La Mulana

One game that I am starting to feel a deep ache for in my ancient bones is the upcoming WiiWare remake of La Mulana.

You would be forgiven for thinking that the original game was a dusty classic designed by Japanese masterminds in the lost mists of the 80’s where it’s cult influence has echoed up through the decades until its glorious remake, but it initially arrived on PC in 2005, first Japanese-only, then lovingly translated by some fantastically prissy English types for the Western world to sample.

By sampling, I mean that I imagine that a fair many people who downloaded, installed and played the game may have after a period of about 10 minutes became confused and troubled. The fair few who continued past that point were in for a far worse mental malaise to come.

A screen from the upcoming remake.

Why? Well, it’s really really hard. Not much of an understatement to say that. If you’ve read my past posts I think it’s fair to assume I’m a platformer fan, and while I’m hardly super skillorated in said fandom I assume a certain knowledge and love of the genre about myself, a ‘cloak’ of platforming geekery which I twirl and cavort in occasionally. La Mulana ripped my cloak to shreds and stomped on it and made me cry saltwater tears. But like an abused mulfunctioning cybernetic puppy, I keep coming back to my scientist owner because I.. LOVE.. him.

The controls are not necessarily THAT hard; an occasionally unforgiving jump button, but the labyrinthine level structure, Metroidvania style of item acquisition/backtracking (the game is pretty much HUGE) and brain-busting puzzles with randomly scattered and arcane clues had me scrambling for the wiki frequently. “Arrghhh.. La Mulana!” Consider it as a mom-friendly swear substitute for just about any situation whereby you are a) utterly confused and do not where to go; b) you have been knocked off the roof of your domicile/care center/self-owned canoe factory by the fluttering of bats; c) bats have killed you and you hate bats and bats are the hand-crafted baubles of Beelzebub (who makes an appearance as a mini-boss! Hell has bad PR!)

Despite being confusing and irritating and plain mean at times, the game becomes something of a fantastic undertaking. The story which initially seems assembled from offcuts of the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade screenplay (featuring a whip-wielding protagonist: the fantastically named Lemeza Kosugi; plus his equally able father) reveals itself more and more, building plot and lore and the protagonist’s proper motivation until it feels at times positively majestic. The euphoria of deciphering an improbable riddle or block puzzle is tangible, and the exploratory joy of opening up another huge cavern chockful of traps, treasure chests and bats is great. I found myself going from initial indifference to the game into being completely consumed by it. One other thing, the retro music is quite fantastic and extremely memorable to the point of open-mouthed humming.

Feel free to give the free PC version a go if you don’t have a Wii. If you get stuck don’t feel ashamed for turning to the wiki or to the excellent Lets Play series by SA forums superstar DeceasedCrab. This is a game that forces you to earn money to purchase the mechanism that allows you to save your game, after all. Also if you don’t read the manual you may die. Go figure..

Indie Game Review: Knytt / Knytt Stories

So apparently there’s this guy called Nifflas. I think he lives somewhere very cold, possibly underwater, possibly in some sort of colour-changing plastic bubble which is built from ancient applied alien technology discovered deep underground. He is able to keep warm by huddling inside a series of 25 warm knitted woollen blankets, each one knitted by an important person in his past. He will think about them sometimes, and will compose an occasional melancholy electronic medley using the chordal approximators of the alien bubble, despite unfamiliarity with the technology at hand. Thousands of miles below the planet’s surface he floats, discovering strange flourescent caverns lit by unseen organic life, dark and silent passageways, small communities of sentient creatures living undiscovered and undisturbed. He cannot communicate with them beyond a brief friendly wave, which they return before he continues on his lonely journey.

What I’m trying to convey (albeit very poorly) is the general feeling I get when I play Nifflas’ Knytt and the ’sequel’ Knytt Stories: expansive platformers with an emphasis on exploration, but coupled with a fantastic sense of melancholy wonder obtained through evocative minimalistic electronica and windswept alien landscapes / huge labyrinthine cavern networks / floaty, airy cloud jumping. There is no Shoot Button.. the few creatures you come across are mostly non-threatening and are content to live their lives as if you didn’t exist. The others are merely avoided.

