Tag: steam

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How’d It Age #6 – Pharaoh / Pharaoh: A New Era

More Info from DotEmu

  • Genre: City Builder
  • Platform: PC

So I suppose this is a bit of a look at how an old game aged, and a bit of a look at how a remake both did and didn’t change a game. Pharaoh is a game that I played when it first came out, and is something that I’ve continued to come back to on and off throughout the years since. This is really the first city builder that hooked me. I’d played some SimCity on SNES, SimCity 2000 on PC, and dabbled a bit in Caesar 3, but none of them really got their hooks in me like this one. However, it had some distinct issues that have never really gone away for me as I play through it, and for better or worse a lot of that is maintained in the remake, though it does come with a few nice tweaks.

I think this screenshot is a good place to start, because it really shows the main thing that drew me to playing the remake over the original. They added a global worker pool mechanic that later games like Zeus started playing with. In the original game, your places of work had to be close enough to housing to allow recruiters to find people for the jobs. What this meant at least for me was that instead of designing cities I was haphazardly putting together pods of industries where they needed to be with pods of housing connected to them, but not too close so their desirability wouldn’t be affected. It always felt like a weird restriction to me in terms of how I wanted to go about designing my layouts. The global worker pool fixes that.

Now, I simply need to have enough people in the city to fill the jobs. What this means for me is that I can design my cities with distinct regions. I can have industrial regions, where resources and production buildings are grouped in ways that make sense for efficient creation, storage, and ultimately trade purposes. I can then have housing in areas where it will best allow it to both have access to everything it needs, as well as room for the buildings to expand in later levels to high-level 3×3+ housing. It makes the entire city creation process about designing rather than fitting to specific mechanical needs.

There’s also an additional sub-option that changes the underlying worker availability from being age-based to just being a flat percentage, and this is unfortunately a good option covering up a mechanic that I feel still doesn’t work right. The underlying default worker pool is anyone in your town from age 20-49. This works great as your city grows and workers move in. However, once your housing capacity is reached it becomes a long term problem. There seems to be an underlying mechanical issue where people just do not have children at a replacement rate so your city ends up ultimately aging out. To keep the worker pool up, you end up just constantly chasing a growing population or doing mechanical cheesing, such as deleting an entire neighborhood and rebuilding it to get new immigrants.

At the time of the game’s release it felt like potentially a systemic limitation that was just annoying. However, it feels like something that should just be fixed. The flat percentage worker pool is an alright solution, and honestly gets me my goal of having a city that I can grow to a predictable size. However, I’d have liked a more elegant solution where roughly stable populations also have roughly stable birth rates, and I can plan around that. Yes, I expect that cities with full health care coverage would have more older citizens that age out of the worker pool, but it’s so aggressive in both the original and remake that it feels broken.

That isn’t the only thing that I kind of wished had more elegant solutions. In the original release as well as the remake I end up hitting a point in the middle kingdom period where mechanically the game just becomes something I don’t want out of a city builder. You reach a point where you’ve kind of seen everything so the game becomes less about city building and more about speed running. You start getting into levels that expect you to have a lot of industry up and running extremely early, and if you don’t do things just right you start suffering consequences such as the pharaoh invading your city. It ultimately is not how I want to play a city builder. I find it more interesting to be chasing layouts and efficiency within that rather than hitting mechanical bullet points, and the later levels just feel like you should build in precise locations at precise times and learn that via being defeated. It’s at that point where I tend to fall into just doing mission editor free play on cool spots.

The game also really did nothing to alleviate boredom around the god mechanic. The tl;dr is you need to keep gods happy or suffer negative consequences. If you keep them happy you have positive consequences. Unfortunately, the practical way to do this is to just routinely hold festivals in their honor. It’s so robotic of a mechanic that I’d almost rather neither positive or negative consequences existed, and the whole thing just went away. Long wait periods while monuments are being built just turn into clicking the festival button every couple months and doing that in repetition for long periods of time. It felt unnecessary 25 years ago and feels unnecessary now.

All that being said, I’m glad this remake is out and is still seemingly being worked on. This offers me a hugely easier way to do my semi-regular hop into the game. It gives me modern perks like ultrawide support and cloud saves. It modernizes a few mechanics and gives me hope that they’re going to be willing to do more to create an ultimately better experience. And I suppose what it really gives me is hope that city builders are still a popular enough thing to exist within some niche on Steam. I would say that since this game came out I’ve leaned more heavily into open-ended builders like Timberborn, but I think there’s still a place to explore more history-focused task-oriented builders like Pharaoh, though I do want to see more of a push to fix what wasn’t liked about the originals if the studio behind this does end up going into later titles.

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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.

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Shelved It #7 – Hollow Knight

More Info from Team Cherry

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PC
  • Also Available On: Mac, Linux, Switch

TL;DR

  • Solid mechanics, solid visuals, solid audio all put together a great base that can be built on.
  • Small bits of lack of polish, rather than anything egregious led to frustration, and eventual shelving.

