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Tag: 2014

  • Steel Diver (Nintendo, 2011)

    Steel Diver (Nintendo, 2011)

    Developed/Published by: Nintendo EAD Group No. 5, Vitei / Nintendo
    Released: March 27th, 2011
    Completed: 2nd November, 2014
    Completion: I finished all the missions. Didn’t bother my arse with the time trials or anything like that.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    I’ve taken a while to write this one because I felt that if I sat down and wrote my little… well, whatever it is these are, reviews, or journal entries or summat, right away, I’d just be going fucking mental here. Because this is one of those stupid games where it’s a total breeze right until the end, where the final boss is just totally stupidly hard for no particularly good reason, and you just end up wanting to snap your god damn 3DS in half, hold it tightly in one hand, fly to Japan and then shove it right up the arse of the director of the game (in this case, Takaya Imamura.) Now, I don’t know where Takaya Imamura lives exactly and he apparently produced F-Zero GX, so that would, probably, be a bit of an overreaction. However, I’ve noticed that Nintendo really, really love stupid difficulty spikes in their second/third tier releases (Super Princess Peach, for some reason, really sticks out in my mind… it was years ago I played it and I still want to fly to Japan and shove a broken DS up at least one arse) so I suppose I should be used to this by now.

    Anyway. Steel Diver was a weird launch game for the 3DS that no one liked, in fact, no one liked it so much that I bought it for three dollars. Three dollars sealed. Seemed like a bargain, I thought. After all, on the back of the box it looks like a cute little sub sim thing! I think I bought Pilotwings Resort for about a fiver at the same time and that was delightful, just delightful, so how bad could Steel Diver be? (Let’s forget about the boss, for a minute.)

    It’s bad. It’s bad because it, in classic “we have this input form, we have to use it” style that you’d have thought Nintendo would have been over by the time of the 3DS, you control it totally through the touch screen. Which turns a submarine sim into a game that’s entirely about choosing to either move the slider that’s “depth” or the one that’s “speed.”

    Sometimes you have to fire torpedoes! But mostly you’re trying to make sure you don’t bump into things by going “erk, going to fast, have to slow down” or “crap, the sea floor is going up, have to raise depth.”

    It’s stupefying. Brilliantly, the game is designed so you never actually have to fight enemy subs (just go past them, there’s no reason to fight them, no score or points or anything) which I guess is “realistic” but sure does make them seem pointless. And when you do have to get into a fight, using the stylus to push some sliders slowly and fire torpedoes… it’s like using the 3DS stylus to get good bits of jam out of a mouldy jam jar. A tedious and lamentable thing to find yourself doing.

    Honestly. Steel Diver isn’t a game super worthy of rage. Because you shouldn’t be getting to the point where you’re fighting the last boss. Just about as far as you should go is opening it to get the Club Nintendo code and then closing the box again forever.

    Will I ever play it again? ha ha ha ha [begins to choke on own mirth]

    Final Thought: Y’all ever play that Radar Mission? Steel Diver is someone at Nintendo going “hey remember we released a sub game for the Game Boy when it came out? That was a good idea, lets do it again.” Steel Diver even comes with a weird, off-brand Battleships-a-like that you can play with another 3DS owner, but you don’t want to do that because it’s the equivalent of asking a friend if they want to sit in a ditch and eat bogies with you.

  • Pix The Cat (Pastagames, 2014)

    Pix The Cat (Pastagames, 2014)

    Developed/Published by: Pastagames 
    Released: October 8th, 2014
    Completed: 24th October, 2014
    Completion: Hmm. You can’t really beat this, I just played the main arcade mode a lot and stopped.
    Trophies / Achievements: 47%

    Oh dear, oh dear. It’s been a tough few weeks here at exp. Towers, with the last batch of games we’ve been playing all being… pish, to be honest. And we quite like the plucky chaps at Pastagames, who’ve made (notably) Arkedo Series 03: Pixel and Pix n’ Love Rush, which are both pretty durn charming retro-inspired titles, so we dipped into Pix The Cat in the hope it would lift the doldrums.

    I, uh, don’t like Pix The Cat, though. I feel sorta bad about it! Best described as a rough reimagining of Pac-Man Championship Edition DX (that’s the second one with the ghost trails) you play Pix (the cat), who has to (for reasons obscure) hatch duck eggs by walking over them then drop said hatched ducklings off in particular zones. This is complicated by the fact he can’t walk into his own trail of ducks (or they all explode) or start dropping them off before he’s hatched all the eggs (because then he loses his bonus.) It’s a game about quickly working out the best route through the screen—or being able to wing it well enough—performing that and then moving to the next screen, getting faster and faster until you hit fever time and everything is worth loads of points, you’re going really, really fast, and if you hit one thing you lose it.

