David Cage, of Heavy Rain fame, recently made some comments at GDC regarding traditional game structure. He argued that levels, bosses, missions, that sort of thing—all of them were obsolete, and that we should move on. Now, in some senses, I kind of agree with him—I certainly want to play more games like Heavy Rain for one thing—but to say that traditional structural devices in games should be left behind forever is foolish and misguided.
Why? Well, because there’s still a place for gamey-games. Not everything has to be an epic interactive movie that is beautifully crafted and cinematographatised. Not everything has to be about in-depth moral decisions and the consequences of those actions. It’s okay to chase high-scores, and it’s okay to put the words “GAME OVER” in front of the player if they mess up.
The reason why this has suddenly popped into my mind is the fact that I was dragged kicking and screaming into the world of the “bullet hell” shooter last night. I’d heard a few good things about the recently-released Deathsmiles on Xbox, and asked a few people on Twitter what they thought. Everyone who got back to me said that it was an excellent game, and also recommended a couple of iPhone titles—Espgaluda II and Dodonpachi Resurrection. It was too late to go and grab a copy of Deathsmiles thanks to the fact most of the country shuts down at around 6pm, but I could at least try the iPhone games. And they had Lite versions for trial purposes, too, which makes a nice change.
I tried them both and was astonished at how impressive 2D pixel art can still be. Neither game is consciously trying to look “retro”, they’re just made of well-drawn, well-animated art rather than 3D graphics. Not only that, though, they’re a huge amount of fun to play. I’d always figured the “bullet hell” shooter as being punishingly difficult—otherwise the word “hell” wouldn’t figure into its genre description, surely—but I was pleasantly surprised to discover that rather than being super-difficult, they’re just quite technical and require rather more than hosepiping the screen with laser fire. Instead, it’s a case of quickly determining what the best route through the bajillion incoming shots is—and the excellent touch-screen controls on the iPhone games (worthy of celebration in itself) makes navigating through them a snap.
The other thing I hadn’t realised about the genre is that the “hitbox” (the area of the ship that registers collisions) is super-tiny—much smaller than the ship itself. This means that you can get away with “scraping” bullets and, in fact, in one mode of Dodonpachi Resurrection, this is encouraged by building up your score multiplier. And speaking of scores, if you’re the sort of person who likes building up gigantic scores, this is the genre for you. Both the iPhone games have full OpenFeint and Game Center support, a bunch of Achievements and full Leaderboard functionality, with an individual Leaderboard for each mode—hopefully free of the sort of cheating we see on the Fruit Ninja leaderboards.
The final thing that I find particularly noteworthy is the fact that the inappropriateness of the music throughout is second only to DEADLY PREMONITION. Check out this music from the first stage of Dodonpachi Resurrection and I defy you to not be smiling by the end of it. Now imagine blowing up like a million tanks whilst listening to that. Yeah. That’s why that game is awesome, and why @feenwager will hate it.
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