Best Games - PaRappa the Rapper
Hit buttons in time with the music. That’s the pitch. That’s PaRappa. It shouldn’t work. It shouldn’t be fun. For a time, rhythm games were the biggest thing in the world. Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania, Guitar Hero, Rock Band, and on and on. They still exist, of course. No real arcade would be complete without some sort of dance based rhythm game at this point. They aren’t as prominent as they once were, but it’s almost difficult to imagine the world before rhythm games. Back when the most rhythm adjacent game you could find was Simon. I’m not sure if the core gameplay of PaRappa the Rapper would have worked if it had been as lean as many DDR games. Had the presentation of the game been as spare. At its core, Parappa is a timeline with timing marks on it. An icon travels along the timeline and when it is over certain segments, it prompts you to press a button. That’s it. That’s the game. When the icon reaches a certain point on the timeline, a timeline that corresponds with the beat of the music, you press a preselected button. You can play around with other buttons at different points on the timeline, but the game really only requires you to press a button at that one particular moment. All of the things that videogames are known for, freedom of movement, improvisation, variable interactivity, those aren’t required in PaRappa. Just press the button when you are asked to and the game will be satisfied. Now, you can improvise, and you can play with the beat outside of the required hits, and the game will reward you for that, but you don’t need to. You can just hit the beats, and you will progress. If you aren’t familiar with rhythm games, I can imagine that this description doesn’t sound very fun. You’re right. It shouldn’t be. But it is. Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising. After all, playing music is fun. In some ways, a game like PaRappa turns the PlayStation controller into a musical instrument. When you hit a button the game will make a corresponding sound and it is up to you then to make those sounds rhythmic. The game is asking you to do the fun part. There is another aspect of PaRappa the Rapper that I should probably touch on. It’s the part that most commentary on the game would probably get to first. PaRappa is completely unhinged. The game plays out in a series of animated skits populated by a cast of paper thin characters. Each skit concluding with a song for you to play along with. The skits typically involve the title character, PaRappa the Rapper, rapping along to some sort of skill building life event. Learning Karate, taking a driving test, learning to bake. It’s all very simple and silly, but every aspect of the game is painted with levels of bizarre and surreal. Character dialog is often nonsensical. Line deliveries are spectacularly odd. Considered motivations are usually nonexistent. In PaRappa’s world things happen simply because things happen. You just have to go with the flow, and, as you are constantly reminded, you ‘gotta believe’. The packaging of this very simple gameplay loop is lively and odd and perfectly charming. If rhythm games needed a kickstart, PaRappa was designed to deliver. Now, decades later, PaRappa doesn’t really compete with the Rock Bands and Guitar Heros of the world, but it is still a very special game. As goofy as it is challenging and without a doubt, one of the best games.
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Work continues slowly, but slowly, on my 2D pixel art game that is neither 2D nor pixel art.
I redesigned and rebuilt the player character model and started the process of rigging it for animation. This game is going to be a strange looking thing. Like an alternate history version of a Capcom CP System game where they put in support for colored lighting, shadow casting, and 16x9 displays. A real chimera of the old and the new. I also started on (restarted really) level and environment design. A lot of the things I didn’t think I would be able to get away with, It turns out I can, as long as I manage any moving objects with a little piece of code I wrote that keeps everything snapped to perfect screen pixels. There are a lot of pixelation shaders out there that crunch polygons and textures down to strictly paletted pixels but there is no fooling anyone if the models still move like they are 3D objects. Spinning, moving too smoothly, antialiasing in sub pixels, or picking up specific specular highlights. They can be 3D objects, but they have to move like they have the limitations of sprites. When I first tested the animation, I found that making some very crisp, pose to pose, animations without a lot of in-betweening looked pretty good, but it was missing something. When I finally figured out what the problem was it seemed pretty obvious. What I needed to do was to make a set of very fixed poses and then do a small handful of tweens, but with no real timing between them. So no held frames would be baked into the animation. Instead, I used the game engine to pull the frames one at a time when they were called for the specific animation. Running for instance might be 6 or 7 frames. But rather than just play “run” as a complete animation, I found that I would call each frame based on the speed or direction of player input. Speeding up or slowing down the animation the way you normally would added some extra smoothing and mush that looked every inch a 3D model pretending to be a 2D sprite. Calling on each frame in the sequence as needed, looked very different. It looks more like 2D animation. It shouldn’t be shocking at all, since that’s more or less the procedure you would use to animate a game character circa 1990. Sometimes the old tricks can be the new tricks, only with colored lighting, collision physics, and shadow casters. I know it’s a cliche line to say that there is always more than one way to accomplish anything. I think that might be especially true for computer graphics. Of course, there are as many paths and processes to creating something like a painting as there are people who paint them, but you would think that with a system as rigid and, literally binary, as a computer, that there would be some processes that can only be done in one way.
