Leger vs. Ice Climber (NES)

I am kind of thankful of being kept in the dark concerning the origins of Ice Climber until being a grown up of sorts.

Ice Climber always felt kind of bare bones in that it just threw some 32 mountains to ascend at the player, but at the time that made sense.

Trying to get to grips with the mentality of having it all served to you at once, being able to pick whatever stage you wanted to play (just like in Wrecking Crew where all 100 puzzles are available from the get-go) the sense of progression can be somewhat lacking.

Not that you could not play the game from the beginning, stop playing after getting a Game Over or continue where you left off just like in any a bit more modern offerings, but it had to be on you to do that decision.

So I just climbed some mountains, tried out some later ones only to realise how fucking hard they were to ascend or played the game with a friend as a competitive thing.

The first one to kill of the other one by any means available was declared winner.

To play it today, from beginning to end, initially with the self imposed challenge of having to beat each mountain without dying (but with the added benefit of being able to restart the current mountain if death occured) somewhat changed my perception of the game.

I have always liked the odd physics and how the interaction with the environment works in Ice Climber.

Often said is that the collision detection is broken but I would rather go with it being quite hard to get a grip on.

Handling the climbers, trying to jump up to the next floor of the mountain (they all consists of eight regular floors with a tall bonus section on the top where it is perfectly okay to die with nothing lost but the chance of scoring more points) is not as easy as it might seem at first.

Not only is it of uttermost importance to make perfect jumps to not bump into the floor above or fall through it on the way down again, picking away at blocks in the way while stopping (or taking advantage of) white fluffy creatures filling in the gaps with new blocks is also a thing to take into consideration.

Some floors are behaving like conveyor belts constantly moving the climber in one direction or the other, some consists of nothing more than moving clouds of various sizes and some have to be constructed by the fluffy creatures to exist at all in a usable fashion. Also, certain blocks are unbreakable.

Spending too much time without progress upwards will have a polar bear with sunglasses and purple thongs to appear, using its weight while jumping to lower the entire mountain a floor.

Oh, and there is also an annoying bird flying all over the place which kills instantly upon contact if not beating it with the mallet first.

Upon reaching the bonus section, above the eight floor, nothing but picking up fruit that a huge condor have stolen and dropped, reaching the top and timing a jump to grab the very condors feet is on offer (for those chasing a high score, others may just kill themselves off to go to the next mountain without having to bother about losing a life).

It all begins rather simple with nothing but entire floors consisting of nothing but breakable blocks, but just some few stages later things start to get really difficult to deal with.

Enemies and clouds moving faster, icicles forming and dangerously dropping down at an alarming rate, floors cosisting of conveyur belts and tiny platforms to stand on while trying to jump and land on small clouds having to be used to break a hole in the floor above.

The difficulty reaches insane heights and just thinking about managing to beat the entire game from start to finish without a Game Over floating up on the screen seems nigh impossible and so much of a frustrating task to deal with.

At least until calming down, starting all over from the beginning and realising how much of a difference all the progress through the levels have made; Having learned how to deal with the physics, getting the timing of jumping onto and from moving clouds or conveyor belts and seeing the layouts of the mountains inprinted into the mind.

Suddenly Ice Climber turns into pure fun and plants a feeling, in me as a player, of actually being able to deal with the challenge on offer.

As a launch title for the NES in Sweden, back in 1986, Ice Climber is one hell of a game and proudly stands amongst the other eight games in the black box series released that very year.

But, like I said, I was kept in the dark.

Ice Climber was actually was lifted from the Nintendo arcade VS. System where the game offered two different sets of 24 mountains to ascend, more enemies, winds blowing and clouds moving in more varied ways, special stages appearing after every eight mountain beaten, different colour schemes and a progression system which marked a beaten mountain as beaten.

The arcade version, released a year prior to the Famicom version, actually feels like a sequel more than a prequel because of it having much more content and being a fleshed out game in most ways.

In my alternative universe VS. Ice Climber should have been released as Ice Climber 2 on the NES, just like it got a port to the Famicom Disk System in Japan in 1988.

But I digress, Ice Climber as I got to know it back then is great no matter what.

 

Leger vs. Alice: Madness Returns (Playstation 3)

Never mind Alice not being able to walk up the last step of a staircase onto a platform. She just seem stuck there until I command her to jump. Then she jumps.

Alice: Madness Returns got some serious issues with getting the environments to feel like more than a dead scenery even though things are moving, rotating and transforming all over the place. You see, an opening which Alice clearly can walk into is never an opening unless the game wants it to be.

Getting stuck on a staircase is really not that strange in the context of previously not having been able to stand on a platform which looked standable or not managed to walk through an opening which clearly had nothing blocking the way through.

