The Stack

Once more, a recent indie title can be played to the point of rolling the credits in under six hours (and that includes one particularly hard jumping sequence that probably took me a half an hour all by itself). It apparently expects you to play it through multiple times, trying to better your performance ratings. Is this the general trend these days? It seems like not long ago that Portal‘s length was a cause of widespread complaint. I suppose this is something that ebbs and flows. You certainly didn’t find 40-hour epics in the arcades of old. When I first tried MAME, I was shocked at just how short those games became when you have infinite quarters. But that’s what fit the arcade machine model, and I suppose the current trend towards many short cheap titles reflects the market of XBLA and its ilk.

A.R.E.S. is a 2D (with 3D graphics) platformer/shooter in which you play an advanced humanoid robot fighting hordes of less-advanced evil robots. In other words, it’s the same story as Megaman, and to a large degree the same gameplay as well. But where Megaman has cartoony, round-featured art that indicates a target audience of children, A.R.E.S. has a shiny mecha anime look aimed at slightly older children. The game supports both gamepad and mouse/keyboard controls; in the latter, the keyboard moves your avatar around while the mouse cursor aims your gun. I’ve encountered such schemes before — I think Crack dot Com’s Abuse was the first. I found it extremely awkward in Abuse, but it feels pretty natural to me here. I’m not sure if this is more due to the game or to my improved skills as a player. Probably the game. You throw a lot of bullets around here, and the targets tend to be fairly big, so it’s not like you need to aim all that precisely.

Dead robots turn into scraps that you can collect and “recycle” to purchase health packs, grenades, and, most importantly, upgrades for your various weapons. I found that a single pass through the game wasn’t enough to get me enough scrap for everything I needed to take out the end boss — I got the upgrades I wanted, but only by spending so much that I couldn’t afford enough health packs. The game encourages you to go back and replay earlier chapters in situations like this. In other words, it’s got grinding. The unusual thing about this is how non-diegetic it is. Not only does the plot not allow for the possibility of taking a break from the immediate crisis to go level up your gear (a dissonance that’s pretty common in CRPGs), the mechanics don’t allow for it either. This is a game that keeps locking doors behind you. The only way to access earlier areas is through a menu, and when you do, you effectively go back in time, but with cooler stuff. I recall commenting about similar things going on in Lego Star Wars, but it seemed more like a tool for completists there, and less like a necessary part of one’s first pass through the game.

Here’s a game that Steam has been pushing relentlessly, including it in various bundles and promotions. It’s priced at $5, but it keeps on being put on sale at 75% off and the like. I guess the main reason is that this is a year-old remake of a ten-year-old game. It’s an extremely slick remake, though. Slick and cute.

So, what we have here is a puzzle-platformer, with puzzles driven by limited use of tools, Lemmings-style. (Not that the game resembles Lemmings in any other respect.) Tools include simple things like the ability to create bridges and blocks, and also exotic mechanics like “ghost traps” that create a hole in a brick floor when a ghost passes over it. Between the ghost trap and the freeze gun, which turns monsters into blocks that you can stand on, monsters in this game are often less enemies than opportunities to alter the level. There are complicated puzzles based around getting monsters to go where they’ll be useful.

The goal on every level is to collect a number of eggs lodged in inconvenient places. As soon as you have done so, the level ends. The nice thing about this sort of goal is that the ordering of the sub-goals can be an emergent property of the level design. For example, sometimes there’s a particular egg that has to be collected last because it’s in a place that you can only leave by using up tools needed elsewhere. I’m reminded of the general “kill all the monsters” goal in DROD, which had a similar effect on gameplay. In fact, I’d call the puzzle content here overall very DRODdish in feel, even though the mechanics are completely different. At the more advanced levels, this is a game about what the DROD community calls “lynchpins”: realizations about what sort of interactions are possible.

One thing worthy of special note is the “rewind” feature, which I assume wasn’t present in the original version from 2001. You can take your actions back continuously, kind of like in Braid, except that it’s not part of the puzzle content here; it’s just a convenience for the solver, and a pretty useful one for this kind of puzzle-solving. I remember that when Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time came out there was a review that said that the ability to rewind your mistakes was such a staggeringly obvious improvement that every game from now on was going to have to have that feature in order to be taken seriously. Well, not a lot of games took that to heart, but Toki Tori is one of them. Also of note is the way that rewinding distorts the screen in imitation of rewinding a VHS tape. Now, the graphical style of this game suggests it’s aimed at children. Is the sight of a videotape rewinding something that children understand these days? Has it entered the lexicon of things obsolete but iconic, like the scratch of a phonograph needle?

