Ok, so over December, XBLIG (xbox live indie games) have had (/are having?) this "winter uprising" thing, which is basically all of the good XBLIG developers promoting themselves and eachother in order to rebel against the endless stream of bullshit massage apps and fart games.
And I downloaded a bunch of them. (and you should too, the ones in this post are all only 80 points. You'd be mad NOT to buy them!!!!!)
And I want to talk about them. I want to talk about them individually and together. So I will do that, in that order. And you can't stop me!
So the games I got from the promotion are, coincidentally, all shmups. First I got Hypership Out of Control. It's upward-scrolling, and its central conceit is that you are constantly accelerating and you have to dodge out of the way of obstacles. There are 10 waves, and on each wave your maximum speed increases, but there is a mode where there's no max speed and you just constantly accelerate until shit gets crazy. And it's awesome. It's a great idea, and they pull it off really well. There are well-placed rewards for going onto more dangerous routes, there are clever power ups and it's got a kickass soundtrack. It's great. It's really really great. It's got a great sense of humour and some self-aware silliness that is awesome.
Second is Decimation X3, which is a lot more space-invaders than it is shmup. And it's awesome. Wave after wave of space invader dudes come and attack you, and when you shoot them, they sometimes drop power ups. and in the power ups comes the awesomeness. Every power up stacks, so you end up with crazy spread and rapid fire and stuff going on. This gives you a similar sense of acceleration to what goes on in Hypership Out of Control (and even more similar to the third game I wanna talk about).
Your ship quickly becomes this ridiculously powerful thing, ripping through the dudes like nobody's business, but the enemies are also getting more powerful, and this is what I think makes this game especially good. Every wave, the enemies start shooting more. I couldn't tell you exactly how it works (obviously) but I think that every X seconds, a random alien shoots, and X gets smaller every wave. This means that you end up being totally showered in bullets, and it gets super bullet-helly, but this ALSO means that when you're down to the last dude of a wave, he is shitting out bullets at an almost constant rate, speeding left and right. It takes what made the last dude in space invaders hard (you have to shoot at where he is going to be by the time your bullet reaches him) and then adds the difficulty of a really intense bullet shower. You've got to concentrate on both things at once or you're totally stuck. And it's great.
Oh also another aspect of this I want to talk about is the visual feedback it gives you. Everything has awesome particle effects. When you kill a dude, he pops in a really satisfying way. When YOU die, you pop in a ridiculous explosion that fills the whole screen with particles. Every power up you collect, the power up's description pops up in the middle of the screen Sometimes you get a power up that showers down a whole row of power ups, like 20, maybe, all at once in a single horizontal line, so you have to line yourself up somewhere and just charge through them to collect as many as you can. And when you do that, the middle of the screen becomes this column of text full of all these different power ups. And it's really neat. Powerups in games, especially slightly goofy/retro games, need more of that kind of feedback. I've been playing AAAAA Reckless Disregard for Gravity recently, and something that game really gets right is feedback when you're doing something correctly. It makes a small "ding!" noise when you are close enough to an object to be collecting hugs, and it makes a longer more different jingle sound when you collect kisses, and every 10 kisses and 25 hugs, you get a voice telling you how many hugs/kisses you have. Also its points are based on fuckin HUGS and KISSES. Also when you hit a score plate it makes a smash sound and "score plate hit, +whatever" comes up in the middle of the screen, whewre you'd be looking anyway. It's a great game.
But I digress. Onto the third game, which I now realise is not actually part of the Winter Uprising thing. And is also by the same people that did Decimation X3. And also I don't have much more to say about it than what I said about the other two games. But: Score Rush. It is a twin-stick shooter, a la Geometry Wars. Left stick move, right stick shoot, trigger to drop a bomb. It is also very bullet-helly, with bosses that have super specific shooting patterns that you have to carefully navigate. (Also you have a really tiny hit-box, which is a really cool thing. Dodging a big lumbering ship between bullets is less fun than a tiny blob in the middle of your ship) It's got the same thing as decimation X3 as far as powerups, where certain enemies will either make your shots more powerful, or add another wingman on your tail. Eventually, you've got a huge spread of bullets ejecting out of you, and you've got like, 8 dudes following you and all shooting smaller spreads of bullets in the same direction. Again, it's got nutty particle effects that are super neat. It's got a great thing where, once you've maxed out your gun, any pickups you get that would improve your gun act as a mini-bomb that will take out some (but not all) of the bullets on screen, giving you some breathing room. It's fun! It's a lot of fun!
Ok. so you've got the backdrop. Now I want to get to the meat of this post. All 3 of these games have (local) multiplayer options. I played all 3 of these games with my flatmates. They all have the same problem. First: local multiplayer is great. All of the most fun times I've had with video games have been me and a few other dudes shooting the shit in the same room while shooting at shit on screen. I have issues with online multiplayer (which maybe I'll get into on a later blog post eventually but probably not) but local multiplayer is great. It's the best.
That said: these three games are all difficult. Real difficult. Like, I haven't finished any of them. They are all super hard, which is part of their appeal. But giving all the players individual lives brings some problems. I've played these games a bunch now, so I've got it down. I can get through to wave 7/8 of Hypership fairly easily, but the first time I played, I couldn't get through to wave 3. And my flatmates are the same. So about 60% of the time we spend playing these games, I'm the only one alive. (now to be fair, I think that HOOC has a "give away lives" button that I didn't notice until after the last time I played multiplayer, so it has this problem the least of the 3).
The fun of DX3 and SR is the power that you get once you're a ways into the game. The way you're tearing dudes apart in their hundreds where you had to aim carefully at the start. But the multiplayer messes this up. The powerups have to be split up between us, the acceleration is slower, the rush is slowed. I don't see why it couldn't have a 3-player leaderboard separate from the others, where we all get every power. It would be so fun to have three ridiculous ships dodging and weaving, destroying everything in their path. But as is, you've got to share out the powerups, it slows the ramp-up down, and the ramp-up is half the fun.
Again, I feel like I've gone into very stream-of-consciousness territory here, but I do have a point. Fun vs. Difficulty. When I play a game in single-player, the difficulty is a challenge to get past. I fucking love Super Meat Boy, because of the hurdles it gives you to jump. The difficulty makes that game an excellent single-player experience. In multiplayer, the fun isn't derived from difficulty, it's from playing with the other people, whether it be cooperative or competitive (or a fight for the highest score, as it is with these games). Once a person is out of the game, the fun takes a real hit. While it would obviously change the game experience a lot, and maybe it's just not what these particular developers want their games to be, I don't see why dying can't just give you a points penalty, or maybe just take away some of your powers. Maybe make it golf-style, where the winner's the person that lost the least lives. Or even shared lives! If everybody's sharing their lives, then everybody's playing the whole time that the game is going. Obviously it gives you trouble if one person is crap at the game, but all the more to smack talk about!
So, developers: I implore you. Keep as many players in your multiplayer games for as long as possible, please. The difference in skill between the players shouldn't be an obstacle to playing together.
