Recent reviews by The Centipede

This has to be very nearly pitch perfection in a game: it knows exactly what it is and plays it to the hilt. From the left-and-right-mouse-button mechanic to the stick figure graphics and the stereotypical Kung Fu Master narration, it is both extremely well-polished where it matters (gameplay) and exactly as well-polished as it needs to be everywhere else, since its simplicity combines with its intrinsic sense of humor to give it a sort of charm.

Eh, who am I kidding. It ain't art, but it'll make you feel like a shaolin tiger after only a few minutes of clicking buttons.

FREEDOM!

Take control of your tiny pixelated action hero BRO and LIBERATE the world from TERRORISM and maybe CORRUPT EVIL CORPORATE PEOPLE depending on who that red dude with the horns and the business suit is (could it be... SATAN?!). LIBERATE the forests. LIBERATE the jungles. LIBERATE the villages. LIBERATE the cities. LIBERATE the xenomorph hives.

Oh, you basically annihilated the level because your massively overpowered BRO GUNS blew up all the terrain? GREAT. You had to destroy the village in order to save it? AWESOME. Let EXPLOSIONS ring like FREEDOM all across the land.

Buy this game because it is fun on steroids and to strike a blow for LIBERTY and AMERICA THE FREE WORLD AMERICA. If you don't, you're clearly a Commie TERRORIST.

***

In all seriousness, it's a platforming shoot-em-up with destructable everything and chained explosions that can really scratch that arcade itch. It doesn't take itself seriously at all and with levels taking about five minutes if you happen to take your time and try to play smart (rather than just blowing everything up, which can be fun), there's no problem with it being arcade-hard at times since you never lose that much progress. The one absurdly tough boss they had--the infamous massive helicopter--they nerfed, which is kinda sad, because when you beat that thing you felt a real feeling of achievement. The pacing is actually pitch-perfect because while frenetic explosions-a-go-go happen a lot you can often times hang back and decide whether or not you really do want to rush in where angels fear to tread (of course you do).

This game's only gone from strength to strength in its development. It built some solid platforming fundamentals first--even the Brototype was absurdly fun--and has added new levels, tweaked graphics, actual recognition from the action hero community, different play modes, and a joyously over-the-top announcer type who can scream with you when you inevitably blow yourself up in some insane chain reaction. The developers are engaged with the community--often in ALL CAPS OF AWESOME--and the semi-regular themed level "competitions" are great.

All this being said, it is unapologetically an arcade game. There is no plot to speak of. The game is not intelligent or particularly witty, nor is it trying to be. You will fail, a lot, and then you will succeed gloriously. If that's not your cuppa, then wave off, though I'd recommend watching a friend play since it certainly is colorful and beautiful in its pixel-art way and can be a treat to watch.

In very rare circumstances so much can be going on that the game will actually slow down. This somehow fails to be a problem because then it just feels like slow-mo in an action film, so it can't even be called a bug (plus, you'll either survive and it'll speed up or you'll die and the level will reset, so it's hardly a big deal).

Hoo boy.

The original A Valley Without Wind struck me as about the quality of a particularly impressive bit of shareware in the late 90s: horribly dated by modern standards and without 1980s retro charm (though maybe that just means it came a decade early), but at the very least technically competent. Animations were smooth (though obviously based on some simple figure rendering program like Poser), the control scheme worked, the story didn't make much sense but a lot of 90s shareware didn't so I could at least poke around with it and be vaguely amused.

You will note that I only have 19 minutes on record with A Valley Without Wind 2.

I'm going to hold off on explaining why for just a moment. This sequel--if it can really be called that, since the whole AVWW "broken reality" thing never made much narrative sense to begin with, and apparently intentionally so--has you running a rebellion against a big bad. Unlike the original AVWW, where you had followers who you would make go away for so many minutes to go gather firewood or whatever while you ran around the infinitely side-scrolling (well, infinitely transitioning, at least) map, this actually has a strategic map for you to tell your followers to go to places and do things and fight baddies. It's a nice touch, adding some level of strategic force movement rather than simply "Bob has a 57% chance of getting a carrot with a 99% risk of dying because Bob is a loser."

