2196: Starward Rogue, a Game About a Severed Head in a Mech

I took a look at Arcen Games’ latest today. I’ve followed this interesting developer for a few games now, most notably A Valley Without Wind and its sequel: two games that fused, oddly enough, turn-based strategy with Metroidvania-esque platform shooting. Arcen’s latest game Starward Rogue continues the dev’s tradition of fusing disparate genres together, in this case arcade shooters and roguelikes.

I say “disparate”; Starward Rogue isn’t the first game to combine roguelike elements with a shoot ’em up core, but it is the first I recall seeing designed around the principles of Japanese-style arcade shooters, particularly those of the “bullet hell” variety. That means intense, complex bullet patterns that you need to navigate through as well as enemies to defeat, and it makes for an exciting, very interesting take on a genre that all too often coasts along without any real innovation.

Starward Rogue casts you in the role of a severed head in a mech as you attempt to rescue someone called Rodney from the depths of a dungeon called the Megalith. I believe these two elements are a reference to one of Arcen’s other games, but it’s one I’m not familiar with at this time. Fortunately, no real knowledge of whatever the other game it’s referring to is required; it’s simply a bit of fanservice for those who have played the game’s spiritual predecessor. Rodney is an entertaining character in his own right, though my only direct contact with him so far has been in the tutorial sequence.

Starward Rogue‘s gameplay is balanced nicely between exploration and action. Each level of the Megalith is split into discrete rooms, each of which has to be cleared of enemies before you can move on to the next one. Unlike similar games such as The Binding of Isaac, though, Starward Rogue’s rooms are often more than a screen wide and tall, and there are a number of unique designs and layouts that you’ll encounter over the course of the game, which are then combined with various enemy and trap waves — the latter tending to be non-destroyable obstacles or gun turrets that will spew out hot fiery death as you try and take down the enemies, then deactivate when you’ve cleared the room.

Levelling up is a simple process: no stat allocation here, simply pick one of three randomly selected perks. These vary from increased damage to having a full map available from the start of the floor — and even being able to skip the rest of the floor you’re on. Alongside these passive bonuses you get from levelling, you can also equip and upgrade your infinite-ammo main gun, your recharging Energy-based weapon (which recharges when you enter a new room) and your limited-ammo Missile weapon. There are also various other passive upgrades you can collect, and one-shot consumable items that generally have some sort of “smart bomb” effect.

Much like the aforementioned The Binding of Isaac, Starward Rogue is a game intended to be replayed and rechallenged. There are a number of different mechs with which to play the game, and there’s a checklist of enemies and items you’ve found over the course of all your runs. There are also five difficulty levels to choose from, with Very Easy all but guaranteeing a full clear run unless you are the very worst kind of incompetent moron, and the highest difficulty claiming to offer difficulty on a par with the legendary Touhou series. And on top of that there are a bunch of achievements to earn, too, so it’s very much a game that will keep you busy for a long time if you get it — though it’s accessible enough to be able to pick up every so often for a quick blast even if you’ve left it alone for a while.

I completed a Very Easy run earlier — there’s no shame in starting either a roguelike or a shoot ’em up on the lowest difficulty, and this game is both! — and am already looking forward to giving it another shot soon. If you’re a fan of The Binding of Isaac and its ilk — “roguelites”, to use the popular term — then you could do far worse than give Starward Rogue a look.

1230: In Pursuit of Score

The sole aim in a lot of video games circa the ’80s and early ’90s used to be to attain a high score. But in all but a few genres of gaming, that simple pleasure of watching a number get steadily higher — a number which proved indisputably how much better than your friends you were — has fallen by the wayside. This is kind of a shame because, having been playing a bunch of games recently in which the old-school objective of “score as many points as possible” is their reason for existence, it’s, you know, fun. Lots of fun.

My fondest memories of high-score chasing in recent years came with two different Xbox Live Arcade games: Geometry Wars 2 and Pac-Man Championship Edition DX. Both of these games got their hooks into both me and my friends and saw us eschewing bigger, more exciting, more impressive releases that were around at the time in favour of simply pumping in virtual quarter after virtual quarter. Geometry Wars 2 in particular completely monopolised the gaming time of a number of us for a good several weeks, as each of us vied for dominance of the game’s six different leaderboards. It became a sort of hypnotic ritual — fire up the game, start up (say) Pacifist mode, play, die, immediately restart and repeat. Three hours later, I’d look up and see that, well, three hours had passed, and that my hands had locked into a claw shape only suitable for 1) holding a controller or 2) in a pinch, wanking.

