September 2010

I love Borderlands. I love throwing down Scorpio Turrets. I kill Bonehead whenever I boot up the game just because he was my first real hurdle, and now I can one-shot him. I have the first three pieces of DLC, and I love them all for what they are (I wish Moxxi’s Underdome awarded XP and/or weapon proficiency, but the endless waves of enemies are still fun to mow through). I’ve butchered zombies, fought the hordes, and bested General Knoxx (Crawmerax eludes me, but I’ll get him some day). Now though, I have the seminal DLC pack, Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution. I’m a fan of the claptrap robots. I think they’re hysterical. My wife and I regularly say to one another “Check me out, I’m dancing! I’m dancing!” This content was made for me, and I could not be happier with it.

CNRR exudes everything that Borderlands is – ridiculous weapons, ridiculous enemies, nonsensical story that makes you smile, and pure unadulterated fun. After three expansion packs, the folks at Gearbox know what they’re doing. Gone are the multi-tiered fetch quests that are most likely collected at the end of the story arc, gone are the enemies that don’t shoot (but still drop guns somehow), gone are the notions of “you don’t need XP” and “you don’t need weapon proficiency increases,” and gone is the straight-line map layout that plagued Knoxx. CNRR takes Knoxx, the best bit of DLC before CNRR came along, and iterated on all the good parts. There are new weapons, new enemies, new versions of old enemies, and eight new levels to attain regardless of whether you bought Knoxx (this is actually a patch feature so everyone has access, but most folks, including me, will associate the patch with the new DLC), and more importantly than anything else it’s a lot of fun and a great excuse to go back to Pandora.

CNRR is fairly short – the main quest line can be completed in around four hours – and the enemies are almost all vulnerable to caustic damage since they’re robots (or half-robotic in nature), but there is plenty else to do. The side quests are numerous and funny (or it may just be that I am immature), the enemies are varied and interesting, and the Claptraps are even funnier here than they were in either the base game or the other pieces of DLC. If you’re only going to pick up one piece of Borderlands DLC it should be The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, but if you’ve got the money for one after that it really ought to be Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution

Pros: Great humor, fun new enemy types, great twists on old enemy types

Cons: You’ll seldom stray from your favorite caustic weapon

 

When players sit down to play a game, they are presented with goals.  Some goals are directly in the rules; some are implied by the action of the game.  

Score lots of points chomping little white dots in a maze.  Guide your miniature army to tabletop Valhalla.  Find whatever castle that princess is in – and get all the stars on the way. Construct the most efficient colonial town, making a bundle shipping goods back to the Old World.  Tell the story of your dark elf and his escape from the underworld.

What if we take these trees and start to see a forest?  That is, are there different principles that can help us understand what goals are working or why one game might be a bigger success than another?  Try this on for size.

When confronted with goals, how will the players pursue them?  There are at least three ways that are easy to recognize and different from each other.  Let’s call them cooperation, competition, and conflict.

Cooperation: We’ll work together to get there!  There’s a lot of satisfying great gaming in working with your friends against the system.  Whether you’re blowing the heads off zombies in Left 4 Dead 2, teaming up in with your guildmates for a raid in WoW, or stopping a global wave of disease in Pandemic it’s a great way to game.  You’ve got friends to help and to help you, good memories built on working together.

Sometimes, though, you’re going to want to look across the table with a mischievous look in your eye and prove to your so-called teammates you can do it better than any of them.

Competition: Push that accelerator to the floor and punch it past the finish line first!  A great framework for game experiences is competition.  Players can indirectly contest with one another to meet the goal.  Racing sims are an obvious thing here, but many, many other games use this premise.  Pegging up the board in Cribbage, shipping barrels of goods off to the Old World in Puerto Rico, or guiding your team to the highest experience level in Mutant Chronicles: Siege of the Citadels – these are all games where the goal is a friendly wager.

And when the taste of our opponents’ suffering is the only fare that satisfies?

Conflict: It is not enough that you reach the goal; others must fall along the way!  Crushing waves of zerglings under a well deployed array of siege tanks, maneuvering to 3:1 attack ratio on the CRT as your grav tanks serve that Ogre a taste of hot nuclear death, or splitting the longest road for the win in Settlers of Catan are all aggressive plays.  The most basic goal for a game is to beat the other players directly.  Instead of satisfying some victory condition first or best, players eliminate their competition or engage them directly for a score.  PVP has a lot of charm.

Just like all these methods.  Each one, specialized and concentrated on by a talented designer is going to give a great game of interesting choices that give you stories to tell in the future. But any chef will tell you it’s hard to make a meal out of only one dish. 

An Artful Blend

The best of the best games will look for each of these principles and find ways to combine them to enrich the game experience for the players.  A racing game might add power ups used to slow down other players, adding an element of conflict to a competitive premise.  An RTS game might award overall points to the player who accumulated the most resources or did the most damage, adding a competitive color to a cooperative/conflict based game.  A board game might have trading cards to build sets – a cooperative game element – as the main economic progress element for buying advances for your civilization.  Classics often fire on more than one cylinder.

When a game focuses only on a single purpose – get to the end of the level, win the best auctions, work together to stop the Great Old Ones – it can still refine and hone its delivery of that experience to a high level of fun.  But whole new vistas open up when players have opportunities to enjoy all three forms in pursuit of the goals of the game.

