2015 Game Review Haiku, #43 – CounterSpy

Infiltrate bases
Both sides of Cold War, stop plans
To blow up the Moon

–

From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.

Alas, a JRPG is still a JRPG in Like Clockwork

Look, I’m well aware of the numerous shortcomings when it comes to Japanese role-playing games. If for some reason you don’t know about any of them, allow me to recommend The Grand List of Console Roleplaying Game Clichés, which does not specifically target Japanese-only RPGS, but many of the elements on the list do overlap. Also, if you ever want to lose yourself in the Internet for a couple hours, check out the trope pages simply for Chrono Trigger, Breath of Fire, or Final Fantasy VII. You’re welcome, and I’m sorry.

Like Clockwork is a comedy RPG that likes to take these well-known tropes, bash them in the face repeatedly, wave them around victoriously for all to see, and then do things differently. It opens with the Sleepyhead Rule, wherein the main character is awoken by his mother to start his quest. However, he is quickly killed in a freak accident involving a police car, resulting in his female companion taking up the flag to finish the hero’s quest. Yup, instead of playing as the brooding, sulking introvert that everyone loves and champions because whatever, you instead play as a young woman who happened to be in the right place at the right time. And she wears actual battle armor, not a metal bikini. This is just the start of spinning those known tropes on their heads.

Made for Fuck this Jam 2014 by John Roberts and created in RPGMaker, which also birthed such interesting things like Starbot and The Stoneville Mystery, Like Clockwork looks exactly as you imagined it might, compiled of a number of recognizable sprites and shapes. To the point that uncommon elements, like a cop car or massively large troll, look instantly out of place. Either way, it’s a bright, colorful RPG world spread across a handful of screens, though more time was obviously spent on the opening town area than anywhere else. Similar to other games created in RPGMaker, you can access a pause menu for stats, skills, and other things that might not even matter, though it does make more sense in this type of environment.

As you go through the early motions of Like Clockwork, your cop car companion Tam McGleish, a rather angry Scottish Detective Inspector, will complain with every breath he takes about JRPG trope after trope, calling them out right on the spot. Eventually, he even breaks the fourth wall to speak directly to the developer–and, on one occasion, cause him physical harm–in order to see things change for the better. Like when the random encounters become too much. Also, in good ol’ silly fashion, the main heroine passes out when having to make a moral choice, as if the decision is too much to handle for her frail frame. There are several other fun moments to discover that I will spill now.

All that said, it’s still a JRPG, just one that points out all the annoying bits. You must go through the annoying bits, at least once, for them to get taken away and changed into something more streamlined, modern. I found Like Clockwork to be lightly amusing, though I guess I’m not used to reading the c-word so many times, as it’s been a bit since I reread my A Song of Ice and Fire books. In actuality, I would’ve liked to play more, to get into a few more battles and level up my party, but that’s not the point here–it’s not a full game, just a snapshot of the tiresome elements of the genre. A riff. It works fine enough, but now I want to load up my years-old save data for Eternal Sonata and get my true JRPG-ing on.

2015 Game Review Haiku, #42 – Like Clockwork

Don’t be the hero
You start as, twist this genre
Fear the angry Scot

–

From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.

Second-guessing all my choices in The Novelist

I myself am not a novelist, though I’ve taken a stab at completing several books, one of which still lingers in the back of my mind as something decent or, at the very least, worth finishing off. That said, I have had some short stories published over these past years of my capricious life–hey, check out “Opportune” in the Triangulation: Lost Voices anthology, being sold over at that Amazon dot com site–and do grok a bit of the internal struggles that come with balancing time with creativity and drive, in terms of producing something.

That’s what’s at the heart of The Novelist–balance. This 2013 game about life, family, and the choices we make comes from Kent Hudson and Orthogonal Games and packs quite a wallop. Maybe not for everyone, but certainly for me, an introvert who spends far too much time worrying about decisions, both past and those still to happen, and whether anything could have been or be different. I will most likely only ever play this game once, and so the decisions I made for the Kaplans are final and finite, never to play out differently. Let me set up the plot for y’all…well, at least how it starts.