The whole thing is supremely relaxing and quietly contemplative in a non-specific way: there’s a sort of mental Zen cleansing to it’s gameplay (it reminds me a lot of the indie classic Seiklus); I found myself completely immersed in Knytt, just waiting to see what interesting new landscape lay beyond the next screen, by the time it ended I felt, well, chilled. There’s an element of Metroid-esque obtainable powers as well which lets the game world unfold with satisfaction but never with much difficulty. Knytt Stories is meant to be more of a community-created-levels type of thing, of which many are very well done, and occasionally bonkers (this was a minor YouTube hit. (Ok, well not really, but it would be nice if it had been..)). Right now I really can’t find an excuse to stop playing as there are so many great levels to try out.

Imagining that the current crop of top gaming titles are a confederation of sentient monsters from classic cinema who are constantly bickering in their hastily-constructed-from-tokyo-officeblock-rebar monster senate about the validity of King Kong’s claim on monster kingship based on an admittedly suspicious hereditary title printed off the Monster Internet, Knytt and Knytt Stories are a pair of thoughtful mutant whales in water-breathing scuba gear, emissaries from a peaceful watery world here to give intelligent assistance to their louder, more powerful land-based bretheren. Please listen to their haunting unintelligible pleas for world monster peace and give these minimalist monsterpieces a go.

XBLA Game Review: Castle Crashers

Two words come to mind when I think of playing Castle Crashers:

WOOHOO WOWPANTS

Because that, basically, is the essence of the game. Its code, its sound, the graphics, the gameplay is just so suffused with WOOHOO WOWPANTSness that it starts to squat in your throat, feeding on lung squabs on its frog-like legs until the WOOHOO WOWPANTS factor in the game is particularly high, at which point it slimily thrusts its way up past your epiglottis and a croak of slow joy is heard. It’s just real nutsy fun.

The first time I played it I was reminded of the classic NES game River City Ransom, a side-scrolling beat-em-up where you progress from area to area beating throngs of collegiate goons into pasty mush with assorted weaponry, all for the love of Cyndi. Enemies cried “BARF!” upon their demise, somewhat improbably. You could do some light shopping, visit a sauna, buy a new pair of boots (all of which had an RPG-lite effect of upgrading certain stats that helped you kick brick) then resume the butt-kicking.

Elements of this game filter through into Castle Crashers. You guide your color-coded knight through an irreverant medieval world, bashing up horn-helmeted warriors, tribal teddy bears, knights with lightsabers etc. with melee and magic. Bash up enough of them and you advance a level and get to plug some points into a chosen discipline, letting you tailor your character towards certain strengths. Combat is easily learned but facing certain enemies needs to be handled well, and combos are unlocked with levelling up, making life easier. As expected from the minds behind Alien Hominid, the game has a fantastic cartoony flair and quirky humour; one moment you’ll be crashing a wedding featuring a groom hunched over a bomb-launching pipe organ, then jumping logs alongside a diarrhea-propelled deer the next.

The real fun comes with multiplayer.. up to four players at once, either over Xbox Live or in the same room, and the latter will have you fighting over couch space as well as the spoils of crashing castles (and eventually fighting each other in-game at various points over a princess smooch). When your buddy goes down, Game is not necessarily Over as you can perform some timed-button-mashing CPR over his colourful corpse, solidifying the bond of brotherhood between you and creating good vibes in the universe.

It’s XBLA Game of the Year 08 and hardly a bad way to spend 1200 Microsoft points. The only thing is that it might be a bit too short; it is an arcade game after all some might say, at any rate playing with friends shoves up the replayability nicely, and completists may enjoy the (occasionally confusing) unlocking of new characters and weapons.