Since those two games, however, there haven’t been that many other titles that have drawn the attention of my friends and I quite so consistently. This is a shame, as I greatly enjoyed that feeling of competition, and relished the opportunity to take a snapshot of my latest high score and rub it in the face of a competitor via some form of social media. (This is where the term “Be A Dick Mode,” often stylised as the hashtag “#beadickmode” on Twitter, originated.)

I’ve been thinking about how and why there hasn’t been a simple score-attack game to get everyone’s teeth into for a long time. And the only plausible reason I can think of is the fact that gaming has grown even more broad and diverse since that time. The rise of mobile phone games in particular has all but eliminated the perceived need for “simple” arcade games with a score attack mechanic, which is somewhat sad.

Bejeweled Blitz remains popular, of course, but I now refuse to play that game because it’s become infested with pay-to-win crap. Leaderboards are utterly meaningless if you sell advantages to players, which is what PopCap’s doing. Unfortunately, I appear to be in a minority thinking this, as the “Blitz” puzzle template is immensely popular — in-app purchases and all — with the latest addition to the formula being a rather sorry addition to the Tetris legacy from EA. I’m just not interested; what’s the point in playing if all it takes to top the leaderboards is being more willing to dip your hand into your pockets than your rivals? Bullshit, I say. Bullshit!

Fortunately, there is a degree of respite, albeit one that I’m yet to convince my friends to engage with. The shmup genre — which people on the Internet don’t quite seem able to agree as to whether it’s flourishing or dying — remains a resolutely score-focused genre, and demands a great deal from its players both in terms of simple manual skills and in the learning of often-complex scoring mechanics. Like a good fighting game demands that you spend time exploring its systems and getting to know how everything fits together, a good shmup demands that you study it, figure things out and then try to put all that knowledge into practice while attempting to avoid fiery laser death.

It’s immensely satisfying when you figure out how a particular game “works”, and the first time you see your score skyrocketing into the high millions or even billions. It’s a genre that brings thrills and excitement with minimal effort expended on storytelling or trying to do anything particularly “artistic”, but at the same time the finished result can be oddly beautiful — hypnotic bullet patterns; the “dance” of the player’s ship navigating through these perilous onslaughts; the sheer, unrelenting energy of most of these games. But these games aren’t trying to say something in the same way that an arty indie platformer is trying to say something; no, instead, all they’re trying to say is “c’mon, one more try and you’ll beat that score” or “c’mon! Bet you can’t clear me in one credit.”

#oneaday Day 685: I’m In Hell

Bullet hell, that is.

Despite not being very good at them, bullet hell shooters are rapidly becoming one of my favourite genres to unwind with. Actually, “unwind” might not be quite the right word, given the sense of tension they tend to provoke, but… oh, I don’t know. They’re fun, all right?

Most recently, I’ve been playing Gundemonium Recollection, which is available on PSN and Steam. It’s cheap, too — at about £8 for it and two other excellent shmups, it’s certainly one of the more low-cost entries in the genre out there. Hell, even Cave’s iPhone games cost more than that.

Not only does Gundemonium Recollection have a fabulous title, it also exemplifies many of the things that I — as a relative newcomer — believe are “typical” for the genre. We have a cute, big-eyed anime art style. We have lots and lots of bullets. We have game mechanics that go a little beyond “move” and “shoot” but not by much. And we have beautifully, wonderfully cheesy music.

The whole aesthetic is one of the things I find most endearing about the whole thing. Speak to your stereotypical dudebro about what constitutes a “hardcore” game and, depending on how into their games they are, you’ll get all manner of different answers. They will likely involve either first person shooters or MOBA games, however, and almost certainly will feature the colour brown prominently. What they likely won’t feature is 18th century anime girls with Old West-style revolvers flying through the sky and shooting down everything from things that look like Angry Birds to scantily-clad women with massive knockers sitting astride gigantic rocket launchers.

And yet, from experience, I know what the more hardcore game is.

You can get good at, say, Call of Duty or Halo relatively quickly, and certainly be able to beat the games on their Normal difficulties without too much, well, difficulty. They’re friendly to short, quick-fire play sessions in multiplayer, and even the single player campaigns tend to be split into bite-size, episodic chunks, with you running from one setpiece to the next — in Call of Duty‘s case, perpetually following along behind an NPC who gets to have all the fun while you watch — towards an eventual, inevitable conclusion.

