#oneaday Day 118: I left this too late again

Oh dear. Half past midnight and I haven’t written anything. Time to quickly think of something off the top of my head!

Err… quick! Video games! I bought Victory Heat Rally today. This is a game I’ve had my eye on for a while (though not as long as some other people have, from the sound of things) after I played its excellent demo a few Steam Next Fests ago. I’m going to do a full writeup and video on this at some point in the very near future, but suffice to say for now that it’s very good.

It’s a game that takes aim at Sega’s “Super Scaler” racers in style, with Power Drift being a particular inspiration. It doesn’t slavishly try to ape the retro style, mind — though there is a nice “pixelise” filter option for the visuals — and rather makes use of some nice pixel art for the characters, cars and some roadside objects, and low-poly environments. It moves along at a fair old clip even on my mini PC that doesn’t have a graphics card, and it’s a lot of fun to play.

Besides Power Drift, it also draws inspiration from Ridge Racer (drift-heavy handling, ’90s rave soundtrack), Sega Rally (rally stages with exaggerated handling), Mario Kart (multiple tracks set in a limited number of environments) and probably some others that I can’t think of right now because I’m tired. It takes all these elements and blends them together to make an immensely compelling game that I’ve played for about 5 hours this evening.

The first series of championship challenges is a bit easy, but the second ramps things up nicely to a good challenge level. There are also some truly infuriating bonus stages known as “Joker” levels where you have to race through checkpoints against the clock while performing some sort of precise driving task. The one I’m presently stuck on requires you to take full advantage of the “drift boost” mechanic the game has borrowed from Mario Kart and boost through various checkpoints. This is a lot harder than it sounds, particularly with the awkward placement of some of these checkpoints, and it has cause many expletives to belch forth from my mouth this evening.

While these levels are infuriatingly difficult, the rest of the game seems pitched at a pretty sensible difficulty level. The opening championship eases you into things nicely, then things ramp up from there. I suspect the third series of championships will be genuinely quite difficult, if the escalation in the second series is anything to go by.

But anyway. Half past midnight, like I said, so I should probably close everything down and go to sleep. There can (and probably will) be more racing tomorrow.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

2368: Building a World… Again

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Playing with RPG Maker MV as I am at the moment, I’m reminded of quite how much I enjoy building worlds. I don’t have the skill or technical knowledge to be able to do so using 3D modelling tools (or even level editors for 3D games) but I’ve always felt I can put together some interesting 2D maps for RPGs.

There are two main approaches you can take when building a world for a game. You can take the “realistic” approach and attempt to build it to something approaching a believable scale, or you can take the “gamey” approach and try to build something that works well in the context of a game.

In actual fact, I tend to find that the best approach is somewhere between the two. A certain degree of game design is necessary when building a world in order to prevent it feeling like an unfocused mess — many modern open-world games fail miserably at this — while at the same time if your world design is completely divorced from reality your players will constantly be aware that they are playing a game rather than immersing themselves in your fictional world.

This isn’t always a bad thing, of course. Some people very much prefer exploring something that has been crafted to be fun, interesting to explore and well-paced. Others, meanwhile, like to wander off the path at every opportunity and see what’s in that cave, over that hill, behind that locked door. And some of the most satisfying gaming experiences I’ve had have come in environments very obviously designed to defy all real-world logic (not to mention architectural principles and, well, physics) — Metroidvania-style titles particularly spring to mind in this regard.

Since the game I’m playing around with at the moment is a kind of grand experiment of sorts, I’m going to play around with a variety of different approaches. The concept of the game sees the party travelling to several different “worlds”, so each of them are going to be structured differently. One of them will be a condensed fantasy RPG-style world, with the distinction between “overworld” and “dungeons”. Another will be one big dungeon — probably a haunted mansion or something along those lines. Besides those, I’d like to do something interesting with a sci-fi/cyberpunk feel, and either something completely abstract or very much grounded in reality. Or perhaps both.

Unlike past projects, where I’ve sort of “winged it” as I’ve gone along, this time around I’m actually taking a bit of time to plan things out to a certain degree. I imagine there will still be an element of winging it as I play around and think of new things I’d like to do, but at the very least I intend to plan out the basic structure and/or map of each of these “worlds” and how the player will interact with them. Then it will be interesting to see how much of a challenge it is to implement each of them using the RPG Maker MV toolset.

