layer, Vexx is a game where such 'passive checkpointing' is nearly unheard of and instead players will find themselves constantly either knocked off of ledges into instant-death pits or onto a ledge at the very bottom even after making it to the final stretch. Narrow ledges and quickly-spinning platforms which force the player to move at a slow pace in order to not fall are also extremely common and needing to repeat these segments over and over is especially tedious.
The issue of a lack of checkpointing is compounded by the other pacing issue of excessive load times. Never before has a game made me realize just how truly impressive the nearly seamless world of Jak and Daxter was for its time, especially since Vexx came out a few years later. When starting up Vexx, a player must sit through the usual developer and publisher logos before the title loads up, then players must load their actual saved game to be sent into the hub, the hub is a bland and small circular room so players must then sit through yet another loading screen as they choose which world to go through and, since most Wraithearts are hidden inside of structures, players will often need to sit through yet another loading screen a short time later as they enter a structure within the world; at one point there is a cube which must be rotated to enter it through each of its six sides and solve short platforming puzzles and there is a loading screen for each side. Just in case anyone still thinks this is a tolerable amount of loading, getting a Game Over sends players all the way back to the Activision logo so that they can sit through the entire process all over again. These frequent, long loading times and the almost complete lack of checkpoints makes the more challenging later areas of the game simply painful and not even remotely fun to play through.
Boss fights are, of course, also not untouched by pacing woes. Vexx has a whopping four boss fights, two of which are against the aforementioned sumo wrestler. Since this is a game which at least tries to have some sort of combo-based fighting system, one would think that these boss fights would at least be intense and would involve making use of fast reflexes and stringing together combos. Instead, every boss fight is yet another exercise in tedium as, without exception, they are of the 'waiting' variety. In other words, every single boss in the game is impossible to hit for most of the fight, but will occasionally use an attack which will leave it vulnerable for a few seconds; the sumo at least needs to be attacked repeatedly to push him off a ledge, but the other two only allow Vexx to get in one hit before restarting their patterns. The final boss in particular is a nightmarish accumulation of everything wrong with Vexx as his first phase generally lasts for about five minutes and consists of nothing except him sending wave after wave of weak enemies at Vexx and occasionally tossing some fireballs; Vexx can finally directly attack him in the second phase, but he takes off a third of Vexx's health with each hit and it takes a long time to land the five hits needed to enter the third phase (which is, of course, filled with instant-death pits). Dying at any point in this excessively long boss fight will naturally place players all the way back at the beginning.
In the end, Vexx could have been a decent platformer, but the plethora of pacing issues present within it makes the whole thing a chore which starts out 'ok' and which only gets less fun to play as it goes on (the camera's also not so great either, though still infinitely better than Herdy Gerdy's). While Herdy Gerdy is a flawed game which still may prove enjoyable for some, the flaws in Vexx turn it into an entirely miserable experience beyond the first half and it would be hard to recommend it to anyone but the most persistent of players.
Vexx can be found on Amazon or eBay for as low as $0.99 and is available on the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube.
As usual, to celebrate Backlog Bonanza Month, here is once again a link to the Backloggery.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
Herdy Gerdy: A Tale of Cameras and Confusion
Backlog Bonanza Month at last kicks off with a long-forgotten little oddity on the PlayStation 2 which goes by the name of Herdy Gerdy. Reception to this game has been split rather evenly as most reviewers seem to either despise it or view it as a brilliant, if flawed, classic. After having played through this game to completion, it has become fairly easy to see why reception has been so thoroughly split over the years, so let's go take a look.
Let's start with the obvious; Herdy Gerdy is a puzzle platformer about a boy named Gerdy and the gameplay revolves around him herding various animals into pens Pied Piper-style. One sentence in and the reasons for the divisive reception already begin to become apparent as, yes, this game is more or less made up of a string of ever-so-frequently-loathed 'escort missions'. Thankfully, Gerdy is a bit more of a literal Pied Piper than usual as the main method of herding most of the animals in the game is to play a flute which will cause a group of nearby animals to gather around and march behind Gerdy in a straight line. Not so thankfully, the AI issues which typically make escort missions such a chore are still somewhat present here as it is not entirely uncommon for one or two of the creatures near the back of the line to get stuck on a wall, fall off a ledge, or simply take a step into the ever-so-deadly water.