This is going to sound weird for a game I’m shelving, but Hollow Knight is really quite good.  It’s a pretty traditional Metroidvania in layout, using a solid short-range melee system and some occasional powerups to round out the move set.  This is complemented by a solid visual style, and great audio and soundtrack to put together one of the best themed titles in this genre I’ve recently played.  However, this was a case of a thousand cuts, where small lack of polish in the details led to a continuous pattern of one step forward, one step backward in my progress.  This was combined with a somewhat questionable use of the Souls death mechanic, to where body runs began to feel like a slog, rather than a good balance of penalty and learning reward.  In the end, the good couldn’t outweigh the bad for me to continue on.

Early example of some of the fantastic visuals you’d see in this game.

However, let’s start with the good.  As with a lot of recent Metroidvania games, particularly in the indie scene, this one is a fantastic looker of a game.  Like the recent remake of Wonder Boy 3, or other Metroidvania titles like Ori and the Blind Forest, this one has a fantastic visual style.  Everything has a great hand-drawn appearance, with thick painterly lines.  It’s a fairly distinct style, and works rather well.  This is combined with great use of dynamic lighting to give some dramatic areas.  The biggest problem with it all is that most of the areas share a similar color range, so things can begin to look rather samey as you continue on.  On the other hand, it never got old running through the environment and having all the little blades of grass in the scene explode into similarly styled particles as I swung through them.  As a whole, this was a part of the game that never really diminished in my time playing it.

The core combat is also really well put together.  The base of the combat are melee strikes, which sounds simple at its core.  However, there was a smart choice made specifically in the horizontal strike, giving some verticality outside of the swing’s hitbox, and allowing players to hit things both slightly above and slightly below without having to be super precise with jump heights. This was extremely nice for how small some of the hitboxes on armored bosses and enemies could be.  This was backed up by a strong set of spells and abilities that are earned throughout the game to fill out the move set.  Examples here include mid-air dashes and double jumps for traversal, or energy missiles and dive bomb spells for damage.  Generally speaking, the game gives you a bunch of tools to use, and its up to you to then figure out what is most effective for each situation.

However, as I continued on, the little details that didn’t quite have the polish of the visuals and core combat started giving way to more frustration than fun.

The first big place this showed for me was in their use of the Dark Souls death mechanic.  The basic system is that at death, your soul gets stuck in the world along side all currency you earned during that life.  If you get back to the soul and defeat it in combat, you earn all the currency back.  If you die before that, you permanently lose all of it.

Generally speaking, I’m pretty neutral on this system.  There’s a fine line where this system works well, and to me it requires enough save points in place that are both close enough together, as well as close enough to where players will die so that the game doesn’t heavily discourage exploration, and keeps game pace post-death high.  To me it feels like Hollow Knight fails on both of these counts.  Many areas had a bunch of save points clustered near the center of the zones, but fewer out towards the edges where a lot of boss battles or more dangerous sort of side dungeons were.  There were also hardly ever any save points actually immediately before or immediately after boss rooms, so deaths during bosses (which are extremely common) often resulted in a long run back to the boss.  It just felt like a lot of wasted time, rather than a good chance to learn and retry the boss quickly.  This was compounded by a number of times where my soul spawned out of reach, effectively ending my change to re-earn my lost currency, so I eventually just stopped exploring altogether, choosing to go the lower risk way of sticking to main paths and simply grinding out kills if I required more money or power for skills.

There were a bunch of other little details that also compounded on top of this core problem for me.  First and foremost, jumping feels awkward.  This is a game with purely digital left/right movement, and no in-air momentum.  If you’re jumping and let go of the stick, you fall straight down.  It just feels weird, and eliminates a lot of subtle movement flow that a lot of better examples of the genre have.  There’s also a really obnoxious backwards impulse after hitting an enemy.  This is combined with somewhat imprecise collision on platforms to put me in situations where trying to jump and hit enemies mid-air around small platforms was pretty much a death sentence if solid ground wasn’t below me.

The final sort of annoyance was in the mapping system mechanics.  Rather than mapping out rooms when you walk through them, you had to clear a couple of hurdles first to map out a zone.  First and foremost, you had to buy a map of the zone from a vendor within the zone, generally well within the zone and out of the way (see annoyance with losing currency when your body run fails due to spawning out of reach….).  This only opened the ability to map the area.  It then didn’t mark areas on your map until the next time you reached a save area (see annoyance with the location and frequency of save poiints….).  Otherwise you were basically flying blind, and have to remember your path through areas until you hit both points above.  Generally speaking, it just felt like an additional unnecessary money and time pit, where I’d rather be spending my currency on functional upgrades.

End of the day, the further I went into Hollow Knight, the more the small details outweighed the good of the core systems.  Could I have grinded through it without too much trouble? Sure.  Are the problems going to be something that bothers everyone? Nope.  However, I’ve got plenty of other games to play, and seeing lack of polish in the details just generally distracts the hell out of me.  However, for those with more patience than me can probably find a lot to love here, so if nothing else, I’d recommend taking a look the next time a Steam sale rolls on through.