Well, I lie. It would've been a nice touch. If it worked.

If anything worked.

If AVWW has the quality of decent 90s shareware, AVWW2 has the quality of bad 90s shareware, the kind that I have spent a good decade and a half trying to forget that I grew up on. The characters have gone from smoothly-animated pre-rendered 3D geometry sprites to poorly MS Paint'd cartoons that move as though they're suffing grand mal seizures. In AVWW, everything was made of pre-rendered sprites so it all fit together visually. Random elements in AVWW2 are pre-rendered, some are drawn, others are painted, and they're all mashed together in incoherent tilesets so it's actually extremely distracting. The control system went from a simple but effective "keyboard to move, mouse to aim" system in AVWW to a clunky and incoherent keyboard-only system. For a comparative example, let's say you want to shoot your magical ball-o'-death at some critter at an angle: AVWW, point and click. AVWW2, hold the right and up and fire keys at the same time and pray to whatever gods you have that you timed that perfect 45° angle shot just right because 45° angles are all you're going to be doing and also if you don't do the fire button at the right time then you're just going to jerkily leap your character up and into the target in a valiant but utterly stupid attempt to smash the enemy with her face. That's how Archon worked back in the late 80s. It's as though the AVWW2 was coded for a particularly archaic D-pad setup. Everything about it is completely retrograde from the original.

It's completely unforgivable, since these people were able to make something competent, if not particularly impressive before. However, it's also unimaginably hilarious. It is so bad you just have to stop and laugh at everything.

And then just stop, since there's absolutely no point to go on any further with it.

There's certainly no point in actually spending money on the experience.

DEFCON has to hold a special place in the hearts of people who lived through the last decade of the Cold War, especially around the WarGames era of the early 1980s since the game is inspired greatly by that film. The thing it gets most about the era is the tone. DEFCON can be a distinctly uncomfortable game to play, coming from a background that includes growing up on Soviet missile targets and preparing for a career as a missileer, fortunately (I now see with the luck of hindsight) cut short. This discomfort is a very good thing, as I'll explain.

The visuals are reminiscent of the vector graphics of the era but, more importantly, add a clinical detachment to what it represents. The bombers, fighters, carriers, battleships, subs, airbases, missile complexes, and radar facilities under your command are all crewed. Thousands of people are working through the game-hours to fight this war--ultimately and obscenely senseless because there is no indication as to what political situation caused it--and they are simple vector icons to be poked at by other, smaller missile icons until they vanish in a little white burst. Cities are filled with millions of civilians and are just simple diamonds that report so many millions killed with each white-burst NUCFLASH (I don't think I need to decode that term; say it aloud if it escapes you). The default settings leave a sickly green glow afterwards, increasing in intensity and representing radiation, though it doesn't model fallout patterns since it's not that kind of game, and this is a very dry, very abstract and unsettling way of emphasizing the lingering destruction left by this global thermonuclear conflict.

Extra credit goes to the sound design. Much like CAPSULE, DEFCON goes for 'theatre of the mind' sensibilities by intentionally leaving the graphics very basic and hitting you with well-done sound. In this case, the music is soft, in minor key, and discordant (and it may be just me, but it gets more so as the world situation destabilizes and the missiles fly). At times, it is accompanied by a very quiet woman weeping. Nuclear detonations are highlighted with, again, very soft noises that could only considered explosions if heard through kilometers of rock: low, prolonged, steady noise.

DEFCON is not actually a nuclear war simulator; it is a nuclear war game and as such is distinctly simplified. Fighters kill bombers, bombers kill battleships, battleships kill fighters. Battleships kill carriers, carriers kill subs, subs kill battleships. No one has forward intelligence on anyone's (other than allies') facilities, and missile complexes are also somehow anti-missile systems. One shouldn't expect realism. However, it does capture the fundamentals of atomic war strategy in terms of nuclear triads (air, sea, and land-deployable atomics) first strike versus second strike and counterforce (hitting the enemy's arsenal) versus countervalue (hitting the enemy's cities). Perhaps the most perverse part of DEFCON, and what elevates it from simple game to an actual teaching tool, is how it accidentally illustrates how changing the scoring mechanism changes the tactics involved: scoring by defending your own citizens leads to counterforce strategies, scoring by killing others shifts to countervalue. It's a remarkably well-balanced game and I've seen various strategies, from counterforce first-strike to countervalue second-strike to staggered reserves, win.