    It sounds pretty good! Simple, yet solid. However, this is not the case. You see, while it’s inspired by Pac-Man clearly, with strict, Pac-Man-me-do controls, it’s got very open levels. This is a subtle complaint, but you know how in Pac-Man you’re always in a tunnel? it means that when you have to make a turn, you’re always sure you’re going to turn down the route you aim, even if you’re going really, really fast—because there will be a buffer between tunnels (the, er, not-tunnel bit.) In Pix The Cat, you’re often having to make very fast turns, even in instant zig-zags, to avoid hitting stuff like drop-off zones or enemies, and it’s super frustrating to suddenly miss an egg, or screw up your entire chance of a perfect because you turned a fraction too soon or too late. In fact I’d say 100% of my mess-ups are because of that. Now, you can easily say “well, you just need better reactions.”But my thoughts are more on the line of “why is this more fun than, say, designing the levels to avoid this problem?” I don’t think it is.

    (You might say “but Snake has wide open levels, and that’s fine!” again I refer to the level design—successful versions of Snake don’t litter the level with things to avoid in difficult zig-zags as well as your own tail. So there.)

    It’s got this one “main” arcade mode, which is again, like Pac-Man, in that you basically do the same levels in the same order every time. Now, they do change slightly. Very slightly. But they’re not different in any meaningful way. And there’s still a timer. As a result, the game reveals itself to be about absolutely perfecting performance through memorisation in order to get a high score. It’s so hard, actually, to get a good score that the game is entirely about not making a single error, hitting fever time and never losing it (which you won’t manage, it’s bloody hard). This is unfortunate! Because there’s a daily challenge mode, with a… I’d imagine random, but I’m not sure, level where you first time through aren’t going to know what’s coming and have to just muddle through as best you can. It’s more… roguelike-likey and I guess therefore it’s interesting how the seeping roguelike-likeyness of games these days means that ones that don’t do it seem at a disadvantage. I don’t really see why the main mode of this is so locked to memorisation and repetition rather than being at least a bit easier and more random to reward skilful play. It’s really weird, honestly.

    Oh, it also does this thing that seems clever, that you “zoom” deeper and deeper into the screen as each level is a tiny part of a bigger level, but it looks all wrong because the tiny levels don’t… ah, god, I’m going to describe this wrong technically, but they’ve got a higher pixel density than the level you’re playing (or something) so it looks really, really bad and incongruous. Boo to that, man.

    Pix The Cat just doesn’t work! On any level! It’s like they had a lot of good ideas, but got them all very slightly wrong. Like they all sat down to program, and put their hands on the keyboard one key to the left. Ah well.

    Will I ever play it again? No. It’s too hard to unlock the “dessert” mode (hard, basically) and not rewarding enough to make me keep trying. And it’s got two other modes, “nostalgia” and “laboratory” which are full of short individual levels but I just could not bring myself to care.

    Final Thought: You can play the daily challenge mode more than once each day. I mean, if that isn’t an example of not quite getting it I don’t know what is.

  • Crazy Taxi: City Rush (Hardlight, 2014)

    Crazy Taxi: City Rush (Hardlight, 2014)

    Developed/Published by: Hardlight / Sega
    Released: July 31th, 2014
    Completed: 14th October, 2014
    Completion: Unlocked the second island.
    Trophies / Achievements: 82/420

    I love Crazy Taxi! Love it. In fact, I pretty much love all of Sega’s “experience” arcade games from roughly that era—Top Skater particularly, if you ever played that one—but Crazy Taxi the one that Sega seemed to be most fond of… exploiting (it just made a lot of money, I guess?) it with ports and sequels a go-go, even if some of them have been pretty stinky. And so it’s come to this. A free-to-play iOS game that’s obviously based on Temple Run, rather than, you know, Crazy Taxi. Reduced to a re-skin.

    But wait! Supposedly series creator Kenji Kanno was involved! I mean, the game was developed by Hardlight, Leamington Spa-based developer of, uh, Sega’s previous Temple Run re-skin, Sonic Dash, but maybe it’s interesting?

    I’ll be frank: I downloaded this thinking I’d play it for literally a few minutes just out of a morbid interest, dash off some words about how you can’t make something free-to-play without considering the context and design of the original game, and call it a day. However, I of course ended up playing this for about two weeks fairly solidly because, of course, free-to-play has to be compelling.

