The Stack

Capsized has twelve levels. I was actually confused about this for a while. One of the few ways the game reports your proportional progress is via secrets: it keeps a running tally of how many you’ve found out of the number available, and also tells you how many are available on each level you’ve unlocked. So I knew that level 11 contained the last of the secrets, but that seemed like a strange number of levels for a game. Well, it turns out that the final level contains no secrets, being essentially just a boss fight. I’ll go into that in more detail once I’ve actually beat the thing; what I really want to talk about is the last few levels before it.

The levels increase in length and difficulty as the game progresses, the former being basically a function of the latter: masses of tough monsters take longer to kill, and increase the odds that you’ll run out of lives and have to start the level over from the beginning. (Remember, your life count does not persist from level to level in this game.) None of this is unusual, but it seems to me that there’s something of a spike here: around level 9, all of the sudden I was taking multiple sessions to complete a level, rather than completing multiple levels in a session.

The game as a whole has a pleasing variety of level goals. To list a few in order of increasing complexity, your goal can be to reach a destination, defeat a specific monster, destroy scattered structures (jamming devices that are preventing the rescue ships from finding you), or locate specific objects and bring them back to your starting point with your tractor beam. Only in the last few levels does it feel like it’s starting to repeat itself. I don’t know whether to call it “running out of ideas” or “recapping what you’ve learned”.

But the chief thing that distinguishes the final levels is the degree to which that tractor beam comes to the fore as the main way you interact with the game. Or perhaps this isn’t a function of the levels so much as of my own increasing familiarity with the thing: earlier on, I’d frequently forget I had it, or that it could be used as an aid to movement, and be stymied by a platform too far up to jump to. It’s easy to forget about when you’re spending a significant portion of your time on each level with a recharging jetpack, which is an easier approach for such things. But I think there’s something to be said for the idea that the later levels encourage its use more: they have significantly large open-sky areas, punctuated at random with floating platforms, globby clusters that resemble fatty tissue and which I think we’re supposed to take as the nests or hives of the yellow airsquid that also start appearing in force at that time and in those areas. And once you’re routinely slinging yourself around Tarzan-style from these things, it’s easy to discover other uses for that mode of movement. Like, the beam is springily elastic, and it’s easy to make yourself go rapidly snapping around on it like it’s a rubber band, which is an excellent defense against enemies that have to aim at you to hurt you. I’ve fought entire battles in this mode.

Capsized marks a milestone for my hardware’s continuing slide into obsolescence. The monitor I typically game on these days is a projector — a cheap “business” projector with a native resolution of 1024×768. This is more than enough for most of the games I play, but it’s getting to be a stretch for some of the newer ones, which are designed with a higher resolution in mind. (Dungeons of Dredmor, for example, seems to have a fixed pixel size for its various pop-ups, and at 1024×768, they take up more of the screen than they really should. It’s playable, but I wind up opening and closing my inventory a lot, where other players probably just leave it open all the time.) Well, Capsized is the first game I’ve played that doesn’t even support 1024×768. The smallest it’s willing to deal with is 1280×1024. Fortunately, my projector is willing to fake this, with results that look okay from my customary viewing distance.

So, what is it doing with all those pixels? Throwing in lots of scribbly detail, mainly. This game has ludicrously over-detailed hand-drawn art. Even the rock walls aren’t simply displayed as solid rock, but as masses of tiny individual rocks without any obvious tiling pattern. It’s a style that I associate with things doodled in notebooks over the course of very long meetings, although of course here it’s animated. And I don’t just mean the foreground: vines sway in the breeze, alien bird-analogues drift about in the distance.

Alien, yes, for this is a game about beleaguered astronauts with worried expressions, crash-landed on a jungle world. So no, there isn’t really any capsizing involved. The title was presumably chosen as a synonym for “shipwrecked”, even though it specifically means “tipped over”, which isn’t really applicable to a spaceship. But I suppose the nautical term helps to establish the metaphor of sailors stranded on a remote island, facing unfamiliar tropical wildlife and hostile natives. And yeah, the inhabitants of this planet are plainly modeled on notions of the primitive savage, with their large masks and blowguns — although, for all that, they’re powerful enough to pose a threat to humans with spacefaring technology and blasters. (Not enough of a threat to actually stop you, of course.)