Which brings us to the scariest part of DEFCON. It is a game; it is to be won. Most people, playing it for laughs, will happily backstab their alliances and set people against each other to get the highest score. This is recognized as part of the game. However, the people who play DEFCON and the people behind various national atomic strategies are not so very different; the former may be civilians and the latter professionals, but they're all human beings with the ingrained desire to win. In broad, human terms DEFCON makes the same point as Spec Ops: The Line (albeit more succinctly and earlier) that the only way to win is not to play, but "winning" is as arbitrarily defined as whatever conflict lead to the simulated atomic exchange to begin with--and in that sense, the winning strategy is taken off the table. The global alert state goes from peace to war on a timer, with no stepping back from the staged brinks. Escalation is inevitable and mandatory.

Of course, this is necessary in the sense of making a game. Given my background, however, that inevitable escalation, bereft of any context or meaning to the war to end all wars, that scares me most. Luckily, I like being scared and even as a guy with a pretense to thinking I can fully recommend this game.

I'm not going to fault Syberia for its pacing or its Guide Dang It puzzles or its demand to hunt pixels. I used to play Sierra games back in the day and Syberia is an artifact of its time, which makes it rather slow, linear, and obtuse from a modern viewpoint.

No, what bugs me about Syberia is its savoir faire. It has a style, and that's fine... but when that style is built with backstory and plot to basically make a Gary Stu the most important man in the world, where everyone must love him if they have a soul, and everyone /does/ love him because he's so special... that bugs me. Okay, so there's a guy who's such a mechanical genius that he can make mechanical life. Fine. But then he makes all his mechanisms toys because he's simple, you see, he's so innocent and pure. If that's not saccharine enough to make your teeth hurt, the developers start to assume you're some sort of mouthbreather and actually spell it out for you: he is pure and innocent and just and kind and has never done anything wrong ever, in pretty much so many words.

Maybe it's because I'm an engineer by trade, but the game smacks of an alternate history wondering why we couldn't all be more innocent. Why couldn't our society be made by toymakers with quaint clockwork mechanisms running everything? Others have spoken about how the game is anti-American; I think it's more anti-modern since it hails back to pastoral scenes in rural towns and, of course, the clockwork... yet as much as they say that the Good Old Days were so great, said Good Old Days never were and the clockwork fantasy underlines that they don't even want to sacrifice anything for the Good Old Days. We want our toymaker utopia, but with faster, better trains and /artificial life/ slave labor. I've no time for backwards-looking utopias, since the past wasn't as great as everyone makes it out to be. I've got even less time than that for backwards-looking utopias that want all of the benefits of technological society without any of its drawbacks, because mechanical magic will somehow keep the spring-loaded spaceships from being missiles or the wind-up automatons from being soldiers or the super-fast super-green trains from being tanks.

I'm not exactly the most sentimental Joe on the planet.

I'm also still sniffling and misting up about half an hour after the ending. I won't tell you whether it's happy or sad; that'd miss the point and give more than something away.

There is a reason this game won all the awards, and it truly demonstrates how to use games as a medium to tell a story. What gameplay there is serves to both engage the player and pace the story; the interactivity draws one into it, to pay more attention than if they were merely watching it--contrast this with, say, /Stranded/ where the 'pacing' is over-executed into boredom--and /To The Moon/ never misses its mark. It also, very subtly, has the courage to ask moral questions about its own particular conceit: the rewriting of a remembered lifetime is simply technological and a given, and is generally posed as a positive--"grant a dying man his last wish"--but it is also questioned in ways that I cannot sufficiently describe without potentially spoiling the game.

This is a game to play through an afternoon, much like /Gone Home/. In fact, I'd argue that they have far more in common, fundamentally, than one would think at first glance given their stylistic and 'genre' differences.