    Don’t worry though! Crazy Taxi: City Rush is still crap. I just love Crazy Taxi, I’ve never actually played Temple Run and to be honest, this is probably my first deep time spent with the current brand of “give us your money, give us it now” style of free-to-play, so on some level it was probably just kind of educational.

    Not that it’s particularly unique. It’s the usual thing. Everything you do you have to wait to do again. Everything you have to wait for you can spend to speed up. Everything you can buy, you can spend to buy it quicker, or to buy it at all; the really good stuff you want you can never earn enough of the right currency for. You’re always being given offers or special events that, surprise, you have to spend to enjoy or take advantage of. And if you don’t spend anything, you have to watch adverts all the bloody time.

    Well, I didn’t spend a penny, in stark contrast to New Star Soccer. I probably would happily have spent a buck to disable adverts, but it started at $2.99 to do that (when you buy some diamonds, or whatever) or $4.99 for a starter pack, and that was too rich for my blood. I put up with the adverts.

    The game itself is really—well, at least slightly—interesting as a case study. You’d think that Crazy Taxi would make a perfect translation into free-to-play land, with it basically being a game where you try to survive as long as possible by repeatedly getting fares. In fact, I would have assumed that’s how this game would have worked; move between traffic in a Temple Run style, pick up passengers and take them places, even if it’s just “on rails.” Get hit too much and it’s game over. However, it’s even lesser than that, in that there’s no timer-free “survival” mode. You simply take jobs, say picking up four passengers, from the menu screens, do a quick mission for about 20-30 seconds either succeeding or failing, and you’re done.

    It’s really not very much like Crazy Taxi at all? I mean, it absolutely manages to nail that Crazy Taxi look. I wouldn’t have found it as compelling as I did if some receptor in my brain wasn’t telling me I was playing Crazy Taxi even though I plainly wasn’t, on some level. The decision to not use the “endless runner” template seems bonkers considering it was already encoded in the DNA, but if you’re wanting people to be returning to the game over and over, in bits, and feel forced to spend money, it makes more sense to offer such a lame piecemeal experience?

    It’s got all the other gating that you’d expect from free-to-play too, with everything needing to be unlocked, your taxi needing to be upgraded, and so on, requiring non-stop grinding to get anywhere (and it’s not transparent about this: the main missions become too hard to compete with from the second one, and you need to basically fully upgrade a taxi to get anywhere.)

    Interestingly, though, I really wanted to like this. Temple Run is copied for a reason and Crazy Taxi is a brilliant setting, but what broke my back was actually unlocking the second island, where I was forced to spend my hard-earned cash on a new, totally underpowered car (that I didn’t want) and then told I couldn’t drive my old car on the island. Obviously that’s to force me into the exact same treadmill I was on on the first island—grind, grind grind—but I rather mistakenly believed that the next island would just offer me tougher or longer missions that would (at some point) force me to upgrade to another car. Nope. Just the same boring loop, but now it felt arbitrary and unfair. Strange the things that can put you off, eh?

    Will I ever play it again? Nope. Literally just deleted it. Goodbye, all my hard-earned upgrades and 261 diamonds (still not enough to buy the car I wanted, that I could only drive on the first island anyway.)

    Final Thought: Kenji Kanno’s involvement on this game was, and I guarantee this, being sent a build at one point and sending back an e-mail with some vague and generally meaningless input. Or he said “you should put Hulk Hogan in the game for weeks and weeks” because that’s what they’ve done for some fuckin’ reason.

  • No Heroes Allowed: No Puzzles Either! (Sony Computer Entertainment, 2014)

    No Heroes Allowed: No Puzzles Either! (Sony Computer Entertainment, 2014)

    Developed/Published by: Sony Computer Entertainment
    Released: 15th April, 2014
    Completed: 10th September, 2014
    Completion: Beat all the levels? I think there’s more levels in a hard mode, but I don’t care.
    Trophies / Achievements: 57%

    I’m stunned that I finished this, honestly. Stunned. Booted up shortly after I finished the PSP original, I imagined I’d play a few levels of this free-to-play match-three-me-do and hit the paywall and be done with it. 