Also, after the first hour of doing some jumping, turning small over and over again to go through tiny keyholes, walking on some invisible platforms made visible and beating up some monsters at places clearly signaling that a battle is about to commence this very loop is repeated over and over again.

With more and more frustrating jumps to make, keyholes getting harder to find, invisible platforms moving faster getting more difficult to reach aswell as battles with enemies that gets increasingly tougher dealing more damage and acting more defensive.

Best of all is the introduction of the exploding bunny Alice can play around with, a bunnt which besides blowing up stuff also acts as a heavy thing to put on trigger plates. Only problem is that after a set amount of seconds it explodes, making the trigger go back to its unpressed state.

Triggers often make a shootable clock turn up (which when shot opens up the way forward), almost always placed somewhere hard to reach. A couple of pits, platforms and enemies away, naturally hard to deal with, and with time passing by while the camera pans over to the clock so that one can not see what the fuck Alice is doing; If not using the precious time when Alice is out of the picture to move her towards the clock it is not uncommon to see time run out having to restart the process.

Such fun, in the blind jumping between platforms above pits of death.

More or less hidden along the way through the fucked up Wonderland of Alice are memories and other collectibles. Due to the linear nature of the game it is quite hard to miss out on the secrets if you actually bother to look for them, and since they offer little of worth to any but completionists its easy to decide to not care about them.

It all feels like an early Playstation 2 game having initially been planned to be released during the previous generation of hardware, designwise, where the argument to care is the presentation.

And by presentation I do not mean the unstable framerate, the sometimes muddy textures or the sudden shoot 'em up sequences (which are embarassingly bad) but the fantastic aesthetics.

The game presents some beautiful environments, sometimes dark and steampunky and sometimes bright and lsd trippingly colourful. Wonderland is a curious place to explore and had it not been for the stages overstaying their welcome (they just never want to end, no matter if they have nothing more to say) I would recommend playing the game just to get to see some of the places Alice traverses.

Juxtaposing Wonderland is a brown and dark city where Alice actually lives when not stuck in her mind trying to make sense of her familys demise in the fire the previous game dealt with. Driven by guilt aswell as a feeling of things not really having happened the way they seem she gets "professional" help to supress her horrifying memories, but a side effect is a Wonderland falling to pieces.

Gritty and grim, but not to an extent of pure horror even though decapitations, bloodlettings and pressure relieving drillings into the brain get thrown in ones way. Partly less horrifying thanks to the cartoony cutscenes and comical undetones throughout it all.

But, no.

It does not work.

Halfway through the game with closer to 40% showing on my save file I just could not motivate myself to keep playing, even having reduced the difficulty to Easy to spend less time in the boring battles.

Switching between the knife and a sledgehammer like horsehead on a stick (or whatever it is, can not remember), shooting projectiles to keep the distance from the enemies, the battles seem to drag on. Even if the weapons gets upgrades, if the butterfly themed evasion is effectively used or if Alice goes into a rage when almost getting killed.

You can find a flow in the battles, you can learn to kill enemies quicker, but the repetetiveness of it all (as a part of the main repetetive gameplay loop) makes it all feel like a chore more than entertainment.

Not having played the prequel I just had to see what was on offer, it just happened to be included as a free DLC, and after some hours of playing the two decades old American McGee's Alice it became obvious that something managed to get lost along the way to the sequel.

No matter the uglier graphics, questionable controls and lack of double jump the first game in the series just felt as a much more inspired product with every new place visited introducing some new kind of concept making it intriguing to see what comes next.

Alice: Madness Returns is in no way a disaster, but at least it should have taken the series in a progressive direction instead of sticking with the generics of the genre leaving the innovation of the prequel a distant memory to be supressed while trying to get Alice unstuck from the starcase.

 

Leger vs. Beat the Beat: Rhythm Paradise (Wii)

Detta inlägg publicerades ursprungligen på Loading.se, 2017/09/10.

Att Wario Ware och Rhythm Heaven är två serier som på många vis påminner om varandra är inte speciellt underligt med hänsyn till Nintendo SDP Production Group No. 1.

Det rappa, munsbitsfokuserade, är återkommande och så även den lekfulla, rena och ofta naivgränsande estetiken som naturligtvis känns som klippt och skuren för de där små, bärbara, skärmarna vars ljusåtergivning inte alltid varit den bästa i alla tänkbara sammanhang.

Visserligen har även Wario Ware gått stationärt, men att Rhythm Heaven skulle göra detsamma var allt annat än en självklarhet; Släppt till Wii, veckor innan Nintendo skulle lansera den svårdefinierade och otydliga uppföljaren Wii U, med allt annat än bruk av A och B på wiimoten för allt vad spelupplevelse heter inbillar jag mig att det måste haft svårt att hitta någon större form av publik.