Now, about those blasters. This is one of those platformers where you move with the keyboard and aim with the mouse, a combination that seems to have become ubiquitous in platformers these days. You have a FPS-like assortment of different weapons, such as a machine gun that fires rapidly but inaccurately, a slow but powerful laser, homing missiles, and so forth. Your basic blaster can be fired infinitely, but the ammo for your other weapons is limited, and can be found scattered through the levels, usually in hard-to-reach places. What’s unusual about this is that you start over with just your basic blaster at the start of each level. So, there’s the hoarding problem solved: every level is completely self-contained. Lives are also reset with each level, as is the status of your jetpack fuel.

The whole business with the Jetpack fuel is interesting. Being able to fly tends to ruin the platforming, so jetpack fuel is found in quantities designed to run out. But what if you use up all the fuel on the level and thereby render bits inaccessible? The game solves this with recharging jetpack fuel, which you can find towards the end of the level. This places the same limit on how far you can fly at a stretch, but regenerates when you’re standing on the ground. This is invaluable for hunting for the level’s last few secrets, because they tend to involve hidden tunnels in those overdetailed rock walls, and the entrance hole can be anywhere, at any elevation.

The thing is, that’s almost all you need the jetpack for. Your astronaut can jump pretty high, and climb vertical surfaces, and comes equipped with a tractor beam. This last is like a combination of Half-Life‘s gravity gun and a grappling hook. That is, you can latch it onto objects to lift, pull, or hurl them, but you can also latch it onto the ceiling above you and swing from the glowing force beam thus created. To the extent that this game contains puzzles, they involve the tractor beam: tricky climbing, rearranging obstacles, transporting boulders to where you need them as weights or stepping-stones. This is also the main way that the game shows off its physics engine.

I haven’t even mentioned the jokey aspects of Dredmor yet, which is a substantial oversight on my part. Usually I’d excuse this by saying that the jokes are superficial, and don’t intrude into the realm of gameplay, where the player’s attention is. But that’s just not true here. The jokes are pervasive at every level, and impossible to ignore. Take damage types: in addition to traditional things like fire damage and electrical damage (which tend to have higher-faluting names within the game, such as “conflagatory” and “voltaic”), there’s existential damage. Crafting skills let you make weapons and armor not just from bronze and steel, but from aluminum and plastic, both of which come in ingots. Randomized magic items have names pieced together out of random words, with madlibs-like results. There’s a magic item that can turn any object into lutefisk, which is more useful than it sounds, because of the various altars to the Lutefisk God scattered around waiting for suitable offerings. There’s one other deity represented in shrines throughout the dungeon: Inconsequentia, goddess of side-quests. who can send you to take on special monster teams with more jovially-randomized names.

In short, it’s a lot like Kingdom of Loathing, but more offhand about it. Which should increase the humor value. The thing is, I’m not really finding the game funny. The death message, “Congratulations! You have died”, always provokes a chuckle, which takes a bit of the sting off the death, but other than that, I don’t think I’ve laughed once while playing this game. The humor more works to set a tone, to establish a particular kind of rapport with the player. It’s not funny, it’s jokey.

And really, this is something that’s traditional in CRPGs. Nethack is quite jokey, providing cream pies as missile weapons and suchlike. The original Wizardry had a jokey heart. Dredmor is unusually dense with jokeyness, but it’s just a difference of degree. Perhaps there’s something about the mechanics of an RPG that invites such an attitude, an absurdity to the whole business of gaining levels that makes the author want to reassure the players that they shouldn’t be taking it too seriously, that it should be treated as something more like a tall tale than a believable simulation of a world.

Right after my last post, Dungeons of Dredmor got a pretty major patch, which Steam downloaded for me automatically. It always feels a little strange when a game spontaneously changes in significant ways just a few days after I start playing it, particularly an offline, single-player game. And it is a pretty major update: there are three entirely new equipment slots (for gloves, belt, and trousers), an entire skill specialization has been removed and its component skills shuffled into other specializations (apparently rendering one of the Steam achievements unachievable), new varieties of trap and vending machine have sprouted. Before the patch, wands used a strange and experimental system of “entropy” and “burn rate” to determine at random when they would become useless; after, they use a more conventional system of charges, which is a little disappointing to me, as I was looking forward to mastering the less-familiar system.

