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| Haven't got to this bit, funnily enough... |
After beating L.A. Noire, I felt the need to do my thing
where I beat a heavy game, then play a couple of light ones. For this, I dug
out my WiiU and play Super Mario Bros again, and Castlevania. Both are
challenging platformers, and both are very hard to beat if you don’t know what
you’re doing; with Super Mario I got stuck on World 7 where there is some very
precise timing required, and with Castlevania, I couldn’t even make it past the
third level. I had a saved game somewhere around the fourth, but it requires
bang-on precision with the platforming and attacks, and more often than not I
fall foul of the knockback that plagues the earlier games. How anybody managed
to beat this I don’t know! Then again, the game is from a very different
generation, where it was usual for people to not have all that many games (I
have several hundred now) and the challenge of the games they did have was
added to by ferocious difficulty, and a lives system that forces you to go back
to the start of the level after every few deaths; in Super Mario it ends the
game altogether! I’m not all that far away from the same thing happening on New
Super Mario Bros U, which I also had a quick go at.
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| Probably shouldn't jump on that snail... |
Contrast this with Cluckles’ Adventure. Aesthetically, it’s
designed to look and play like one of those older games, but the comparisons
end there. There is no lives system; you can replay a level as many times as
you want. The 100+ levels are a lot shorter; even the longest one I’ve come
across takes about a minute and a half. There are power-ups that help you (so
far I’ve only come across a shield that will allow you to take an extra hit,)
but none that you’re supposed to have in order to get through a level. No boss
battles either, that I’ve seen! It’s just you and a small number of core
gameplay mechanics vs some very competently designed levels.
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| Old classics were great at the time, but things move on. |
For example, 30-something levels in to the game, one of the
stages telegraphs a secret room by putting a large square boulder on the ground
that doesn’t impede you in any way, but is deactivated by a switch at the
bottom of the level. Once you return to the area, the boulder is gone, but if
you jump straight down rather than clinging to the walls, you fall on to a
spike trap, die and return to the start of the level. Now if that were at the
end of a level you’d spent ten minutes on, or you had limited lives, it would
probably feel quite cheap. But since the only penalty for this is about 40
seconds from your life, it puts you in a position to say “Yeah, OK, you got me.
Well played. I’ll know for next time.” I’m not saying the new games are better
than the old classics, or the other way around – more that they are indicative
of the generation in which they were developed.
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| A gamer's game, to be sure! |
I also had a go at Spelunky. I’ve had this game on my Xbox
360 for a while, and I pick it up every now and then. This is a bit of a weird
one because I can never usually play it for very long. It’s a rogue-lite, and
the obvious comparison is to Rogue Legacy that I have on my laptop. It’s a
similar sort of thing; go around a 2D procedurally-generated dungeon in to find
a lot of treasure, defeat the enemies and progress through the game. Where I
find Spelunky lets itself down is that there’s nothing you can do with the
treasure in-between runs. With Rogue Legacy, the gold you earned could be used
to upgrade your character or equipment. With Spelunky, you can buy new
equipment as you’re going along, but other than that there’s nothing else to do
with the treasure and you lose it all in between runs. It’s good to pick up and
play for a few minutes but the brutally hard progression system makes it
difficult to remain engaged for long.
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