So far, the game’s introduction has a single, linear “dungeon” to introduce the player to the basic concepts. After that, I intend to allow them to choose how they progress through the initial phases of the game — though I also intend to put in some systems to ensure some jumping back and forth between the different worlds and their corresponding styles is in order. Should keep things interesting. We’ll see, I guess.

2364: More MV

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I’ve been playing some more with RPG Maker MV today. Despite telling myself before I started fiddling around that I wasn’t going to be too ambitious, my project’s plugins folder is now full to bursting with all manner of goodies to extend the functionality of the basic engine and basically make it almost unrecognisable from its vanilla form. (This is good, because “it looks like an RPG Maker game” is considered a grave insult by some people on the Internet.)

I’m not going to share any specific details about the game I’m putting together to learn the program as, if it ever gets finished, I want it to be a nice surprise for my friends to enjoy (but hopefully a certain amount of appeal to those of you who don’t know me quite so well, also). However, I can talk a bit about some of the plugins and goodies I’ve been making use of.

An absolutely essential site for those wanting to go beyond the basic functionality of the RPG Maker MV engine is the MV Plugins Master List. It is, in theory, a central repository of links to the most popular RPG Maker MV plugins, along with snippets of information about them. This was my starting point for exploring the world of plugins.

RPG Maker veterans will be familiar with the name Yanfly, no doubt, as he’s one of the most active users of the program’s various incarnations, and has long been producing some of the most well-regarded plugins and scripts out there. His new site is absolutely rammed with fantastic plugins, all of which are well documented and easy to use. Of particular interest to many people will be his implementations of the popular ATB and CTB battle systems from the Final Fantasy series; when used in conjunction with other plugins to alter how the battle screen looks and works, it’s easier than ever to put together a really distinctive looking game with easily understandable mechanics.

Himeworks is another great resource for plugins. Not only does Tsukihime produce some excellent, again well-documented plugins, she (I think?) is also an active member of both the RPG Maker community in general and the community on her own site, offering helpful advice and accepting feedback for her plugins through the comment sections.

Aekashics has some great resources, this time mostly visual ones for use in battle or as appropriate throughout your project. Aekashics has a very distinctive style that is nice and consistent between all the different resources available, and they’re all very high quality. If you don’t want to use the default RPG Maker monsters but are as cack-handed as me when it comes to producing artwork, Aekashics’ site should be your first stop.

Here are a few other cool plugins I’ve been using:

PrettyGauges – a delightfully simple plugin that allows you to easily customise the rather amateurish-looking default HP, MP and suchlike gauges in RPG Maker MV.
TerraxLighting – a super-cool lighting system that allows you to use events as light sources on your maps. The radius and colour of the light sources can be adjusted, and they can even be made to “flicker” slightly to simulate fire or electronic screens. Using lighting makes a huge difference to how RPG Maker MV’s default visuals look.
VictorEngine – a series of useful plugins that run a similar gamut to Yanfly’s collection. Where VE wins out over Yanfly is in things like the customisation of visual elements like the battle screen status window and suchlike, whereas many of Yanfly’s plugins are more focused on new or optimised functionality.

I’m having a lot of fun so far. Whatever you might think of RPG Maker-produced games, there’s no denying that the software itself is an extremely fun, creative tool that allows anyone to put together something that will make them happy. It can also be a great jumping-on point to learn coding principles, even if you’re not writing your own JavaScript plugins yourself — the Event system’s pseudo-code is a good way of thinking about how things work and how you tell a computer to do things, but is simple and straightforward enough I bet even my friend James (who, when it comes to technology, is borderline retarded, which is strange because he’s otherwise a very clever chap) could make an NPC walk around and call the player a bellend.

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.

2118: Mini Metro

A new release on Steam caught my eye earlier today: one Mini Metro, an abstract puzzle game based around the idea of subway systems. Feeling like taking a punt on something unusual, I downloaded it and was delighted to discover a simple to understand but tricky to master puzzle game with some highly original, interesting mechanics and a gorgeous, clean aesthetic.