To not exactly summarize, you almost owe it to yourself--especially if you've become an old hand at cynicism (however cheerful) and repressed bitterness like me--to buy and experience this game. It may not lead to any life-changing epiphanies, but it almost certainly will make you feel, and that's not a bad thing.

Things may change by the actual release, but I seriously doubt it.

Starbound strikes me not as the spiritual successor to Terraria, but rather a reskin of it. Let's take first impressions:

Okay, character generation. That's pretty cool, we can be humans or bird people (with breasts) or plant people (with breasts) or robots (with breasts)... you get the idea. The customization is a nice factor, as it was in Terraria, but it also has the same gameplay impact: zero. I understand why there are no species differences; it makes balancing the game easy. However, it also means that really 'species' is just another layer of paper-doll customization that does not build on Terraria's gameplay.

Oh, I start out on a spaceship? That's cool... and it's out of fuel. Okay, forced plot to form a tutorial. Got it. Go press [E] around some consoles so you can get exposed to visually complex UIs that mean nothing to you at the moment, then press [E] some more to beam down to the surface... which is Terraria again, but with different colors and critters.

Now you start out with a 'matter manipulator' which serves as a universal block editor that combines the functionality of axes, picks, and shovels in Terraria. That's a good thing; this is supposed to be a future and future gizmos are cool.

However, the matter manipulator is absolute _crap_. It takes ages to collect dirt, of all things, and you have to use it to chop down trees. I hope you like holding down the left mouse button for extended periods of time, because, hoo boy, you're in for some exciting left-mouse-button-holding action.

Gameplay proceeds as follows:

1) Make a crafting table by collecting wood and then magically generating the table from your back pocket. Like Terraria.

2) Make a bow by doing the same thing but now acquire some vines as well. Same back-pocket generation. Like Terraria.

3) Use the bow to shoot a critter to get some meat so you don't starve to death. Hey, actual gameplay mechanics that aren't from Terraria! Thing is, Starbound is very particular that you use a bow to kill animals to get food. Hit them with swords? Shoot them with laser beams? Nope, you've somehow made the animal corpse inedible, no meat for you! Use the bow, using the exact same hold-the-button-then-release-when-it-flashes mechanics we've seen in... well, Minecraft, minus the flashing; Bastion, with the flashing... most games with bows, really.

4) Cook the space meat over a campfire (crafted as per previous) so you don't get space ringworm. Alright, that's more Minecraft talking.

5) Craft a forge by collecting stone (remember, your starting tool sucks!) and then...

6) Start crafting wooden tools, as in Terraria.

Wooden tools that are better than your high-tech space age matter manipulator.

Progression then consists of collecting better materials to build better tools to get better materials and kill bosses along the way.

Just like Terraria.

All the vaunted 'worlds' mechanic does is change maps out at the cost of fuel (which must be collected) and allow for even more palette swaps, but since this is a game about building materials, the palette swaps mean that you need mineral X for object Q and sorry Mario but the mineral you're looking for is on another planet.

If you've played Terraria, you've played this game, pretty much. If you've gone through and beaten all the bosses in Terraria, then you've also inadvertently beaten this game too.

Now, in all fairness, god games are a difficult genre to do properly. One has to purposefully limit the player in order to prevent the game from becoming boring, yet one has to empower the player enough so they actually feel like at least a minor god in the game world.

Now let's come to GODUS. Like many things, I got it on the cheap so I'm not ranting on the basis of 'oh em gee what a ripoff.' If you get something in alpha or beta, you pays your money you takes your chances. Let's look at the game itself.

It's a mobile game. No matter what anyone else has said, it was always intended to be one.

How can I tell?

It's obvious, thanks to friends in the industry and a little (so-far unpublished) dev work I've done on the side.

Mobile app monetization is done by throttling the player experience: let the player do some things, force them to wait, then let them do it again. It's that waiting period that mobile games cash in on: people get impatient especially in the last hour or so. That's often why the timers are slightly off from what would seem natural off-times like eight hours or twelve hours or a day or so: you've waited a whole day, but there's just one hour left before you unlock Gizmo X you want, so you pay ten cents and get it.

