Tag: platformer

Posted on

Game Ramblings #56 – A Hat in Time

More info from Gears for Breakfast

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: PC
  • Also Available On: MacOS, PS4, Xbox One

TL;DR

  • Great riff on the Super Mario Sunshine game loop with some clever mechanics to avoid feeling too samey
  • Solid core platforming mechanics held back a bit by some auto activated actions

Back in the Yooka-Laylee write up I wrote “I’ve seen a lot of people saying that this game proves that 3D platformers are dead, but I’m not convinced.”  A Hat in Time is proof of that.  While it’s far from a perfect game, it picked a great game to start with and moved in its own direction to give us a classically-inspired platformer that doesn’t fall prey to the nostalgia trap that others have.

The nods at Mario games aren’t hidden, even down to the last dungeon being a take on Bowser’s Castle.

It’s obvious right from the start that the team behind the game loved Super Mario Sunshine.  The core game loop is 100% there.  Each world has some common theme with a bunch of different missions, replacing shine collection with a time piece.  After finishing a bunch of the individual segments, you get a spectacular boss fight, then on to the next world.  Secret levels are scattered throughout to test your platforming skills and give more time pieces as you earn different abilities.  Rather than FLUDD, you get a bunch of hats and badges as helpers, but the helper effect in puzzle solving and combat is similar.  It’d be easy knock the game for being so close, but once you get past the basics the game starts bringing in some unique pieces to make the game feel unique on its own.

Each world has its own theme, whether it be the mafia-filled restaurant island or a haunted forest where you lose your soul.  More importantly though, each world plays different.  As an example, one world involves the travels through an active movie studio.  Rather than going with the open level pattern that Sunshine uses, you instead go through parallel movie sets actively helping in film some movies.  Another instance has a true open-world taking place in a set of sky islands, where you never drop out of the world after collecting a time piece.  In doing this, the gameplay feels familiar, but the actual pace of world completion changes enough to feel fresh throughout.

Boss fights are always colorful, always entertaining, and as usual a music theme only helps.

The breadth of powers available in hats and badges also opens up the gameplay a lot more than the Mario source.  In the badge department, some of these purely exist as helpers, whether it’s a collection magnet or a radar to find treasures in the world.  Some of them add practical moves, like a hookshot or the ability to quick-charge hat powers.  Still others are just there for fun, like the one that replaces voiceovers with mumbling.  Hats are more direct in their use, allowing for things like slowing time or creating platforms out of specially marked areas.  The important thing is that you’re limited in what can be equipped at a time to one hat and eventually up to three badges.  This lends an important strategic element as swapping out your gear in the middle of a fight can be a big hazard, so the planning element of figuring out what gear you want can be the difference between life and death.

That’s not to say that this game entirely avoided all the common pitfalls of 3D platformers.  When the camera is free to move, there’s still a lot of areas where the camera either gets in your way, or the need to move it causes havoc in tight platforming areas.  There’s also a number of auto-activated moves that like to cause chaos.  The wall run in particular had a habit of activating when I was just trying to platform near a wall, often causing me to catch over a gap and fall to my death.  Generally speaking though things worked as well as I expect out of the genre, and problems I had were minimal enough to not cause me to want to shelve the game out of lack of patience.

There’s also a bunch of secret levels which unsurprisingly take the form of similar levels out of Sunshine.

If there’s anything I’d really say here as a wrap up note, it’s that nostalgia-based platformers probably want to be careful of where they pull their source.  Yooka-Laylee took inspiration from slower Banjo-Kazooie collectathons and joke-focused writing, much to its detriment.  In going with something like Super Mario Sunshine, A Hat in Time was able to take a game loop that is much more immediately satisfying to the user, and write a light, but still solid story that didn’t need to lean on in-jokes to try to get laughs out of the audience.  By then adding its own spins to both the move set and world flow, it was able to do something unique to itself to avoid feeling like a carbon copy of the original.  With Super Mario Odyssey just a few days away, I’m pretty confident that we’ve yet to see the end of this genre.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #47 – Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap

More Information from DotEmu

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Switch, Xbox One, Windows, Linux, Mac
  • Original Version On: Sega Master System, Game Gear, TurboGrafx-16

Right from the start I could see that this game is a lovingly made remake of Wonder Boy III.  This remake feels like the original, if the original was made in 2017 with fantastically drawn visuals.  While that means that it doesn’t lose its original charm, it also means that it carries some finicky mechanics from the late 80s with it.  However, the quality of the original still comes through, and being able to play it without having to break out the old consoles is still worth the experience, and the polish in place to transition between the old and new is absolutely impressive.

The hand drawn style is a standout, particularly against the original primitive pixel visuals.

The most obvious thing that’s been changed here are the visuals.  Rather than going the easy route and sticking with an upgraded 8-bit Master System style, DotEmu went all out with a full visual refresh of the original game.  Every character, NPC, and world area has been redrawn over the original geometry, maintaining the original gameplay space, but giving it a fantastically modern look.  If it wasn’t for Cuphead finally being ready to release, this one would probably be a runaway winner for me in terms of flat out best looking pure 2D platformer.

Transition between styles is immediate, and can be done at any time.