The Kaplans are on vacation in an isolated house on the coast. Novelist Dan Kaplan hopes the time away will not only reconnect them all, but also defeat his crippling writer’s block, which is stopping progress on his next book. Dan’s wife Linda wants to work on their failing marriage, as well as develop a career as a painter. Their son Tommy is incredibly lonely here and desperate to gain his father’s attention. Also, the house is haunted, and you play as this spiritual incarnate, listening to the family’s thoughts and influencing the decisions the family makes over the course of the summer. More on that last bit…in a bit.

The Novelist has two styles of play: stealth or storytelling mode. I went with the former, since it seemed to add more to the gameplay, wherein you actually have to be careful not to make yourself known to the house’s inhabitants, otherwise you can’t read their thoughts and help influence them in a certain direction. As a ghost, you can travel–and safely hide–in lights, but you can also exit light fixtures to move around the home, and this is when you need to be aware of where Dan, Linda, and Tommy are at all times. If they see you, they’ll become suspicious, and if you can’t hide fast enough, they’ll eventually be spooked to the point of no return. Without this element, I feel like The Novelist would simply be an interactive story, which is not a deal-breaker at all, but trying to remain hidden at least adds some tension while searching the home for clues.

The Novelist is separated into chapters, and in each one, you must gather clues and listen to the family’s thoughts to learn about their lives and true desires. Once you are ready, you must make a decision, which means selecting one person’s desire over the other two, which often leads to disappointment on their parts. If you found enough clues, you can make a single compromise, which means it’s only half disappointing and probably better than nothing. For one chapter, I forgot to make a compromise before whispering my ghostly choices into Dan’s ear as he slept, and I’ve felt horrible ever since–someone else could have at least be minutely happier, if not happy, and I funked it up.

Anyways, your decisions then affect the next chapter and how the characters feel and move on with their days. You’ll read letters and notes that give you a glimpse of the repercussions you’ve created, as well as feel like a sad sack of slop every time you spy one of Tommy’s crayon drawings. At night, after you found all the clues and selected your decision, you get to wander the house freely as everyone sleeps, coming across spiritual journal entries of people that once lived in the house; I found this to be the least interesting aspect of The Novelist, and it felt like a forced way to explain how the home became haunted by a spirit. All I was concerned about was the here and now, the current happenings.

Ultimately, from The Novelist I learned that I’m probably going to be a terrible parent. Many of Tommy’s issues, such as wanting to build a toy car or look for arrowheads in the woods, seemed trivial when compared to fixing Dan and Linda’s marriage or Dan making progress on his next novel, which, as an author, is his job and future income and security. So Tommy got left out for a lot of the game, except later when I did make his education a top priority for the family. Still, there were ups and downs across the whole summer, and while things turned out okay-ish for everyone involved, I still wonder if I could have done a better job of manipulating them towards happiness.

The Novelist will not blow anyone away with its visuals, but the writing and solid voice acting really help bring the Kaplans to life, in a way that makes their dreams and desires feel tangible–and thus more heartbreaking when you steer them off the path. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in choice, as this is basically those big moments in Mass Effect and Telltale’s The Walking Dead, but from beginning to end, and much more mundane. It’s all the more believable despite the magic whispering ghost zipping from lamp to lamp and hiding in bathrooms, which never seemed to get visited, to not get spotted.

2015 Game Review Haiku, #41 – The Novelist

Meet the Kaplans fam
Use your ghost powers to change
Their lives, poor Tommy

–

From 2012 all through 2013, I wrote little haikus here at Grinding Down about every game I beat or completed, totaling 104 in the end. I took a break from this format last year in an attempt to get more artsy, only to realize that I missed doing it dearly. So, we’re back. Or rather, I am. Hope you enjoy my continued take on videogame-inspired Japanese poetry in three phases of 5, 7, and 5, respectively.