Mini Metro places you in charge of the subway system of one of several cities around the world. The city itself doesn’t make a huge amount of difference save for the map on which the gameplay is based: most of them have some sort of body of water which will require you to construct tunnels or bridges to traverse, and you only have a limited number of these to use.

The mechanics are simple: stations appear across the map, represented as large shapes. At each station, small shapes appear to represent commuters. The shape of the commuter represents the station they want to get to. They’re not fussy about which one of several identical stations they get to, but they most certainly do want to get to, say, a “triangle” station. In order to fulfil their requests, you need to draw coloured subway lines between the stations in order to set up efficient routes. You begin with just a couple of available colours, but as each in-game “week” passes, you have the option of adding more lines to your network — though you have to be careful, as if you don’t have an actual train to put on the line, it’s not much good to anyone!

As the game progresses, more and more stations appear and the map zooms out to expand the available playing area. Certain stations may be replaced by unique symbols such as stars or pentagons, too, forcing you to ensure that these stations have good access from all lines, or at least a relatively straightforward route of interchanges to use. In order to manage with the growing requirements of your city’s commuters, each “week” you get a new locomotive to add to your network, as well as the choice between either a new colour of line to add or an extra carriage to add to one of your trains, improving its capacity. Using these upgrades effectively is key to success just as much as laying out your lines carefully.

There’s a few different ways to play, too: the standard mode simply ends when one of your stations becomes overcrowded, the endless mode keeps playing regardless of overcrowding, and the Extreme mode forces you to live with your mistakes, as unlike the normal mode you are unable to edit your lines or trains once you’ve put them down. There’s also a Daily Challenge mode, where everyone gets the same level to play on a given day, and competes for the best ranking on leaderboards.

I’ve only played about an hour of Mini Metro so far, but I anticipate it being one of those games I dip into every so often when I have a few spare minutes to while away. It’s an understated, fun little game with some excellent mechanics and a lovely aesthetic, and if you’re a fan of more abstract games it’s well worth a look.

2095: Exploring Space

I’m starting to get a bit interested in Elite Dangerous after chatting about it with a friend the other night. It sounds like the ongoing, active development of the game is starting to pay off a bit with some actual Stuff to Do, albeit Stuff that gets a bit repetitive after a while, from what I understand. There’s a great deal of potential there, however, and with the status of Star Citizen a little uncertain, Elite Dangerous is starting to look a little more like the “safe” choice for next-gen space opera action.

I’m a little loathe to pay full price for Elite Dangerous at this point, however, since the thing I’m particularly interested in — the Horizons expansion, which adds planetary landings to the mix — costs about the same as the base game of Elite Dangerous and, in fact, comes with a copy of Elite Dangerous included, too, meaning that if you want to play Elite Dangerous now and enjoy Horizons when it comes out, you effectively have to pay for it twice, which is a bit poo, but that’s not what I’m going to get into today.

Anyway. The point is, while I was looking at Elite Dangerous and willing the price to magically drop by itself, I spotted some “related” games on Steam that looked intriguing. One in particular caught my eye: Rodina. I became even more interested in this after reading a user review that compared it favourably to 16-bit classics Starglider and Damocles, so I decided to check out the free demo this evening.

Rodina is a game that prides itself on seamless exploration. And for once, that isn’t an exaggeration: you start the game on foot on an asteroid, follow a signal to find your spaceship, hop into your spaceship, wander around inside your spaceship, take off, fly around the asteroid, find some bits to make your spaceship better, take off again, leave the asteroid, start flying around the solar system and start investigating planets for a mysterious alien menace that appears to have thwarted humanity’s attempts to colonise the stars.

Rodina is technically in Early Access at the moment, but it is possible to “finish” it already, apparently, by seeing through the whole story. The story is primarily told through text boxes that appear through a combination of messages you receive on your ship’s communication system and data crystals you find scattered around on the various stellar bodies around the solar system. It’s an intriguing little tale with some good writing, though seeing interactions between people depicted through this rather cold medium makes the game itself feel like a rather lonely experience — doubtless intentional.