    Perhaps admirably, there isn’t a hardcore paywall with No Puzzles Either! (God, that title’s annoying. Makes it seem like I’m shouting every sentence. I’m going to drop that exclamation mark.) Basically, the game tries to make you pay by being stingy with playtime. You can store a maximum of three “picks” without paying; each pick being one play of a level, each pick takes eight hours to be refreshed. The first time I saw this I thought it was eight minutes, and was like “man, that’s just annoying enough.” Eight hours is on a whole ‘nother level… except for the fact that it rounds up to 24 hours for all three to be refreshed, meaning that you can dip in and play this once a day. Which adds a rather ok rhythm, somewhat undoing any reason you’d have to pay up unless you were just desperate to play more immediately. I wasn’t.

    And yet… cumulatively, I played this for sixteen hours. Sixteen hours total of me playing three match-three levels and unlocking and raising the monsters that form the block types. Sixteen hours that included days where I wasted my three plays totally on either grinding to try and capture one of the many, many rare heroes that allow you to upgrade monster blocks in particular ways, or bashing against one of the brick-wall tough levels that you either have to be over-levelled for or spend one of the paid-for consumables (which you can also gain randomly, but it’s even more rare than the rare heroes.)

    Do I have any excuse for this? Not really. To be honest, it’s the odd side-effect of the fact that I could play it once a day and no more. It made sure that I returned to it, regularly, in a ritual—a low-rent Vesper.5—that also ensured I didn’t spend any money on it. Because what would be the point? The best thing to spend money on would be the consumables, but if I just kept playing long enough I’d win eventually. And why pay a tenner to unlock infinite playtime? I’d just play it in a sprint, and I probably wouldn’t even enjoy it.

    I mean, not to say that I necessarily enjoyed No Puzzles Either. It was just this thing I did every day, apart from those days I didn’t. 2-3 minutes, frittered away, across months. But it’s done now.

    Will I ever play it again? No.

    Final Thought: The only reason I beat this was because I used my last block-clearing consumable on the last level at a point where I was sure I would win. I would not have bothered grinding to get another consumable or beat the level any other way, so I should probably have had some hella endorphins because of the high stakes. And yet… I didn’t. Man, I really didn’t view this game as anything except a timewaster.

  • Desert Golfing (Blinkbat Games, 2014)

    Desert Golfing (Blinkbat Games, 2014)

    Developed/Published by: Blinkbat Games
    Released: 7th August, 2014
    Completed: 2nd September, 2014
    Completion: Conceivably, you could class reaching 1000 holes as completing it, so I officially gave up on this one. I got to hole 69 (hurr hurr) and quit. 197 strokes, a 2.9 par.
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    “To play golf is to spoil an otherwise enjoyable walk.”—attributed to “the Allens” by H. S. Scrivener in 1903.

    Will I ever play it again? No.

    Final Thought: Here was me, worrying my time spent playing New Star Soccer, a game where you mostly aim an arrow to make a ball go a direction, would make me look a total fanny. Why did I worry?

    (Desert Golfing is the purest representation of the idea that if you stick some surprises in your game, game designers are going to lose their shit over it. Why create an ecosystem like Spelunky’s when you can just, you know, stick a bitmap rock at hole 300 and slightly and slowly modify the colour palette? Video games truly are art, in that Desert Golfing allows those “in the know” to jerk themselves silly while the average punter thinks “a kid could do that.” It is our shark in formaldehyde, although one I’d believe made without guile, now we just need some dickhead to spend £8 million on it.) 

  • Threes! (Vollmer/Wohlwend, 2014)

    Threes! (Vollmer/Wohlwend, 2014)

    Developed/Published by: Asher Vollmer and Greg Wohlwend
    Released: February 6th, 2014
    Completed: 9th February, 2014
    Completion: This is an interesting one. I got a high score of 9,420 and decided it made the most sense that I delete it and never play it again.
    Trophies / Achievements: 240/1000, but who cares about that kind of thing on iOS?

    Threes kind of completely breaks the idea of this blog, doesn’t it? You definitely can’t finish Threes. It’s not a thing you can do. There’s not even—like in many endless games—an amount of content you can see before you’re done, unless you definitely count seeing all the high numbers (who do have a bit of personality/back story?) as finishing it. That wasn’t going to happen.

    However, I spent six hours—more or less exactly, I checked—playing Threes on Sunday and at the end I decided I didn’t really ever want to play it again. I think that, contrary to what people demand of reviews, the point where the person playing the game gives up is a super interesting and educational point, and not enough developers really pay attention to that. In general, I force past that point (hell, I beat Duke Nukem Forever through gritted teeth) and that sickness is why I started this—to see if finishing things does gain me more than giving up earlier, whether I like it or not.

