I stand corrected

jparish 8 June, 2013 6 Comments

Well, I goofed in my write-up of the second stage of Donkey Kong Jr. — after messing around with the game a little more today while I was stuck like a veal calf on the airplane, I realized that you can in fact jump to the upper moving platform from the spring jack. It’s not very easy to do, because the timing is so weird and if you snag on the platform without actually mounting it your downward arc to the ground beneath it will count as a fall rather than a spring jump, which means it will count as a fatal action rather than something you can just shrug off. It works on both the NES version I’ve been experimenting with and with the arcade version based on some of the videos I’m double-checking against. This fact doesn’t change my overall critique of the stage — if anything, the fact that a one-pixel collision mishap can turn a safe action into a deadly one simply highlights DKJr.‘s sometimes irritating flaws — but it still merits a revision.

In other news: USgamer launches Monday, lord willing. I’m pretty excited. It’s shaped up to be exactly the kind of site I’ve always wanted to write for — the distilled essence of 1UP’s best moments minus the restrictions and limitations imposed by running on tech and design geared around being a Big Player Playing By The Rules Established By IGN and Gamespot. I could do without a site launch the first day of E3, but it wouldn’t be the first time. Or the second. Or even the third….

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Games

The Anatomy of Super Mario VII: A shocking turn of events

jparish 7 June, 2013 2 Comments

Donkey Kong Jr.‘s repetition of its predecessor’s beats continues here. Where its second level resembles Donkey Kong‘s third stage, the third level here somewhat evokes Donkey Kong‘s second stage.

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Which is to say, it’s the low point of the game.

The problem with this screen is similar to the one with the cement factory: It throws a lot of different things at the player all at once, while taking the main character out of his natural element. This electrical station removes Junior from the vines where he moves most gracefully, playing instead more like a scenario that should star Mario. It’s all about moving left to right, right to left, jumping over obstacles all the while. The hazards even resemble the barrels from the first stage of Donkey Kong in terms of their movement: Yellow sparks circle the filaments, while blue sparks descend on those dotted lines that appear to be… well, I’m not really sure what they are. They kind of look like sprinkles of water, but they don’t move, and in any case it doesn’t make sense for electrodes to drip water. It’s an odd failure of visual design.

The rules of this stage are pretty easy to grasp. Horizontal platforming is more intuitive than vine-climbing, after all. But Junior doesn’t manage flat stretches of ground as well as he does clusters of vines, and the hazards come fast and furious. The different colors of sparks move at different speeds, and the blue ones can be slightly unpredictable. By the time you’re on the third level up, Junior is dealing with a huge number of moving obstacles — enough to make that one egg-drop bit of stage two seem like a breeze. Success here is contingent on Junior navigating two-speed threats on a tricky surface.

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Beyond that, there’s really nothing much to this stage. It’s easily the most straightforward level so far in the game, with each level presenting small variations on the central design challenge. The difficulty comes in the way it doesn’t play to Donkey Kong Jr.‘s strengths; Nintendo created a game in which optimal play happens suspended above the ground, then plopped a stage about dashing across the ground in the middle. There’s certainly nothing wrong with mixing things up, but as in stage two the problem comes from the fact that the basic platforming mechanics in Donkey Kong Jr. simply aren’t very good.

But, on the plus side, the game at least ends strong.

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Anatomy of a Game, Games
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The Anatomy of Super Mario VI: Gradations

jparish 6 June, 2013 14 Comments

Everyone’s really angry right now about game systems they’ve never played, huh? That’s lame. Let’s do something different and get all salty about one that’s been around for a few decades instead.

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I’ll say this for the second level of Donkey Kong Jr.: It does a much better job of being a second level than the second level of its predecessor did. This feels like a logical extrapolation of mechanics from the first stage combined with new features and challenges. Another nice detail: The first thing you face here is a spring, which is a repurposed jack from the third stage of Donkey Kong. Neat!

And that’s about where the good ends. Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration, but this stage sees the designers’ reach exceeding their grasp. Not entirely unlike what Junior’s sprite looks like when he jumps. It’s metaphorical, maybe.