Men som saker och ting skulle komma och bli, åtminstone borta i japan, fick det ett varmt mottagande representerat av dryga hundratusen exemplar sålda under dess första vecka på marknaden. Hur det gick i väst bortom den kritikerälskling det skulle komma att bli, detta Rhythm Heaven, har jag dock inte en aning om.

Konceptuellt finns det ingenting jag inte uppskattar med denna Beat the Beat-installation, där simpelhet och rå taktkänsla är den stabila grund allt vilar på, och dess naiva framtoning till trots, eller egentligen tack vare, briljerar det med en visserligen Wario Ware-doftande men i ett större sammanhang unik audiovisuell skrud.

Bekant med serien är saker och ting ungefär som vanligt, om inte snäppet simplare med endast två knappar att hålla reda på, och de centrala minispelen, eller rättare sagt låtarna, handlar som väntat om ungefär allt tänkbart någonsin.

Badminton uppe i luften, bland utstiktsskymmande moln med en katt i ett flygplan och en hund i ett annat. En fabrik i vilken stora och små mutterliknande robotar byggs ihop. Små glada bakterier, förflyttandes i takt till musik, betraktade via ett mikroskop.

För att ge en livslängd lite längre än de 28 låtar som utgör den huvudsakliga delen av kampanjen, fördelade fyra och fyra med en avslutande remix inkluderandes samtliga låtar i berörd kategori kan man låsa upp än fler låtar, dock i repriserande tappning, diverse minispel, texter att läsa, låtar att lyssna till utan att spela dem och så vidare.

Och det är väl bra, så långt.

Men Beat the Beat: Rhythm Heaven gör en hel del saker fel, som om det stressats ut på marknaden utan att man tänkt igenom exakt vad beslut x samt y får för konsekvenser för den potentiella publiken.

Det handlar både om små saker, som att man om man råkar peka med wiimoten mot skärmen i någon meny inaktiverar styrkorskontrollen och lätt skapar en förvirring varför styrkorset plötsligt tycks ha slutat att fungera.

Och större saker, som att man och här känns det plötsligt lämpligt att räkna upp det jag kan komma på i ett mer punktmässigt format.

Varje låt introduceras med en tutorial som man visserligen kan hoppa över men ej avvaktivera om man känner att man vet vad som väntar och med fördel vill gå rakt på låt.

Spelet säger inte till om man gjort bort sig under loppet av en låt, vilket gör att man aldrig kan vara säker på om man klarat den såvida man inte spelar den till dess slut.

Om det går åt helvete finns det inget sätt att starta om berörd låt från början, utan man tvingas istället pausa låten, hoppa ut till menyn, välja berörd låt (och då peka mot skärmen för att välja den om man råkat inaktivera styrkorset), se dess namn presenteras på skärmen, trycka - för att skippa dess tutorial och först därefter få en ny chans att klara den.

Låtarna kan vara extremt frikostiga vad gäller misstag, men de kan även vara fullskaligt anala så till den grad att man knappt förstår varför man ej klarat dem och detta trots att man ges små ledtrådar, eller beröm, efter varje spelad låt.

Tidiga låtar kan vara otroligt mycket svårare än senare, och någonstans i trakten av spelets tredje remix tycks svårighetsgraden slå i taket för att sedan klinga av så till den grad att man av bara farten rusar hela vägen fram till den sjunde och avslutande uppsättningen av låtar.

Spelet är hundraprocentigt linjärt på så vis att man måste spela låtarna i en bestämd ordning där enda sättet att låsa upp nästkommande låt är att klara den aktuella.

Det är som att man någonstans längs vägen glömt bort att man inleder hela upplevelsen med att berätta för spelaren att det inte är så himla viktigt att perfekt synka knapptryckningar till takten utan att fokus lika gärna kan ligga på att ha skoj.

Munsbitskonceptet hade väl, om så som ovan vore fallet, fungerat klart mycket bättre om man kunnat välja mellan en hel uppsjö av låtar från sekund ett, om spelet sagt till direkt något gått åt helvete och att man kunnat starta om en låt snabbt och enkelt utan att behöva ta sig an ovanstående procedur?

Som för att verkligen gnida in salt i spelarens öppna sår är det här med upplåsning av bonusmaterial en extremt omständligt process att ta sig an; Varje nivå kan man misslyckas på, klara med ett "OK" eller ett "SUPERB". Ett SUPERB krävs för att man skall ges en slumpmässig chans att tackla låten för en PERFECT (vilket innebär att man inte missar ett enda knapptryck).

Efter tre misslyckade försök eller andra spelade nivåer upphör denna chans för att någon gång i framtiden åter slumpas fram.