Dronefall imagines a pixel art future overrun by deadly drones

It really bums me out covering games much later than I intended, especially indie titles or tiny slivers of experimentation from the myriad jams that go down in this industry, as often finding information about these things months–or even years later, as is the case with Dronefall – Prologue–is nearly impossible. You’d think my seasoned Googling skills would unearth all the details, but nope, not for something as slight as this; that said, I dig the search engine company’s new logo.

Anyways, I’ll do what I can with what I got, but if you know more than me and want to rub my honker in it, by all means. Dronefall – Prologue was made by Inglenook, a company that is hard at work on something called Witchmarsh. The short little thang was produced for the Charity Game Jam back in 2013, along with almost one hundred other games, with funds going to the Reprieve UK foundation. Again, I do not remember where I was and how I came to download it, but its executable file was in my videogames folder…so I gave it a double click.

Basically, we have a future overrun by drones, machines unafraid to murder and cause chaos. They were not programmed to bite the hand that wires them, but they’ll do it without question. In Dronefall – Prologue, you play as a woman whose name I cannot recall or look up due to nobody else ever in the entire Internet-driven world having touched the thing. YouTube and Google continue to suggest Downfall instead. Anyways, naturally, she has just awoken up to this dark, dastardly future, and begins moving left to right in hopes of figuring things out. It’s a puzzle adventure game, though there’s only a little bit of both in this “prologue” chapter; you can examine items in the world and turn wheels to shut off machines or pipes leaking steam, and there’s truly only one puzzle to maneuver through at the end, which is not difficult to figure out. Then it fades to white and the dreaded “to be continued…”

Before I finish this post, I have to say that I’m pretty amazed with myself for breaking Dronefall – Prologue, a game that takes maybe no more than five minutes to get through. Towards the end, you have to take a lift down from the second floor to the first, and somehow, the lift got activated without our main hero girl on it. I could stand her over where the lift once was and still activate it, but that meant she rose into the darkness known as the ceiling as the lift rose as well. I walked her to the right onto the next screen, and everything froze, then crashed. It’s like accessing the warp pipes in Super Mario Bros, except instead of leaping forward a few worlds it teleports you back to your desktop.

Considering I can find next to nothing about Dronefall – Prologue or even Inglenook–its website is launching soon!–and that the developers are all hands on deck for their Kickstarter project, I don’t expect there to be a continuation of this adventure. Which is a shame. Not because there’s a fascinating story or mystery here, but it looks gorgeous, and a full-fledged dive into this unpredictable future through pretty, pretty pixel art is more than enough to count me in. That said, Witchmarsh, an action RPG set in 1920s Massachusetts, does seem to have a similar look, so perhaps I’ll check it out later this year.

St. Chicken is actually about surviving the perils of the ocean

I don’t think I can actually tell you where my copy of St. Chicken came from–probably a bundle from yesteryear–but I never imagined it was a game about a magical guppy leading its offspring to ancient relics while keeping them healthy and nourished and out of harm’s way. The game’s executable file has sat untouched in my laptop’s “videogames” folder, but I’m trying to make a dent and open up some hard-drive space.

Truthfully, I expected a cutesy, colorful platformer starring a cartoonish chicken, like a throwback to the early Sony/Sega mascot days, on some sort of religious mission to save his or her brethren from factory farm management or an evil tractor while gathering enough eggs to unlock power-ups. Nope.

St. Chicken is a quirky puzzle-lite maze explorer where you play as a lost pet guppy with special healing powers. Basically, you swim around as the titular St. Chicken, collecting white pellets that ding as you touch them, which I imagine are food. As the guppy eats each pellet, it grows larger, and after a set amount, spawns a tiny offspring, called fry, as well as shrinking back down in size. Your fry need to remain close to St. Chicken to stay healthy and alive, and by pressing the space bar you can summon the offspring over all at once. Kind of like the “all units” command from whatever RTS franchise floats your boat.