So, woohoo wowpants. It’s that good.

Scanning, salad, thought factories, etc.

Here’s something I wrote a while back. A little bit tongue in cheek methinks (well at least the first half) and a wee bit precious perhaps. Thought it might be appropriate for the blog.. so warts and all, etc.

Hello!

I’m a scanning addict. Yep. It’s true.

A scanning addict. Do you know what that is? Do you want me to tell you? That’s me there, in the scanning addict support group (every Monday 7PM), nursing a scalding-hot cup of
roasted beans; glance flitting from the floor to the government-issued cream clock. I shouldn’t be here, I’m thinking. I don’t really have this problem. I’m actually a pretty well-rounded, well-read guy: I know a bit about context.. I can read between the lines. I *understand* things. Hey, it’s true! I understand things ALL THE TIME; I’m never confused by big words like “intent” or “hidden meaning”. Nor am I dissuaged when it appears that I might just be in over my head a bit with what I’m reading. I mean, I’m reading all the time. How much time is it going to take me to understand.. well, everything I read? Because I’m ALWAYS reading. Always, and it’s always crystal-clear. My brain is like a car compacter. A HUGE 32-page article, some really arduous and lengthy book (Ulysses was pretty big right? and the second half, I totally got. The dude was having a dream or something, case closed), I can consume and compact into some small corner of my brain, so that when some seven-headed literary critic association bears down on me when I die and demands a presentation of the pros and cons of totalitarian government as espoused (espoused? pretty good huh?) by John Galt in Atlas Shrugged, I’ll smile, lean back and give a THREE WORD ANSWER that will totally slay that beast. I have it covered! It’s almost
like I don’t have to read anything ever. Ever. Again. I might as well go back to finishing You magazine blockbusters and feeling smug about nailing that one about ant entomology (which I did NOT, by the way, look up on Wikipedia).

Ok. So what the H-E-double hockey sticks am I on about? It’s about the way I read things. Usually internet articles: blogs, news stories, whatever.

I’m a scanner. A scanner is someone who reads things quickly and cannot, after a period of time following the reading, recall anything about the material other than a couple of factoids that were particularly interesting at the time. Not only am I a scanner, but I’m a PRETENTIOUS one. Meaning, I basically read things for the sake of reading them. In my mind, a body of text is potentially composed of interesting words or phrases that I might be able to glean and use for the sake of enlargening my mental capacity for annoying people by attempting to show off my mental capacity. Any context or the author’s intent is discarded; it’s just literary epicuranism. I’m picking apart a lasagne to suck up the bechamel sauce and leaving the mince in the dish.

I don’t necessarily want to or need to understand what I’m reading.. to me, it’s just an appraisal of the written word on the level of its aesthetic and how it could potentially inflate my written aesthetic potential (confounded by the fact that I hardly, you know, WRITE anything) OR a particularly delicious informative nugget that YOU probably do not know. It wasn’t always like this for me: my greatest and loveliest joy in the past has been to ascertain a Meaning from a text, be it my own or the authors. Now, I don’t want to know anything. I know what I know, and if you disagree with me in the written word, well by golly, be prepared to have your article
dissected for delicious phrases and little else. Forget about changing MY mind, ok!

I LOVE to scan. I can do it all day. I’ll open about 6 tabs at a time in Firefox to just scan through quickly and close; I might daisy-chain a few articles if it has an interesting link. At the end of the day, I might know something about Aztec burial rituals and I might want to find an excuse to insert the word “occidental” into that big important novel I’m GOING to write someday (you know, give me time to beef up my literary chops and I’ll totally start thinking about thinking about starting to maybe write a first chapter!).

There is no real independant thought involved in this kind of assimilation. It’s the mental equivalent of a monkey figuring out how to fire a shotgun he couldn’t possible design and construct himself.

