Jumpnshootman: Spaceport Hope

I picked up the space bundle on groupees because I liked the pixel art of this title, which was used as the background or whatever. I also like the name of the game, since it at least has ... A slightly different feeling from the general miasma of game names (retribution! evolution! origins!) in the modern day.

Spaceport Hope isn't a complex or overly long game. As implied, it is a Jump and Shoot mans. You play a smuggler or courier named Cole who transports drugs (of the beneficial kind, we infer) between regions and planets in 'the system'. You get framed, have to unravel the mess and visit every planet in the system to do so. The 'planets' generally have a level or two, maybe a dungeon, some loot and some other nonsense. There are more than a handful of planets, but not exactly a dizzying amount of content. I saw most of the game, through my playthrough, though I didn't get all the achievements, so I must have missed something.

The story is, as implied, pretty simple - But it's not bad. It's a little smarter than just 'kill the bad mans' and while the mystery isn't mind-blowing stuff, I found it a little better than the mediocre average. The plot isn't exactly save the universe stuff, and Cole is a catalyst not the be-all end-all savior of man, which is refreshing?

He's just a courier.

The game's visuals are generally good, though there is sort of a sliding scale in action. The levels and their background are fantastic, the scrolling background is just gorgeous stuff. Yes, it is pixel art, but it is really well done. I really like the set of screenshots I took, while it isn't hard sci-fi, it has some roots in trying to evoke stronger elements. The enemy models look good, and are well animated, and the weapons (of which there are many) have nice looking little animations. Your character isn't good looking, and the faces of talking NPCs are really terrible. It's a bit jarring, but most of the game looks good, if you're into pixel art. If you're not, well, it's simple stuff - but the color scheme isn't drab and it has lots of variety in the chosen palettes, so it's a little refreshing even for that.

The music and audio are nothing special, but they fit and aren't ever off tone. Good enough is good enough when it doesn't feel weird or too repetitive. They're just normal, nominal background sounds.

Gameplay ... Like I said, jump and shoot mans. Cole has a double jump, and is surprisingly maneuverable in the air. It feels good and slick, and not at all weighed down. You enable and disable weapons in the weapons menu, and then switch between them with shoulder buttons, or whatever the keyboard has. It's simple, satisfying stuff, though you will find most of the weapons useless and several of them life-savers. The rocket launcher and homing plasma gun are pretty much your go-to tools, once you get them, for most of the game. There is a weapon heat mechanic, and ammo in action, which can get a little grating. The cooldown mechanic is in, I think, to get you to chance your weapons on the fly. Problem being is most of the weapons just don't take to every situation. Weapons, other than your basic automatic rifle, draw from three pools of munition - fuel, missiles and shells or whatever you want to call them - which isn't as well balanced as it should be.

There are lots of boss fights, and a couple trickier platforming sections, which are the game's main charms. Most of the boss fights weren't too punishing and took a bit to figure out, then execute. I didn't have to attempt them a ton, so maybe they're a little too easy, but I did appreciate how most of them required figuring the boss out and trying different things. The platforming is pretty forgiving stuff, since Cole's double jump makes him insanely agile, but there's more than a few good sections.

All in all, Spaceport Hope is a solid execution of a simple premise. It does have some issues with dps uptime on some trash enemies and the weapon balance is a little off, but on the most part I found very little to actively complain about. It is a simple game of moderate length, so if this is what you're looking for to spend a couple days on, it'll be fine enough.

Cards for Stars: Super Star Path

The endless march of bundles games and grinding cards off them continues on after a couple week break to learn how to paint miniatures again. (Not well, mind you). Up this ... Week? Day? is Super Star Path, which I acquired in the groupees #25 greenlight bundle not all that long ago.

Super Star Path claims to be a mixture of puzzle game and top down space ship shooter. I would say this ... Is sort of true? The puzzle comes from shooting the immobile and rather defenseless "aliens". If you set your shots up wrong, you end up with a dead end path, and then you die. There are also boss fights, at the end of each level, and some shooty elements in the later levels within the level.

The game is very polished; the controls work well, the options menu is fully featured, the graphic work, sound, music and voice acting are all quite good. The steam announcements from the devs make it sound like the game has problems, but on my aging machine I never hit a hitch and my hour plus of playing was all pretty smooth.