As often tends to be the case with games that break new ground, you can see some really inventive ideas on display here, but the tech and programming and general understanding of how video games work — or would come to work eventually — wasn’t entirely in place yet. I can’t be too hard on Donkey Kong Jr., because everything about it is pretty solid… except the way all the parts fit together.

Stage two here involves a remarkable number of platforms, some of which move. This may remind you of Donkey Kong‘s stage three, and in fact I don’t think the presence of the spring jack is an accident. Despite its differences from the first game, DKJr adheres to many of the same beats as its predecessor. So here you have moving platforms, though they drift left to right instead of vertically (because Junior moves best vertically); the platforms run perpendicular to his personal orientation.

The analogue doesn’t work perfectly, because Junior still jumps to get about, and his jumps obey the same approximate physics as Mario’s. They’re also less precise, because Junior’s sprite is larger along the horizontal axis and sticks his arms and legs out. His shape shifts as he jumps, which introduces a small element of visual uncertainty to the action — small, but enough to make the game play a little more awkwardly than it should.

The stage begins with a bounce off the spring jack, with the apex of Junior’s rebound bringing his head even with the moving platform immediately above. It actually looks a bit like he could grab onto or otherwise mount the platform, but quite the opposite: If you’re not careful about how you jump, Junior’s head will clonk into it and he’ll fall to his death. Whoops.

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The spring jack takes you to another solid platform, provided you don’t hit your head and plunge to your death. Beyond that, however, is the first moving platform. It’s pretty easy to hit: As a double-sized platform, it’s a big target that spends very little time outside of Junior’s inherent jumping range, and it’s below the platform from which you jump, so you have a lot of grace with your jump’s arc. From there, you jump to the right and climb a vine. In a nice touch, the vine here is accompanied by a second one running parallel to it so you can zip up quickly if you wish.

Beyond here, though, the game becomes surprisingly taxing. The next jump is a major sticking point in a Donkey Kong Jr. playthrough, because you’re dealing with two hazards at once, both of which run on a cycle that tends to make them overlap in a very difficult way. The only way forward is to hop onto a vine hanging from a pulley reel. It moves back and forth, alternately getting longer and shorter as it does so. It doesn’t come as close to the upper platform as the moving floor below came to Junior’s disembarkation point, and due to its retraction it generally appears above Junior’s head. In short, it’s a tricky jump.

At the same time, Mario is releasing a stream of birds that fly straight away from him then take a sharp downward turn when they reach a gap in the floor at the top level. Once they drop, they take another sharp turn, doubling back to fly off the left edge of the screen below Mario. As they drop, they let loose an egg. The egg, which will instantly kill Junior upon contact, always lands at the left edge of the platform from which you have to leap to grab onto the pulley vines.

Due to a quirk in the game’s timing, the short window in which you can leap over to the vine has a tendency to overlap with the short window in which an egg is smashing fatally against the portion of the platform from which you have to leap to reach the vine. Time is ticking down, but you’ll frequently find yourself stuck here waiting for these two elements to fall out of sync, allowing you to make your leap in safety.

Once you manage to reach the vine, you’re safe from eggs, but your lot is no less difficult: You have to drop from the vine onto another moving platform. This one is half the width of the lower platform, and you really need to have a grasp on Junior’s vine-maneuvering physics to fall precisely onto the tiny moving object. It feels slippery and imprecise.

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Once you make it past the jumps, the remainder of the stage is a breeze. It puts Junior in his natural element — shuffling along vines — and provided you have a good grasp on rising versus falling (two-vine grip versus one) in order to dodge the birds that zip along at variable heights, it doesn’t take much time to reach Mario’s perch.

In a game of a more recent vintage, this stage would be a lot of fun. It features lots of different challenges — a shocking number for the time, honestly — that require you to apply a wide variety of disciplines and skills in order to reach the top. You’re jumping, bouncing, climbing, dealing with different kinds of moving scenery, and dodging bad guys. It’s impressive! But it’s not much fun, because poor Junior is saddled with 1982 controls and physics. His jump is limited and visually ambiguous. He moves slowly and feels clumsy. Nintendo laid down a bunch of great ideas they’d explore in later games with this level, but here it doesn’t quite gel. A+ for Ambition, but C- for Execution.

