Weekly Game Music: Lullaby Set (Braid)


I know it’s Halloween, but I’m not aware of many spooky music that’s tolerable without context. Instead, I’m choosing a relaxing music from Braid: Lullaby Set, by Shira Kammen and Pam Swan. And hey, the video displays a burning city, so I guess that’s creepy enough for some of you.

Braid stars an unlikely hero named Tim. He’s a well-suited, necktie wearing character who can jump high and reverse time. He ventures through painterly stages to find the Princess who disappeared for a rather vague reason. Presumably, she’s kidnapped by a monster; others claim she left on her own accord. Regardless of reason, Tim has to gather the missing puzzle pieces to unlock the location where the Princess went.

Does the story sound a bit familiar? It’s true that Braid is a Mario-like puzzle-platformer, and it certainly makes a lot of references to the famous Nintendo game series. However, Braid is known for its extremely difficult puzzles, and jaw-dropping twist-ending that forces you to reinterpret the entire story. Some of its puzzles involve reversing time at a different rate, slowing down time within a certain area, walking to move time forward and back, and creating shadows of yourselves to conduct different activities. One puzzle even requires you to use the puzzle pieces you’ve collected to retrieve the last on in the course. Braid certainly requires a good amount of creativity and analysis to progress through the game.

It’s worth noting that Braid is yet another indie game developed by only 2 people: Jonathon Blow and David Hellman. The game is available for PC, Mac, and Linux via Steam, App Store, and Ubuntu Store respectively. Additionally, it’s available for download on Playstation 3 and Xbox 360.


Extra!

Title: Downstream
Game: Braid
Composer: Shira Kammen


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City of Wonder Review


City of Wonder, developed by Playdom, is a construct-your-own-city simulation with a historical slant. As such, City of Wonder adds one more dimension to simply just constructing a city: it also allows you to construct your own history to better technology, artworks, and/or military. While this certainly makes the game unique, the complexity and slow growth makes it difficult to enjoy the game in the beginning. It does, however, get much better further into the game.

Starting City of Wonder is similar to CityVille: a Cultural Adviser guides you into collecting new populations, money, and cleaning up cultural decorations. And, well, that’s it. Goals are introduced in the upper-right hand corner, but unlike CityVille, only one goal will appear at a time. From this ever changing goals, however, all the actions are introduced, including farming, planting, visiting other cities, researching new technology, developing a military, building markets, decorations, monuments, homes, and so forth. Finally, Expeditions are introduced, allowing you to either exchange culture, trade, or go to war to other colonies.

City of Wonder has a few advantages and disadvantages compared to CityVille. On the advantages side, City of Wonder does not use the energy system in CityVille, allowing you to conduct any activity as rapidly and as long as you’d like. Instead of the energy system, you’re only limited to the amount of resources you have left to build and expand your territory. This is quite a huge relief, considering how so many games rely on this trope too much (Bejewled and Angry Birds being notable exceptions). Another advantage is the unique Expedition system. Your attacks, trading skills, and cultural sophistication are all dependent on the kind of buildings you’ve created. Thus, you have to strategically construct a city tailored towards a certain attribute, while sacrificing others.

On the disadvantages side, City of Wonder “builds-up” slower than CityVille, and has a worse GUI. Visiting you’re friends cities are not very satisfying, since the only action you can take is to collect from their Embassy. Since there’s no reason to explore other peoples’ cities, there is no aesthetic competition. City of Wonder also feels less animated, which is a bit of a double-edge sword. While it’s convenient that resources are collected automatically simply by clicking on a farm, it loses the gratification of collecting the spurting items via a mouse. Spam-wise, City of Wonder demands less from your friends, but more from your credit card.

I personally thought City of Wonder was a slightly less entertaining than CityVille, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad at all. I found it quite satisfying playing it, even though its GUI is rather unwieldy.
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CityVille+ Review


CityVille, developed by Zynga, currently stands as the most played game on Facebook. I’ll admit that I did not enjoy FarmVille much, another popular game by the same developers, and had a very reserved opinion when starting up CityVille. That said, I was pleasantly surprise. CityVille manages to be an addicting game due to its clear objectives and a decent strategy, despite the horribly implemented interface, and even worse demand for spam.