However, the more impressive trick is that you can go between the original and modern looks at any time, and most importantly, the original sprites maintain the aspect ratio of the remake on modern platforms, giving a nice mix between the look of the old and the practical functionality between the two.  You simply press R2, the screen wipes side to side, and you’re right in the old style without having to pause the game.  This can also be done with R3, changing the music between the old and new, giving you the option to mix and match your preferred styles for sound and visuals at any time.  This is particularly important, because it has some surprising gameplay ramifications as well.

The hit boxes in modern graphics are…vague.

One of the biggest issues I continued to have was that the hit boxes in modern style were not that precise to the actual visuals of the character.  In some cases they matched pretty well to the general shape of the enemies, but in a lot of cases they were often much smaller than I was expecting.  For single enemies this wasn’t a huge deal, but for packs of enemies, it meant I was often swinging and missing, then getting stuck in situations where I would take a lot of unnecessary damage.  However, the hit boxes in the original game were generally much more precise, so by the tail end of the game, I was often switching to the old visuals purely for collision convenience, and minimizing my damage taken simply due to the more instinct-precise way of attacking.

Mechanically speaking, there’s also a few warts that were fine in the 80s, but at this point are kind of just moderate annoyances.  There’s a lot of situations where enemies can stun lock you into corners and walls.  While I wouldn’t take damage after a hit until I finally landed, it was annoying getting endlessly juggled into a corner until an enemy decided to finally turn around and back off.  For the bosses, they were mostly fairly trivial as well, with each boss generally having one attack and a single hit zone that was generally placed in the most obnoxious place to attack, while trying to avoid relatively quick and low damage attacks.  Jump physics are generally fairly precise, but mid-air control is definitely not as good as some more modern takes on the genre like Shovel Knight.  Generally speaking, this was a pretty high quality game mechanically when it originally came out, and the remake benefits from being able to start with that solid base.  While everything here is still pretty solid, it definitely plays like an 80s game, for better or worse.

All that said, this is a great take on an older title.  In doing the port, they avoided the trap that a lot of remakes do in trying to reimagine an old title.  This one is as straight a gameplay port as I’ve ever seen, particularly since the old title runs permanently emulated in the background.  The modern visuals and audio, as well as the fantastic feature to switch to the originals in real time is a nice touch that I wish more remakes would take advantage of.  End of the day, if it comes down to breaking out an old console, or playing this remake on a modern platform, I’d say throw out the few bucks and go this way, it’s worth it just for the visuals.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #44 – Runbow Pocket

More Info from 13am Games

  • Genre: Platformer/Racing
  • Platform: New 3DS
  • Also Available On: Wii U, Windows, Xbox One

This is a strange one in a lot of ways.  Runbow is the second retail title I’ve seen (and own) in the US that is specifically New Nintendo 2DS/3DS exclusive.  Despite platformers being entirely dependent on good physics, the weak physics also ended up being something I could ignore because the core mechanics of the game were simply good enough to ignore the problems I was running into.  The short format of the levels also ended up being a significant draw to playing this in a portable fashion.

I suppose it’s worth getting the physics problems out of the way because it really is the main drawback of some of their design decisions.  Jumping itself is generally pretty stiff, and while it’s predictable, doesn’t have the same smooth variable feel that a lot of better 2D platformers end up having.  Because of this, I was becoming more dependent on overcompensating my jumps, then air dashing to adjust my landing positions if I under or overjumped my intended landing area.  However, dashes in general have an awkward pause at the end of the action.  While this wasn’t generally a problem, the inherent core idea of getting to the end of the level as fast as possible is negatively impacted by the loss of momentum, even just from a feel perspective.  The act of landing on platforms also had some issues.  I was never really able to pinpoint whether it was the small size of the screen or simply a game feature, but it felt like platforms had some amount of magnetism if you were “close enough” to landing on the edge of one.   This combined with the stiff jump meant I was second guessing a lot of precise jumps that were over more significant gaps.  For most platformers, this would all combine to be the death of the game, but luckily the core mechanics of the level progression were good enough to let me ignore a lot of this.

From a high level the core mechanic across the entire game is that the platforms, traps, and in some cases shields around enemies in the foreground and the level’s background are made up of a handful of primaryish colors.  If they match, the platform effectively disappears.  This right there is what elevates the game to something fantastic, and the amount of depth that the devs pulled out of a seemingly simple idea surprises throughout.  Each level has some way of playing off this system to actively change what things can be collided with.  This can run the gamut from the entire background changing in rhythm with the music to waterfalls of flowing color to shapes moving across the scene seemingly at random.  You’re simply dropped in and given a few seconds at the start to figure out what’s going on and react to it so you don’t lose time running through.

The format also worked fantastically as a portable experience.  The longest levels typically hit goal times around 1:15 or so, but were typically only in boss levels.  Most standard levels fit into the 20-40 second range.  The idea of grabbing my 3DS, hitting a couple levels while waiting on something, then putting it away has always been a draw of the platform, and this fits the bill nicely.  The fact that there’s a ton of content (nearly 200 levels in just the core game) means that I can be poking at this for a long time, even ignoring the replayability of going for low times across all levels.

This is definitely a bit of a unicorn.  It’s a New 3DS exclusive, a platformer with awkward physics that I didn’t hate, a game experience suited for portables that shipped last on a portable, and despite it all is a fantastic time to play.  A lot of that goes into a great style that is wrapped directly into the core mechanics of the game, giving a lot of mileage to what is at the surface a really simple idea.