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Anatomy of a Game, Games
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If Animal Crossing has a win state, I think this is it

jparish 5 June, 2013 6 Comments

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GYROIDS EVERYWHERE.

I have a very nice review of the game that I’d like for you all to read. We’re hammering out the last details of USgamer and should be launching soon, so hopefully you won’t have to wait long for my opinion on New Leaf. Not that you haven’t already made up your mind to buy the game (or not).

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The Anatomy of Super Mario V: Junior league

jparish 3 June, 2013 11 Comments

After Donkey Kong exploded into what was the single biggest of success to that day for Nintendo, a company more than 80 years old at that point, a sequel became inevitable. Nintendo didn’t really know how video game sequels are supposed to work in those days, though, so they went about making a follow-up in a completely different way than just about every other game maker of the era. Back in 1982, sequel were usually just faster, more difficult, or simply more graphically impressive versions of the original game. Kind of like now! But even more so. I mean, yeah, you can only do so much with Pong. But Space Invaders‘ sequels just added color or other small features; Ms. Pac-Man even began life as a ROM hack.

Donkey Kong Jr., on the other hand, threw out a good many of the elements that defined Donkey Kong to create something wildly different through still recognizable as a successor. This proved to be both good and bad. Let’s talk about why.

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Like the first game, Jr. spans four single-screen action sequences. And, much as in the original, the first three levels find you at the bottom of the screen working your way to the top in a sort of obstacle course zig-zag. The fourth and final level takes a more open form requiring you to unmake the stage’s structure. As before, the protagonist — in this instance Kong’s son, I guess? — lacks offensive capabilities outside of a small number of objects contained within the environment, forcing players to go on the defensive most of the time. You can move in four directions and jump. And that’s about it.

The radical change that Jr. brings with it is a fundamental shift in the orientation of the action. Donkey Kong was the ur-platformer, consisting of large horizontal swaths of real estate linked by vertical elements (ladders, elevators) that took Mario out of his safety zone and placed him in an elevated state of risk. With the new protagonist for Jr. comes a difference in the core action of the game. Junior is an ape, not a human, and as such he moves about differently. The primary emphasis of movement in Jr. is verticality, not the horizontal. You spend most of the game climbing vines rather than running, and Junior’s horizontal motion is hampered by his simian nature. His body is more elongated than Mario’s, making him more awkward to control on the ground. He jumps less gracefully, too. Junior’s in his element while climbing, and the game reflects this in its design.

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The obvious downside here is that climbing is more complex than walking. Maybe it just feels that way to me because I’m not a monkey. No, wait, it really is. When Mario walks, he can move left or right, jump straight up, or jump in an arc to the left or right. On a ladder, he can climb up or down. Junior can do all of these things as well, but the vines and chains that fill these levels offer greater choice of movement to add to the mix. Junior can cling to either the left or right side of a vine, and so traveling horizontally requires twice as many actions as you’d expect: Jump on a vine from the left (Junior will cling to the left side), then tap right once to shift to the right side, tap again to reach out for the nearest vine to the right, and finally tap one last time to shift entirely to the second vine.

The trade-off for these added convolutions is greater precision and intricacy in play. Junior can hold onto vines two different ways — clinging to a single vine or to two at once — and these choices affect how you navigate the levels. When holding one vine, Junior climbs slo-o-o-o-o-owly, but he’s more compact and less vulnerable, and he can slide down a vine quickly. Holding two vines, he climbs more quickly and descends sluggishly.

Junior’s handling takes some getting used to, and the first level makes allowances for newcomers. You basically have two routes to the upper level: You can go via vine, quickly but with greater need for skill, or you can take the lower route and leap from rock to rock in a more traditional platformer style. The latter route is by far the less effective of the two. It’s slower, less precise — Junior’s tricky to platform with thanks to his odd shape, which becomes even more pronounced in its weirdness when he jumps and extends a hand forward — and once you start climbing you have to double back anyway to bypass the platform midway up the rightmost vines. You have to do some platforming either way, since there’s a gap too wide to be crossed via vine in the middle of the screen, but going by ground only is slower, dodgier, and causes you to miss out on scoring opportunities.