The single most intrusive change is the new crafting interface: the changelog states “we stole the old one from Minecraft, we stole the new one from Terraria”. What this means is that instead of putting items into slots in a special interface and hitting a button to put a combined item in another slot, with an optional recipe list to expedite the process, the recipe list is now all there is. You scroll this list until the recipe is under an unmoving pointer, then hit a button to execute it, using items from your inventory. This means it’s no longer possible to abuse the crafting interface to extend your carrying capacity, which is probably a good thing all told.

I find the new system unsatisfactory in a number of ways, however. The icons representing the recipe targets no longer have tooltips, leaving me guessing a little about what I’m creating. The scrolling list, unlike other scrolling lists in the game, doesn’t recognize the mouse scrollwheel, and the interface itself, unlike all other pop-up interfaces in the game, can’t be closed by pressing ESC. These are obviously bugs, though, and will probably be addressed in further revisions — indeed, I notice that Steam has downloaded another patch as I write this, so they may even be addressed already. But the interface is by its nature less convenient for certain things, like making ingots out of ore. Ingots are the basic ingredients for most smithing recipes, and ore is the basic ingredient for ingots. It doesn’t have a lot of other uses, so in most cases, you want to smelt your ore the moment you find it. In the old interface, you’d do this by picking up the ore off the ground and throwing it into your portable ingot-making tool, then hitting the “smelt” button. In the new interface, you have to find the appropriate recipe in the scrolling list, which slows the process down considerably. To make matters worse, you can’t just click on the recipe when it comes into view. You have to scroll it to the center, the spot pointed to by that pointer.

But again, maybe they’ve improved this already. And if they haven’t, they probably will. It may feel a little strange to play a game that’s being frequently patched, but it has advantages.

Actually what I’m reporting is my second death. My first game was over quickly enough that I don’t think it counts. My second lasted long enough for me to explore the first six floors of the dungeon quite thoroughly, and start on the seventh. A modicum of care and caution is all it takes to keep a game going for hours, it turns out, because there’s no hunger factor or anything forcing you to keep moving downward faster than you’d like. (Food exists, but is pretty much optional. It just gives you a buff that temporarily increases your healing rate to one hit point per turn.) And that care really should have carried me longer than it did. My death, as is traditional in roguelikes, was a stupid one.

It started with a treasure zoo. This is a blatant nethackism: on most levels (possibly all; I didn’t really keep track), there is a room completely full of monsters, which typically come flooding out the moment you open the door, accompanied by frantic zoo music. I pretty much knew how to handle zoos by this point, of course. I was playing a melee specialist, having chosen this for its simplicity so I could get used to the basics of the game, so I didn’t have a lot of power to kill multiple monsters at once. Taking on a zoo meant fighting more monsters than I could comfortably handle, and periodically falling back to heal and recover. In extreme cases, it meant retreating all the way to the stairs to the previous level.

The problem here was that the zoo was extremely close to those stairs. I managed to retreat to it once, but the monsters mobbed around me so close that I was completely surrounded when I came back down. And that created a problem I wasn’t anticipating when I went back down. The way you go up a staircase in this game is by moving onto it. Thus, in order to go back up a staircase you just came down, you have to move off it and back on again. But if you can’t move due to all the monsters crowded around you, you can’t do that.

Now, if all that had happened was that I got surrounded and killed because stairs don’t work right, I would call it a cheap shot. But I managed to make a pretty good go of it. The monsters whittled me down to near death, but I had some emergency supplies that helped me to survive: buff potions, healing supplies, food. The food effect may not sound like much, but I’m finding that, for a heavily-armored melee fighter, this is a game of margins. Most monsters’ attacks weren’t doing me a lot of damage; I just had to make sure that I was regaining health at an overall faster rate than I was losing it. Elemental resistance also seems to be a big part of this. On most of the dungeon floors that I’ve seen, there’s a dominant elemental damage type, and donning an item that grants even one point of resistance to that type can be a big win.

