I was pointed to the wonderful game William and Sly yesterday. A typical platform game, the player takes on the role as Sly the fox. William, Sly’s master I take it, and Sly are out to collect mushrooms in the forest. Unfortunately, William says he is unable to get to his mushroom storage cave on the other side of the forest because the runestones that he uses for transporting across the forest have gone out. Sly is thus given the quest to find the runestones and recharge them with magical fairyflies he can collect in the forest.

At the same time, Sly collects any mushrooms he comes across, some of which are in hidden caves, hidden behind the game’s scenery. This makes the game much more about exploring the terrain because the hidden areas have no visual distinction. Sly must also worry about Darklings, which are evil creatures that do not harm Sly himself but eat any fairyflies that Sly has collected. Luckily, Sly can gain some power-ups, one of which allows him to glide while the other allows him to dispell Darklings.

Reading that description, the similarities between William and Sly and say another platform like Super Mario Bros are blatantly obvious. Sly runs and jumps, gains power-ups, and is on a hunt for mushrooms (no pipes though). There is even a sense of hidden wonder in both games where pipes allow access to hidden areas in Super Mario and in William and Sly there are hidden caves that have no differentiation from their surrounding landscape.

But when playing as Sly you do not feel the same way as when playing Mario. The level design in William and Sly is based on recreating a forest; while the graphics are not photorealist they are defiantly more realistic than say the hills or trees in Super Mario games. The bounding and running animations of Sly are superb, I found myself just examining Sly’s motions because they are so smooth. Couple those with the excellent somber music and the thunderstorm effects, the game does much more to place the player into a world that is less based on cartoony action and more about experiencing the surroundings.

Collecting items works differently too. When an item is collected the player is given a brief acknowledgement that they found the item but nothing else is shown. No running total is in the upper right hand corner, no score, not even a timer. In fact, the game has no UI in its main play mode at all. Hitting SHIFT will bring up a single page that lists all of the items the player has gathered but I for one barely used it, since I didn’t care how many mushrooms I was collecting.

The power-ups Sly receives are few but interesting in how they are presented. For dispelling Darklings Sly has to gain a “white magic” power. Sly is given this power after he unlocks a runestone but only for a short time. A Darkling can be anywhere in orientation to any given runestone so it adds another element of exploration if the player wishes to find and dispell as many Darklings as possible.

*Spoiler* The second power-up is the gift of flight, or the ability to glide if the player holds the up button. This is gained by patience. When Sly comes upon an alter in the middle of the forest a sign gives a hint that if he waits on the alter he will learn to fly. After about 15 seconds of waiting a message appears telling the player that Sly can now use his wings. Waiting there struck me as something different, platformers are typically about speed and progression. Having to wait, albeit for not a long time, was an excellent way to add in this power-up, especially in regards to the explorative nature of the game.

I immediately thought of Blueberry Garden while playing William and Sly. Both have large maps that players explore and items to collect throughout. Yet, each add something different to a platformer game rather than fighting or speed. The player can still focus on those aspects as both games allow them, one can dispell every Darkling in William and Sly or may try to kill the animals in Blueberry Garden, but the player is not forced to do those kinds of actions. Each game takes the same-old platformer mechanics but frames them in a way that is serene while still keeping with the spirit of the platforming genre.

The other game William and Sly reminded me of was Tale of Tales’ game The Endless Forest. Dubbed a “multiplayer online game and social screensaver,” The Endless Forest takes place in, well, a forest too. Both games nudge the player to explore the game’s environment but at the same time are almost too whimsical to play, where the player would rather just let the game run because it creates a soothing atmosphere. At the moment I am writing this I have William and Sly running in my browser and I’m just listening to the music/sound effects from the game, it’s quite nice.

If I had to make a complaint about William and Sly it would be that the points should have been removed from the game. The player technically receives a score if they finish the game, where every mushroom collected is worth 100 points and every Darkling dispelled is 1000. There even seems to be points awarded if the player finishes the game in a certain amount of time, though no time is shown anywhere while playing the game. I never felt like I was working towards a score, nor was I trying to beat the game fast. Adding points may motivate some people to play the game, maybe even push people to play the game differently, but for me the gameplay was intrinsic enough that I wanted to play just to play.