This way I read and assess and store information on a day-to-day basis got me thinking about my spirituality (oh no, here we go..) and how I react to the Burning Truths of scripture. (You know, Scripture IS fire. You can’t hear it without getting burned. When your brain is a great soggy sponge though, saturated with the non-spiritual liquid of the day-to-day, it’s easy to let what you hear bounce right off. Just an aside.) When I hear a sermon, the stock response so often is “oh, that’s good to know”; I might attempt to catalogue “key” (in my mind) parts as moral reactionary factoids which I will hold other people to (even though I myself might not even attempt to aspire to the stored biblical principles) until I eventually forget them.

There is no SUFFUSING of my mind and my being in the learned biblical truths. This is where I want to be; I want to mentally chew on and marinate my understanding in biblical knowledge, I want to be completely startled and joyously surprised by truths which I have read and intrinsically know on a continual basis; I DO NOT want to store them as grey cold data to trundle out when I want to assess someone’s moral behaviour (rarely my own, as i’ve said).
If the Word is living, I want to live with it. If it is flaming, I want to be on fire with it, and let the
Eternal Flame purify my understanding and cure me of cynicism and dry, apathetic factual assimilation and recollection.

So what do I need to do? On the day-to-day level on which I’m just reading through stuff for the sake of reading through stuff, I need to divorce my brain from it’s role as a sterile warehouse and turn it into a factory of thought. Time to produce, package and ship some opinions, fools. On the level of God’s eternal truth, I need to stop nibbling on factoids and start devouring it like a pregnant woman at an all-you-can-eat salad bar. Also.. how is it that these two levels
(that need addressing) actually interact with one another? Well.. the more I squeeze the sponge of my day-to-day brain of useless information, the more room and space for the eternal truths to take hold and to grow. I think. This doesn’t negate the factory element… a factory (well, the ideal factory) has a sparse warehouse.. a (number of) raw material(s) is(are) taken, processed, and leave(s) the factory as a product which serves some purpose (Too many ()’s in that sentence. Sigur Ros might be proud). Extraneous raw materials take up space, and serve no purpose until used, and eventually go stale. So it should be with the information we assimilate.

So does anyone else feel the same way? Am I highlighting a mental thought process which is actually kind of childish and, you know, a sort of you-may-have-thought-like-that-kind-of-when-you-were-seventeen-but-everyone-gets-out-of-that-
pattern-of-thought-with-maturation-and-age kind of thing? Is my struggle the struggle of EVERY MAN?? (delivered in booming baritone)

(I have no clue where I was going) (deja vu)

Asciilicious

“If you ain’t hip to the rare housequake, then, shut up already, damn!” So sang Prince in 1987, and so do I when I’m sure no-one is around, due to the fact that I haven’t filled a stadium since at LEAST the early 90’s when I marshalled the forces of Ulthor H’Dumak against the tyranny of Grandma Pants and her Exploding Fingerbread Packaging (they never invited me back to Cleveland again).

Prince is my favoured choice of music when I play Nethack, a game without music, sound effects, or graphics. Both this game and Sign ‘O’ The Times were released in 1987, and both are dense impenetrable musical/gamical tomes of frustration, joy and eventual resignation once you realise the funk is just too darn strong. Nethack is a classic example of a roguelike (ask your dad), the history of which I won’t go into here, suffice to say that a roguelike is characterized by no graphics, permadeath and forcing yourself to vomit in order to burn through a balsa wood wall with your stomach acids (true story). Fun, neu?

Maybe you can't tell, but I'm pretty much screwed at this point.