Your goal is to get all your fry safely to the end of the level where some glowing bit of treasure or relic awaits, which is not as easy as it sounds. Like in Pikmin, your babies are pretty vulnerable, and if an eel or sting ray makes contact with them, they will perish, with no way to get them back. You also have to stay on top of the fact that St. Chicken’s fry are always close because if they linger too long away from their parent, they will perish from general weakness. I ran into a few cases where one little fry got caught behind a wall and didn’t follow the others along the main path, perishing after a few seconds by itself.

From what I can gather, there’s a total of six levels to get through in St. Chicken, each gated by a specific number of rescued fry. Alas, I couldn’t get past the fifth level, as I found it beyond frustrating to lose all of St. Chicken’s offspring right near the end. Granted, it was my fault for not paying close attention, but the thought of going back and redoing the entire level over again–it’s fairly lengthy and tedious by nature due to having to move slowly and meticulously since many paths are blocked off at first–did not excite me. And so I’ll walk away from 2012’s St. Chicken with 64 fry happy and safe from underwater predators, but no more than that.

You can tell a true cowboy by how they spell in Jack MacQwerty

You’d think that, having been copyediting for almost a third of my life now–a couple years in college after I switched from pursuing art something-or-other to journalism and then almost ten years in the big, scary, real world–that I’d be more into the niche spelling genre of videogames. Y’know, things like Typing of the Dead and Icarus Proudbottom Teaches Typing, where the goal is to spell a word, often fast, for some kind of result, whether it is shooting a zombie in the head or moving on to the next task. I may not be a fast typer, but I’m a pretty good speller.

Jack MacQwerty doesn’t try to do too much differently with this small, but strong sub-genre, but it is cute and quirky and has fun with the mechanics nonetheless. Basically, you play as the titular sheriff, taking out opposing cowboys and bad guys by typing their names. Dun dun dunnn. Sometimes their names are traditional, like CLINT or CHERRY, and other times you’ll be feverishly hitting the keys to finish names like ISENGARD, FART, or IDAREYOUTOKILLME. Not going to lie, I totally guffawed when I saw an enemy called SHRECK quickly followed by THEMASK.

When you run out of ammo, type RELOAD to reload, which makes sense and totally gets under your skin when you hit the wrong key and have to start all over while bullets zoom your way. It’s like missing that active reload in Gears of War when you need it most. Later, you’ll want to avoid shooting bystanders with names like DONOTSHOOT and INNOCENT. Also, if you lose enough health, type HYDROMEL for a swig of power and rejuvenation, not that I believe honey-based liquor contains such powers, but that’s videogames for you. Personally, I go right for the raspberry iced tea.

Ironically, for a game about spelling, there’s quite a number of typos on both the game’s GameJolt page, as well as in the “how to play” menu within Jack MacQwerty. Not sure if they are there to be funny, but the professional part of me doubts it. Other than that, I enjoyed my time in the word-littered Wild West, and the retro aesthetic does a fine job of not getting in the way of either the fun or the jokes. If you have a few minutes to kill and like spelling out funny words really fast, give it a shot. Happy trails!

There’s chaos to create in Just Cause 2

When I first got my Xbox 360, some many years back, I maintained a small collection of games, doing what I don’t do now, which is finishing one before getting another. That all said, I did delight in some extra dessert now and then by downloading free demos of upcoming games, such as the ones for Crackdown 2 and Dragon Age II. I think you can still download free demos to this day, but at this point I have little time for teasers and would rather just wait for the full thing to either come out or be dropped into my library as a monthly freebie. The times, they are a-changing.

Well, way back in 2010, I sampled a bit of Just Cause 2, as this demo did not hold your hand, but rather set you free. There was a short cutscene to explain why Rico Rodriguez, the man with the grapple hook and hunger for explosions, was on this tropical island, and then you have thirty minutes to do whatever you want. I remember restarting it multiple times, trying something new with each go and really enjoying any and all chaos I could create. Strangely, this never did result me in purchasing a full copy of Just Cause 2; thankfully, all I needed to do was wait five years and then I’d get a free copy from Microsoft.