The aesthetics also are an entirely mixed bag. The game generally looks nice, being a product of the cel-shading craze at the time, but the design of the character models themselves ranges from bland to weird and the facial animations characters make, especially Gerdy's abnormally huge never-ending grin when he's just standing around, range from bizarre to outright creepy. The music is actually one of the strongest points of Herdy Gerdy and is wonderful to listen to, the song Gerdy plays when using his flute even varies based upon the current level's tune, but there also simply aren't all that many songs in the game so most of them get reused over and over. As for the voice acting, it's impressive that what seems to be a fairly low-budget game from 2002 is fully voice-acted, but the less said about the general quality the better, so I think I'll just let it speak for itself.
Yet if there is one aspect of Herdy Gerdy which I suspect most people can agree upon, it is the camera. Cameras in games have greatly improved over the years, but when the PlayStation hit many developers had trouble figuring out how to make a good camera for 3D environments and even when the PlayStation 2 rolled around developers still had a few kinks to work out. With this in mind, I can safely say that Herdy Gerdy still has such an exceptionally bad camera that it is not only poor for its time, but may very well be one of the worst cameras I've ever seen in a game on any console. Herdy Gerdy provides players with three different perspectives to toggle between - an entirely useless up-close view, a nearly-as-useless 'normal' view which is still far too closely zoomed in, and a somewhat tolerable overhead 'shepherd's view'. The camera constantly fights the player as sometimes it will let the player rotate it and other times it will refuse to budge, sometimes it will get stuck inside a wall, or sometimes the 'shepherd's view' will decide to put a tree, wall, or some other piece of the environment between itself and Gerdy, forcing the player to either remain completely blind to what's going on or to temporarily switch to one of the other far-worse views. Of course, many times the camera simply won't care which view the player wants and it will remain zoomed in on all three views; this usually happens inside winding passages, on ledges, or sometimes even near deep water or the herd-eating Gromps (which are the only real enemy in the entire game and which themselves must be lured into traps) just to add to the fun.
The other major issue Herdy Gerdy has is it doesn't seem to quite know what it wants to do with its mechanics. For example, 100 bells are hidden in every level and collecting all of them unlocks some interesting concept art or unused animations, but nearly all of the early-game levels hide a handful of these bells in places which Gerdy is incapable of accessing until he obtains other abilities far later in the game; bells reset upon leaving a level, so it is far too easy to spend a fair amount of time collecting nearly all of them only to discover that the last handful are hidden away somewhere Gerdy just can't quite reach. At other times, the game becomes outright counter-intuitive with the bells and certain ledges; the pink, bear-like Gromps will knock Gerdy into the air and back to the start of the level (and then proceed to eat his herd) if they catch him, but in certain locations they will instead knock Gerdy up onto an unseen ledge with a few bells which otherwise cannot be accessed, leading to one of the strangest cases of guess-and-test gameplay I have ever seen. The issue with bells gets more bizarre in the later levels as paths start to appear which only open up after Gerdy has collected a certain number of bells in the level, transforming them from an optional collectible to an essential gimmick; many late-game levels even require Gerdy to collect all 100 bells (bells are thankfully at least easier than usual to find in these levels), which completely eliminates any sense of achievement gained from unlocking the concept art from that level.
Herding itself is also an odd gimmick. Gerdy generally has to successfully herd a certain percentage of animals into their proper pens to unlock paths to new levels, but there is no reason given for why the citizens of the world of Herdy Gerdy are so in love with the concept of herding as only rarely does an NPC come along whom actually needs help herding animals for one reason or another; unlocking a new level itself is strange as it requires finding and talking to an old gypsy after attaining the required herding percentage, but even these gypsies give absolutely no reason for their herding requirements other than telling Gerdy something along the lines of "you still need to herd more animals before I can take you to the next level" (and yes, the game constantly breaks any sense of immersion by having characters refer to areas as 'levels' and making other blatant gameplay-based references). In fact, aside from a very small amount of endgame stages which require all of the animals to be properly herded, there is absolutely no incentive to do so; a "stage clear" message will appear after all of the animals have either been herded or died and sometimes an NPC will give Gerdy some of the bells for a level when this occurs, but not even so much as the message changes when this 'stage clear' is completed when it is achieved entirely through proper herding, so in an unintentionally morbid twist the game encourages players to simply lead the herds into various deathtraps after the next area has been unlocked.