    So now here I am, trying to see if I learned something by stopping far before that point. In fact, my decision to stop with Threes was completely arbitrary. I didn’t top my high scores (I was third, that day, and I’ve slid down to fifth) I didn’t get some particular amount of achievement points; I just realised that to get a higher score was going to not simply require the expense of time, but that time would be exponentially increased by the randomness inherent in Threes.

    Threes. It’s simple. You can combine 1s and 2s to make 3s. But anything above that must be equal to combine: 3+3=6, 6+6=12, and so on. The board is 4×4; you move tiles by sliding them and the entire board slides that direction (unless a row or column is full.) Every slide introduces a new tile on the board. The game is over when the board is full.

    I probably didn’t need to explain it, but I did. It is—honestly—very very good. But after six hours I stopped playing. There’s a why to this, and one of the things someone might say to me is “ah but you didn’t understand…“ or “this isn’t a problem because…” no, you see… I already stopped. In six hours, the game actually un-clicked.

    In Threes, when you slide tiles, a new tile slides in on one of the rows (or columns) you were sliding. So if you slide only one row, the next tile (which you see the type of in advance) comes in. Brilliant; you have a 2 at the end of the row, you know a 1 is coming next, and it slides in. Perfect.

    However: lets say you’re sliding three rows. In one you have a 2, and a 1 is coming next. The other two rows? A 1 is really, really bad. You have a one in three chance of it coming in the right row. 

    OK, so maybe you should move something else, right? Get yourself into the right position. No, because that 1 is coming now.

    This can scupper an entire game. Is it fair? No, but when I question “should it be?” As far as I’m concerned, yeah, it should be.

    Another example: the white tiles. You’re not always sliding in a 1 or a 2; sometimes you slide in a bigger number. As a player, you almost always expect it to be a 3. Except, sometimes it’s not. Is there any way of knowing? Well, the designers have already stated they’ll be noting when the white tile is bigger than a 3 with a + symbol. Maybe this will help, but when your board has 3s, 6s, 12s, 24s and more on it, you’re more likely than not to end up sliding a new 12 right next to a 96, in a game-ending fashion. Is it fair?

    These two examples are good examples of things that there are probably ways to change, depending on the type of game you’re trying to make. Maybe you want that randomness! I think what I’ve noticed is that in a very mathematical game, I don’t. Like… at all. But here’s one problem that seems more difficult.

    You have a crowded board; a 96 and another 96 are some distance from each other. You want to combine them. However, every move you make brings a new tile on the board. So you have to spend most of your time making sure you are clearing the new tiles that come in—at a maximum, in general, you can allow a couple of moves before you start needing to clear multiple tiles in a single combo move—and every single one of those moves can just keep the 96s floating back and forth, never quite touching.

    But of course, allowing (say) more free movement? Could break it totally. Decreasing the number of tiles that comes in? Will definitely make it too easy.

    Now, I didn’t master Threes. If I had, maybe I’d be saying “this isn’t a problem, because…” as I was capable of (say) keeping the board so clean that I always had full movement, and could intuit moves allowing me to get my big numbers closer together (on the rare occasion they were far apart.)

    But I didn’t, and I’m not. Because after six hours of obsessive play, I stopped and, other than writing his, I haven’t looked back.

    Will I ever play it again? No, but there’s probably a version of this game I would.

    Final Thought: I played the entire thing with the sound down. I didn’t even know there was an (apparently good) soundtrack until yesterday.

  • Gunhouse (Necrosoft, 2014)

    Gunhouse (Necrosoft, 2014)

    Developed/Published by: Necrosoft
    Released: January 15th, 2014
    Completed: 31st January, 2014
    Completion: It’s an endless game, but the story ends after day ten, so I called it a day there!
    Trophies / Achievements: n/a

    So! Gunhouse comes from the insides of the head of my pal Brandon Sheffield, so I feel like I can’t really critique his game honestly. Yep, that’s right chaps: CRONYISM. But I’m going to use it for everyone’s benefit, by using this spot to do a nice little design-heavy interview with Brandon, considering he’s easily accessible to me and that. So away we go.

    Why is the house three by six?

    The width and height of the puzzle area is determined by how much of the screen I thought I could devote to a puzzle section. In a game like 10,000,000 on iOS, you have most of the screen devoted to the puzzle, and very little to the art—which is okay, because the art is tiny pixels. But one of my aims with this game was to showcase Juan Ramirez’s art, because I quite like it, and we had a lot of other attempts previously, with completely different puzzle modes, that just made it too small. So I drew a Vita screen to scale, then tried to figure out how much space I could use. then I divided that space up into equal squares that I could actually get my index finger on without much trouble. That’s where it all came from!

