The Strange Grandstanding of Evo/Wave

 

Every so often on the stream (www.twitch.tv/taurinensis) we do a little segment that I have dubbed the Free Game Dive.  It involves going on Steam or websites like Itch, downloading free to play indie games and playing them through.  I've found some real cool little titles over the course of doing this segment so it's generally a lot of fun.

Recently, one of the games I finished as part of this segment was something on Steam called Evo/Wave, a short collectathon platformer in the same vein of something like Banjo Kazooie or similar titles.  The story is about an old AI called MagnaVex (get it?) drestroying some kind of computer core that causes the world to get all screwed up.  You, playing as a little robot dude, have to go into 3 worlds, collect some shit and reverse the damage that MagnaVex has done. 

According to Alexandre Isidorio, the guy who designed the UI, the game was made as a student project for a university course and as far as the game itself goes it's actually pretty good.  Having just finished Yooka Laylee and absolutely hating it playing a game like this which actually seemed to have a bit of thought and effort put into it was nice.  The final stage as well where you fight MagnaVex in a series of platforming challenges was particularly fun and did a good job of testing your skills with the games various power-ups, worth a shot if you have a couple hours to kill one day for sure.

But there's something weird going on with the games story, what little there is of it.  When you collect all the parts in the games three levels and are about to enter the final encounter with MagnaVex, a cutscene plays where he makes a bit of a speech about the current state of the industry, about how games have become unimaginative, constant installs and updates are annoying and companies are nickle and diming using at every turn and it's done in this sort of "old man yells at cloud" tone and yet, is he wrong though?

The constant installs and updates ARE annoying.  It's not something I've ever been too bothered by because I'm more than happy to just play or do something else while it goes on but the fact that the days of being able to just buy a game, slam it in my machine and just play right away are long gone IS annoying.  The fact that every time I fire up Xenoblade Chronicles on my Switch and it asks me to do a software update on a game made THIRTEEN fucking years ago is cause for minor irritation.

The nickle and diming of the industry as well is also a well documented and often complained about side of things.  Battle passes, microtransactions and bullshit DLC featuring content that should have just been in the initial purchase are rampant not to mention the constant remaking of safe bet, classic games in a thinly veiled attempt to get you to open your wallet for that nostalgia hit

But it's the criticism of people that feel that the creativity has been largely sucked out of games in exchange for varients of the same thing that really rubs the wrong way.  I'm not one to say that ALL of gaming has become stagnant, I'm far too widely versed in the deepest, most obscure realms to honestly think that but I do feel that generally speaking gaming, at least the mainstream stuff, has sacrified being interesting in exchange for being mostly OK.  What I mean by this is that if you look that the libraries of anything from back in the day, take the PS1 for example, the games are widely varied, even within the same genre.  There's a lot of experimentation going on with style, mechanics and presentation and while it makes the sysem interesting there are quite a lot of just flat out stinkers on that system.  Nowadays I feel that everything is sort of made from a template, usually something that worked well in the past and while that means that truly, honest to goodness fucking AWFUL games aren't really all that common anymore the creativity within the medium has suffered greatly as a result.  

It's been a thing in the AAA scene forever but even the indie scene hasn't avoided falling into this trap.  At time of writing there are two big indie games that I am told are very good.  Lies of P and Sea of Stars.  I have yet to play either of these and people who's opinions I don't immdiately disregard have told me that they are good games and they sure as shit look pretty cool but Lies of P is just Bloodborne and Sea of Stars is just Chrono Triggter (it even has Yasunori Mitsuda doing the music, for fucks sake).  I'm always glad to have more of a good thing, sure, but it doesn't make me a cranky old boomer, like Evo/Wave suggests that I sigh a little at all the safe bets and appeals to nostalgia.

Still, Evo/Wave is an pretty good Free2Play thingie if you have some free time and nothing better to do.  The dev might have his head up his own arse on the state of the industry but this is a game that fucking NO ONE gives a fuck about so collect the shiny objects then turn it off and ignore his crap opinions going forward.

Returning To Cookie Clicker

 

Back in 2013 I caught wind of a little game called Cookie Clicker, a silly little browser game where you click on a cookie to make a number go up.  When you have enough cookies you can buy buildings that make cookies for you and the goal of the game is to make number go up and nothing more.  

Somehow this game became a sort of internet sensation and gave rise of a plethora of imitators thus giving birth to the "idle game".  A genre where you fiddle with a thing for a bit and then you have the game basically play itself and you come back to check on it every so often to buy upgrades to make whatever number you're trying to raise go up faster.  For the most part it's a pretty insipid genre that isn't worth your time at all full of low quality titles made by devs looking to get something quick into their portfolio or worse, to try and get a quick buck out of you for very little effort.

But during a particularly boring work day I got curious and decided to return to the OG after 10 years to see if it was the same old silly distraction and was surprised just to see how much it had expanded.  I didn't think there was a lot you could do with a game that's solely about clicking on a cookie to get buildings to get more cookies but it seems I was mistaken.