Just like last post, we have here a game that I purchased in a bundle deal some time back but didn’t get around to trying until it was made part of the current summer promotion on Steam, and which I finished in less than a day after I finally started it. It probably won’t be the last.

Jolly Rover is one of those games that’s easy to sum up in a single sentence: it’s Monkey Island with anthropomorphic dogs. Seriously, the MI influence here is so strong that I think I have to call it homage in order to avoid calling it rip-off. You’ve got the nerdish hero who becomes a pirate over the course of the game, the damsel in distress who’s more competent than the hero, the voodoo, the ghost pirate, the cannibals who turn out to not really be cannibals, the occasional mentions of circuses, the jungle maze that you can only navigate with cryptic instructions and the cavern maze that you can only navigate with aid from the dead. There’s an opening chapter at a settled island with a pirate bar (where the locals complain about how bad business is lately), which you return to in the end, just before a wedding takes place. It even reuses a couple of MI‘s jokes.

The details are shuffled around, of course. The ghost pirate isn’t your enemy. The wedding doesn’t involve the damsel in distress at all. The circus is part of the player character’s backstory and device for “Son, I’m proud of you” material. The voodoo is primarily a magic system used by the player, with puzzle-solving effects like heating iron and making trees drop their fruit.

The biggest difference is that Jolly Rover is just a much gentler game. I mean that both in the sense that it has a more relaxed ambience, and that it gives the player a lot more help. You get a parrot companion early on who dispenses hints in exchange for crackers (a collectible scattered throughout the game), but outright hints are just the beginning of the help you get. The game highlights clickable objects when you hold down the space bar. It also keeps track of what you’ve done, so you don’t have to: any action with a result you’ve already seen will have its highlight text in white, while any action that yields something new has blue text. This rule holds even when clicking on an item multiple times yields different results: it’ll highlight in blue until it runs out of reactions.

And it’s only polite that it gives you this much help in finding things you haven’t clicked yet, because this is a game that really wants you to click on everything. There are three distinct sets of collectibles — the aforementioned crackers, pieces of eight, and fragments of pirate flags — that can turn up pretty much anywhere. Click a wooden statue, and it might turn out to have crackers stuck in its teeth. Sometimes crackers can be collected from a single barrel multiple times. I haven’t achieved 100% completion in this stuff yet, but this is exactly the kind of thoroughness challenge that obsessed me as a child hunting for all the points in the Sierra games, and so I may come back to Jolly Rover the next time I’m in the mood for mechanically working my way through all the objects in a room until all the text turns white. (It’ll be an opportunity to listen to the Developer Commentary, which unlocks after winning the game once.)

There are two features that I felt worth singling out. First, this is a game with a status line, containing the player’s current score, an old-fashioned rank title determined by that score, and a brief statement of your current Quest: “Join a crew”, for example, or “Find Treasure”, or “Make Salamagundi”. It reminds me a bit of the use of the status line in The Blind House, but here, it’s used for humor: sometimes the Quest line changes several times over the course of a cutscene as the player character’s assessment of the situation changes. For example, at one point it goes from “Make friends with the nice pirate ladies” to “Hide from the scary killer pirate ladies” over the course of an overheard conversation. This particular mechanism obviously isn’t a Monkey Island imitation, but the playful treatment of the user interface struck me as being much more in the spirit of Monkey Island than a lot of the things that imitated it quite closely.

Secondly, there are a couple of items that are too large to carry, but which go into the player’s inventory when clicked anyway, with the explanation that the PC is just remembering where it is so he can move it when he needs it. The inventory item in these cases is just a memory, a token that lets you signify your desire to use a distant object. This is an approach to inventory that I’ve contemplated using before, and not just for exceptional cases, but for everything in the game. Really, all it requires is a slight change of concept: consider inventory not as what you’re carrying on your person, but as the set of tools at your disposal, including anything that you can get at easily. But is such a reconception really even necessary? The way inventory is treated in adventures is typically pretty abstract already. Text adventures sometimes make a nod at realism by putting a limit on how much you can carry and forcing you to drop stuff, but graphic adventures frequently don’t even allow you to drop stuff. We have no problem accepting this, which is a pretty good indication that we’re already thinking of the inventory as composed of puzzle tokens rather than physical objects. Whether this is a good thing probably depends on the story you’re trying to tell.

