LVL Headed

I lived in the age of the original Megaman games, and I also own the Megaman Anniversary Collection.  In playing through the Megaman franchise, you see a little love lost for the game and level design.  All the NES titles are good to excellent, but as the series moved on to other consoles, it seemed to loose something.  To see what I mean, pull up YouTube and watch a playthrough of Frostman’s stage:

There doesn’t seem to be any of that “spark” that you find in the earlier titles.  The stage doesn’t throw any tricks at you, it just seems to be a straight line through a bunch of enemies with some rocket-snowboarding tossed in as a minigame.

I like to think that this is what Capcom realized when they set upon the creation of Megaman 9.  The graphics are retro, for sure, but so is the spirit.  Megaman 9 brings back the wonderful level design of the earlier games with some of the lessons of today to make what may be the best in the series.

What makes a good Megaman game is the level design.  In the older games, the levels were tests of your memory, reflexes, and (basic) intellegence.  Megaman wasn’t about tossing different enemies on the stage, it was about adding enemies as an extension of the stage.  It isn’t about destroying tons of enemies, it’s about finding your way to the boss with as much health, lives, and weapon energy as possible.

Level design in Megaman 9 seems to have had as much thought put into it as it was in Valve’s Portal.  Level obstacles are introduced gently: in Galaxy Man’s stage, you walk into an empty room with two portals.  Hopping into one flings you out of the other one (so I guess the game has a little more in common with Portal than I originally stated).  Then, the challenge is ramped up: after this room, the player finds spots in which they must hop in and out of portals over a bottomless pit.  This is repeated in every level, players encounter a safe example of what’s to come to learn what to do when the real challenge comes up.

You might argue with me on this point that there are plently of levels in which something will come flying out of a bottomless pit without warning, causing you to fall in yourself.  To that I say… well, yeah… but even these instant-kill situations pop up at the beginning of each level before the player has gotten too far.  If the player dies towards the end of the level by this means, it’s not because it hasn’t happened before.

Megaman does have a reputation as a game in which you have to die multiple times to know what to do.  I’d say that for Megaman 9 this isn’t quite true, though you’ll die a few times for sure.

Well, I still have plenty of game to finish, but it seems like the guys at Capcom have put some real love into this.

A decade from now I will turn to my cyborg grandchildren, and I will tell them “I was there.” And I will also tell them “It kind of sucked.”

Yesterday was the opening of the 4th annual I Am 8-Bit art show, and it was right here in Los Angeles. I owned the art book and I love games, so of course I had to go. Only it wasn’t so much of an art show as it was just a big party. We waited in line around the corner to get in and the place was packed with people hanging out and talking and dancing and drinking (If I remember correctly, the event was sponsored by Colt 45). When we finally did get in, it was pretty difficult to work our way around the people just standing around and partying to look at the (wonderful) art hanging on the walls.

In the first paragraph, I said it kind of sucked. This is not in any way because of the artwork inside. It was all beautiful and creative and wondrous, and it made me proud to be a part of the culture. I’ll try to go back some time and append some pictures into this post, though I’m sure you could just google it and find pictures on any other site. No, it wasn’t the art, it was the atmosphere. It was as if nobody gave a damn about the artwork. I think one of the pieces had been broken, and I witnessed some guy leaning against a wall-sized canvas painting. Leaning on it. Butt rubbing against it, faced the other way just so he could look at the DJ.

Unbelievable.

The evening ended pretty well though as I did get one of the wonderful MegaMan 9 posters. I can’t wait for that friggin’ game to come out.

Get Up on the Raft

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Somewhere in the bowels of California lives Liam Lynch, my hero.  An insomniac and artist, Lynch spends his time creating music, films, podcasts, and I figure anything else that pops into his brain.  If you’re wondering, Lynch is my personal hero because he just does what he wants.  He’s the one who helps me believe that, if you want to be something, just do it and you are.

But I’ve gotten a little ahead of myself, haven’t I?  I should wait to shovel out praise only after I talk about Lynch’s new CD, Get Up on the Raft.

If you’re familiar with Lynch’s previous work, you’ll notice that this album is much more serious.  This is a great departure from Fake Songs and Lynch’s hit “United States of Whatever.”  Get Up on the Raft abandons the silly and fun attitude for a more personal tone, with songs like “Get Up on the Raft” and “Tracing the Shape,” which speak of growth and life experience.  These songs have the ability to tweak your emotions and put you somewhere within the lyrics.

If you’ve listened to Lynch’s last album, How to be a Satellite, you’ll hear a continuation of the style in songs like “How to be a Satellite” in this album.  There’s still energy in the sound, but it’s a bit more subdued in favor of a more personal experience.