I’ve played a reasonable amount of roguelikes, ever since my dad introduced me to URogue on a SCO Unix pc back in the day, and there’s a certain spartan, utilitarian charm to a game where everything is ascii characters. Parents! If you think computer games are sucking away the imagination of children, try sitting them in front of a roguelike: if they gibber in fright at the sight of a ‘D’ on-screen (um, a dragon) then they are IMAGINING an ascii ‘D’ is a towering fire-breathing iron-scaled lizard of doom whose countenance is terrible to look upon. (A lower-case ‘d’, by the way, is a dog. Petting a dragon not recommended.) Where imaginative death is concerned however, Nethack is the Machiavelli amongst the scheming Italian politicians that are other roguelikes. Here are some ways you could die (from this site):

* attempting to ride a petrifying monster
* attempting to saddle a petrifying monster
* brainlessness (a mind flayer eats too much of your brains and you die from abject stupidity)
* bumping into a boulder
* bumping into a door
* bumping into a wall
* drinking a burning potion of oil
* carnivorous bag (…)
* caught him/herself in his/her own magical blast
* choking
* closing drawbridge
* collapsing drawbridge
* colliding with the ceiling
* contact-poisoned spellbook
* contaminated potion
* contaminated water
* crashing into iron bars
* crunched in the head by an iron ball
* kicking a cursed throne
* death ray
* deliberately gazing at Medusa’s hideous countenance
* dragged downstairs by an iron ball
* drowned
* electric chair
* electric shock
* exhaustion
* exploding chest
* exploding crystal ball
* exploding drawbridge
* exploding large box
* exploding ring
* exploding rune
* exploding wand
* explosion
* fall onto poison spikes
* falling downstairs
* falling drawbridge
* falling object
* falling off a petrifying monster
* falling rock
* fell from a drawbridge
* fell into a chasm
* fell into a pit
* fell into a pit of iron spikes
* fell onto a sink
* gas cloud
* gas spore’s explosion
* genocidal confusion
* iron ball collision
* kicking [something]
* kicking a [petrifying] corpse without boots
* kicking down a shopkeeper’s door (..see above pic..)
* killed him/herself with his/her bullwhip
* killed him/herself with his/her pick-axe
* killed while stuck in creature form
* land mine
* leg damage from being pulled out of a bear trap
* life drainage
* magic missile
* magical explosion
* mildly contaminated potion
* molten lava
* overexertion
* petrification
* [petrifying] corpse
* [petrifying] egg
* poisoned blast
* poisoned needle
* poisonous corpse
* potion of acid
* potion of holy water
* potion of unholy water
* psychic blast
* residual undead turning effect
* reverting to unhealthy [normal] form
* riding a [petrifying monster]
* riding accident
* rotted [...] corpse
* rotten lump of royal jelly
* rusting away
* scroll of earth
* scroll of fire
* scroll of genocide
* self-genocide
* shattered potion
* shot him/herself with a death ray
* sipping boiling water
* sitting in lava
* sitting on an iron spike
* sitting on lava
* slipped while mounting [a monster]
* squished under a boulder
* starvation
* stolen [petrifying] corpse
* strangulation
* suffocation
* swallowing a [petrifying monster] whole
* system shock
* tasting [petrifying] meat
* teleported out of the dungeon and fell to his/her death
* the wrath of [deity]
* thrown potion
* touching [an artifact]
* touching the edge of the universe
* touch of death
* tower of flame
* trying to help a [petrifying monster] out of a pit
* trying to tin a [petrifying monster] without gloves
* turned into green slime
* unrefrigerated sip of juice
* unsuccessful polymorph
* unwisely ate the body of Death/Famine/Pestilence
* unwisely tried to eat Death/Famine/Pestilence
* using a magical horn on him/herself
* went to heaven prematurely
* wind swept
* zapped him/herself with a spell
* zapped him/herself with a wand

Some of these, I honestly have no idea. A lot of these can just be bad luck.. something I have a lot of when I play this game… I can’t tell you how many times I’ve slipped down the stairs and DIED for no real reason, or been crushed by a boulder trap out of the blue. The first few times it’s entertaining though, however memorizing the arcane knowledge required to make even some sort of headway just doesn’t seem fun anymore, and as much as people love Nethack for it’s great depth I’ve been forced to move somewhere more forgiving for my roguelike fix. Behold, Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup.. relatively simple but fun, and when you die, you feel as if it’s because of something stupid that you did. Plus it has cool features like auto-explore and a good graphical tileset (cue purists gagging).