Gundemonium Recollection, meanwhile, is hard with a capital ARRRRRRGH. While the whole game is no more than about 15-20 minutes in length, as is typical for the genre, reaching the end of the game is a significant feat, particularly as you’re encouraged to attempt it without continuing. And once you do manage to make it through to the end, you then have your score to consider. How can you pump it up? How can you maximise your scoring potential in each stage?

Bullet hell shooters are less mindless than their name suggests. The stereotypical “shmup” involves dodging up and down while hurling increasingly-ridiculous weaponry at incoming enemies. And yet in bullet hell shooters, the actual “shooting” side of things is the least important factor. The skill you have to practice is dodging all those bullets — no easy task, but successfully pulling it off makes you feel like a badass.

In fact, achieving anything in the game, whether it’s progressing twenty seconds further than you did previously or beating your high score, makes you feel like a badass. There is, in fact, quite a comic juxtaposition between how badass you feel having achieved something in the game and the incredibly cute anime art style and music.

Such is the way of Japanese games, though. The culture of “gamer” (whatever that actually means) is significantly different over there, meaning we get little gems such as Gundemonium Recollection and its two sequels springing up out of nowhere and providing something infinitely more fun that Brown Shooty War-Bang Soldier of Duty XIV.

Assuming you don’t mind failing. A lot. Perhaps that’s the key difference. In a title like Gundemonium Recollection, you can fail. You can fail embarrassingly quickly if you suck as much as I do. Conversely, to go back to our earlier examples of supposedly “hardcore” Western games, there’s little to no consequence for failure. Die in a single player Call of Duty level and you just restart from your last checkpoint. Lose a multiplayer match and you can just try again — it doesn’t matter at all, because you still got XP and a little closer to the next batch of unlocks.

In practice, you’re actually achieving much the same kind of thing in Gundemonium Recollection, only the progress you’ve made isn’t necessarily reflected with perpetually-filling progress bars and unlocks. Rather, you’re making progress with your own skills, improving your own abilities at playing the game, and as a natural extension of that, you’ll be able to get further, score better, or take on the more frightening difficulty levels. (I haven’t graduated off “Novice” yet, and still felt like a badass when I finally took down the final boss.)

So, then, the next time you describe yourself as a “hardcore gamer” to someone, just consider that somewhere out there there’s someone playing a game about flying magical girls with revolvers who is infinitely more hardcore than you could ever hope to be.

#oneaday Day 67: Cultural Differences

Games are a fairly unique medium in that they allow pretty much anyone easy access to material from other cultures without the language barrier necessarily getting in the way. A book in a language you don’t understand, for example, is pretty much useless. A film can be appreciated for its direction and cinematography if not understood. Music can be enjoyed on a certain level. But a foreign game, assuming its not too story-heavy, can be enjoyed by anyone.

It’s here that we run into the East-West divide. Both parts of the world enjoy producing games with stories, though Western stories often tend to err on the side of “gritty” while Japanese tales tend for the most part to be more on the colourful, melodramatic side, often derided by people who don’t enjoy them as being “emo”. Let’s leave narrative-heavy games aside for a moment, though, and look at games that are “gameplay experiences” first and foremost.

For comparison purposes, I’m going to take dear departed Bizarre Creations’ Geometry Wars 2 for the Western front, and CAVE’s Deathsmiles for the Eastern front. Both are Xbox 360 titles, both released at a low price point, though Deathsmiles saw a retail release as opposed to Geometry Wars 2‘s Xbox LIVE Arcade-only release. This, in itself, is somewhat telling.

Let’s consider the games’ respective aesthetics first. Geometry Wars 2 is, as you may expect from the title, abstract in nature. There are no “characters”, there’s no “story”, it’s just a bunch of neon shapes against one little white abstract “ship”, and everything explodes into a shower of beautiful fireworks. It’s spectacular to behold (assuming the person playing is any good) and recognisably “next-gen” (or “current-gen” if you prefer, since it’s technically more accurate).

Deathsmiles, on the other hand, looks like a SNES game, albeit one with enough things on screen to make the little Nintendo box explode. It’s all sprite-based, it has chunky pixel-art backgrounds that have been upscaled to HD but not quite by enough, it has animations done by hand rather than generated procedurally and suffers from occasional slowdown due to the sheer amount of shit happening on screen at once.