There was a game design conversation yesterday on Twitter that discussed such things as how gameplay centers too heavily on Power Fantasies and Discreet Choices, or that games are just Movement and Collision Detection. I feel these arguments are always too reductionist in nature, boiling down to a discussion of why “game X doesn’t have Y.” While this is a great thought experiment, people tend to focus on very popular games in these arguments, your WoWs, your GTAs, Rohrer’s games (which for the “elite” gamer is popular). I rarely see people discussing Flash-based, as William and Sly is, or Social games in their arguments of how we can bring gaming to the next level as a medium, art, or whatever.

Is William and Sly a Power Fantasy? Maybe, you can certainly play it as one. I personally liked bouncing around. Does it have Discreet Choices? Sure it is basically a linear level with an ending but you don’t need to enjoy it in that way. What about Movement and Collision Detection? Well of course, it is a spatial representation of a forest and a platformer. Did I feel that all I was doing was moving and colliding, no more so than I could argue that life is based around movement and collision (might throw good old Virilio out for that argument).

When these types of discussions come up we need to be more open minded about the breadth of games that exist. There are game designers who are trying new things and I think more of us should be putting our own ideas of how to further the medium into practice. The EAs and Activisions of the world will not be producing the same games forever, especially if we all try to sneak in new ideas and frame our games differently so more gaming audiences take notice. We just need to be sly about it.

inFAMOUS epitomizes what I love and hate about open-world, parkour games. Fitting, considering the game is a moral dichotomy game.

For those who may have not played Infamous, it has a laundry list of genre/mechanic titles. It’s an open-world, shooter, morality, parkour, rpg game. The setting is three city filled islands, similar to other open-world game landscapes (Assasin’s Creed, GTA). Players traverse these cityscapes by climbing, gliding or skating on the city’s architecture. The premise of the game is that Cole, the main character that players control, is infused, no pun intended, with electricity, allowing the player to use the electricity stored in their body in a number of ways. Shooting electricity like a gun is the basic ability but other powers can be unlock or upgraded, such as electric grenades or arc lightning. Topping it all off, the game places the player in a number of morality situations, making the player choose to act good or evil.

Each of the five titles that describe Infamous offer something in the game, though not necessarily something good.

Open-world

The open-world landscape is very well designed. The islands are smaller than in GTA, which makes sense considering the player must rely on their own powers for travel. Eventually players get the power to glide across power lines and grind on train tracks, making getting around much quicker. It was not as fast as say quick travel in Fallout 3 or using cars in GTA but in Infamous I felt like I actually experienced the city. Open-world games often have contradictory concepts, developers build huge worlds for players to play in and yet players are given extraordinary means to travel quickly though the world. Infamous had a good balance between having a quick way to travel and having to know your way around the city.

Water was another story. Since the world consisted of islands there was lots of water to be seen. Since Cole is electric, the rational in Infamous is that water hurts Cole. It doesn’t make much sense considering Cole will grab live power lines and be fine but steps into a water puddle and loses health. Water was generally used as a separator. It separated the islands and it separated the platforms players had to traverse in the sewers (Cole had to go underground to turn each island’s power back on). Basically, if the player was in water they most likely screwed up. Either they missed a jump or they were fighting on a bridge and fell. In the former case water added difficulty, in the latter water was a mercy kill so the player could get back into the fight quickly. While death by water didn’t make sense I can see why the developers added it. Thank god, it never rained in the game.

Parkour

Parkour gameplay is certainly being stream-lined and Infamous is one of the latest examples. I found climbing on buildings was much easier and quicker than in Assassin’s Creed. The design of Infamous required this; the buildings are too high and varied for the parkour mechanics to work otherwise. But this brings up an interesting problem, if you make it easy to climb why can’t I climb on everything?

I’ve seen other reviewers laugh and criticize the game for not allowing Cole to climb on chain-linked fences but that made the most sense to me. At no point was Cole able to climb that type of fence. As with water, chain-linked fences are not allowed, ever. I figured that out right away and was fine with it. What frustrated me was when objects that I had climbed on before were suddenly made un-climbable. Stacked shipping crates, certain rubble patches and specific “story important” buildings with special textures were un-climbable, even though most of them looked as though they would be very easy to climb or, in the shipping crates case, would only allow climbing if the player could grab the very top of the structure. This is the problem of “if you have a hammer everything looks like a nail.” I was taught that I could climb on everything, and yet it was taken away from me.