There is a full upgrade system and a large selection of ships to purchase. Unfortunately or fortunately, the ships don't play all that differently, each one generally have a defensive advantage, or a mild offensive advantage. Different defenses tend to be keyed to different levels, you are clearly supposed to do certain levels with certain ships. It's a little Megaman-y, if you will. The upgrade system is supplied by two types of drops, enemy specific ones or just getting gems off the run off the mill enemies that explode en masse.

The game has some real issues though, and after an hour, it starts to drag. It has much the same problem of say, Block Legend DX, where elements of the game can be kind of mindless then you have to really pay attention to bosses. Super Star Path is a lot worse, though, for this.

Basic problem: The main game is a bit meandering, and often you're just sitting there in a narrow path waiting to move forward and unable to shoot whatever is threatening you - a lot of which does not care about the 'blocks' in the way or anything akin to line of sight. The column is simply too tight, and the game's rng too often produces very narrow openings that just lead to periods of being bored. Several of the later levels are better about this, but there's a dull point midway through the game. The more frustrating problem is it is easy to slip up when fighting an enemy that doesn't interact with the "terrain" and end up blocking yourself in. The whole crystallized aliens thing requires trying to aim past the front row and while it's a cool mechanic, it doesn't interact well with some of the designs.

As for the other thing, the bosses play so differently from the rest of game it ends up feeling a little jarring. The bosses also rely on mostly not paying attention to them and just dodging their shots, which is ... Kinda dull actually? I guess that is a shmup thing, but I don't see why you can't do phased sections of the fight where you get some actual dps uptime. If you like shmups, it is quite effective.

Simply put, Super Star Path is a couple good ideas, a nice looking game and then a bit of a let down. In the first hour you see very little variety, and you can only get blocked in to slowly die to the screen moving on so many times before you yawn the game off your computer - frankly, it should just have a quick reload button, since why not? I had fun with it, and I do like the music, but the potential just isn't worked with.

I don't see why some of the levels didn't have wildly different terrain or branching paths or ... Turning or just any sort of variety to break it up. The guy (guys? gals?) who did it produced a polished, nice looking game with good assets, but they could have made a much better game with some minimal expansion. Anyway, if it looks appealing, grab it on sale. I'm not complaining about the first forty-five minutes, which is pretty fair for paying like forty cents or something for it.

Greenlight is the perfect company to the indie paradigm

Indie, you see, has the airy pretension of a certain innate right to call itself art. And there are basically two metrics by which art is allowed to consider itself successful. The first is commercial success, but never too far, because anything that makes enough money loses the second metric. The second is suffering.

Ya know you want to do more than stare: 2013 in review

As with last year, this is a set of mini reviews summarizing my recollections of games I played over the course of 2013. Unlike last year, I'm going to be really frank about something: I don't necessarily recall, with perfect accuracy, how I felt about the games while I was playing. This is more or less a summary of how I feel about them a week, a month or almost a full year afterwards. This is after digestion, these are the lasting impressions.

I divide this into four categories, which work in the following somewhat conflicting ways. Category A is the games I think, regardless of your tastes, you should give a serious look at and try because I really enjoyed them. Category B, inversely, are game I think you should try only if you like the genre they're in, but otherwise I felt pretty highly about them. Category C are games I liked or sort of like, but I'm not really recommending unless you're already inclined towards them, or I had problems with getting them running. Category D lastly are games I just stopped playing and/or can't really see personally ever telling anyone to play.

You may notice this review system is entirely subjective. While I do my best to be impartial about things that aren't objective in nature, the truth of the matter is, you're going to have to look at my reviews and decide if you agree with me or don't. If you do, then my opinion is worthwhile, but if you don't maybe you like the games I don't like, and vice versa. As an aside, where I put my experiences does not interrelate with where you put yours. If you really liked a game and I didn't, it doesn't matter, it just means we disagree and you can probably look at the review to figure out why. I get hung up on stuff that doesn't matter to most people, but I do tend to talk about why.

To me, that's the idea, to talk about flaws and facets, and then maybe other people can figure out from my subjective opinions how they'd mesh with their subjective opinions. Because ultimately we're not all that objective, except I will say I'm a fanboy of absolutely goddamn nothing and that's my thing.

