8-bit hacks

The Path you take = The Path you make

The Path describes itself as a horror take on Little Red Riding Hood, but in the end, it stands far apart from even the best of the horror genre's traditional stewards. Sure, as noted, there are more than enough design issues here to go around, and if I was going to break it down, I'd find several issues with the presentation as well. While I found myself annoyed by the mechanical obstacles in my way, the slow walking speed, the abhorrent object interaction, the motivation tightrope remained steady enough for me to hold my balance all the way to the end. Thus, I will set that aside, at least for tonight.

There are going to be spoilers aplenty in this entry, so consider yourself warned. This is not a review in the gaming sense. I'm going to discuss the game, how it affected me, and my take on it, and the content of the story figures integrally into any discussion we're going to have here.

Inherit the Wind

There’s an old film fable where Stanley Kubrick commissions a score from the talented composer Alex North for a new film he was working on. Some film about space. Before North was finished with his work, Kubrick showed an early print of the film off to studio executives with placeholder music. Just something out of the public domain; whatever he could dig up. Old music, by guys named Strauss. The end of this story is well known; North's work was discarded, and pieces like Also Sprach Zarathustra and the Blue Danube are instantly associated with Kubrick's epic. Ebert does a fantastic job of summing up just the kind of impact this made on the film:

We are asked in the scene to contemplate the process [a space station docking], to stand in space and watch. We know the music. It proceeds as it must. And so, through a peculiar logic, the space hardware moves slowly because it's keeping the tempo of the waltz.

The undeniable certainty of machines dependent on orbital gravity was a perfect match for the certainty of the Austrian waltz. It fit because that force already has a musical undercurrent, an unwavering consistency and tempo, and pairing it with the Blue Danube only enhanced what was already there.

This isn’t a film blog, so let’s work this back around to games. The brilliant WiiWare Art Style title Orbient builds on these same foundations. As the player slowly glides through space and picks up moons, each new satellite adds its own motif to the music. The music layers together just as the moons layer together, culminating in a deep, majestic symphony.  Because the music is designed to line up with the force of nature, putting you in control of the force puts you in control of the music, if only to a small degree. Even that small degree is an extremely empowering feeling, but the control is only as free as the perfect tempo of gravity allows, of course. It’s perfect for a precise, mathematical game like Orbient, but there’s certainly more potential here, and perhaps if someone were to apply the same principles to another force, we might have something cooking. That’s where Flower comes in.

The Scenic Route

Eurogamer has gotten the attention of a select few in the blogosphere for its review of indie darling and IGF Seamus Mcnally winner Crayon Physics Deluxe. It correctly identifies a quirk with the game's difficulty curve:

CPD presents something of a problem. It can be a fantastically fun and challenging game, but often only if you choose to ignore the obvious route to the finish. One level on the penultimate island clearly wants you to create a weight and pulley system around a floating cloud, but it's impossible not to notice you can literally draw one straight line and complete the level. Years of gaming conditioning tell you to do just that, and expecting players to take the scenic route to a star is a problem in the level design. Success is ludicrously rewarding if you steel yourself to do something a particular way, but you'll know you could always have used the old box, rope and weight trick in a fraction of the time.

The reviewer is correct. Years of gaming conditioning do force you towards taking the shortcut because the game doesn't tell you you can't. We have become so coddled by expansive achievement-ridden games that practically include a "to enjoy follow these directions" manual built in to a tee that the concept of having seemingly unauthorized fun with a game seems blasphemous. They didn't reward me for avoiding the obvious solution, so how can I have fun with the game? Would this reviewer have given the game a higher score if there was an explicit achievement for clearing a puzzle using only rhombi, or illustrations of Hobbes? The implication that Crayon Physics would be more fun if the creative solutions were somehow authorized or rewarded by the designer is laughable.

No rules, just Art Style

We're waist deep in the gauntlet of heavy hitting fall releases, and frankly, there are just not enough hours in the day to put together a lengthy and well-informed take on everything, not when there's life outside of games to deal with as well. I'm not interested in forcing myself through the gigantic amount of new releases out there just to be first to the table with a full take. It seems like the gaming equivalent of gorging at a really nice all-you-can-eat buffet until you simply can't take another bite. While I may be American, this sort of approach does not seem like the most enjoyable way to play through the massive fall slate. I'll have impressions of everything as I get through it on my twitter feed as it seems to be the most appropriate place for you to find those, but I'm moving at my own pace.

Despite brand new and shiny AAA releases all around me, my defense mechanism to the massive release shock is that I'm retreating to the most fun games I can find, both new and old. I've dipped my toes into the much-hyped waters of Fable II and Fallout 3 but neither have compelled me in the least to invest more time than I already have thus far. I'm playing both Mother games for an upcoming reality check and in the run up to the just-released English patch for Mother 3, but what I find myself getting the most lost in the last few weeks are the simple and engrossing WiiWare games in the Art Style series.