My personal favorites on this album are “Exhibits” and “I’m not Ready.”  Lynch channels a purer style of rock that bands like Tenacious D use like a punchline, but Lynch is very sincere.  You can listen to samples of the songs on Amazon.com, and you can always see what Lynch is up to on www.liamlynch.net

Metal Slug has recently been re-released on Nintendo’s Virtual Console. This is kind of a funny thing to do, since Metal Slug was playable on the Wii about since it was released if you bought the Metal Slug Anthology disc, like I have. Well, however it’s been released, Metal Slug is still a classic.

Like games such as Contra, Metal Slug has you running about shooting soldiers, collecting power-ups, and bringing down bosses. Also like Contra, it’s hard as hell. After all, Metal Slug was designed for the arcade, where the cost of a human life was only a quarter, so the game has to make it up in volume. You die a lot. A whole lot. And yet, you’ll come back for more.

Like any shoot’em-up, the appeal in Metal Slug is the overwhelming enemy fire. The fun lies not so much in shooting back, but rather in dodging the rain of bullets. The reward in shooting the enemies is that they’ll no longer shoot at you. The designers of Metal Slug knew what they were doing, as the environments pull together the dodge-and-shoot mechanic of the game excellently. The early levels are somewhat flat, lend a lot of cover, and generally give the player a few good shots before they enemy can get a round off. As the game progresses, the terrain gets rockier, the enemies shoot faster, and it becomes harder to stay safe. There’s a good curve here for difficulty.

This isn’t to say you’ll learn not to die. I already warned you, you’ll die over and over again. And strangely enough, it’s enjoyable. While a large part of Metal Slug is the dodge-and-shoot gameplay, what keeps you coming back is the challenge of staying alive. That sounds either a little strange or a little obvious, but just run with me. When you first pick up Metal Slug, you’ll die so much that you will begin to think of death as the default state in the game. Ten seconds of gameplay, and then you die. Fifteen more, then again. As you keep playing, you’ll get better, and you’ll start to live a little longer. The challenge ceases to be about killing enemies or reaching the end, instead it becomes a test of will. How long can you stick it out? The game challenges you to live through the entire level, as it resets count of how many prisoners of war you’ve rescued each time you die. In Metal Slug, you don’t expect to make it through the entire level on one life, you just try to use as few as possible. Each second alive becomes reward in itself, a sign that you aren’t sucking quite as much as you were earlier.

As for style, Metal Slug won’t fail to toss a lot of detail at you. While the game has a cartoony style, they make it work for them. Enemies and environments are incredibly expressive, and the few enemies trying to run away or sneak off of screen pull you more into the game. Backgrounds are detailed, and you’ll never feel like you’re walking through the same hallway again. It’s a fun style for a fun game.

There’s much more to Metal Slug than all this, but the game is best experienced by playing. Preferably, in an arcade, where the fight to survive is strengthened when the cost of death becomes more than a loss of points, it becomes a quarter as well.

For the past few days, I’ve been playing around with Game Maker 7 (the pro edition) to see if it would work for a project I’m starting.  Before this, my previous experience had been with Flash and Torque Game Builder.

First thing, Game Maker is easy.  Really easy.  It’s a visual coding experience, meaning that instead of typing up what needs to happen, you simply select options to create a list.  Doing the selecting isn’t hard either, as each of the options has a description which tells you exactly what it does.  If you have even the slightest bit of programming experience, it’ll be refreshing not to have to memorize or look up special functions, but rather just pick them off the list.  Game Maker also allows for scripting by hand, but so far I haven’t found anything in which I’d have to worry about it.

This isn’t to say that everything is cut and dry for the beginner.  You’ll still need to look through the help file or go through some tutorials to pick up on certain things, as you would with anything else.  I’ll say though that so far the help section and the tutorials for Game Maker have been tons more helpful than those for Torque Game Builder.  Working with TGB was a nightmare of trying to find anything useful in the documentation.  The Tutorials for TGB mostly ask you to cut and past code instead of explaining what each bit of code does, and then stop before getting to any of the more powerful and useful features in the program.  Game Maker walks you through everything nicely, and really lets you know what you’re doing.

As long as I’m comparing Game Maker and Torque Game Builder, I might as well say that Game Maker isn’t as pretty as TGB, and that I missed some of the options when it came to building stages and levels.  In TGB, I’d create high-res graphics in Illustrator or Photoshop and then shrink them down into the level to retain some quality.  In Game Maker, there’s no ability like that.  You have to create art the exact size that you want it, and so far I’ve had some trouble creating small anti-aliased graphics for use in Game Maker.

In the end, this thing is really cool.  The pro version cost me 20 bucks, but I’ll prefer that to the amount of scripting I’d have to do in Flash and definitely to the hell of searching through Torque Game Builder documentation.