OK, I’m interrupting the expedition to Syberia. I intend to get back to it soon. But for now, Steam is having another one of its promotions. Like last year’s “Treasure Hunt” (or this year’s “Potato Sack” promotion for Portal 2, which I sat out), it involves earning rewards via special Achievements in various games. And as before, I’m not particularly interested in the rewards, but I find the Achievements appealing. I don’t intend to buy any games just for the promotion, but I’ll certainly be trying for the Achievements in the games that I already have.

Day 1 of the promotion featured two such games, AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!, which was also featured in Day 1 of the previous promotion (perhaps because it tends to come up first in alphabetical listings), and Swords & Soldiers, a game I know nothing about which I got in a recent Indie bundle. (For my money, games that I know nothing about are pretty much the point of those bundles.) AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!‘s new Achievement is to complete a special level with a five-star rating, and I made some attempts at this, but found it difficult; on a couple of tries, I came close enough that I would have succeeded if I didn’t keep smashing into things so much. This was frustrating enough that I took a break with S&S, which proved engaging enough that I wound up playing all the way through campaign mode for all three of its sides.

S&S is a port of a WiiWare game, but to my newly-sensitized-to-iOS eyes, it seems like it was developed with an eventual phone port in mind. Everything about the UI is extremely touchscreen-friendly. What’s more, it seems like a pretty good example of a post-Angry Birds iPhone game, or at least part of the same stylistic trend as Angry Birds: it’s all broad slapstick and extreme stylization. I just described the caricature in Syberia as restrained. There’s no sense of restraint in S&S. It’s a story of three childish nations warring over things like barbecue sauce and toys. The three sides, in the order they become available for play, are the Vikings, the Aztecs, and the Chinese, all thoroughly stereotyped, which strikes me as especially problematic in the case of the Chinese, who still exist. (Sure, descendants of Aztecs and Vikings exist, but the Aztec civilization is long gone, and Viking was always more of an occupation than a race.) The Chinese here speak in pidgin, they say things like “Ah, chop chop” when summoned, their swordsmen wear conical straw hats (which as far as I’m aware have never been part of any military uniform), etc. So it’s not even current stereotyping, but more like Chinese stereotypes from the 1930s, which is probably why the authors thought it was acceptable. For my part, as a white guy, it’s not my place to be offended on other people’s behalf, but it’s nonetheless too embarrassing to pass without comment, and for that reason has engendered some painfully clueless arguments about racism on the Steam forums (content warning: “It’s just a game” used).

Regardless, the gameplay is interesting. It’s essentially an RTS with asymmetric sides. It’s also a simplification of the genre, like Eufloria but in a completely different way. The biggest simplification is that the map is one-dimensional. Some maps have bits where the path splits for a while and rejoins, with a railroad-like switch at the branch point to tell your units which way to go, but even there, within the path you choose, you’re fighting for distance along a line. Furthermore, you have no direct control over your units. Whenever they’re not fighting, they’re moving from left to right. As is normal for an RTS, the simplest way to win fights is to have lots of units together, but the fact that they all go running off the moment they’re summoned tends to work against this approach. Each stereotype has different ways around this. For example, the Vikings, the most straightforward side, have a healing spell that you can use to help your frontmost warrior survive in combat until the guys behind him catch up, while the Chinese have a spell that duplicates a unit, letting you build a posse out of one guy. The Aztecs have necromancer units that can turn corpses into animated skeletons, so each guy that pulls ahead and gets killed gets to be part of an undead horde later.

The interesting part is how little these simplifications change things. In practice, RTS-style gameplay often reduces to a fight along a single path between two bases, each side throwing all they’ve got at it, trying to counter the opponent’s offense efficiently enough to have resources to spare on an effective offense of their own. S&S takes that moment and turns it into the entirety of the game. And it works pretty well. It’s essentially a game of tradeoffs. You’ve got the tradeoffs between current troop strength and research into more powerful stuff, you have to increase your gold-collection rate by spending current gold, and in the later levels of their campaigns, each side develops their own megaweapon that they can use if they can refrain from casting other spells long enough to afford its mana cost. The Aztecs can even sacrifice their own units to gain a little mana, but I suppose that’s essentially the same choice every side makes when they decide whether to cast a defensive spell to save a unit’s life or not. Apparently there are some gambits that are extremely difficult to counter, so two-player play might not be all that interesting in the long run. But the single-player campaign remains interesting and varied for as long as it lasts, which was about six hours for me.