In Just Cause 2, you take control of Rico Rodriguez, an undercover U.S. operative on the Southeast Asian island of Panau–which is not real, people–to track down a former friend, who has disappeared with top-secret intel and a lot of money. There’s also an oppressive dictator to deal with, as well as three rival gangs who are waging war on the island. I’ve only done the first two or three story missions, so not much has unfolded yet, but I’m sure I’ll get to all these plotlines soon enough. Y’know, once I get my fill of running amok and blowing up enemy territory.

Let’s get this out of the way: the story is not written well, made only more ridiculous by the wooden voice acting. Rico’s actor sounds like he is reading the script for the very first time and they only have the ability to do one take. Good thing I’m not here for the story, as playing and making things explode feels really good, especially when you can use Rico’s magical zip-line thingy to zoom away from all the destruction. Like a true cool action hero. I’m not stellar yet at performing stunts while riding on top of vehicles and aiming the grappling hook is occasionally a nightmare. Still, if you can hit an enemy on a rooftop with it and pull them off to their tumbling doom, I highly recommend it. The gunwork doesn’t feel amazing, but I am more of a grenade-tossing maniac from on high sort of chaos creator.

Truthfully, I didn’t mean to dive right into Just Cause 2 after finishing Lara Croft: Guardian of Light and deleting it from my Xbox 360’s hard-drive, but the game was in my download queue already and automatically started once it saw there was enough space opened up. I’m still working on Final Fantasy IX‘s third disc, LEGO Jurassic World on the Nintendo 3DS, and need to get back to Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots, especially with V only days away from release, though I won’t be getting to it until I finish Peace Walker and Ground Zeroes. Oi. Talk about chaos, right?

Tilt every platform to make it through Through

Here’s the unfortunate reality: I will never have enough time to explore all the game jams out there that I want to explore. I’m still not even close to seeing all the entries from GameBoy Jam 3, of which there are 237 in total, and I’ve tried out a whooping three, each of which had something unique or fun to offer: The Tale of Kelda, Roguelight, and Meowgical Tower. Now here we are with a further 181 creations for the next iteration, the rightfully named GameBoy Jam 4, and I don’t know what to do with myself. Guess I’ll play something.

Through is a short, proof of concept puzzle platformer starring a tiny black pixel that could probably befriend the likes of Boxboy and the doomed hero from Disposabot. There are twelve levels in total, with the goal being to reach the teleport pad; however, it’s not always a straight path to it, and this is where tilting takes over. By pushing our tiny retro pixel soldier against a wall for a second or two, he or she or it can pass through, turning the wall into empty space and reshuffling the other platforms around. It’s a bit mind-bending, and I never really saw how the world shifted or was going to shift, like one eventually did in Fez, but if you kept playing around with tilting this way or that, the exit would get closer and closer.

The twelve levels here are not difficult, especially the first three that act more like a tutorial than anything, and so Through is more of a casual playthrough, where you try pushing against a wall and seeing what happens. If it doesn’t work out, jump elsewhere and push another wall. Floor spikes make an appearance only in the final level, and those kind of dangerous elements could have been introduced earlier to create some tension or force players to find an alternate path to the exit. All of this is backed by a looping soundtrack of bloops and bleeps, though it works well enough.

A “To be continued…” message pops up after you finish Through‘s final level, and I do hope we get more from this. The mechanics are there, but a little more variety could help, as well as a smidgen more art, though the simple graphics help create a lonely aesthetic. The game’s developer goes by the username goshki, and I’m not familiar with any of his other work, but I’d love to see this warp maze puzzle game expand into something a bit trickier, more demanding. Personally, I think it’d be a great fit on the Nintendo 3DS, especially if there’s a level editor involved, wherein we can then see what others can create with this idea. All right, I’m off to get a cup of coffee, and I think I’ll just push against the kitchen wall afterwards and see where it takes me.