The premise is intriguing enough, to be sure. The execution… well, it’s difficult to make a fully informed judgement based on just an hour of the demo — take note, Mike Diver of Vice and your atrocious Senran Kagura 2 review, no I haven’t forgotten about you — but I have mixed feelings so far. On the one hand, it’s cool to see a game with such a great sense of scale; the solar system in which the game unfolds feels big, and stellar bodies feel like more than bitmaps you fly towards until they suddenly, magically become a 3D planet surface. There’s a cool atmospheric re-entry system where you have to wrestle with your ship’s controls as you descend, and successfully popping out of the bottom of this is always a satisfying moment.

Trouble is, like many games of this type, the scenery is a little bit bland, or at least it has been in what I’ve seen so far. Everything, be it planet or asteroid, appears to be variations on “coloured ground with procedurally generated mountains”; there aren’t any real geographical features to speak of, so don’t expect something like No Man’s Sky from this. This takes a little bit of the fun out of the exploration; a key part of space exploration simulators — and what I’m hoping Elite Dangerous: Horizons will nail later in the year — is allowing you to discover all manner of weird and wonderful things around the galaxy. Rodina has plenty of things to discover, for sure, but for one thing, they’re all signposted with waypoints when you get close enough, and secondly, everything I’ve discovered so far has been nothing more than a few randomly scattered crates and barrels and one or two data crystals. While the story these apparent crash sites was revealing was interesting, by the end of the demo it was already starting to get a little bit tiresome to track down these logs.

There’s a lot of potential, for sure, and just as I was finishing the demo, the game was starting to open up a bit, suggesting that I travel to the actual planets in the system to deal with the alien menace rather than just finding log after log. It sounds as if at the present time, there aren’t really any friendly NPCs to interact with, which is a shame, but it’s something the developer intends to include in the future.

I’m not sure I liked the demo enough to want to drop 11 quid on the full game just yet, but it’s certainly an intriguing little game with a great deal of potential that I’ll probably keep my eye on to see how it develops. I’m all for more space games, since we’ve been deprived of them for a good few years; hopefully this is the beginning of a renaissance.

2015: Ziggurat Vertigo

One of the best — or worst, depending on your perspective — things about PlayStation Plus is that there are regular deals on a wide variety of games, seemingly almost at random. During these sale periods, games drop to Steam sale-tier prices (i.e. £2-3 for a typical indie game) and consequently make trying some new things out a rather more appealing prospect than it might be under other circumstances.

So it was that I came across a PS4 game called Ziggurat the other day. I didn’t know much about it, but it sounded like it might be fun, so I grabbed it for £3 and gave it a shot. Turns out it is a lot of fun — and nothing to do with a not-particularly-good iOS game by the same name that I played a while back. (Thankfully.)

Ziggurat is the latest in the interminable line of “roguelites” out there; that offshoot of the roguelike genre that keeps the “permadeath” and “procedurally generated” parts and ditches the heavy-duty stat crunching and turn-based exploration in favour of something a bit more immediate, accessible and, in many cases, action-packed. Sometimes it works better than others; procedural generation is something that is very impressive on paper, but in practice it can often lead to levels that are chaotic messes with no real sense of “design” about them, just some tiles splattered around the map at random. This sort of thing is fine in an ASCII roguelike, but less fine in a game with actual visuals.

Thankfully, Ziggurat eschews the totally random approach and instead constructs its levels in a modular manner, somewhat similar to how board games like Advanced Heroquest and Descent construct their dungeons. Rooms are linked together by corridors to make an enclosed map; you start in one place, have to find a “portal key” somewhere in the level, then take it to the boss room, fight the boss and continue to the next level. It’s a simple, tried but true structure and fits well in the context of the game.

There is a sort of plot to Ziggurat, but it’s of the “back of a napkin” tier from old-school arcadey games from the 8- and 16-bit era. You’re some sort of wizard, and every so often the opportunity arises to fight your way through the eponymous Ziggurat to become a super-awesome elite wizard. It’s more likely that you will die, though, which is okay, because the “sacrifices” of unworthy novices pay tribute to the old gods, or something like that. It doesn’t really matter.