Syberia (not to be confused with the cheesy 1994 FMV game Cyberia) is an atmospheric point-and-click adventure by Benoit Sokal, a Belgian comic book artist and game designer. What is it with Belgian comics and adventure games? Well, in this particular case, I think it has a lot to do with living in the shadow of Hergé. Like the adventures of Tintin, Syberia is a story of traveling to distant lands where everything and everyone is a little odd, rendered in a style that’s fanciful and caricatured, but at the same time oddly restrained about it. This is one of those adventure games with pre-rendered backgrounds under 3D characters and other animated elements. The art is gorgeous, very old-world picturesque with intense clarity of detail and a very pleasing distance haze.

The story starts in an alpine town called Valadilène, where the player character, Kate Walker, a lawyer from New York, has come to arrange a large corporation’s purchase of the old toy factory that forms the basis of not only all the town’s wealth, but much of its machinery and architecture: there’s hardly anything, even in the office of the town’s elderly notary, that isn’t in some way connected to a custom clockwork automaton in a metal top hat. The opening cutscene begins with a funeral procession composed entirely of automatons. Of course, in a sense every single character in the game is an automaton, a machine with fixed inputs and outputs, canned dialogue, and scripted motions that play out as if driven by an uncoiling spring. But I don’t think I’m supposed to have made that connection.

The factory deal is complicated by the owner’s death, which forces you to track down a lost heir, who apparently went off to Siberia on a special clockwork train to look for mammoths or something. Presumably in the process Kate will learn valuable lessons about what’s important in life and stuff; in the beginning, she’s pretty clearly the city slicker amongst simple rural folk, and there’s really only one way that can develop.

I recall getting just past Valadilène to the second chapter before stopping playing this back when it was new. I’m not quite up to that point yet now. I’m finding that I’ve forgotten most of the first chapter, and have to rediscover the solutions to puzzles. There was one particular bit that I remembered quite clearly, though, because it stuck in my craw so badly the first time. At one point, a boy demands that you draw a picture of a mammoth for him. You cannot progress further into the game until you comply. You have a pencil and paper (treated as a single inventory item), but I could not for the life of me figure out how to use them to draw a mammoth. It turned out that you have to apply them to a small carving of a mammoth that I had failed to notice etched into a nearby wall. The problem here isn’t just that the carving is easy to miss, it’s that there’s no clear reason why it’s necessary. Can’t Kate draw a mammoth freehand? Everyone knows what a mammoth looks like. Or, if that’s unacceptable, the game should at least tell us that it’s unacceptable: have the kid look at Kate’s unaided handiwork and say “That’s not what mammoths look like!” or something.

So anyway, that’s what I’m anticipating in the later parts of this game. Lovely art and lousy puzzles.

It took me until the ending to realize this, but the story of Prince of Persia (2008) owes quite a bit to Shadow of the Colossus. Oh, it’s less subtle about it, leaves less unsaid, puts the player in a less morally ambiguous role for the bulk of the game. But the two games share a fundamental story of a woman restored from the dead by means of a Faustian bargain with an imprisoned dark god (who speaks in both male and female voices), a bargain that leaves the buyer physically changed, corrupted (or Corrupted), and the darkness empowered. There’s some similarity of setting as well: an isolated and forgotten valley containing ruins of a dead civilization, including the massive central temple where the darkness is housed.

The chief difference is that in SotC, arranging for the woman’s resurrection by doing the bidding of the darkness is the player’s job, whereas in PoP it’s already happened: Elika’s life was the one restored, and her father, the king, was the one desperate enough from grief to listen to Ahriman’s temptations. As a result, he becomes one of the game’s recurring bosses, always waiting for you back at the temple when you have something important to do there. This state of affairs is revealed in full through dialogue about midway through the game, but disjointed visions hint at it throughout. (In fact, the very first thing you see on starting a new game is a disjointed vision, which seems like a very bad choice to me. As I’ve said before with respect to other games, the purpose of a game’s intro is to orient the player, not disorient them.)