When you start CityVille, it introduces you with a house and a farm. A guide, Samantha, will direct you in how to build a house and collect rent from it. After that, your tutorial is done: nice, short, and easy. Immediately after the tutorial, however, the Goals (akin to Xbox’s Achievements) are listed on the left-hand side of the screen. The first few will teach how to do other activities, including farming, starting a business, and expanding the population. The most interesting goal is one that requires you to visit your neighbors. Your list of neighbors already include one computer-generated character, Samantha herself. Her city acts like a model city: it has nearly everything you can place and decorate in your city. Additionally, the goal teaches you the different things you can help in a neighboring city, such as collecting money, touring the population to a specific business, and even setting up your brand. The game, of course, limits your activities in the neighboring city and forces you to go back home. By then, however, you’ve already been sold the ultimate objective of the game: making your own city like Samantha’s.

As mentioned earlier, CityVille is addicting. It starts very quickly and smoothly. It has so many things to do, including building houses, maintaining business, farming supplies, decorating the town, and expanding the ever-growing population. The goals are listed in a visible (if annoying) fashion, providing rewards to further compel you to achieving the ideal city. And of course, there’s always you friendly neighbor Samantha, reminding you what you could do with enough cash or persistence. The consistent drive to build and expand the city to your own liking is a compelling tried-and-true experience by several Sims games, and it certainly works wonders here.

Until you run out of Energy. Typical of any Facebook games, CityVille at one points just halts your actions entirely because you don’t have enough stamina to continue. You’re forced to wait five minutes once the energy meter runs out to recovery one unit, and even then, the thirst to continue playing is immediately dried up by the next action you take. As much as I greatly dislike this Arcade-like monetizing, it does pose a bit of an advantage. Knowing your energy bar limit forces you to plan on the best course of action to take to best supply and profit off of your own population. Are you willing to sacrifice an entire day to re-supply your reserve? Or do you need it immediately? Do you want to take the rent from that house now, or when the rent is available to all of your residents? The latter has a huge advantage. By collecting many items at once, your bonus meter fills, supplying extra cash at the end.

Perhaps the part I like least about this game, however, is its constant insistence that you remind your friends you’ve played this game. This tends to be less of a problem in Google+, because those game reminders do not appear in the homepage, but it does get annoying for the player him/herself after a while. Even worse, there’s only 3 ways to expand your population and area of play: inviting more friends, then demanding certain roles, paying cash, or leveling up.

The latter two revolves around CityVille’s 2 currency system: the Coins, which you collect through normal activities, and Cash where one can buy with real money. Leveling up also gives one cash, to later hire different city jobs. I haven’t paid my dollars to convert to cash yet, but I’m assuming it’s using Google Checkout.

Despite it’s glaring flaws and rather cluttered user interface, CityVille still had it going with its constant demand for new activity, requirement to carefully plan your next steps, and the ever-looming goal of creating your dream city. I definitely recommend trying it, well over FarmVille, but I warn you, you’re going to want a lot of friends to help out.
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Weekly Game Music: Stairway to Revelation (Tower of Heaven)


Here’s another chiptune from Askiisoft’s Tower of Heaven, Stairway to Revelation by flashygoodness. It’s a recurring theme in the game, and fits perfectly with the Gameboy-like graphics the game portrays.

The game starts with Eid, a big-headed silhouette, entering the Tower of Heaven. Upon entering, an omnipotent voice grudgingly welcomes our hero, warning him almost immediately that the path is dangerous, and the the time is limited. When Eid completes a few trials (represented as floors), the amused voice forces him to carry the Book of Laws. As Eid climbs higher up the tower, the absurdity of the laws imposed by the book increases.

Tower of Heaven, though short, is a painfully difficult 2D platformer. Breaking any of the laws written in the Book of Laws causes instant death. These laws include, “don’t touch the side of blocks or walls,” “don’t walk left,” and my personal favorite, “don’t open the Book of Laws.” The laws points out the frequently unwritten rules in difficult platformers such as touching the side of platforms on mid-flight will lead to death, anyways.