Not only that, though, but Deathsmiles has “character”. Rather than the abstract appearance of Geometry Wars 2, the player “ship” in Deathsmiles is a person. Specifically, it’s one of four underage Gothic Lolita angels dressed in borderline-inappropriate costumes accompanied by a familiar. Similarly, all the enemies are recognisable as “monsters”, be they humanoid, dragons, flying eye things with bat wings, spiders or indeed the wonderfully named final boss, Tyrannosatan.

The key thing about the two games’ respective aesthetics, though, is that Geometry Wars 2 is consciously trying to look shiny and new, while Deathsmiles is more than happy to look like an arcade game from at least 10 years ago—the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” approach. Neither approach is necessarily more or less valid than the other, but it’s an interesting contrast.

Then we come to how the two games play. Geometry Wars 2 has a variety of modes, all of which can be explained very easily. They all involve killing things before they touch your ship, with only a couple of modes (King, in which you may only fire while sitting in certain temporary “zones”; and Pacifism, in which you can’t fire at all and can only destroy things by detonating “gates” by passing through them) varying even slightly from this formula.

Deathsmiles, on the other hand, should be a simple matter to explain. It’s a shoot ’em up, after all—how complicated can it be? But I attempted to explain it to a friend earlier and ended up confusing both myself and him. The game’s tutorial makes it sound rather straightforward—fire in either direction, use a smart bomb, charge up shots or use a lock-on attack—but in fact there’s a surprising amount of hidden depth.

Firstly, since it, like Geometry Wars 2, is a game about getting high scores, there’s a somewhat intricate method to attaining the highest scores that involves destroying the correct enemies with the correct type of shots. The game mentions this in passing, but it’s up to the player to determine what it actually means. Geometry Wars 2, on the other hand, is about shooting shit and using a bomb if you’re in an inescapable situation.

Secondly, there’s the key element of the “bullet hell” shooter—the hitbox. Graze any enemy in Geometry Wars 2 and your ship explodes. But the same isn’t true in Deathsmiles—mercifully, since the player sprite is relatively large. No, instead there’s a pulsing “heart” symbol in the middle of your characters chest and that—and only that—is the thing that can be damaged. Because this is so small, it means you can navigate your player character through intricate arrangements of bullets that initially seem impossible to avoid. Much of the game becomes about less about shooting things and more about learning how and when these patterns appear, and finding an appropriate path through them. The patterns are the same each time, too, so you certainly can “learn” the game, as opposed to Geometry Wars 2‘s more random chaos.

Then there’s the matter of replay value. Both games are designed to be replayed in a “score attack” style. But Geometry Wars 2‘s sessions tend to be rather short for the most part—a few minutes at most. In most modes, the game ends when you’re dead. More skilled players get to play for longer in most cases.

Deathsmiles, on the other hand, takes you through at least 6 levels, the order of which you can select to a certain degree, and offers you unlimited continues. The whole game takes about 20-30 minutes from start to finish. This means that “beating” the game is within the reach of absolutely anyone, even on the hardest difficulty settings. Sure, you’ll get crap scores, since your score resets to zero every time you continue, but you can at least reach the end and whore for Achievements if that’s your bag. The sign of a skilled Deathsmiles player, then, is not how long they play for, but how long they can survive without their score resetting. This doesn’t necessarily have to be from the beginning of the game, as tackling the levels in different orders can provide optimum bonus-point scoring potential, but then we get into a whole other order of depth.

It’s interesting to see two wildly different approaches to what is essentially the same genre—the shmup—and contrast them. I like both games very much, but I feel that most people will probably find themselves favouring one or the other, much like game design philosophy in general.

I’ll leave you with one of the most interesting things to ponder: whether Deathsmiles‘ character designs would have ever been green-lit by a Western developer, even knowing the fact that the arguably “sexualised” nature of them doesn’t factor into the game itself at all? I somehow doubt it. Don’t believe me? Take a look:

Cute, right? Bit of a stockings and thighs and boobs theme going on. We’ve seen self-consciously sexy Western female characters before, so surely nothing new there. How about if I tell you how old they’re all supposed to be?

Yeah. Pervert.

#oneaday Day 64: Welcome to Bullet Hell

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.