Also these reviews are not, as with last year, of games entirely from MY 2013. Many of them are older, but some are more recent, but I feel like hey - how often do you get to read a review of complete games years later, or compared to modern titles? The point here is to discuss if this $5 title is still worth your money four years after its release, and how shit ages, and if we have time how many donkeys power uPlay.
 

The Secret of Success is Card Work: Gravi

Puzzle, or more specifically torture platformers are not "for me". I take some solace in the fact that they're not really for most people, though there is a very vocal minority who clamour about them and I guess buy them. So I'm willing to admit, Gravi isn't for me but in spite of that it's actually still pretty neat. I don't mean that in the sense of They Bleed Pixels, though I guess mechanically it was pretty cool too. I mean Gravi is a neat take on a puzzle platformer that uses different mechanics as opposed to adding different mechanics on top of the base.

Gravi, which is also the main character, can not jump. Instead he can project matter onto surfaces, and that matter (depending on the size of the projectile) will attract him. There are two different projectile settings, either shooting a fifth of his load at a time, or all of it at once, which changes the range of the attraction as well as shrinking Gravi. Sometimes you want to be smaller, and sometimes abruptly becoming too big will kill you as well.

In other words Gravi isn't based on pixel perfect jumping, it's based on looser physics based trick shots and has an odd feeling to it that almost feels like playing pool, but with jumping puzzles? It's hard to articulate the exact strange feeling of the game, and while the difficulty isn't exactly level it fits in with the strangeness. It's mechanically different and while physics based puzzles have been a thing for a long time it's just its own sort of weird I guess. Also, Gravi doesn't adhere strictly to being a puzzle platformer - Sometimes a set of hazards are to be overcome with slapdashing forward, or precise timing, or a mix of all three, which creates a looser feeling in my mind that helps keep the "torture" platformer feeling from setting in. It's not always that you're failing the jump by two pixels, it's sometimes that you haven't figured out what you want to do and sometimes you need to let go, jam the directional stick forward and just blind luck your way through.

However, while I was hoping to get through a decent chunk of the game before just writing it off, Gravi is ultimately just another torture platformer, albeit it does have its own sense of flow and style that makes it a bit more interesting for a while. I eventually brick walled and received an achievement for dying too many times, which just prompted me to close, then uninstall, the game. Torture platformers have an element where you can tell the level development just went through a process of adding spikes or other hazards hap-hazardously and willy nilly to "increase the challenge". The problem is, honestly, you play torture platformers to overcome the difficult moments. No one is going to feel a sense of accomplishment over not twitching 2 pixels too far to the left and dying at a point the developer just randomly slapped some spikes onto "because um spikes go in torture platformers hurk". It's just brain dead design.

The game is pretty charming for a while, and as you can tell, I got a good hour of chillout gaming from it before it just spike walled me off from the rest of the content. While I know I'm not the target audience, having realized somewhere between They Bleed Pixels and Giana Sisters that PC platformers aren't for me, I'm actually not sure how good this game is as a torture platformer. The controls are weird and loose, and while the music is fantastic the graphics are a bit unnecessarily drab, which doesn't make for a great presentation. It is physics based, and while that's neat in places, Gravi is kinda hard to control at times which may turn off fans of the genre. Without that I'm somewhat at a loss as to who this game is aimed at.

I also had a lot of issues with Gravi's hit box, which feels oddly shaped, and several of the pinpoint movement sections seemed to kill him out of hand. I also couldn't tell if shrinking reduced his hitbox. The screenshot on the right is where I gave up on the game, and while I experimented with using the size changing and different mass shots to try to squeeze past, I couldn't determine if I was messing up the precision jump or if I needed to be smaller. Because I died most often to the incidental shit around it, I couldn't nail it down and just ended up getting sick of the sloppy controls then deleting the game. I don't think this is how puzzle platformers are supposed to work and like I said, it just feels like brain dead design.

I don't mind dying a hundred times to a challenging part. I'm not going to enjoy it, but I don't mind it conceptually. I do mind dying 80 times to incidental garbage for no reason to get 20 decent attempts on the jump. So, like I said, I'm not sure who wants to play this and I'm not sure a game that could have been a sweet chill out title didn't lean back a little on the stupider pinpoint precision jumping puzzles.

I got Gravi through a groupees greenlight bundle. The soundtrack is really good.