Everything about GODUS' architecture reveals that it's a mobile app. Everything is timer-based and requires physical pickup, so one can't just leave it running, get a scrumload of power, and then do whatever one wants. Problem is that it's being sold for PC and isn't being monetized, so it's all a dreadful waste.

For example: you need to clear space for your followers to live. You do this by sculpting land, which has been a genre staple since Populous (thanks, Molyneaux). You sculpt land by spending belief, which you get from your housed followers, so it's a self-supporting cycle.

Fair enough.

Thing is, your housed followers don't generate belief at a rate, like say resource buildings in an RTS; they generate a wad of belief on a timer that you then have to pick up; you can then spend this resource in a somewhat unimpressive bit of sculpting and then have to wait until more wads pop out--no stutter-production like, say, Supreme Commander or probably Planetary Annihilation, which appears to be a far superior god game by sheer accident.

That forced-wait mechanic is the industry standard for mobile games, and it's like that because it makes mobile games make money. PC games? They get your money up front (and then more for DLC) so instead you're basically investing in a useless timesink, which is further compounded by the lack of (or any plan for) a creative version where you can sculpt to your heart's content.

Minecraft, which is what everyone wants to be in beta, had survival and creative modes simultaneously through most of its development. As it turns out, this is more or less why: while balancing the effort/reward ratio in survival, if people got frustrated they could go into creative and make whatever they wanted whenever they wanted. When that got boring and they wanted challenge, back into survival. Survival/creative dichotomies packaged together are intensely good things.

But back to GODUS. I could and will describe the other mechanics, but they're all effectively subservient to the house-sculpt-house-scuplt cycle.

Except when they act to interrupt it.

In the beginning, you house and sculpt pretty normally. Not the most exciting thing in the world, but it works. Later, when your civilization discovers agriculture via Cards (which are effectively bonuses or levels-up unlocked via population and then double-unlocked through applying collectable Stickers found through in-map exploration), suddenly you've got Wheat as a resource that you need to build more houses.

Which, in the mobile world, would mean another thing to monetize. Need more wheat? Wait, or buy more.

In the PC world, it serves only to stunt gameplay. While you wait for wheat to accrue (when it does; it seems buggy), you're basically stuck acquiring belief and sculpting land waiting for when you can further expand your housing and therefore follower population and therefore progress in the actual game.

This is a slow, tedious, boring process. For example, I spent half an hour letting the game run while I did chores then came back to collect the dropped belief and then sculpt for an entire thirty seconds before running out of belief. In that process I was able to put a small dent in a mountain in the way.

Needless to say, I didn't feel particularly godlike.

So that's the tactical level pretty much ruined; what about the strategic level?

What strategic level?

Remember when I mentioned Cards? They're arranged in a Timeline, which roughly models the progression of a civilization from the Stone Age to the Iron Age. This is purely linear, with Cards unlocked solely by population count (and, later, Wheat and Ore. No, that's not 'total Wheat and Ore' generated, it's a set Wheat or Ore cost. You have to make the active decision to either wait the length of the Romanov dynasty to build a few more huts or wait a geological eon to get a card that progresses you through the game). This means that everything you can get is revealed to you from the very beginning, and none of it strikes me as particularly impressive.

So, to recap:

1) Mobile game sold as a PC game, so it's the timesink of timesinks well beyond MMOs (which at least generally let you do things over all that time).

2) Completely linear gameplay.

3) Effectively zero customization, unless you want to spend the time to sculpt land into interesting shapes. This is best achieved through savegame cheating, which is highly indicative.

And what should good god games have?

1) Activity--you are constantly going around fiddling with things, doing this, doing that, being all godly even if you're not always allowed to pull out all the big guns all the time. (None of that here.)

2) Empowerment via customization--you're a god, aren't you? Shape your people! Make them expys of Hindus or Jews or Aztecs or bloody Cthulhu Cultists.

That's perhaps the most frustrating thing. There's nothing particularly keeping GODUS from being a good god game. Other people complain about the simple cartoony graphics, but that worked really well for Spore particularly in the Space game--at which point you were basically a technologically enabled god, no? The adjustment from timers to rates isn't that great a change, and the cost of doing things could be finagled. Yes, it would require changing the core mechanics but it's not insurmountable since all the assets could be exactly the same. Keep the Card/Sticker mechanic, but put it in a tree a la the old standby Civilization tech tree so you can optimize towards plains dwellers or mountain hermits or coastal barbarians or whatever. One could even leave in the Wheat and Ore mechanics so long as they were put on a rate system rather than a timer system, which would also give them far more visibility.