Shooter / RPG

I’m still not very good at console shooters, I can’t control the analog stick very well. Infamous was easier for me than other shooters because different powers allowed for splash damage, making accuracy not as required as with a typical gun. The diversity of the powers added a lot to the game but the option to upgrade powers seemed tacked on. The game would have benefited from a “use and level up” mechanic instead, where the more a power was used the higher that power’s level increased. Plus, each type of power had a good and evil side where players could only upgrade the powers on their chosen morality side. No neutrality in this game, and at this point the only reason to replay the game would be to use the powers I was not allowed to use the first time, which is not sounding that appealing.

Morality

I played as an evil character, because I am pure evil. Actually, I always decide in a morality game whether to be a good or evil character during the first few major moral decision. Then I usually go all out for that side. I believe I chose the good option during the first moral decision but decided I didn’t like the love interest in the game so gave my soul to the utter darkness, never looking back.

To me it didn’t seem to matter. The cut-scenes and dialog with the story characters rarely mentioned the fact that I was on a killing spree. At one point I drained the energy out of a helpless person, which charges Cole’s powers, right next to a story character. They didn’t mind, just went on talking like nothing happened. It’s one thing when players perform evil acts in games and only “evil” enemies are around as witnesses but when the main character is interacting with other story characters as frequently as in Infamous the morality tale fails miserably because everyone has amnesia. Or is blind. Or both.

Now I may be wrong but the way I feel now, after finishing the game as an evil character, I do not think the story would play out any differently. Pursuing the opposite moral choices is not an appealing prospect to me because the story would be the same. Whether that is true or not I don’t know, but the fact that I feel this way means that the story was not good enough to warrant a replay. That means the only other reason to play again would be to use the opposite morality powers but, having seen the opposite powers, I don’t think using different powers would offer enough change in the gameplay.

–

I finished Infamous, so that says something. It is a great open-world game where you can jump on buildings and grind on train tracks. The quests, combat elements and powers were varied enough not to get boring either. Some parts of the game were frustrating: the climbing properties changing on certain objects, having to arbitrarily level up powers and the moral choices not affecting the story. Did I like this game better than Assassin’s Creed or GTA? Hmm, that is hard to say. GTA games defiantly have more content and usually not as heavy handed with the story. Assassin’s Creed benefited from ancient cityscapes, which automatically bracketed what was possible in the game making for a tighter experience. So no, I don’t think Infamous is better than AC or GTA but I did, and continuously wanted to, play the game all the way through. It may not be the best open-world, shooter, morality, parkour, rpg game but it’s still pretty good.

Like gardening? Don’t like zombies eating your brains? Well then Plants vs. Zombies is the game for you. A cross between old-school Tower Defense games and the addictive game Insaniquarium, Plants vs. Zombies is an easy game to get into but hard to put down.

Summary: The game has easy mechanics to follow, variety in the plant and zombie types, tons of strategy and lots of mini-games. Gameplay is a little ambiguous at times without health bars and everything in the game must be unlocked. However, these faults matter little after you have played ten hours of the game and still want to play some more.

From the maker of the games more addictive than heroin, Pop Cap has made another highly enjoyable one with Plants vs. Zombies (and this fix will only cost you $20). PvZ is a tower defense game but does not involve placing towers around a zigzagging corridor which enemies follow. Instead the player is charged with defending their lawn represented by a checker board type field with zombies walking along the horizontal rows (A similar Flash game Warlords).