The point is that Elika, as beneficiary of the deal, feels responsible for Ahriman’s imminent escape. This is why she’s pushing herself so hard. Also, she belongs dead, and she knows it. In the end, sealing Ahriman away again means sacrificing the life that she got from him. I’m not quite clear on which is cause and which is effect, as it makes sense either way, but they definitely go together. And what follows is one of the most interesting things about the game, or at least one of the artsiest.

Control of the story effectively ends here, but control of the avatar does not. The Prince picks up Elika’s limp corpse from where it lies, at the base of the now-luminous tree growing on the seal of Ahriman’s tomb, and control is given to the player, who pilots the Prince back outside — there being nowhere else to go. You move slowly; you can’t run or jump while carrying the body. At a certain point in the long passageway out, the credits start scrolling by on one side of the screen. This condition lasts long enough for the player to think of this state, of carrying the dead princess out, as an ending.

But of course it’s an ending that has to come to an end, when you emerge from the temple, and lay Elika down on her mother’s tomb, and still have no place to go. There’s no way out of the valley. The areas you spent most of the game exploring are unreachable without Elika’s magic. You can’t even try to kill yourself; all the cliffs are now protected by invisible walls. You can hear Ahriman whispering about how unjust the situation is, that Ormazd (Elika’s god but explicitly not the skeptical Prince’s) used Elika as his pawn and then discarded her. It’s easy to feel a similar sense of betrayal here, if not by a creator deity, then by the creator of the game.

Restoring the temple had caused four withered stumps on top of stone structures outside to grow back into small trees, each bathed in light. Reaching each of these trees required a different jumping trick — here we are after the credits, but there’s still a bit of genuine gameplay left. This left the question of what to do with the trees once I reached them. It turns out that there’s only one thing you can do, only one input recognized: the Sword button, which chops them down and re-corrupts the area around them. And it was clear: I was being given the opportunity to re-make the choice that Elika’s father made. To bring Elika back to life by giving Ahriman what he wants. To render the entire game thus far moot. To imitate Shadow of the Colossus more directly. A moral choice, leading to good and bad endings (or bad and worse, as the case may be)? No, there’s only one ending. I looked for another option, a way to just leave this place, to leave Elika dead and not make things any worse. The only options are to continue the story by destroying the world, or to quit, which is more or less the same thing.

The strange part is that I kind of feel like quitting was a legitimate option here. I don’t usually feel that way: just as shutting a film off before the final reel doesn’t change the film’s ending, so too does a game with a single scripted ending still have that ending even if you refuse to play through it. But, like I said, this game goes out of its way to make you feel like you’ve already seen the ending of the story at this point. Nonetheless, I played on to the darker conclusion. The last thing you see is the Prince carrying Elika away, groggy but definitely living and not at all pleased, as Ahriman emerges and overtakes them, filling the sky.

Apparently a lot of people were unhappy with this ending, and a DLC epilogue was added to the console versions to pacify them. (The epilogue does not seem to be available through Steam.) However, as seems to usually be the case with unpopular endings, I like it. It is, if nothing else, gutsy. It’s not just a cheap shock ending, because it emerges from the characters — including the self-centeredness of the Prince, who proves through his actions here how little he cares about the epic struggle he’s been assisting, or even about Elika’s wishes. Also, it’s kind of a Snake Plissken ending, a way for the hero to assert his autonomy by defying the powers that dared to assume his continuing loyalty even as the reason for that loyalty was taken away. And that’s something you don’t see a lot in games. (You don’t even really see it in the Metal Gear series, which is on record as taking inspiration from Snake Plissken.) Ironic, then, that for the player, it’s the ending you get by just going along with what the game wants you to do.

Viewing it cynically, though, the whole thing was probably meant mainly as a sequel hook, and from that point of view, it was a failure. Just as well. To my mind, it works best as the last word.

Playing Prince of Persia (2008) again just after sampling Angry Birds makes for an interesting contrast. I said that I was prejudiced against thinking of stuff that you play on a phone as “real games”, but in a way, Angry Birds feels like more of a game than PoP08. Even though your actions in it are limited to operating a slingshot and tapping the screen to activate special abilities, it somehow feels a lot more free than PoP‘s full movement and array of contextual actions. I think this is because the few actions you can perform in AB are more significant: any input is acted on immediately, and small differences can have large consequences. PoP, on the other hand, is designed around discrete actions, and windows of opportunity to to perform them. If you’re swinging by your arms from a horizontal flagpole, and you press the Jump button to flip to another flagpole farther along, the precise moment that you press the button doesn’t matter, as long as it’s within the interval allocated for success. I suppose this is the sort of gameplay that OnLive is ideal for.