Also, at one point during this fight, I gained an experience level, which heals you instantly to your new maximum health. But I couldn’t count on that happening again, and I was running out of useful potions, so I looked for other options. My best bet seemed to be that Knightly Leap skill that I mentioned in my last post. There was one spot that it looked like I could jump to, just past the mob, and from there I could possibly make a break for a side chamber that was a little farther away from the zoo, possibly far enough away that I’d stop attracting fresh monsters to replace every kill. Alternately, perhaps I could wait for the cooldown on the Leap to expire and leap back to the stairs, hopefully triggering them.

Neither of those things happened. The spot I was aiming for was not in fact one I could leap to — I think a corner of irregularly-shaped wall was keeping it out of direct line-of-sight. Discovering this on selecting the Leap action, I, like a fool, just poked around with it until I found a spot I could leap to, heedless of whether it was a spot that exposed me to more monster attacks. And that was that. I had put up a valiant fight that lasted a lot longer than I was expecting, and it’s conceivable that I could have pulled through if I hadn’t made that mistake. But that’s far from certain.

The thing is, I’m not even all that disappointed in my stupid death. You have to take this sort of thing in stride if you play roguelikes. And besides, it gives me an opportunity to try out a new character, with a different set of skills. I was thinking at first that once this game was over, one way or another, I’d take a break and play a different game for a while. But I’m honestly impatient to try out more of Dredmor possibilities.

Now, here’s a game I’ve been hearing good things about lately. Dungeons of Dredmor is a roguelike. I’ve commented before about the looseness with which this term is bandied about lately, but Dredmor really means it. We’re talking not just random maps and permadeath here. Dredmor fits the classical roguelike descriptor in every way except two, those being the shuffling of item effects from game to game and the graphics made of text characters. I could imagine a character-graphics version of the game. It would wind up losing much of the UI slickness, like the tooltips, but it wouldn’t play fundamentally differently.

Other than that, it’s so roguelike that it can steal some of Nethack‘s gameplay gags. For example, there’s the Knightly Leap skill, learnable by characters who specialize in dodging. At first I couldn’t figure out how to make this work, but then I realized that it’s just like the Knight class’s #jump command in Nethack — which is to say, it only lets you jump like a knight in chess. The game doesn’t explain this, which effectively makes it into a puzzle, albeit one that’s easier for people who have played other roguelikes. And that seems to be a major factor in the game as a whole. At least at the early stages, it’s not so much about fighting monsters as exploring your options and figuring out what’s possible.

The thing is, after investing a few hours into a game, I’ve become reluctant to try things that might be unsafe. I should note that the permadeath is optional: when you start a game, you get a menu of difficulty settings and other options, prominently including a big checkbox for permadeath. But it’s checked by default, and besides, as an experienced player of roguelikes, it just seems proper to me. But I’m not even talking just about death. This is a game with a major crafting element, with recipes for potions and armor and whatnot learnable from bookshelves you find in the dungeon. I’ve started finding equipment recipes that require items I’ve previously found and wasted, either by consuming them to find out what they do (some of the more exotic magic items take potions as ingredients), or by selling them to shops. So now I’m reluctant to throw anything out in case I find a use for it later. But your inventory is painfully limited — the block of slots looks nicely large when you first see it, but you can easily fill up entire rows just with different kinds of cheese. (And yes, cheese can be a crafting ingredient.) Crafting tools can extend your carrying capacity a little by holding items in their ingredient slots, but this is awkward when you actually want to craft something. So I’ve been spending a great deal of time just managing objects. There’s a large room on one level that I’ve made into my dump and warehouse, with items sorted by type, and I go back there whenever my inventory is full or I need to spend some time healing. If I die now, it’ll seem like wasted effort.

OK, I’m having technical problems with Gromada. There’s one level that consistently crashes to the desktop. It doesn’t do it immediately, and it doesn’t do it at a consistent time, but I can’t get through the level without a crash, regardless of what I do. The level does do some peculiar things that I haven’t seen happen on other maps — specifically, it involves a bunch of pre-damaged enemy tanks, and a repair center that will eventually give one of them a key as it repairs it. I can believe that this construct somehow gets into an untenable state when multiple tanks try to access it at once, or something like that. But this speculation doesn’t help me much. I don’t have a fix or a workaround.