What you do need to know is that Ziggurat is pretty much a spiritual successor to Heretic and Hexen, two games that came out back in the golden age of 2.5D sprite-based first-person shooters. Heretic and Hexen were noteworthy in that they were first-person shooters that opted for a fantasy setting rather than the (then) more common space marine situation. (Military shooters were still somewhat niche interest at this point, and multiplayer was something that was only really played by people who had IPX networks at their workplace.) Despite the fantasy setting, though, neither Heretic nor Hexen were role-playing games; they were action games through and through, with most of the weaponry on offer having clear analogues in more conventional modern and futuristic weaponry.

Ziggurat follows this pattern nicely. You start with a basic magic wand that is a rough analogue to the peashooter pistol that was the default weapon in games like Doom and its ilk. As you progress, you’ll acquire spellbooks (shotguns), magic staves (machine guns) and alchemical weapons (rocket/grenade launchers). Each of these weapons requires a different colour mana (ammo type) to power, with the exception of the pistol… sorry, wand, which recharges its mana over time if you stop firing.

The interesting addition to the Heretic/Hexen formula — and something that Hexen II touched on — is a progression system. As you defeat enemies, they drop “knowledge crystals” which provide experience points. Filling your experience bar causes you to level up and be able to pick from cards that depict “perks” of various descriptions. These are randomly drawn each game and range from immediate benefit (heal life, regain mana) to ongoing buffs (recover health when you enter a new room, increase the amount of mana you can hold for a particular weapon) to temporary buffs (magic wand does double damage in your next combat). Once you’ve picked one, on subsequent level ups you generally get the option to buff up a perk you’ve already taken or add a new one to your collection. There are even some perks that allow you to choose from a wider selection of perks on subsequent level ups, so there’s a fair bit of variety.

Structurally, Ziggurat isn’t quite as freeform as Heretic and Hexen. Rather than fighting your way through a linear-ish level, you freely explore the level, uncovering rooms one at a time. Rooms will generally be either a “special” room of some description — perhaps with traps, treasure or the portal key — or a standard room with a swarm of enemies to defeat. If you encounter enemies, you’re deemed to have started “a battle” and are locked in the room until you defeat all of them. There’s a decent mix of enemies, ranging from carrots that charge at you screaming to ghostly maidens that fling some description of otherworldly shit at you. Like the classic first-person shooters of yore, different weapons are more or less practical against different enemy types, though a generous auto-aim facility makes aiming and shooting with the controller less of a chore than it is in some games.

A pleasantly old-school throwback in Ziggurat’s overall structure is the fact that you have a score, though you don’t find out what it is until the end of a level or the end of your game. You score points for all sorts of things, ranging from collecting items to clearing rooms — and, obviously, the longer you survive, the higher your score will be. There’s even an “Endless” mode to challenge for those who are gluttons for punishment — though I’m yet to make it past the second level on normal mode!

Ziggurat is a lot of fun, then, and if you’re looking for something relatively quick and throwaway to play — and you miss the ’90s era of first-person shooters — then you could do far worse than give it a shot, if you’ll pardon the pun.

2013: Starchaser

Interesting indie game time? Interesting indie game time.

I’m a big fan of the doujin (independently-developed) games that Playism brings to the West. Japanese indie games have a very distinctive character about them; they’re rarely the most technically impressive games in the world (though there are exceptions, like wonderfully gorgeous shoot ’em up Astebreed) but it’s rare to find one that doesn’t feel like it’s been infused with heart, soul and love. The doujin culture in Japan breeds people who are passionate and enthusiastic about their work; these aren’t people who are making games to prove a point, these are people who are making games because they love making games.

One of Playism’s most recent releases is a peculiar little platformer called Starchaser: Priestess of the Night Sky. This is the work of a doujin circle called Nonlinear, and the designer’s philosophy behind the game is an interesting one: he wanted to make a 3D game where the concept of 3D actually mattered. He has a point; there’s a lot of games out there that are presented in 3D, but which actually only practically play in two dimensions at once. Even renowned games like Super Mario 3D Land/World tend to only have the player worrying about two dimensions at a time for the most part; it’s rare you have to worry about the width, length and height of an environment at the same time in a Mario game, and that format works well for its accessible, family-friendly formula.