No real point about this post, it’s not really a review. Nethack is still great fun if you have the patience. Next time I talk about games it’ll be about something with graphics. (Or possibly Dwarf Fortress, and you don’t want me to talk about Dwarf Fortress, trust me..)

Indie Game Review: Spelunky

Does the world need another games review site, especially one on indie games? It’s certainly debatable, and two like-minded individuals could get together over a glass-topped coffee table, sip from their Marcus Fenix-emblazoned limited edition mugs and tug at their hand-knitted favourite-scene-from-GTA-IV-embroidered snuggly winter jersey while calmly disliking the other for their views on quality headsets. However eloquent their arguments and however richly embroidered their respective designs, chances are they would probably never have heard of Derek Yu, and how much he loves roguelikes, Indiana Jones, 8-bit sidescrollers, insane difficulty, La Mulana and blending together disparate elements until they somehow taste delicious. (I hear he makes the BEST kerosene/peanut-butter/bromine cookies. They’re called “Torpor Agents”.)

In the spirit of trying things that are tasty and delicious and also really really hard and hurt your teeth and cost you money but you can’t stop eating until your mouth is a stumpy tooth-rooty mess, I decided to engorge myself on his latest offering after getting a little bored of Mass Effect (which is still great, make no mistake. Commander McBreakfast Shepard will be seeing me at some point in the future). It’s called Spelunky and basically it combines Rogue dungeon-delving with sidescrolling Jumpism and Avoidism (as in the hard-as-nails Spelunker, La Mulana), and I’m finding it really hard to stop playing. Each new level is a randomly-generated death cave chockfull of treasure, bats, traps, edgy shopkeepers, damsels, kissing booths and gambling, and no matter how many times I die horribly (and the variations are long and entertaining) I can’t help going at it again.

The point at which I realised this game was canned brilliance was when I decided to rob a shop. You have an inventory, basically bombs (the entire level is destructable and bombs can be used to create paths/blow up gold-veined walls for treasure/kill things), ropes (climb out of pits), some special items like parachutes, capes (..) and then one carryable item. My plan was to lure the shopkeeper to the front of the shop, arm and place a bomb outside the shop (doing so incurs the shopkeeper’s wrath.. we’ll get to that now), retreat to safety, brace myself against raining shopkeeper chunks, profit! Of course the bomb went off, shopkeeper didn’t die, and now a shotgun-wielding one-shot killing super-fast high-jumping old man is chasing me across the level. I run into a room with a Golden Idol. Quickly throwing a rope to the roof, I pick up the idol, triggering an Indiana Jones copyright-infringing boulder. Leaping for the rope, the boulder passes harmlessly beneath me, crumpling the shopkeeper into irate old man paste and leaving me his shotgun for assured instagib jollies for the rest of the level until a misjudged leap gave way to a misty-red brainplant.

Just give it a go and don’t be put off by the generally insane difficulty. Despite dying after getting 6 levels deep and getting the cape and the shotgun and the pitchers mitt (a bat! a freaking bat killed me..), there’s an immediacy to the game that doesn’t leave you moping but gets you right back into it again from square one, and the headway you will eventually make is that much more rewarding.

Download it here!

um hello

how fun is it to start a blog? it’s certainly easy. a few clicks here and there and a flat corner of the internet is yours on loan and you may broadcast forth as to whatever yummy brain chunks you have in your cranial fridge. sitting and wondering what the devilled egg to write about is another thing. you would hope not to have to write something for the sake of it unless your writing itself is stylistically interesting and more entertaining than the meaning it is trying to convey. my general irreverant concern for most things ups the ante to make it interesting.. however in the spirit of science and experimentation I will try to keep it boring as I find that most blogs are very much so (but not your blog of course ).

well whatever. I think i’ll try reviewing things. I like games and music, ergo et cetera.