I do, however, have an error log. It isn’t terribly informative about the problem, though. It mainly just seems to be a bunch of diagnostic print statements that got left in the release, lots of “sprite free” and “Beginner curclock=27106024” and the like. There’s one line that gives me pause, though: “SND::Can’t control CdAudio volume”. CDAudio? Is this game supposed to be playing CD music? There’s some evidence to support this. I hadn’t been getting any kind of background music during the missions; the only music I had heard in the game was a jolly jingle on winning levels. And yet, the options menu contains a music volume slider, which doesn’t seem to affect that jingle at all.

Well. I tried playing the disc in Windows Media Player, but it didn’t recognize it as having audio tracks. Perhaps my current system just doesn’t recognize audio CDs at all? It’s been quite a while since I last used one. But no, I tried one out and it worked fine. Perhaps it’s just hybrid audio/CD-ROM discs that give it trouble? It took me a while to locate a disc in my collection that I knew to be a hybrid — I know I have several, but I’ve forgotten which ones they are. The only one I could think of was Spirit of Excalibur, a game which uses CD-audio tracks for NPC speech and rather memorably starts the speech tracks with every insult to the player character in the game. Yes, a memorable game, but not a memorable name, so it still took me a while to find it. Anyway, the system handled it just fine. So unless Gromada uses some weird audio format that later operating systems don’t recognize, it looks like there aren’t any audio tracks on the disc. Perhaps the original Russian version was different. At any rate, I’m going to assume that this isn’t actually the cause of the crash.

The crash doesn’t actually stop my progress entirely. After you’re a few levels in, Gromada makes two levels available at once, and after that, three. This doesn’t seem to be a branching structure, but rather just a choice of ordering. Still, this means I could keep on playing other levels. But I’m discouraged now, and I don’t want to bother finishing any more levels until my problems are resolved. Which may never happen: this is a game with basically no web presence, and nary a patch. I’ve found a few cheat codes, but those seem to be the only words anyone has to say about it. Bethesda customer support acknowledges its existence, but only just barely.

As with every post these days, I’m posting this a few days late. It was when I was playing the Lexaloffle retro-styled games that I started thinking about playing something from the stack that came by that style more sincerely. I’m not sure why Gromada is the one that stuck in my head. Heck, I’m not sure why I even own it. Probably because it was cheap and in an eye-catching, colorful package. At least it still installs and runs without problems.

Gromada is an isometric sci-fi tank game from Russia. It seems to go out of its way to emphasize its nation of origin, in fact, as if to appeal to all those Red Alert fans who instinctively associate Russia with massive supertanks. (And yes, it was released at about the right time for this to be a plausible factor.) I’m not sure this is the case, though. The two chief things that suggest conscious russification are the way that the opening animation displays the logo as “Громада” at first, and the way that the mission briefings are often awkwardly translated, with not enough articles. But the former could just be a matter of Bethesda (who published the game in America) not wanting to spend the money to redo the animation from the beginning, and the latter could just be plain ordinary cheap-videogame bad translation.

Everything, including vegetation, is rendered with a plasticky Gouraud-shaded sheen, as if it’s all toys — and the canary yellow paint favored by the enemy emphasizes this more. I’ll say this: the vehicles rotate remarkably smoothly for a sprite-based game. Presumably a lot of time and effort was devoted to this, an effect that we get trivially in the age of 3D.

Your supertank can be controlled from either mouse or keyboard. The keyboard controls are avatar-relative — “tank controls”, as they’re sometimes called. This is at least appropriate to the context, but I much prefer the mouse, which is a simple click-to-go-here system, complemented by click-to-fire-here on the other mouse button. (This is the sort of tank game that lets you rotate your turret independently of your direction of movement.) This still has its problems, mind. You can hold down the fire button to keep on continuously firing at a single point (as long as your ammo holds out, anyway), but, inconsistently, you can’t hold down the go button to continuously update where you’re moving. Also, tanks need to move in a circle in order to turn, and the mouse doesn’t give you direct control over which direction you’re circling in; for small turns, it’ll choose the most direct way, but if you suddenly have to go back the way you just came, you can wind up bumping into perfectly avoidable walls. Still, the click-to-move system lets you essentially set your tank on autopilot so that it doesn’t stay still while you concentrate on shooting at things, and that’s pretty nice.