    If you have a block on one side or the other, you have the choice of sliding it whichever way it’s facing, as a special or a gun, or trying to turn it into a 3×2. I’m pretty satisfied with that as a trade-off for beginning players, since once you’re more advanced, you can move that configuration of four tiny blocks over to the side before it becomes a big block, if you want. I think it leads to interesting thought processes that you don’t usually have in puzzle games. “Where do I want this to go?” is a question you only ask in games like Hexic and their ilk, but this one’s even simpler than that.

    Wider definitely has way more issues, and narrower has zero strategy.

    Why restrict the player to shifting left and right?

    That came from two things. For one, I didn’t want to make a puzzle game that had been made before, because that’s boring, and I felt that within my 6 rows, 3 columns approach, I would have to come up with something new anyway. you can’t get much of a match 3 going when you have such a small playfield. The use of sliding and gravity, since you can slide between one and three segments out of the field at a time, lets you move everything on the field to anywhere you want, provided you have enough practice and can start to see the patterns. As a handy point of reference, any tetrominos one sees are easily turned into squares, simply due to how they’re constructed—so you can either wait for those to show up, or create them, then make squares and rectangles from that. Some people requested swapping, multi-directional shifting, and the like, but I was never interested in that, simply because of how much it’d been done before, and because it would make the puzzle so much more boring with its limited space. Ultimately I wanted a puzzle game that made you think differently, and I think this one does.

    Also, sliding works really well with the loading guns/special weapons concept.

    Why highlight two types of block and give them a boost?

    That was to add more strategy—we wanted people to care more about which block they loaded and where, so we added “shapes” to the gun’s bullet patterns. The match blocks, as we call them, were to encourage people to care about when they load certain blocks. So if you care when and where you’re loading these blocks, you can actually plan a couple steps ahead, a la; “I know I can’t get that block in here right now, but I’m going to set it up for next time, and I’ll have a match right out of the gate.”

    There are only three types of block on the playfield at a time. Why have five possible blocks?

    That’s basically one of the biggest design flaws. We determined that that’s how many guns we would have (10), and then we randomised the guns that you’d get. But that was before upgrades and before the enemies moved in lanes, and before the guns had shapes, and it was a bit too late to change once the rest of that stuff came in. Right now what gun you have is randomised (I’ve determined that you can get through it with any combination though.) In an ideal world, you’d let people choose their three guns, and hopefully in the future we’ll be able to accommodate that. no promises though…

    So, three types of blocks for a 3×6 space makes the most sense?

    For the level of play we were seeing, yes. I personally liked 4 types of blocks, and we had that for a while, but it was to hard for basically everyone, so we scaled it back to three. But back when we had four types of blocks in one puzzle, you could also add small amounts of power to your guns by sliding in 2 or 3 small blocks. Getting rid of that was a good idea because people were just spamming with that, and not ever making big blocks.

    Did you explore any other alternatives to big blocks of a different type replacing guns already in a slot?

    We did consider having guns not replace each other, but simply add less ammo, and change the weapon type. We tried it, and found that people just didn’t care what they put where as much any more, and also it made the game too easy, and we didn’t want to rebalance at that point. It felt more spammy, and less like you were making choices.

    The building period ends with the shutter closing slowly. This tends to favour extra building at the last minute at the bottom. Intentional?

    That was an idea of Jim’s—he thought it might be fun to have a frantic final moment to slide stuff in, which can be pretty compelling if you’ve got the right match on screen, or have been building let’s say a 2×5 block, and you just got it, but the bottom edge is still on screen, so you can slide the whole thing in. Those kinds of moments feel pretty good I think. I was worried about favouring the bottom there, but since you can also do specials, it’s not a big deal. Another thing I did to make the bottom row more important was dramatically up the HP of the basic minions, to make the bottom row one you care about a bit more. They have 30% more HP than flying enemies, for example.

    Thanks again to Brandon Sheffield, who disagrees with me about Sonic 2 and finds “the tunnels more reactionary than memorisation-based.” He’s crazy!

    Will I ever play it again? It’s endless! Maybe! Though I’d be more interested in playing a beefed up sequel.

    Final Thought: One of the musical tracks by Disasterpeace put me right in mind of London Girl by the Pogues, for some reason.