This sort of gameplay is the consequence of a particular model of action that goes back to the original 1989 Prince of Persia, a game that was famously built around rotoscoped animation, allowing for movement of unprecedented realism. It was, in essence, the ancestor of modern motion capture — just in 2D, which meant that all they needed to capture motions was a movie camera. But a rotoscoped animation is just a static series of frames, something that can’t respond to changes. Most other platformers didn’t put such a high priority on fluidity of motion, and therefore didn’t care if they snapped directly from a walk animation to a jump, or from running at full speed to the left to running at the same speed to the right. In PoP, jumps were linked to the Prince’s stride, and switching directions meant playing a brief animation of the Prince skidding to a halt and turning around. Anyone who’s played the original for any length of time has toyed with just skidding left and right repeatedly.

Now jump forward nearly two decades and add wall-running. A wall-run is a pre-recorded animation. When the animation ends, the Prince has to go into one of his other animations, such as catching hold of a ring embedded in the wall and swinging himself further onward, or planting his feet against the wall and jumping outward, or plummeting. Unlike simple 2D rotoscoping, a 3D engine allows for blending of animations, and we see that in cases where the player is allowed to interrupt an animation at any point, such as jumping away from a wall-run. Nonetheless, in a lot of situations, animations are allowed to play out in full before further input from the player is acted on. It’s like moves in a fighting game. I compared the combat sequences to a simplified Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat before, but the same movement model, and therefore the same feel, is found in the acrobatics as well.

It should be noted that the developers really did go all-out in producing the movement animations, particularly in the way they accomodate Elika. Elika follows your every move, swinging from the same flagpoles and balancing on the same beams. When this would normally result in Elika occupying the same space as the Prince, there are special two-person animations built around it. For example, if you’re both balancing on a beam and you try to move the Prince into the spot Elika occupies, the two of them execute a tricky maneuver where they swap places by grasping each others’ arms, putting their toes together, and pivoting 180 degrees. When I saw this for the first time, I was incredulous that two strangers could pull that off without exchanging any words. But as the game goes on, you of course get used to such things. Which, also inevitably, means that they stop being impressive. It’s got so that I try to keep significantly ahead of Elika most of the time just so that I don’t have to spend time waiting for the more elaborate two-person animations to execute.

Hardware failure has left me unable to continue in Prince of Persia for the nonce, so in the meanwhile, let’s find out what the big deal is with Angry Birds. I’ve had access to iOS devices for a while, but I haven’t really tried to play games on them, even though they’re dirt cheap compared to most PC and console stuff. I suppose I still somehow regard them as some how less “real” than PC games, which is an irrational prejudice that I’ll have to play a few to overcome.

So, Angry Birds. The gameplay consists of catapulting projectiles (in the form of cartoon birds) at structures made of blocks of various materials (glass, wood, stone) that have enough of a 2D physics engine behind them for them to react convincingly to all kinds of impact, weight, and pressure. Most types of bird also have some special action that can be triggered once during their initial flight, such as speeding up or exploding. As in Peggle, you control the launch angle without a lot of feedback about what the effect will be, which gives the game a substantial luck factor. This creates partial reinforcement. Although some levels definitely have specific planned solutions in which you target a series of structural vulnerabilities, there’s always the possibility that you’ll win by a fluke if you just keep trying over and over. I can see this as contributing to the game’s popularity (just as it did in Peggle), but I understand that there are a bunch of Flash games based on the same mechanics that haven’t been such monumental commercial successes. I’m not really familiar with them, and presumably neither are most Angry Birds players, but most of what I’ve described so far seems unavoidable.

Whatever the virtues of the other castle-smashers, I’ll give Angry Birds this: it handles well. It’s very responsive to the touch and supports all the most-used touchscreen operations, including wipes to scroll the playfield back and forth and scrunching the screen to resize the view. And for that reason alone, it’s probably worth playing on its original target platform, even now that it’s been ported to PC.