Visst ser jag Beat the Beat: Rhythm Heaven som ett måste i samlingen, mycket för att det är så otroligt unikt i vad det gör och det speciellt sett till spelutbudet till Wii, men jag kan inte skaka av mig känslan av att det stressats ut på marknaden för att ha en chans att slippa konkurrera med utbudet som komma skulle.

Menar, det är inte som att det där upplåsningsbara materialet förlänger livslängden nämnvärt, för så omfattande är det inte, utan snarare är det omotiverat placerat bakom en vägg av frustration som kompletterar den redan extremt obalanserade och designmässigt irriterande resan genom den taktfokuserade kampanj som spelet består av.

Tur är det då, att en majoritet av spelets låtar, och dess audiovisuella läckerhet, är morot nog till att fortsätta spela lite till, och lite till. Retfulla Monkey Watch, urfåniga Ringside och intensiva Air Rally är utan tvekan fullgoda exempel på att problemet ligger på annat håll.

 

Leger vs. In the Hunt (Saturn)

Near the end of Irem in the arcades a group of people later forming Nazca Corporation of Metal Slug fame put together a game in the west known as In the Hunt.

It shows, since In the Hunt both looks and feels like a underwater version of Metal Slug where the player controls a submarine which may shoot in three directions (up, forward and down).

Certainly not a crowded genre, especially considering the choice of vehicle, this not automatically scrolling run and gun (or shoot 'em up, whatever you prefer) got ported to the Playstation and the Saturn (aswell as Windows and later to more modern systems such as the Switch and Evercade).

Not having played the Windows version my guess is that the Saturn version is the worst of the bunch.

While the inclusion of a really ugly and repetitive (some scenes are shown over and over again) full motion video acting as an introduction does not matter much, the terrible and frequent slowdowns makes the game extremely annoying to play.

The game looks truly beautiful, with detailed animations of both the environments and whatever interacting with dito. Windows in the hundreds breaks in a visually satisfying manner, explosions and projectiles can fill up the screen and small people only a couple of pixels in size runs around in the background trying to stay alive in the midst of the chaos.

However, as soon as things start to get hectic the game starts to crawl and the already slow submarine starts to feel like it trying to plow through tar.

Combine this with some truly awful collision detection where the hitbox of the submarine seems impossible to figure out (not to mention that huge things flying over the screen, projectiles and debris, sometimes kills you and sometimes not) many, many, many deaths seem to come out of nowhere.

And if this was not enough, already the first boss delivers an attack which seems almost impossible to avoid no matter what you do, and this is something reoccuring over and over again through the game.

Passages which seem like you have to die to get past, if you do not happen to get lucky and get an opening where you most often do not get one (such as trying to navigate the rows of giant rockets going up the screen which you can not sqeeze in between, destroy or do anything with besides speeding them up or slowing them down depending on where you shoot them).

By the third stage of six in total the game goes completely haywire.

Yes, it is extremely impressive to be chased by a giant stone, uh, giant while traversing upwards. Getting big shit to fall on its face until it breaks and reveals muscles, blood and whatnot beneath.

But here the slowdowns get unbearable, enemies multiply in numbers, explosions appear everywhere and the screen gets so filled with happenings that it seems impossible to be in control of the situation.

This original version from Japan do offer unlimited continues, so to plow through the entire game is really not a problem.

Normally this would feel like a great way to pratice all of the stages to finally be able to go 1CC on the game, but the more I play the more frustrated I get having to deal with the unbalanced gameplay and annoyingly bad programming (even the graphics seems to fuck up on stage four with huge parts of buildings you go through shaking unintentionally, making it all seem glitched).

The insight of having to deal with the frustration of it all over and over again until I (maybe) will manage to beat it without using any continues makes me finally come to the conclusion that I will never, ever, bother to learn how to beat the game.

I could go on talking about the power up system (which consists of an M and A changing the upward projectiles, and a blue, red and green orb changing the forward moving projectiles), but sticking with the M (Missiles) and the blue magnetically attracting variant (Supersonic Torpedoes) is pretty much all that is needed to be bothered about.

Unbalanced and underdeveloped system, indeed.

Oh, and the soundtrack seems to be changed from the original one found in the arcade version to something more anonymous, generic, and technotic sounding; Even when playing the game loudly without any sfx nothing seem to get stuck on my mind.

The music is not bad, it just feels uninspired and do nothing to elevate the joy of playing the game. It is sort of... just there.

Also, if chasing a high score to brag about you will have to take notes since they are not saved, and going co-op (which is a nice feature) do not do any good when taking the already terrible slowdowns into consideration.

In the Hunt, known as Kaitei Daisensou in Japan, simply fails to live up to its beautiful graphics and promising concept. It seems stuck between the equally game changing R-Type series and Metal Slug, seemingly not knowing how to proceed in a good manner.