Zombies will eat any plant that they come into contact with so each row must have some sort of protection. Plants usually function work along there horizontal row, any turret or blocking plant used will only affect the zombies in that row. Each row only has nine or so grid spaces and only one plant can occupy one grid square at a time. The strategy of the game is a balancing act between which types of plants you put into each row and how to counter each zombies unique abilities. For instance, the ‘Cactus’ plant shoots spikes which can take out the zombies floating on balloons. Did I mention that this game is both funny and the animations are awesome

The economy in PvZ is based on two currencies, sunshine and money. Sunshine is used to buy plants while playing a round. Powerful plants cost much more than normal ones but players can place sunflowers to collect more sun while the round is underway, making purchasing better plants possible. This is another bit of strategy, the player needs to learn to build enough sun-flowers to acquire more sun but at the same time defend those sunflowers from the zombies (since sunflowers are defenseless). Zombies sometimes drop money, which is also given as a reward for completing a round. Money is used to buy upgrades or other items that work outside of the main game rounds. But it’s worth mentioning that instead of sunshine and money automatically being given to the player, the player must personally click and collect these currencies. The player is always engaged in the action for this reason, continually looking for new sunshine and money icons to collect during the round, while placing plants to defend their lawn.

Another excellent mechanic in PvZ is the fact that a player can only choose a certain number of plants to take into any round of play. While there are over 40 different types of plants the player can only have up to 10 plants available at a time (players start with eight six slots, but can purchase more). Though the player does not make this decision blind, each round shows which zombies the player will be facing next making it easier to decide which plants they will need.

PvZ feature five different lawn-scapes for the player to defend. There is the player’s front and back lawns, which are played during the day and night, and the roof. Those zombies may not be quick but they understand what it means to flank a position. Each area offers something different. During the day the front yard consists of five rows to defend; at night gravestone popup on the lawn making it impossible to place plants in those squares. Also nighttime makes it harder to collect sunlight but certain nighttime plants become available. In the backyard a pool is added, where the player must learn to use aquatic tactics since regular plants cannot be placed in the water by themselves. At night the fog rolls into the backyard making it hard to see the first few columns of squares on the board. Finally, the roof area is vaulted, so the player has to learn to use the plants that fire on a ballistics trajectory, instead of straight shots. Having such a variety of play areas makes this game much more enjoyable than other tower defense games that are played on a single area or map.

PvZ also offers different modes to play. The game eases the player in through Adventure Mode, stepping through each plant and zombie type as the player experiences each of the five play areas. Adventure mode is the only one offered when the player first installs the game and they have to play through most of it to unlock other modes, but it never feels like grinding just to get to other options. The player gets introduced to some of the mini-games while playing the mode as well, making the entire mode a boot-strapping experience.

Other modes include Mini-games, Puzzle, Survival and Zen Garden. The Zen Garden is an outside area to grow plants and earn money, but is mainly a side area. The other three modes, however, add a lot to the game and all of them are extremely fun to play. Some of the mini-games combine their gameplay with other Pop Cap games like Bejeweled and Insaniquarium. Puzzles are about making the right move at the right time and Survival stretches a round of play over multiple rounds where any plants that are placed stick around but more and more zombies are thrown against them.

Wrapping this review up, besides having to unlock everything, one major drawback to the game is that the plants and zombies are given ambiguous statistics. Zombies do not have visible health points and it is not clear how much damage any plant does to a zombie. The player learns rough estimates, a simple zombie with “low” health takes ten shoots from a “normal” damage plant. From a casual perspective having vague terms describing the stats of each unit is fine but I feel not having the accurate numbers represented somewhere takes away some of the strategy that min-maxers may enjoy. Yet it is nice to not have to worry about the stats as much. If you keep up with current tower defense games many flood the screen with unit stats and some are even designed so that the player must understand those stats in great detail to have any chance of winning. Not casual by any means.

Plants vs Zombies has a lot to offer any player and considering that it can be played in small chunks is great as a side game. The variety not only in the unit types and play areas but in the different modes as well add plenty of playable hours to the game. And while this is not your traditional tower defense game, it is not your traditional tower defense game. Which makes it that much more appealing.

Other review run-down: The Escapist, Wired, Gamespot.

This review will have spoilers and is more of a thorough look at the game than a normal review. If you think you will play the game in the future it’s better not to read any review of the game in order to get the best experience possible. Exploration is a big factor in the game, if that is taken away some of the magic of this great game is lost. You have been warned.

Blueberry Garden is stylized, spartan in design and heavy on the exploration. While a short game, it was immensely fun and for $5 on Steam something that cannot be missed.