I have a recent example. I am trying to achieve an effect, something sort of like feathers or the little strips of paper dangling in layers from a pinata. Over the course of a few hours I discovered about a dozen ways to do that. Some of them are existing, even old by computer graphics standards, techniques. Some of them are combinations of strategies. A couple I came up with and for all I know they are completely novel. Some of them are purely geometry based. Just manipulation of triangles. Some of them are combinations of geometry and shader programs written to run extremely quickly on a computer’s GPU. A couple are purely image based, using layers of textures. The best ones for my purposes are probably combinations of all of these. Not one of them is the wrong or right choice. They all have their tradeoffs. I have thought many times over the years of getting a job teaching 3D modelling or animation. I have even applied a few times. I was once offered a job almost on the spot to teach a 3D course, but I turned it down. I didn’t think the school’s curriculum really aligned with the way I think digital art should be taught. There is not just one way to create anything, and there is not just one way to teach it. I think that might be my problem. I have been doing computer graphics a long time, and I can see so many potential paths. Trying to tell someone new to it that there is a right way to do anything, or that they should try to do things the way that I do them just seems so wrong. Wrong and possibly harmful. People should work the way that works for them. But that also means that you need to try a bit of everything, be a generalist, before you know what does and doesn’t work for you. Should a person new to, say, 3D modelling start by sculpting, hard low polygon modelling one vertex at a time, work orthographic or in perspective? I don’t know. I have a lot of tools in my arsenal at this point, but mostly, I know that I don’t know everything. I don’t have that self assured bravado that someone might need to walk into a classroom and declare that they know the path to getting you from zero to 3D artist in a few months. I know too much to think that I know that much. Best Games - The Irritating Maze
The Irritating Maze is not a complex game. It is not a game that defines or extends a genre. You will not find a compelling narrative or ingenious mechanics here. The Irritating Maze is simple. But it’s the right kind of simple. The Irritating maze is the most pure sort of game there is. A test of skill. When you start you get to choose from a wide selection of playable characters. Either Man or Lady. It doesn’t really matter, though, because the game plays identically no matter who you choose. After that, you guide the tip of a metal rod through an electrified maze filled with hazards. That’s it. That’s the game. Guide what amounts to a round cursor through a maze. Don’t touch the walls. Then do it again. Then again. Win. But you probably won’t win. The Irritating Maze might be simple in concept and design, but it is ridiculously hard to play. There are only three levels, but just making it halfway through the second one is an accomplishment. Some of the hazards are truly devious. Parts of the maze move, there are rapidly moving wheels, and at one point the game traps you in a small box, and then moves the box around. Sinister. Released to arcades by SNK in 1997 without much fanfare and based on a mid 90s Japanese variety show segment that very few people in North America and Europe would have been familiar with, it’s no wonder that The Irritating Maze is not a very well known game. Maybe you will just have to trust me then, that this game is so perfectly executed that it’s amazing it didn’t spawn a wave of copycats and sequels. The Irritating Maze is one of the few Neo Geo arcade games of the time to be built into a special cabinet. It used a trackball controller and sported an air cannon that would blast air in the players face when they collided with one of the walls. I suppose that incorporating a metal trackball that would actually shock the player would have been a lawyer's nightmare, so they went with the air cannon. Probably a safer choice. Still, the game starts with a warning that any person who is pregnant or has a heart condition should not play The Irritating Maze. Maybe they should have put that on the cabinet in bright glowing letters. We would probably be playing The Irritating Maze 15 today if they had. There is a place in this world for wild dynamic systems based games and vast arrays of player verbs, but sometimes, sometimes, you just want to move carefully through a maze. That makes The Irritating Maze one of the Best Games. Today I submitted the last of my ‘one story a week for six weeks’ stories.