Lastly, Herdy Gerdy just doesn't seem to know what to do with itself in general. The game keeps track of a player's 'fastest time' for each level in an attempt to add replayability, but herding itself is a rather slow, often even tedious, process which is completely at odds with this more arcade-based gimmick. The story bounces around all over the place with mini-arcs which generally go absolutely nowhere, friends and antagonists who appear for all of one area and are never seen again, and a main plot which begins with Gerdy's father somehow being placed under a sleeping spell by a rival whom Gerdy must defeat in a tournament to Gerdy needing to defeat this same rival in order to save his island from danger despite the fact that I do not believe it is ever mentioned as to just why the entire island is apparently in danger in the first place. To add to the confusion, Herdy Gerdy is an attempt at a typical 'coming of age' story as Gerdy grows to become a 'great shepherd', but, as has already been mentioned, there is never any sort of explanation given as to why shepherds are so important in Gerdy's world and Gerdy himself only rarely says anything beyond making noises of confusion/surprise or giving single-word responses, meaning he never really grows as a character because there is simply not much to him to begin with. Even the level unlocks make little sense as there are often multiple paths Gerdy can take, but all except one will almost always be blocked off in one way or another, resulting in a far more linear type of progression than the world map would indicate.
Overall, Herdy Gerdy isn't a terrible game, but it isn't a very enjoyable one either. It has some nice touches and certainly seems to have had a lot of effort put into it, but the mechanics are simply all over the place and rarely work together well while the camera is bad enough that there were more than a few times during my playthrough where I simply decided to quit because I was sick of fighting it nearly every step of the way. Still, some people clearly are able to forgive Herdy Gerdy's shortcomings and have enjoyed it immensely and it's hard to argue against at least giving the game a try when it can be found for as little as $0.01 (plus shipping of course) online.
Herdy Gerdy can be purchased online from Amazon or eBay for as low as $0.01 used and under $10 new.
In honor of Backlog Bonanza Month, here is once again a link to the excellent Backloggery.
Let's start with the obvious; Herdy Gerdy is a puzzle platformer about a boy named Gerdy and the gameplay revolves around him herding various animals into pens Pied Piper-style. One sentence in and the reasons for the divisive reception already begin to become apparent as, yes, this game is more or less made up of a string of ever-so-frequently-loathed 'escort missions'. Thankfully, Gerdy is a bit more of a literal Pied Piper than usual as the main method of herding most of the animals in the game is to play a flute which will cause a group of nearby animals to gather around and march behind Gerdy in a straight line. Not so thankfully, the AI issues which typically make escort missions such a chore are still somewhat present here as it is not entirely uncommon for one or two of the creatures near the back of the line to get stuck on a wall, fall off a ledge, or simply take a step into the ever-so-deadly water.
The aesthetics also are an entirely mixed bag. The game generally looks nice, being a product of the cel-shading craze at the time, but the design of the character models themselves ranges from bland to weird and the facial animations characters make, especially Gerdy's abnormally huge never-ending grin when he's just standing around, range from bizarre to outright creepy. The music is actually one of the strongest points of Herdy Gerdy and is wonderful to listen to, the song Gerdy plays when using his flute even varies based upon the current level's tune, but there also simply aren't all that many songs in the game so most of them get reused over and over. As for the voice acting, it's impressive that what seems to be a fairly low-budget game from 2002 is fully voice-acted, but the less said about the general quality the better, so I think I'll just let it speak for itself.
Yet if there is one aspect of Herdy Gerdy which I suspect most people can agree upon, it is the camera. Cameras in games have greatly improved over the years, but when the PlayStation hit many developers had trouble figuring out how to make a good camera for 3D environments and even when the PlayStation 2 rolled around developers still had a few kinks to work out. With this in mind, I can safely say that Herdy Gerdy still has such an exceptionally bad camera that it is not only poor for its time, but may very well be one of the worst cameras I've ever seen in a game on any console. Herdy Gerdy provides players with three different perspectives to toggle between - an entirely useless up-close view, a nearly-as-useless 'normal' view which is still far too closely zoomed in, and a somewhat tolerable overhead 'shepherd's view'. The camera constantly fights the player as sometimes it will let the player rotate it and other times it will refuse to budge, sometimes it will get stuck inside a wall, or sometimes the 'shepherd's view' will decide to put a tree, wall, or some other piece of the environment between itself and Gerdy, forcing the player to either remain completely blind to what's going on or to temporarily switch to one of the other far-worse views. Of course, many times the camera simply won't care which view the player wants and it will remain zoomed in on all three views; this usually happens inside winding passages, on ledges, or sometimes even near deep water or the herd-eating Gromps (which are the only real enemy in the entire game and which themselves must be lured into traps) just to add to the fun.