From a marketing perspective Blueberry Garden, created by Erik Svedang and has won a few awards for it, is a platformer. The basic walk and jumping mechanics are there, along with the abilities to pick up objects and, if edible, eat them. Oh and you can fly. I forgot to mention that. Technically you spend less time on platforms and more time BASE jumping from platform to platform. Flying isn’t free form (meaning you cannot fly up as well as down), as I said it is BASE jumping, or a controlled glide. Getting to higher and higher elevations so that one can glide to the next area of interest is the true puzzle in the game.

There are a few problems with the controls when the game character is near breaks in the terrain. At one point I was caught in an infinite jump and other physics-related hiccups occurred while I was moving. Nothing that made it impossible to play and didn’t hurt the game at all. Plus you can press the HOME key and the game’s character is transported back to the start position, instant fix. Actually that function is there so the player can bring back fruit to the start position quickly but more on that in a bit.

You as a player control an un-named protagonist who is placed in the world (looks like a Parrot crossed with Mr. Peanut). At the beginning of the game the player is shown a large water faucet on the upper left hand side of the world and it is gushing out water. The first time I played I did not take any notice of this and was enjoying my time gliding around having fun. That was until the water level started rising rapidly and the game ended because the garden flooded. So much for being purely an exploratory game. There is a goal.

When the player is first dropped into the world a few control hints popup as the player explores their surroundings. These helpful reminders seem to be in very relevant places, which must have been tweaked with play testing. However, just knowing the controls means very little in the grand scheme of things. If the player wishes to win the game they have to understand the world.

As in the name, the game takes place in a garden … of sorts. The world where the game is played is actually quite large, both vertically and horizontally. There are boundaries that can be reached but this defiantly not a small garden. You will find very few similarities to Viva Pinata or Harvest Moon in Blueberry Garden when it comes to actual gardening except for its basic elements. Flowers bloom, trees grow and die, fruit ripens, and animals wander around … actually that is Viva Pinata.

The first major epiphany the player gets is when they stumble upon a larger than life object. These objects (represented by tomatoes, cheese, books, plastic bottles, dice, etc.) can be found throughout the garden and are to be collected by the player. Remember that there is water pouring into the garden and that water faucet is very high up, well over to the left hand side of the garden. Luckily those large objects that the player finds will aid their quest.

Each time an object is found the player is transported back to the initial starting position (with a little blurred fade effect). The object however is placed on a platform next to the start position. Every new object found continues to stack on top of each other to form a tower of an interesting variety. The player at anytime can hit the up arrow when they are under the platform and instantly be transported to the top of the tower. They then use the tower as a jumping off point, as the tower goes higher the player can glide farther. The goal is to get it large enough to glide over to the faucet and hopefully turn it off.

Not every object is easy to find or to approach, which is when the fruit make their entrance. The player is introduced to fruit almost immediately when they enter the world but there uses may allude them for a while. I did not use them for quite some time until I got to a point where I could not collect objects any more so I decided “Hey, let’s eat some fruit.”

Five types of fruit exist in the garden and they each produce a special power when eaten. Blueberries allow the player to fly upwards (instead of just gliding) for a short period of time, making it easier to get to higher elevations without being quite as high. Star fruit (which are very good in real life) allow the player to breath under water, with a bubble being placed around the player’s character. At the bottom of the level there are underwater chambers that do contain objects and the player cannot stay underwater for very long. Pears and cherries augment the garden’s terrain, pears can extend platforms horizontally and cherries extend platforms vertically (however I didn’t really use either of them except to get one or two objects). The final fruit I never understood, nor do I even know what type of fruit it is. It would drift away when I tried to eat it. Perhaps it has some use, I just never found it.

Reproduction of fruit is as important as eating the fruit. Fruit is created by trees which are in turn produced by fruit that has ripened, fell to the ground and finally turn into a seed. Trees themselves will eventually die but as long as there is fruit on the ground more trees will spring up. Initially there are places where fruit trees already exist and seem to be placed there in order to help the player find more large objects. For instance a group of star fruit trees (for breathing underwater) was growing next to an underwater tunnel that led to a large object.

The player can also play a role in cultivating fruit by picking up fruit and dropping it in locations across the garden. Trees will grow anywhere with space to grow, meaning there cannot be too many trees in one locations. The fruit trees also compete with each other. I brought back a number of fruit to the game’s start location to plant them and eventually one type of fruit tree would out grow all the other fruit. There is rhyme and reason to the ecosystem.