I’m gonna take a little break from writing (like a couple days… not like a break break) so I think this is all the words I have left in me this week. I only have one more story to write for the ‘write one short story every weekend jam type thing’ that I have been doing.
I will be glad to be done, since it is slightly stressful coming up with something new every weekend and then having a bunch of strangers judge it and pick it apart. On the other hand, it is pretty fun to push yourself and just see what you are capable of coming up with. And maybe it’s even a little fun to have a bunch of strangers pick apart your work, while you pick apart theirs. The hope is That in the end any story that comes out of this process will be that much better. You have passed that first draft, first read hurdle, and you can really try to send it. I still find that writer's block is not a thing. At least not for me. I can pretty easily come up with a handful of story ideas for any given prompt, toss out all the really bad ones and run with the sort of okay one that I have left over. It usually takes me a couple of hours of jotting notes and stray lines to come up with something approaching cohesive, but coming up with new story ideas or scenes, or characters, or situations. That’s not really a problem. That doesn’t mean that I write fast though. Many people in the competition would write a couple of stories and choose the one they liked best. A weekend is just enough time for me to write one sub 1000 word story and polish it up to any sort of presentable state. If I thought I had a few thousand words to work with, maybe I would write faster. Long dialog scenes or detailed action scenes. Stuff that can really get away from you if you have no hard word cap to deal with. That’s that sort of stuff that can really flow out of you when you get going. Or, to be more specific, If I really get going. I don’t know how you write. Maybe you are one of those fast people. Over the past year, I have only finished a couple of stories. I have two that are on the verge of done, and another two that need a bit of work but are otherwise humming along fine. But, like I said, I don’t write fast. I like to take some time and consider words and phrases. Try on different ways to describe things. Rewrite a single sentence 7 or 8 or 25 times until I get it just right. I do think that, for the most part, my stories this year are better, or more workable than last year. It’s tough for me to judge. I think I have less trouble getting them out, at any rate. Well, it’s time I submit my story for this week. Wish me luck. Quite a few months ago, I bought the full Affinity suite of products. Before you ask, of course they were on sale.