The other major issue Herdy Gerdy has is it doesn't seem to quite know what it wants to do with its mechanics. For example, 100 bells are hidden in every level and collecting all of them unlocks some interesting concept art or unused animations, but nearly all of the early-game levels hide a handful of these bells in places which Gerdy is incapable of accessing until he obtains other abilities far later in the game; bells reset upon leaving a level, so it is far too easy to spend a fair amount of time collecting nearly all of them only to discover that the last handful are hidden away somewhere Gerdy just can't quite reach. At other times, the game becomes outright counter-intuitive with the bells and certain ledges; the pink, bear-like Gromps will knock Gerdy into the air and back to the start of the level (and then proceed to eat his herd) if they catch him, but in certain locations they will instead knock Gerdy up onto an unseen ledge with a few bells which otherwise cannot be accessed, leading to one of the strangest cases of guess-and-test gameplay I have ever seen. The issue with bells gets more bizarre in the later levels as paths start to appear which only open up after Gerdy has collected a certain number of bells in the level, transforming them from an optional collectible to an essential gimmick; many late-game levels even require Gerdy to collect all 100 bells (bells are thankfully at least easier than usual to find in these levels), which completely eliminates any sense of achievement gained from unlocking the concept art from that level.
Herding itself is also an odd gimmick. Gerdy generally has to successfully herd a certain percentage of animals into their proper pens to unlock paths to new levels, but there is no reason given for why the citizens of the world of Herdy Gerdy are so in love with the concept of herding as only rarely does an NPC come along whom actually needs help herding animals for one reason or another; unlocking a new level itself is strange as it requires finding and talking to an old gypsy after attaining the required herding percentage, but even these gypsies give absolutely no reason for their herding requirements other than telling Gerdy something along the lines of "you still need to herd more animals before I can take you to the next level" (and yes, the game constantly breaks any sense of immersion by having characters refer to areas as 'levels' and making other blatant gameplay-based references). In fact, aside from a very small amount of endgame stages which require all of the animals to be properly herded, there is absolutely no incentive to do so; a "stage clear" message will appear after all of the animals have either been herded or died and sometimes an NPC will give Gerdy some of the bells for a level when this occurs, but not even so much as the message changes when this 'stage clear' is completed when it is achieved entirely through proper herding, so in an unintentionally morbid twist the game encourages players to simply lead the herds into various deathtraps after the next area has been unlocked.
Lastly, Herdy Gerdy just doesn't seem to know what to do with itself in general. The game keeps track of a player's 'fastest time' for each level in an attempt to add replayability, but herding itself is a rather slow, often even tedious, process which is completely at odds with this more arcade-based gimmick. The story bounces around all over the place with mini-arcs which generally go absolutely nowhere, friends and antagonists who appear for all of one area and are never seen again, and a main plot which begins with Gerdy's father somehow being placed under a sleeping spell by a rival whom Gerdy must defeat in a tournament to Gerdy needing to defeat this same rival in order to save his island from danger despite the fact that I do not believe it is ever mentioned as to just why the entire island is apparently in danger in the first place. To add to the confusion, Herdy Gerdy is an attempt at a typical 'coming of age' story as Gerdy grows to become a 'great shepherd', but, as has already been mentioned, there is never any sort of explanation given as to why shepherds are so important in Gerdy's world and Gerdy himself only rarely says anything beyond making noises of confusion/surprise or giving single-word responses, meaning he never really grows as a character because there is simply not much to him to begin with. Even the level unlocks make little sense as there are often multiple paths Gerdy can take, but all except one will almost always be blocked off in one way or another, resulting in a far more linear type of progression than the world map would indicate.
Overall, Herdy Gerdy isn't a terrible game, but it isn't a very enjoyable one either. It has some nice touches and certainly seems to have had a lot of effort put into it, but the mechanics are simply all over the place and rarely work together well while the camera is bad enough that there were more than a few times during my playthrough where I simply decided to quit because I was sick of fighting it nearly every step of the way. Still, some people clearly are able to forgive Herdy Gerdy's shortcomings and have enjoyed it immensely and it's hard to argue against at least giving the game a try when it can be found for as little as $0.01 (plus shipping of course) online.
Herdy Gerdy can be purchased online from Amazon or eBay for as low as $0.01 used and under $10 new.
In honor of Backlog Bonanza Month, here is once again a link to the excellent Backloggery.
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