It strikes me that it’s been a while since I played a game with printed documentation. The manual for this game, while pamphlet-sized, is surprisingly thick, given the game’s fundamental simplicity, but it turns out to be mostly occupied with an illustrated backstory. The portion devoted to the game basically just summarizes the menus and the controls, not even giving the rundown of enemies and pickups that, say, its fellow tank game Combat (2001) does. Note that Combat was released a mere two years after Gromada, and furthermore is deliberately retro, even to the point of containing limited lives, but it seems ages closer to modern design sensibilities all the same.

Well, it turns out that I had finished a larger fraction of the game than I had thought. Just a few more hours sufficed to finish it; I probably could have polished it off in a single day if I had devoted the time to it. It turns out that the game does not, in fact, expand on the rules as I described them, and the two layers of the game, the combat-and-spellcasting system and the card game, don’t interact much.

Mind you, they do interact a little more than I thought they did in my last post. In addition to doing damage, the card game feeds your mana, or, as the game calls it, “rage points”. You start with no rage at all, but every time either player strikes a normal blow (that is, every time either side uses a poker hand, as opposed to casting a spell), both sides gain some rage points, the attacker getting significantly more than the defender. This gives you an extra incentive to hold off on using your accumulated attacks until you’re sure that the resulting rage boost won’t give the opponent an advantage.

Going in the other direction, there’s one suite of spells that directly affects how the card game plays: Fate spells give you extra action points, letting you do more card-rearrangement in a turn that you’d normally be able to. This has a significant enough effect that I relied on it heavily in the endgame battles. There’s a gimmick, repeated twice, of bosses with tons of hit points, which can only be brought down to defeatable levels by means of a special spell that costs your maximum rage to cast. The obvious approach there is to just hoard your rage until you have enough, but on the second such boss, I found this inadequate. Spending some rage on a fate spell the moment I had enough turned out to be worth it.

That’s about it as far as gameplay of interest goes. I do think there’s room for a richer game within this ruleset. What if some enemies had spells that could alter the cards, changing their suit or rank? What effect would wild cards have? What if an enemy were immune to damage from hands based on matching ranks (the easiest sort of hand to make), and could only be defeated with straights and flushes? There’s one fight in Runespell: Overture where you’re not allowed to cast spells, but other than that, it doesn’t really explore this stuff. Well, at least it doesn’t try to drag things out. It knows about how long the rules as given can maintain the player’s interest. Also, as you might have guessed from the title, this is supposedly just the first chapter of the story. If further chapters get made, maybe we’ll see more variety.

I suppose that by now the description “like Puzzle Quest, but with X” is an entire genre. Runespell: Overture is like Puzzle Quest, but with a card game based on building poker hands. The basic mechanics are as follows: You and an opponent take turns, performing a default of three actions each turn. Most of these actions will be spent rearranging cards, either stacking face-up cards from your side of the playfield or stealing unstacked ones from your opponent’s side (both gaining them for your own use and preventing the opponent from using them). When any of your stacks contains five cards, you can use it to attack the enemy. Better poker hands do more damage: a pair does 8 hit points, while a five-of-a-kind does 20.

Mind you, the fact that it’s a fantasy-themed game using standard playing cards has me wondering if it reminds me more of Faerie Solitaire than of Puzzle Quest. It all comes down to depth. Puzzle Quest provided the possibility of pursuing various different strategies, and gave us enemies with different attributes that required different approaches. Faerie Solitaire remained pretty much the same throughout.

I haven’t got very far in Runespell yet, but so far, it looks like it’s somewhere between those two cases. As in PQ, there are spells, things that you can spend your actions on that take the tactics of combat outside of the card game, or that enemies can use to gain distinct powers. But in PQ, half the joy of the spells was the interplay between the spells and the match-3 game, each affecting the other in nontrivial ways, and I haven’t seen that in Runespell yet. I’ve seen damage spells and shield spells and spells that prevent the opponent from casting other spells, but nothing that affects the cards directly, or is affected by them. So it could very well be that the underlying card game is always basically the same, something that could be swapped out and replaced with any other hit-point-based combat mechanic that takes place over multiple rounds. But we’ll see.