The standard cookie clicking, building aquring gameplay is still there but now you can harvest Sugar Lumps once ever 24 hours to upgrade the buildings for greater efficiency but there are a few buildings that, when upgraded have mini games attatched to them now.  For example one of the buildings you can buy is a bank and when upgraded with a sugar lump you get access to a simulation of a stock market where you can buy and sell goods that change value every 15 minutes or so and you can get a quick burst of cookies if you invest wisely.  It comes complete with the ability to upgrade it further with sub-buildings and brokers and it comes with a full on graph that updates in real time and it's not very complicated, sure, but its an interesting addition considering the main game that it's attatched to.

Another feature that is new from when I played it all those years ago is the ascention system.  When you bake a certain number of cookies you can ascend, as in lose everything you currently have, for a permanent buff and a token to spend on a staggeringly large talent tree.  I have no idea what half the upgrades even are as they are hidden behind branching pathways I can't see yet but the most useful one so far has been the one that allows cookies to build up at a reduced rate while the game is closed.

The game has so much stuff going on in it now that there's a dedicated wiki for it and even that's telling me about stuff that I haven't, after about a month of playing, haven't even caught a whiff off yet.  For example there's a thing called the "Grandmapocolypse" which involves making all the grandmas you bought get mad at you for some reason and the game starts spawning "wrinklers" or something and I have no idea what those are.  The art changes to this sort of weird horror-esque mural and it all sounds very strange and I think the mystery of what this feature is exactly has me captivated enough to keep an tab open every day that I fiddle with between other games and housework.

It has got me wondering if there are similarly fleshed out and feature heavy idle games out there that might be worth a look but unfortunately the genre is full of so much garbage that it will probably forever remain a mystery and I'm more than happy to just sit here and bake cookies for eternity

[Backlog Update] Having My Time Wasted

 

Since I just recently became a father my time for working through my backlog has been fairly limited but I have managed to find a decent chunk of time to put a decent-ish dint into Yooka Laylee and Xenoblade Chronicles.  The theme for both of these games seems to be wasting my time a great deal so let me vent about that a little bit

First Yooka Laylee which I had a rather large accident with about a week ago.  See, I just became a father recently and so in order to help with the child care I have moved my computer to the area of the house where the baby sleeps, it's not an ideal setup but it allows me to get a bunch of stuff done while not leaving the newborn unattended, for a temporary setup its not so bad.  My computers power cable is plugged into one of those power strips that have the little on/off switches on them and then that power strip is next to me on the floor.  As I was playing Yooka Laylee, pretty much the moment I picked up a Pagie (the game's main collectable, for those that haven't played) I accidently hit the off switch on the plug for my PC with my big fat arse and my computer abruptly shut down.  When I resumed, probably because I lost power as the game was saving, my file had been corrupted and I could not load my game.  I had to delete the file and start over again, but I can't be mad about this really because this is a case of me wasting my own time.

What I can be kind of mad about is just how stupidly Yooka Laylee is designed. One of the reasons I was hating it so much my first time round is that I would be exploring a level and be getting blocked every few minutes or so because I would start a level challenge only to find that I didn't have the right ability to actually clear it, a whole bunch of the pages across the first three levels are just completely inaccessible without skills gained from later stages.  This is fine in a lot of other games, Metroidvanias do it all the time but in a well designed game it happens once every so often, a little goody to keep in the back of your mind to come back to when you fill out your move set but in Yooka Laylee its ALL the fucking time and it was pissing me the hell off.  

In this second attempt though I said fuck ALL that and I'm basically blasting through each stage, getting the powers and the bare minimum pagies to unlock the levels and then once I have everything I'll come back and clean up to get the 100 I need to beat the game.  I'm hating the game a lot less now that I know to play it that way but even though I have a bit more momentum going this time the game just generally still feels very bland and soulless.  

Xenoblade on the other hand isn't particularly badly designed, I'd say generally speaking it's a good game when you're moving the plot along and having fights with monters your level but MY GOD does this game love to fuck you about with just the most boring area design and the dumbest side quests I have ever seen in an RPG, I am starting to remember why I gave up on it back when I played it on the Wii.

I got to a town called Aclamoth? Akalamoth? Alakazam? I can't remember but it's full of bird people and this place is fucking HUGE.  It looks like the kind of place that would sit right at home in some massively popular MMO with other players running around shopping, handing in quests and looking for raid groups but Xenoblade isn't an MMO it's a single player game and therefore this area sucks shit.  It's full to bursting with side quests from various NPCs and all of these guys are spread way the hell around so just running from one exclamation mark to the next took fucking ages and then once you've done that the quests you get aren't any fun either

One quest had me going back to an area called Tephra Cave, an area from the start of the game with level 5 monsters (I'm 40-ish) to collect NINE randomly spawning little blue balls.  If that isn't the very definition of a time waste then I don't know what is.  I don't mind quests to kill X number of Y if it's done in the current area and killing those monsters is a nice excuse to get some bonus EXP but half of the quests from this town are like that Tephra Cave shit and I can barely stay awake playing it.

You COULD argue, if you were a stupid twat, that these are optional side quests and if they suck so much I should just skip them but fuck you if you think that because I paid what? somewhere in the realm of 3-5000 yen for this shit.  I didn't pay my hard earn money to NOT engage with its features and content, I'm not a shitty journo that plays only easy mode and then shelves the game for life, miss me with that shit.

Anyway I've finished most of those quests now so hopefully by the time I have another backlog update I'll have something nicer to say as the plot, which admittedly I am quite into, progrresses.