See you at the table, gamer.

Fans of the original Beyond Good and Evil can take heart- Ubisoft hasn’t forgotten about you. They announced today that they are releasing Beyond Good and Evil on both PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade in 2011. Not only that, but they will be improving the graphics to a crisp 1080p. READ MORE

Ivy the Kiwi?

September 29, 2010

It is rare to see new IP. It is even rarer for that new IP to be a two-dimensional platformer. That is what we have though. Ivy the Kiwi? is the newest game created by Yuji Naka, the man responsible for Sonic the Hedgehog. Ivy the Kiwi? is not just a reskin of the Blue Blur though. Sonic is about momentum, speed, and multiple paths through the level while Ivy is self-propelled (think Bit.Trip Runner or Canabalt). You can cause her to jump, but she’ll always be moving to the right through gorgeous environments that look hand-drawn and invoke the same sense of childlike wonder found in Yoshi’s Island

So you can’t control which direction Ivy is going or how quickly she is getting there, but you have more options than jump and not jump. In order to avoid environmental obstacles you will need to use the Wii remote to draw vines for Ivy to run on and jump off of to avoid spikes, pits, and anything else that would do the titular birdie any harm. Drawing vines for Ivy turns from an act of necessity to an act of strategy. Only three vines can exist at any given time. If you go to draw a fourth the first will disappear even if Ivy is currently standing on it. You’ll need to plan ahead, but the action can still be hectic with the vine limit.

When enemies join the game’s spikes and acid you will need to use vines for more than level traversal. You can either use vines to block enemies away from Ivy or you can use the vines to bounce Ivy up into the air and then down again to use a spin drill move to take the enemies out permanently. And you’ll need to get good at the drill technique as it is the only way to get past the breakable blocks that show up in later stages. Ivy the Kiwi? does a good job of introducing concepts slowly so you won’t ever feel overwhelmed. As soon a you’ve mastered jumping over spikes you will move on to keeping acid from falling on Ivy’s head, and after that you’ll start encountering enemies. Eventually you’ll need to throw rocks at obstacles which is difficult since you can never stop Ivy’s movement, but the physics are sound – when a throw doesn’t work properly it isn’t because the game cheated you, but trying the same section over and over again can be frustrating nonetheless.

The unique mechanics presented here make Ivy the Kiwi? look like a platformer but play like a puzzler. You’ll need to figure out what to do and when to do it since Ivy’s constant forward motion imposes a time limit on the short but numerous levels. If you are looking for a family-friendly game on Wii whose challenge ramps up as the game progresses making it appropriate for younger gamers and older gamers alike.

Pros: Good progression of techniques, Gradual difficulty curve

Cons: Throwing is tricky due to lack of direct interaction with the environment

Ivy the Kiwi?

September 29, 2010

It is rare to see new IP. It is even rarer for that new IP to be a two-dimensional platformer. That is what we have though. Ivy the Kiwi? is the newest game created by Yuji Naka, the man responsible for Sonic the HedgehogIvy the Kiwi? is not just a reskin of the Blue Blur though.Sonic is about momentum, speed, and multiple paths through the level while Ivy is self-propelled (think Bit.Trip Runner or Canabalt). You can cause her to jump, but she’ll always be moving to the right through gorgeous environments that look hand-drawn and invoke the same sense of childlike wonder found in Yoshi’s Island

So you can’t control which direction Ivy is going or how quickly she is getting there, but you have more options than jump and not jump. In order to avoid environmental obstacles you will need to use the stylus to draw vines for Ivy to run on and jump off of to avoid spikes, pits, and anything else that would do the titular birdie any harm. Drawing vines for Ivy turns from an act of necessity to an act of strategy. Only three vines can exist at any given time. If you go to draw a fourth the first will disappear even if Ivy is currently standing on it. You’ll need to plan ahead, but the action can still be hectic with the vine limit. The gameplay scales down well on the DS, and the control scheme works most precisely on the platform. 

When enemies join the game’s spikes and acid you will need to use vines for more than level traversal. You can either use vines to block enemies away from Ivy or you can use the vines to bounce Ivy up into the air and then down again to use a spin drill move to take the enemies out permanently. And you’ll need to get good at the drill technique as it is the only way to get past the breakable blocks that show up in later stages. Ivy the Kiwi? does a good job of introducing concepts slowly so you won’t ever feel overwhelmed. As soon a you’ve mastered jumping over spikes you will move on to keeping acid from falling on Ivy’s head, and after that you’ll start encountering enemies. Eventually you’ll need to throw rocks at obstacles which is difficult since you can never stop Ivy’s movement, but the physics are sound – when a throw doesn’t work properly it isn’t because the game cheated you, but trying the same section over and over again can be frustrating nonetheless.

The unique mechanics presented here make Ivy the Kiwi? look like a platformer but play like a puzzler. You’ll need to figure out what to do and when to do it since Ivy’s constant forward motion imposes a time limit on the short but numerous levels. If you are looking for a family-friendly game on DS whose challenge ramps up as the game progresses making it appropriate for younger gamers and older gamers alike. 

Pros: Good progression of techniques, Gradual difficulty curve

Cons: Throwing is tricky due to lack of direct interaction with the environment

Managing Editor Graham Russell contributed to this review.