Starchaser, then, takes a slightly different approach to 3D platforming. Unfolding through a series of levels on both the inside and outside faces of a series of cubes, you control a young girl as she learns to commune with the stars by navigating through several perilous labyrinths of these cubes. The game starts very simple, but it’s not long before it introduces one of its core mechanics: gravity floors. These checkerboard cubes have their own gravitational pull, so if you’re airborne (through jumping, falling or walking off the side of something) you’ll be sucked towards the nearest one if you’re within its zone of influence. This may well be at a completely different angle to where you were standing a moment ago; Starchaser’s levels unfold making full use of all three dimensions, and you’ll have to look around in every direction carefully to negotiate a pathway towards your destination, making quick-witted use of the gravity mechanic and more conventional platform skills in order to survive.

It’s actually a really delightful game to play. It reminds me somewhat of PS1-era puzzlers like Kula World, Kurushi Final and the like. At least part of this is due to its somewhat… functional presentation (it won’t run in 1920×1080, and it won’t exceed 30 frames per second) but even with its (apparently deliberate) technical limitations, it’s a joy to play, once you get used to the peculiar control scheme. It’s a very distinctive, original take on the 3D platformer, and a great game to dip in and out of when you fancy banging your brain against some fiendish environmental puzzles and enjoyable boss fights.

Starchaser is available now either direct from Playism or on Steam — buy on Playism and you get a Steam key for free.

2006: Interstellaria

I’d made a promise to myself not to get suckered into trying any more endearingly retro-styled 2D pixel-art exploration-centric games, because the last few I’ve tried (Terraria and Starbound spring immediately to mind) ended up being enormously disappointing and pretty boring to me. (I’m not necessarily saying they’re bad, mind, more that the Minecraft model of “here’s a world, do stuff in it” just doesn’t really appeal to me any more.)

However, I happened to see Interstellaria on Steam earlier today, and for just £7 I felt I had to take a look at it. And, for once — so far, anyway — I wasn’t disappointed.

Interstellaria is perhaps best described as a successor to the old late-’80s/early-’90s space exploration games like Starflight, Star Control II and Space Rogue. You get a ship, you recruit a crew, you upgrade your ship, you explore the galaxy, you fight things, you discover treasures, you uncover a galaxy-spanning mystery and (perhaps) save the universe in the process.

Interstellaria throws you straight in to its world from the outset. Thrown out of your erstwhile home by your flatmate who is no longer content to have a scrounging, unemployed wastrel living rent-free under their roof, you take to the streets in search of gainful employment. After dismantling a robot for the nice man who lives just over the road from you, you find yourself recruited into the slightly shady-seeming crew of a starship that is about to take off. The starship begins its grand adventure and fends off a pirate attack in a thinly-veiled combat tutorial, then is ripped to pieces by an unknown enemy craft, but not before your former captain runs away, leaving you in charge of the crash landing from which you are ultimately the only survivor.

Fortunately, it seems, you’ve crash landed on a planet where there’s another starship that’s almost in working order. You come across a fellow survivor and team up to get the elderly ship back into space again, and from there it’s up to you to start discovering the truth behind the mystery of the “Abductors”, a race of aliens who appear to be giving the galaxy a certain degree of grief.

From here on, you have freedom to explore and do stuff around the galaxy, though you’re nudged pretty strongly in the direction of following the plot. Gameplay is split into a few different areas: managing your ship, space combat and planetary exploration.

Managing your ship is a little like FTL: Faster Than Light in that you have to assign crew members to stations according to their skills (which develop over time). You also have to take care of your crew’s needs — hunger, boredom and fatigue — by providing them with facilities to relieve these issues whenever necessary. The ship you start with has both limited space to include modules — there’s pretty much room for basic navigation, sensors, engineering and tactical stations and one of each of the “needs” modules and not much else — and power to devote to them, so you have to juggle power around according to your ship’s needs at any given moment.

Get into combat and you’d better hope you remembered to put some power into the weapons systems and charge them up, because you’ll need them. Unfolding on a small tactical display (which provides more information if you have someone manning the sensors) you can move your ship around in real time as well as see incoming missiles, cannon fire and other projectiles. In this way, you can dodge and avoid enemy fire while attacking your foe; it’s an interesting, slow-paced take on “bullet hell” in some ways, and it’s a nicely unconventional take on space combat that is in keeping with the 2D pixel art aesthetic.

