Category: Flash Games

Static Gameplay

I have continued to poke at Anti-Idle, and I have run into the same problem that others have cited about Guild Wars 2: there is a large dead zone between “have all your toys” and the cap. In Anti-Idle, that is actually thousands of levels, but it’s an idle game, so those can mostly happen while you’re AFK.

Once you reach the point where all the fights feel the same, you have completed the meaningful content. You beat the game. You’re done and can quit now. Also, when “RPG elements” has come to mean “character advancement,” it stops feeling like your character is advancing when you are just adding new numbers to old abilities. Again, game over, you won.

The sense I get from GW2 is that we are seeing the history of its development. (Entirely made up story follows.) Long before they abandoned the idea of horizontal progression, the original idea was like GW1: low cap, almost everything at the cap. Let’s give the characters all their skills by level 20. Hmm, people really like progression. Okay, we’ll match the industry leader and have 80 levels. Let’s push the elite skills back so we don’t have a 60-level dead zone. You saw a bit of that “needs more progression” when slot skills went from “all available immediately” to “buy 5 in this tier to unlock the next.” There must have been months of meetings trying to decide how to give players more toys over time without breaking the model of having one skill bar. There are some bonuses to unlock via talents, and your gear starts giving you more (not just bigger) stats, and … well, that plateau is kind of essential in the original notion of horizontal progression. Let’s hope they solve it before the coming level cap increase(s) and new tier(s) of gear.

GW1 had hundreds of elite skills you could capture, along with secondary classes, so you could pick your one bar of skills from literally thousands of skills. Part of horizontal progression is having the option to progress, more options not just ones with bigger numbers.

: Zubon

Concurrent Comments

You may have achieved the right balance in your bullet hell game when the comment:

this [beating every level without getting hit] is probably the easiest impossible achievement on Kongregate

appears within five minutes of:

this is, quite literally, the bare-bones minimum of shooting games with nary a crap given if it was even playable or not

: Zubon

I must admit it is some BS to have a boss (5-3, stage 3) that can shoot from (not just at) any point on the screen, including exactly where your ship is, so you need to already have seen its entire attack pattern to not be sitting where a bullet is about to materialize. Although, if my military had the ability to shoot from inside our enemies’ ships and bodies, I would totally exploit that.

Heirs to Progress Quest

Progress Quest is the original 0-player MMORPG. It was designed in 2002 as a parody of the gameplay you know and love, with “fire and forget” convenience that went beyond auto-attack to auto-everything. Turn it on, create a character, and the game takes it from there. There is not gameplay as such, but it is a brilliant piece of work and strangely hypnotic.

As with most things, there is actually a genre of these by now. Kongregate has an idle game category. Epic Combo is notionally amusing, and Farm of Souls is more of an idle RTS game (with just peons). I’m tempted to fiddle with a few of these, but Kongregate is currently promoting Anti-Idle, which has enough little things going on at once to actually make it a game. It has its version of Progress Quest that you can play interactively instead of idling. It has a mini-FarmVille, a lousy Mario Kart, a collectible card game that doesn’t look very good but probably is not the worst on the site, a variety of mini-games, fishing, and some other things I have yet to sift through. It also has its own quests and achievements built in.

At worst, the gameplay is no worse than things you have paid to do (mine in EVE, farm almost anything). At best, well, it’s not a lot better than that anyway. When social media games were having their heyday, I found some of them interesting if I played 5 or 6 at once. The aggregate can involve interesting resource and attention allocation. Most of that seems built in here, plus your equivalent of offline skill training.

: Zubon

Opposite Directions

I think of Spiral Knights as the Zelda MMO. The gameplay takes me back to Nintendo and Super Nintendo days. The setting is obviously rather different.

What if you took Zelda in a different direction and decided that chopping down tall grasses in search of rupees was the heart of the game? I give you: Bush Whacker 2. Zelda, minus the monsters and game elements, plus the standard social media energy mechanic and cash shop. I do not have endgame experience, but I think I just summarized the whole thing. (It also has a quick-whack button, in case you find tedium tedious.)

: Zubon

It is strangely hypnotic. I have yet to research what happened to Bushwhacker 1.

Comedy and Bouncing

Guild Wars 2 worked beautifully at launch. I had a couple of disconnects, but the game seemed to run perfectly even with 40 people escorting an NPC.

Right now, servers are down and have been since I woke up. Either the marketing people are there and bored or they pre-scheduled something, because I just received an e-mail encouraging me to join the headstart, buy Guild Wars 2, and start playing now! Bad timing, there.

While you wait, this is Jumping Line, a platformer with no buttons.

: Zubon

Obfuscation

The opposite of Pixel Click Bosses appears in games that are too eager to give the player data. They want the indication to be clear and highly visible. Unfortunately, the game is still going on underneath those indicators. The game is not hiding the new factors by using too few pixels; it is hiding the existing factors by using too many.

I cited this with Arkham City. Chuck the Sheep is a recent flash game with the same problem whenever you reach a new section of the map. “Congratulations! Welcome to the next area! We’re using font size 72! Oh, and there is a duck flying at you underneath this text!” Guild Wars does the same thing in Tahnnakai Temple. Like all the Factions missions, it is timed, but it has a visible timer because you can lose by taking too long at each stage. That timer occupies the exact same real estate as the NPC pop-up text explaining what is going on.

: Zubon

Oh, and do you want to read what is going on? Every minute you spend reading the quest text is one less that you have to reach the Master’s reward.

Use the Medium

Two online collectible card games that Kongregate introduced to me are Elements and Tyrant. While Elements has more grinding and is more vulnerable to perverse randomization, I find it a superior game design. One of its virtues is that it takes advantage of being a computerized card game, rather than calling for physical cards.

This is typical with exporting existing things to new media or material. I recall the early encyclopedias on CD, some of which probably even made good use of hyperlinking, but they were largely a data dump of text into something more compact than a meter-high stack of books. In our gaming world, you had arcade ports to home systems without changing the dynamics built around “insert 25 cents to continue.”

Elements has cards that you could not exist in a physical CCG. Some of them are possible with a sufficiently large pre-made set, but let me give you some examples. Continue reading Use the Medium

Uniqueness

The latest Kongregate giveaway may interest you, because it is for $10,000 of gift certificates (over 10 years), although the gameplay involved is not interesting. No, what interests me is this: what work is “unique” doing in the game’s description, “Choose from one of six unique races”? In what sense are dwarves, elves, and humans unique? Are they saying that they are not identical with other and trying to use “unique” as some kind of superlative for “different”? Is it a translation error?

At least they did not go on to claim that their races were the most unique.

: Zubon

Rarefied Grind

In our continuing series of games that take a single mechanic and run with it, we hereby present Coinbox Hero from Armor Games. The coinbox gives out coins. You use them to upgrade your coin-generating and collecting abilities. Ultimately, you will destroy the coinbox.

There is also polka music and a TWIST ENDING.

: Zubon