All that said, I have to say that I’m taken aback by how mean-spirited the game feels. First off, the goal is to crush pigs to death. The pigs, located in and around the structures you’re smashing, are ugly green creatures, stylized into just heads, which roll around if nudged. They can’t fight back. They’re utterly helpless. When hurt but not hurt enough to pop, they develop bruises and black eyes. And your motivation for crushing them — well, the ostensible reason that the birds are so angry involves stolen eggs. Goodness knows if the specific pigs you’re smashing with bricks were involved in that at all; the birds certainly don’t seem to care. But that really isn’t important; it only comes up in a cutscene once every 21 levels, and besides, it’s only the motivation within the fiction. The motivation for the player is what’s in front of you all the time: the pigs are ugly and disgusting, and they laugh at you. If you fail a level (by using up all your birds without murdering all the pigs), the survivors smile snaggle-toothed grins and guffaw piggishly. If you fail to fail, you get raucous and triumphant avian laughter from your own side. That’s the game’s mindset: the only options are to laugh at or be laughed at, to dominate or be dominated. Life is mean.

Furthermore, the birds, who are presented as being capable of emotion (or one emotion, anyway), are deliberately reducing themselves to nothing more than weapons, things to be used, and used up. I’ve seen it posited before that the birds are terrorists: they are, after all, killing their victims (not enemies, as I hope I’ve made clear, but victims) by flying into buildings. I’ve seen that suggested jocularly, but I didn’t realize until I played just how close to the surface it is. The birds are making suicide attacks: shortly after a bird comes to rest, it goes poof. As I mentioned above, there’s one type that explodes on command, which makes it specifically a suicide bomber. They even make use of their offspring this way: there’s one type of bird whose special ability is to drop an egg, which falls straight down and explodes (while the bird itself, having no other purpose than to give birth to a weapon, collapses into a flaccid husk and perishes). Remember that the birds’ whole casus belli was to protect their eggs. Either that was just a pretext, or something has gone very wrong in the execution of this war.

The real hallmark of mean-spiritedness, though, is that when it presents cruelty and dehumanization, it expects you to respond with laughter. But there are definitely people who respond to that, and they’re probably underserved by the game industry in general. So I expect that this is part of its popularity. Although honestly I suspect that it’s sold as well as it has mostly just through a positive feedback loop, with people buying it simply because it’s at the top of the charts. Which, I have to admit, is more or less why I myself chose it above all the other iOS games I could have been playing during this interlude.

Prince of Persia (2008) is organized around groups of four. There are four colors of power-plate, and four distinct sets of zones, each of which is made of an entrance zone, a terminus, and a circle of four zones between them. And there are four bosses, each ruling over one of the four zone groups.

The bosses are a bit like ringwraiths. Former humans with bodies made of black, oily Corruption ¹Come to think of it, Corruption strongly resembles petroleum, and the whole game is set in the middle east. I’m a little tempted to read allegory into this, but such things are really too subtle for this game. , they accepted power from Ahriman during their mortal lives, and consequently now serve him for eternity. Their names are apparently forgotten, because they’re all identified by their jobs: the Hunter, the Alchemist, the Concubine, the Warrior. And the peculiar thing is that most of the fighting in the game is against just these four creatures. You have to fight them over and over; every zone has a boss fight you have to win before you can cleanse it. And there isn’t a lot of combat beyond that.

To be precise, I’ve seen three other sorts of foes. In the very beginning, you have to fight some soldiers who are chasing Elika on her dad’s behalf. (Notably, you don’t kill them. They run away when defeated. I recall that The Sands of Time also had a bit at the beginning where you fought ordinary human soldiers before everyone turned into sand-wraiths, but it wasn’t so squeamish about letting them die.) Then there’s a periodic between-chapters battle against Elika’s father himself, who’s not undead yet but probably on his way, if I understand the backstory correctly. And finally, there are lesser Corrupted that spawn at specific points in the paths between corrupted zones — but there’s at most one such point per path, and it’s possible to slip by them without a fight if you’re fast enough. Even if you do fight the lesser corrupted, they’re a lot quicker to defeat than the bosses: if you can back them all the way up to a ledge or wall, you drain the rest of their lifebar automatically. A boss in a similar situation will just teleport closer to the center of the battlefield.