And what is an ecosystem without animals. There are a number of animals in Blueberry Garden that are mostly there to piss you off. They eat the damn fruit. I’m trying to cultivate some blueberries in a location and they are scarfing them down like there is no tomorrow, which is exactly what I’m trying to prevent. But seriously, they add an interesting element to the game. Instead of the fruit tree population exploding out of proportion, the animals are there to keep the population down (and it is a garden, there are always animals).

The animals reproduce too. The best part is when the little guys with party hats start kissing and more of them pop into existence. Just as with fruit the player can affect this too, separate the animals and they do not reproduce. A little vindictive but even when I left the animals alone they still ended up going extinct.

Eventually the player gets the tower high enough to glide over and turn off the water. Once that is completed a sign appears next to the start location with a picture of a moon, and points to the upper right hand side of the screen. The rest of the game is played at the player’s leisure, they must collect any leftover objects in the world in order to reach the moon and win the game.

That’s when I realized that the unknown fruit and cherries in my garden had gone extinct, along with all the animals. I don’t know if that is deliberate but I felt disappointed, now there was time to play with everything at my own pace but I lost some pieces along the way. This makes me wonder if this game could work, not as a platformer but solely as a simulation garden game.

It only took me about an hour and a half to beat the game and that was with two tries; the garden flooded in my first game. I would have liked to seen more in the game, either randomly generated levels, a level builder or just more levels in general. But the price tag is cheap, the develop team was one guy and hopefully additions will follow.

Going into Blueberry Garden I thought it was going to have a message. Something about conservation perhaps or the futility of life (maybe the player could not win). Seems like a lot of Indie games have been taking this route, which is fine but can be convoluted if done wrong. I can’t tell but nothing like that seems to present itself in this game. Blueberry Garden is just a game that meshes platformer mechanics with interesting power-ups, a simple eco-system and simple puzzles. All in an artistically stylized package. It’s just a game, no message required. And I am perfectly fine with that.

In other reviews:

Kevin VanOrd’s review over at GameSpot calls the game mediocre but the review is mediocre itself. Comparing Blueberry Garden to games like Braid, Flower, and Flow (PS3 version) is like comparing blueberries to oranges, they have completely different in scope of development and project goals. Now games like Everyday Shooter and And Yet It Moves is fine, but I would still say that Blueberry Garden has a certain charm to it that I personally enjoyed. That said, the game could be longer and the eco-system more prominent. This review also points out bugs in the game, which as I said for me where just physics-errors.

Nathan Meunier review over at Green Pixles is a shorter version of mine, lots of praise for the game.

Here are some interviews with the Erik Svedang, the creator of the game (got this list from his site).

“Of Blueberries and Gardening” by The Escapist
“Flying high in Blueberry Garden” by Tuna Snax
“Greenfingers: An Interview with Erik Svedäng” by The Reticule
“Ten Questions with Erik Svedäng” by Game and Player

Also when you beat the game you get a link to a special URL where you are treated to some interesting stuff like the image below. I will not say anymore.

Got a weird email yesterday, that was not meant for me. But it is about Microsoft’s new controller-free project Natal.

“If you have watched any of the videos or read any of the press around Project Natal, there is no doubt this is game changing technology. Now that the buzz has died down about Project Natal, we want to let you know that we are hiring for key positions on the team. That said, we are contacting you to tap into your network and get the word out that we are building out the remainder of the Project Natal team and that ground floor opportunities are still available.

You probably know people that would want to work on an early stage project where there is still room for creativity and defining the parameters of a product. We would love for you to tell them about Project Natal. You can forward this link to your gaming friends or colleagues that will showcase the activities of Project Natal.”

So it looks like Natal will not be out anytime soon if they are advertising that it is an “early stage project” where “defining the parameters” is still an issue. Click the link in the quote and you can see the 20 jobs that Microsoft is trying to fill (also the list is below). No doubt there will be some stiff competition for them.

Found some other stories on this subject but this is new stuff, at least in the last day: G4TV, alt+f4 , Team Xbox.