Complicating the stage navigation, Mario (this villain of this piece) has set what appear to be living steel traps loose on the vines. Maybe they’re supposed to be snakes, I don’t know. Whatever the case, the red ones patrol the vines, moving down and then up before slithering onto the platform to which the vines are attached and moving over to a different vine. They move somewhat randomly, but once they start traveling along a vine they’ll always move all the way to its end before doubling back, making them somewhat predictable.

The blue ones, however, are much more dangerous. Mario releases them at regular intervals and they snap along the top level before ducking down a vine and chomping a path all the way off the screen. They move far more quickly than the red ones, and they constantly regenerate (whereas if you manage to destroy a red one it’s gone forever), but because they travel a one-way route their threat is somewhat diminished.

Simply coming into contact with a snake/trap — even its tail! — is doom for Junior. Still, he does have a weapon of sorts in the form of the fruit that appears around the screen. Touch a fruit and you’ll knock it loose, causing it to fall and take out any enemies that happen to appear along its path. In Dig-Dug style, if you’re good enough to hit multiple enemies with a single fruit, you’ll rack up major bonus points. You can even use a touch of finesse when fruiting a foe; if you touch both a fruit and an enemy at the same time, it’ll count as a kill in your favor.

The stage ends once you climb the upper central vines, grab the key, and move toward Kong on the topmost platform… which causes Mario to abscond with the gorilla, much to Junior’s confusion.

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Anatomy of a Game, Games
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I found a familiar tune in AC: New Leaf

jparish 3 June, 2013 2 Comments

I bought a big pipe organ for my Animal Crossing home a few days ago because it looked neat, but otherwise I didn’t think much of it. I put it with all my similar-looking “exotic” (aka classical Chinese) furniture in my home’s posh basement and promptly forgot about it until this afternoon when I wondered to myself, “Does this thing play music?” I pressed a button and it played a single note. Another button press, and it played a different note. So I kept playing, and the resulting melody sounded familiar.

Admittedly, it sounds a little odd playing through a cathedral organ, but it’s nice to have the ability to listen to Totaka’s Song any ol’ time I want.

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The Anatomy of Super Mario IV: The kinging of Kong

jparish 2 June, 2013 13 Comments

Here we are, already at the “end” of Donkey Kong: Its fourth screen. By today’s standards, DK is comically short, but four uniquely designed screens was nothing to sneer at back in 1981. Besides, arcade games weren’t after long-term immersive commitments. This was a light snack of a game to see how high a score you could rack up before being unable to keep up with the rising difficulty as you worked through the four looping stages over and over again. You wanted the kind of time sink we expect today from a Skyrim or whatever, you bought a PC and played Wizardry. For a quarter — about 65 cents in today’s money — Donkey Kong offered a satisfying bang-to-buck ratio.

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One neat thing about Donkey Kong‘s fourth stage is that it actually lets you “beat” the game. Sure, once you finish this level you loop back to the start, but for all intents and purposes the game places a clean divide between story and play. Subsequent post-conquest loops simply let you experience the story in a more challenging way, but once you’ve blasted through all four levels you’ve witnessed the full Donkey Kong story: Gorilla steals girl, climbs construction project. Blue-collar dude goes to rescue her. Gorilla retreats further up the construction site every time blue-collar dude comes near.

And eventually, we come to this place: 100 meters up, a place from which there is no further retreat. Mario’s pursued Kong all the way to the top of the building being assembled. Pauline stands stranded atop a scaffold at the peak, while Kong stands pounding his chest as a cornered beast with no further tricks up his sleeve. Unlike previous stages, he has no offensive maneuvers here, and he doesn’t move left or right. He is, effectively, on the ropes, seeking sanctuary in the skeleton of the penthouse office.

Of course, he can still smack Mario senseless, so the goal here is to conquer Kong indirectly. You can’t win in a straight fight, so instead you get to turn the tables on the beast and use the level design against him for once.

Fittingly, this is the most “boring” stage layout in the game. Unless you’re simply a thundering idiot and leap off the side of the girders, it lacks the platforming challenges of the past two stages. The ground is stable, flat, and spans nearly the entire screen uninterrupted. The only real threat comes in the form of the Mario-seeking fireballs, which appear in alarmingly large numbers.