More fundamental changes would include stealing a page from the Spore Creature Creator and let people paper-doll and combine the simple art elements to customize their culture. If Dawn of War could do it for the RTS, then any amount of customization--even if it's limited to user-modifiable skins--would really add to the sense of being a god and your followers being your followers rather than just generic people. (Actually, thinking about it, the Spore engine would be perfect for a god game.)

Okay, I'm starting to get excessively emotional. Let it suffice to say that these changes seem highly unlikely and, in this game's current state, I cannot in good conscience recommend it to anyone. If it were a mobile game, that would be a different matter: it would be unimpressive, but passable. In this case, avoid it.

See, I like games that are art.

I also like games that are fun.

Believe it or not, I like Goat Simulator on both accounts.

Second one first. It's fun. You know the drill: run around causing stupid buggy havoc as a stupid buggy goat. Hilarity ensues.

First one last: this is exactly what it is intended to be. It's not some sort of pretentious postmodern deconstruction of video game tropes. Like Blood Dragon, it knows exactly what it's supposed to be, says it on the tin, and runs with it. This makes it more successful in many ways than many "proper" games that make big claims and don't live up to them (Mass Effect) or claim depth and have nothing to show for it (Stranded).

I hope they make a million bucks off of a goofy, gimmicky thing they threw together for a laugh.

I grew up on point-and-click adventure games, particularly the old Sierra ones. This reminded me of 'em and so I got it on the cheap since I've also got Proteus and Waking Mars.

This is more like Proteus than Waking Mars; it's about wandering, having no real point or distinct rhyme or reason. Everything is presented without explanation; you're stranded on a planet with no background and get to walk (slowly) through alien vistas to visit robotic temples without explanation. The artwork is nice, yes, as is the music, but none of it is groundbreaking, /especially/ if you're over a certain age and remember EGA and VGA adventure games of the late 1980s and early 1990s at all.

The problem here isn't so much the lack of explanation. This is definitely aiming towards minimalist 'art' and encouraging user interpretation (though I once had an argument with a collage artist that, since art is a form of communication, /something/ must be intended by all artistic design choices--if the artist completely abrogates the work of interpretation to the observer, then the artist is not communicating and could be doing absolutely /anything/).

The problem is the pacing.

This is quite possibly intentional.

Your little astronaut walks slowly. All the screens have to be backtracked. In one playthrough, there just isn't that much to see. In my playthrough, I wandered through all the available screens three times over to be rewarded with... well... let's just say a game over that had as little explanation as anything else, though in hindsight it was a good game over since it illuminated just a little bit more of the world the developers created.

Are there different endings? I don't know, and that's where the problem comes in. The manual encourages leaving the game alone and waiting for things to happen; something about how actions are static but the world is dynamic or something. That's fine, but even then the amount of time it takes for your character to walk from one side of the screen to the other is an investment that doesn't have much payoff. Is there any guarantee that if you leave it running for an hour and then come back and wait the one or two minutes it takes to change screens that you'll get something different? No.

I don't want to sound like an anti-art game philistine, so I have to compare this to other works. Proteus, which is equivalently aimless, rewards running around and backtracking by being immediately interactive. Starseed Pilgrim encourages exploration by hiding the backstory in rhyme. The Swapper gives you new things to look at, backstory, and moral dilemma without relying on kinetics or speed. The Endless Forest at the very least interacts with you, and its artistic bent is /anti-kinetic/. The Graveyard had you moving very slowly, but every step added to the story (and it didn't suggest that there was replay value in an attempt to become a time sink).

Stranded offers none of these things, and certainly does nothing to suggest that it has more to it. It almost seems to be given away by the tagline: "Do you know what it is to die alone, and so far from home?"

Seems like it is to shuffle around a bit and then, well, die alone in a godless universe and out of shake-n'-vac.