Head down onto a planet and you’ll have the option of visiting one or more different landing sites, assuming the planet has a breathable atmosphere. Each landing site is a few screens wide (rather than a never-ending procedurally generated world) and usually features some enemies, some resources to harvest and, occasionally, interesting artifacts, characters and plot-related shenanigans. Controlling each of your crew members independently (or as a group) you can direct them to explore, harvest materials, enter into combat with enemies and interact with the locals. Each planet has a distinctive look, feel and soundtrack (the music is by chiptune artist Chipzel and is really rather good) and manage to feel relatively “organic” without falling back on random procedural generation. (At least I don’t think so.)

The game’s not without its flaws — the interface is a bit clunky in places, the keyboard inputs aren’t as responsive as they could be, camera controls on ground missions are bugged and combat is… lacking in depth, to say the least — but all these issues are more than made up for by the fact that it’s the first game in a very long time that I feel has proven to be an adequate successor to the classic space exploration sims I mentioned earlier. It has a lot of potential to improve over time, and is already an interesting, charming game that is well worth your time, particularly if you’re feeling nostalgic.

1993: The Joy of Smaller Games

You know me by now; I enjoy a good 100+ hour RPG that I can sink my teeth into over a long period of time, but I’m often reminded quite how much a short, simple, straightforward game can hit the spot on occasion.

There’s a lot of different places you can get this sort of experience, but I’ve been finding it particularly pleasant on the PlayStation 4 recently — thanks in part to freebies delivered through PlayStation Plus, and partly simply due to the selection of excellent, low-cost indie titles available on the platform.

Triple-A junkies are quick to whinge about the number of indie titles on PS4, particularly when they show up as PlayStation Plus freebies — they’re seen as “less valuable” somehow — but, in actual fact, the PS4 is a good home to them. Not only is the Dual Shock 4 eminently suitable for fast-paced arcade games — which a lot of these titles, which tend to channel retro sensibilities somewhat, err on the side of — but social features like the screenshot sharing, online leaderboards and live video broadcasting make otherwise solo experiences into much more compelling prospects that can be shared with others.

Most recently, I’ve been particularly enjoying a couple of games, and in many ways they are polar opposites of one another.

The first is a title called Woah Dave, an Atari 2600-style platformer from the people who created the Bit Trip series a while back. Woah Dave is a deceptively simple but enormously addictive take on the Mario Bros/Bubble Bobble formula in that all you have to do is survive for as long as possible while fending off never-ending waves of enemies. You can jump, you can pick up things, you can throw them. That’s it. It gets more frantic as you progress, and the only reason to play is to try and get a high score. And that is reason enough.

Woah Dave is testament to the fact that strong gameplay will always be compelling and enjoyable, regardless of technical proficiency. That said, while the game looks like a mess of gigantic pixels in about 8 colours, it runs at a silky smooth framerate, with extremely responsive controls and a very enjoyable overall “feel” to the whole experience. It’s dumb and it’s silly and it’s shallow, but it’s a lot of fun.

The other game I’ve been playing a bit recently is a shoot ’em up called Astebreed. I was a big fan of this when it originally released on PC, so I decided to “double dip” on the PlayStation 4 version, and haven’t been disappointed.

Astebreed is a beautiful-looking, 1080p, 60 frames per second cinematic shoot ’em up in which you pilot a giant mecha with some unconventional weapons systems as you attempt to fend off the unwanted advances of alien race the Filune. Along the way you learn more about their human experimentation and the true fate of your adoptive father and his two daughters, who have been made into living parts of a Filune reality alteration system that has the potential to be used as a deadly weapon.

The plot is pure anime — and, frankly, a little difficult to follow, given that a lot of it unfolds while the action is coming thick and fast on screen, leaving little time to read subtitles — but it’s snappy, pacy, dramatic and even a little emotional. Unlockable documents that you can read after clearing the game once show that the game world, setting and backstory have been very comprehensively fleshed out, too, and the whole experience is wonderfully polished until it shines.

I’m still rubbish at it, though.