Combat is always one-on-one (apart from Elika’s magical assistance), and feels a bit like a simplified Street Fighter/Mortal Kombat-style fighting game, in that it’s about carefully-timed button presses rather than fluid grace — a charge that could be leveled at the platforming sequences as well. For what it’s worth, I’m rubbish at this sort of fighting. I understand that there are combos to be discovered as well, but the only combos I’ve managed to pull off are the simple ones like “sword-sword-sword-sword”.

All Corrupted, whether minor or boss, have a habit of metamorphosing into forms that are vulnerable to only a single sort of attack: turning the Corruption of their body into a sort of armor with blue highlights means you need to use sword attacks to get it off, a sort of black cloud around the feet and back needs you to pull them out with your gauntlet, and turning into a mass of black tentacles is an invitation to use Elika’s magic. You’re given a help text explaining these vulnerabilities the first time each form is used, but after that you pretty much have to just remember them (unless Elika shouts out advice, as she does sometimes). What I didn’t notice at first is that the combat QTEs work very similarly. I mentioned before not being able to react to the QTE button prompts quickly enough; I now suspect that this is intentional. What you’re supposed to do — what works — is to recognize the situation before the button prompt comes up. If a boss rears up on a tall column of Corruption, for example, it means that you’re about to be asked to press the Jump button to leap out of the way before he falls on you like a wrestler. So for once, we have QTEs that make it worthwhile to pay attention to what’s happening in the gameworld instead of just staring at the UI.

I’ve probably been making Prince of Persia (2008) sound more linear and constrained than it is. Let me describe its structure more fully.

The map is a highly symmetrical network of zones and passageways. The divisions between zones aren’t explicitly marked; it’s possible to go from one zone to another without realizing it. Each zone starts off in a state of darkness and corruption. In fact, “The Corruption” is the name of a sort of writhing slime that covers any surface that the level designers don’t want you to touch. And each zone has a special spot called “Fertile Ground”, consistently pronounced with a long i, like “fur tile”. When Elika does her sacred magic thing on the fur tile, a Genesis-Effect-like aura spreads out from it, restoring color, making grass grow, and permanently cleansing the zone of the Corruption. (The architecture is left in ruins, but you can’t have everything.) Cleansing all of the zones is pretty much the game’s main goal.

The important thing to recognize about this is that the Corruption is a constraint on your movement. Entering a corrupted zone, you’ll find that you’re mostly confined to a single path. Cleanse it and your options open up. Which is a good thing, because you still have a good deal more to do there. The cleansing magic also makes glowy floating things called “light seeds” appear, turning the zone into a hunt for collectibles. And in this phase, the player has considerable freedom. Yes, you get the same visual cues as always for reaching them, but in some cases I’m pretty sure that I spotted and followed alternate routes to light seeds before I found the preferred one. Notably, light seeds that you collect while falling stay collected even if you get rescued by Elika. I don’t think the preferred route ever actually requires you to be rescued, but it’s a serious option.

Now, with certain exceptions, every zone in the map is open for exploration from early in the game. However, most of the fur tiles (and some of the light seeds) are in places that can only be accessed by means of special magical powers that Elika accesses one by one over the course of the game. There are four different powers, including flight and a power-climb that can take you across ceilings, but they all come down to the same thing: they all, in some way, transport the player from a special colored plate — the color determining the power — to a fixed destination. The plates are another assertion of authorial control: if you could just activate these powers from anywhere, the experience would be in the player’s hands, and we can’t have that.

So, how do you obtain these powers? By collecting light seeds. You get your first power at 60 seeds, the second at 170, the third at 340, and the fourth and last at 540. 540 is significantly less than the amount available, and (as far as I’m aware) there’s no advantage to collecting more after you’ve got all the powers, so obsessive completism is not required, unless you’re like me and just value 100% completion for its own sake. You do, however, need all four powers to complete the game, and that means a lot of hunting and backtracking to find enough seeds. Inevitably, you wind up crossing through zones that you can’t cleanse yet in order to reach ones that you can.

The interesting part, however, is that you can take the four powers in any order. Whenever you go back to the Temple to cash in your seeds, you get to choose whichever of the remaining powers you want. And the order in which you take them affects the order in which you can cleanse the zones. If you want to tackle a particular zone first, you can find out its required power (which is helpfully listed in the map screen’s zone data) and obtain that power first. You still ultimately have to cleanse all the zones, but there’s no particular ordering to them, even though there’s still a Metroidvania-like progression of decreasing constraint.