Developed by 3 people (including the composer), Tower of Heaven is playable online at NewGrounds.
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Weekly Game Music: Now You’re a Hero (You Have to Burn the Rope)


Let’s venture into songs with lyrics again. Here is You Have to Burn the Rope’s Now You’re a Hero, by Henrik Nåmark. Yep, a music by a Swedish composer!

You Have to Burn the Rope is an action-packed game starring a nameless, bowler-hat wearing character who’s specialty is to throw axes. As he traverses through a long and windy tunnel, he finds at the end a beautiful dinner room with a giant, menacing monster: the Grinning Colossus! Our hero bravely chucks axes at the boss, but to no avail. The Grinning Colossus’ health regeneration prevents the hero from making even a small dent. Desperately avoiding the bullets shot from the boss’ eyes, the hero finds a cryptic engraving on the wall: “You have to burn the rope!” As if he understood perfectly, the hero grabs a burning stick off the wall, climbs to the ceiling, and acrobatically burns the rope that’s holding up the chandelier. With the support gone, the chandelier falls onto the Grinning Colossus, bringing about its terrible demise!

If you couldn’t figure out from the title or the description above, yes, the game is a joke. It poignantly points out an impractical commonality in many action games: defeating a boss requires tactics that seems to completely ignore the abilities you’ve worked so hard to master. Once the boss is defeated, Henrik’s song plays, creatively noting the game’s sarcasm.

Despite it’s short gameplay, You Have to Burn the Rope actually had a brief following. Fans wrote in-depth reviews and guides to play and finish the game, frequently praising it for its complexity. Developers like Michael Ancel praised the creator for its “creativity.” It was even awarded as a finalist for 2009’s Independent Games Festival for Innovation.

You Have to Burn the Rope is playable online at Kongregate.
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Weekly Game Music: On To Grasstown (Cave Story)


Going back to chip tune again, On To Grasstown is from a free PC game called Cave Story. This game’s design, artwork, code, sound, and music were put together by one Japanese man, Daisuke Amaya, within 5 years. While initial introduction was slow, the game gained massive popularity when translated to english, starting a new wave of indie games that still inspires young developers today.

One of Cave Story’s strength is in its tragic story. The story begins with Doctor laughing at what looks like a crown, then obtaining it. Scene changes: there’s now a text chat between a boy in a lab coat attempting to contact “Sue.” Another scene change: the protagonist wakes up in a cave. He’s mute, amnesiac, and defenseless. First thing he does is climb up, and travel further into the cave for a weapon.

If that sounded confusing to you, this is intentional. The further one progresses through the game, the more the details starts becoming cohesive. Shortly in the game, you’ll accidentally fall into a small town of rabbit-like creatures called Mimigas. You learn that the Doctor is kidnapping each citizen one-by-one. You find that the Doctor kidnapped Toroko, a Mimiga that’s mistaken as Sue. You meet Sue. There are Dragon eggs. The boy in the lab coat reveals himself. By progressing through the story, each detail makes the world more complete. In fact, even mentioning the name of the protagonist is a spoiler.

Cave Story is a Metroidvania game — a platformer shoot-em’ up like the Megaman series, but emphasizing on exploration over action. There are hidden items to collect, different weapons, and multiple endings. It’s difficult to find every one of them in the first run, so there’s a high replay value behind this game. The old-school graphics has a certain cute charm to it as well; a bit ironic considering how bleak the story becomes.

The best part of Cave Story, however, is its excellent level design and surprisingly polished story. Each level is intentionally designed to help introduce and demonstrate a new weapon. The game doesn’t feel too difficult until the very end. Also with the story, the fact that the protagonist doesn’t remember anything helps interject your own views of the world. As the details pour in, you become the protagonist, learning slowly what your purpose is, and how to fight it.

Cave Story is available for the PC, Mac, Linux, PSP, Xbox, and TI-83 Plus for free. A polished version is available for payed download on the WiiWare and DSiWare as a downloadable. Similarly, Cave Story+ is on PC and Mac via Steam and App Store respectively. Lastly, Cave Story 3D is now available for the 3DS.


Extra!

Title: Cave Story
Game: Cave Story (Wii, DS), Cave Story+
Composer: Daisuke Amaya
Remixer: Yann van der Cruyssen

Title: Escape Route
Game: Cave Story
Composer: Daisuke Amaya
Remixer: Corran


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