I have used Affinity Designer for a few years now, but up until recently, I haven’t had much reason to use Affinity Photo. I use Krita for most of my painting and image editing, and I still like it, but recently I have been working on my IPad more and more often. Drawing and painting directly on the screen has its advantages. Since Serif offered a single licence for Windows, Mac, and IOS, doing some image editing and painting in Affinity Photo was sort of a no-brainer. It’s fantastic. So I was a Photoshop and Illustrator guy. I used them both for almost twenty years. Professionally. I can honestly say that there are a lot of reasons that I prefer the Affinity suite. And no, it’s not just the price. Having pretty much the full toolset on the iPad is great. That I can use the same file on IPad and desktop is phenomenal. And, for the most part, the non-destructive tools are at least on par with Adobe’s, if not better. Compound masks are a must have for me now. I think they may have a little way to go with their brush engine, but I have been able to paint most of what I want to with very few issues or problems. The vector tools are solid, and if I ever find them lacking it’s pretty easy to hop over to Designer and build out a mask or text. If Photo has some decent vector tools, then it shouldn’t be surprising that Designer has some decent raster tools. Pixel paint brushes and patterns that an Illustrator artist would kill for. I used to promote Affinity Designer, because I used it nearly every day, but now, after using both Designer and Photo extensively, I can easily say it might be worth it for you to switch from Adobe products. Until something much better comes along, I will happily continue paying the very low upgrade price for the Affinity suite of products. Best Games - Money Puzzle Exchanger / Money Idol Exchanger
If you're like me, you think about Magical Drop 3 more than a person really should. Almost immediately after thinking about Magical Drop 3, you think of Money Puzzle Exchanger. It turns out, Face, the developer of Money Puzzle Exchanger, might be like me. The similarities between Money Puzzle Exchanger and Magical Drop are maybe what you might call legally actionable. Both games play very similarly. Circles that march down from the top of the screen and you as the player have the ability to grab one, or a similar group of those circles, pull them down to the bottom, move them to a new column and fire them back up to the top. If you make certain combinations of circles touch at the top, they will clear, or in the case of Money Puzzle Exchanger, they will be replaced by a circle of a different value. That’s the biggest difference here. In Magical Drop, making a line of three or more of the same color bubble will cause those bubbles, and any other similarly colored bubble touching them, to pop. In Money Puzzle Exchanger those circles represent coins and matching, say, five coins with a one on them will convert them all into a single coin with a value of five. Two fives make a ten, five tens makes a fifty, two fifties makes a hundred, and five hundreds makes a five hundred. Match two five hundreds and they will disappear, clearing them from the board permanently. While that all sounds sort of straight forward, imagine trying to make several matching patterns like that at high speed. Magical Drop can be difficult, but matching colors is trivial compared to that. On the surface, the gameplay of these two games might seem extremely similar, so similar that Data East may have sued Face over it, the experience of playing Money Puzzle Exchanger is very different from Magical Drop. There is so much more strategy and planning involved. The action is not as fast paced, but maybe even more hectic. More mentally stressful. In a good way. For a moment I thought that Money Puzzle Exchanger might have the wackier cast of fun characters, but they both post up a good showing in that department. So, Money Puzzle Exchanger is a lot like Magical Drop. And that’s great. But it also plays differently, and maybe is a bit more difficult. And that’s also great. It’s a lot like one of the other best games, but I don’t think that’s disqualifying. Money Puzzle Exchanger is different enough that I think it stands on its own as one of the best games. Every once in a while, I come across a game that I just don’t get. I can’t understand why other people enjoy it. This is very much a ‘not for me’ thing. I mean, go enjoy whatever games you like, I’m not going to tell you no, or tell you that you are wrong for liking it.
Almost always, I come across these games because someone recommended it to me. Or someone wrote an article about it. Or they talked glowingly about it on a podcast or YouTube video. Because they like it. They enjoyed it. And then I try it, and I don’t. The common public reaction seems to be to tell everyone who likes that thing, that they are wrong for liking it. I don’t and can’t subscribe to that. I know that there are things that I like that other people won’t. Usually I can try to articulate why it is that I like that thing, but I don’t actually expect my opinion to sway anyone. There are legions of games, and I won’t attempt to name them here, that I don’t enjoy, but I can imagine how someone else might. There is a much shorter list of games that I have a lot of trouble understanding who they are for. And yet, these games still have their proponents. I recently played a game, that I won’t name here, that came highly recommended. There are even some people out there calling it potentially their game of the year. I’m baffled. I played it. I think I explored it fully. I think I played enough to see what other people see in it… and I’m baffled. I hated almost every bit of playing it. No, the kids are not wrong. This is just something that is very much not for me. And that’s okay. I truly hope that the person for whom this is their game of the year, enjoyed every second of their time with it. I will be playing something else. There are so very many games to choose from. |
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