But your goal here is different than in the previous levels. You’re not trying to reach Pauline this time; it’s a snap to climb to the top of the girders. But with no ladder leading to her from Kong’s perch, Mario can’t actually reach Pauline this time. The objectives have changed, and instead of its previous race to the pinnacle the game takes on a touch of Pac-Man: You can move freely around the screen now, and your goal is to pass over and gather each of a specific type of collectible. Here, though, the items you pursue aren’t dots but rather rivets holding the structure together.

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Sharp-eyed players will notice that the center portion of this structure on every level consists  of the same I-beam flanked by a pair of bolts. Mario’s task, then, is to remove these rivets from the joints holding the central portion aloft, causing Kong’s support to collapse. You accomplish this by simply walking or even jumping over the bolt.

Simply accept the game logic of this all, OK? No, realistically this doesn’t make sense (why doesn’t each girder collapse once the rivet is removed? How is Mario able to grab a bolt while sailing through the air above it?), but, you know, whatever. The goal communicates itself pretty neatly and obviously through visuals, and the level objective does a great job of turning the tables on a grand scale. It works. It feels climactic. And it’s fun.

The bolt-gathering mechanic changes up the nature of the game somewhat. Until now, collecting has been optional: You can gather up Pauline’s lost belongings (purse, hat, umbrella) in each stage for a score bonus, but it’s strictly a points thing. Here, you have to chart a path through a swarm of unpredictable fireballs while also taking into account the dynamic nature of the stage.

See, while this level begins as a wide-open four-tier structure linked by ladders — allowing you to move freely at your whim — gathering up the rivets changes the lay of the land. Each rivet you swipe leaves a gap in the floor that affects both you and the fireballs. You can leap the holes, but you can’t walk over them (Mario hadn’t learned to B-dash yet — it’s very tragic). Neither can fireballs pass over the holes.

This can have both good and bad effects. It’s great when you’re being pursued by eager flames: Simply hop over a rivet and it’ll be stuck at the edge of the hole, fuming at you in impotent frustration like those cops from the next county over every time the Duke boys crossed back over the Hazzard county line. On the other hand, the vanishing rivets causes the fireballs to cluster up dangerously, which can be a real problem when they clump together around a spot you need to pass over to pick up a bolt. The gaps also limit your own offensive capabilities; since you can’t jump or climb while wielding a hammer, the presence or absence of bolts on your current level determines just how widely you can range in pursuit of fireballs to smash.

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With all the bolts in hand, Donkey Kong experiences a comical Wile E. Coyote moment as the girders collapse and he’s left hanging in the air for a moment before plunging 15 meters to the lowest level.

But wait! Pauline’s platform is also suspended in midair with no support! Does that mean…?

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No. It doesn’t. In a nicely thoughtful touch, Miyamoto designed her perch to be slightly wider than the span of the girder-and-rivet gap below, so it drops down to where Kong had been standing, allowing her to reunite safely with her midget love. Pity Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman broke up — they’d be perfect as the leads in the live-action Donkey Kong.

Kong himself is defeated but not dead, a divergence from the King Kong source material (and more in keeping with Donkey Kong‘s other inspiration, Popeye). He’s merely stunned. Video games were more humanitarian back in the day, you see. Ostensibly, this leaves Kong free to start the next loop and kick things off all over again. But really, it leaves the door open for the sequel, in which some basic roles become radically reversed.

It’s not hard to see why Donkey Kong catapulted Nintendo to powerhouse status. In 1981, its breadth of variety, crisp visuals, and shifting challenges and objectives outshone anything yet seen in the arcades. Other games matched it in one area or another, but nothing else brought all three of these values together into a single package. For all its relative complexity, its design did an excellent job of teaching the player on the fly from the very opening moment where Kong chucks a barrel directly down into the oil tin to motivate Mario to get moving.

Despite the somewhat weak second level, Donkey Kong remains fun to play more than 30 years later — it’s simple compared to all that it inspired but remains entertaining for its purity of purpose and how well its concepts are expressed. You can see how Donkey Kong would kick off a dynasty of games that continues strong three decades later; its creators are still around, and they’ve never completely lost sight of the design discipline they demonstrated here.

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