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This past weekend, I was privileged to play an interesting new indie title named Mushroom 11.
When I watched the trailer of the game, I was instantly interested in the unique mechanic in controlling your ‘character.’ Of course the design of the character you control is absolutely worth mentioning. You play as an amorphic green blob, with no name that I was able to discern. I had no issue with the lack of description or simplicity of the character model, in fact, I applaud it. Mushroom 11’s tutorial instantly begins to show you how to control your blob, and the game becomes completely about the game’s mechanics.
The mechanics of the game appear shockingly simple, you essentially use the 2 mouse buttons to delete parts of your blob to move it. Except when you delete blocks, the blob replaces these blocks randomly out of different sides of itself where the level allows. The mouse gives you 2 types of control: a large sweeping deletion type, and a fine tuned deletion tool. The large sweeping tool, bound to the left mouse button, allows for rapid movement and easy size reduction. The fine tune deletion tool makes it much easier to delete smaller portions of your blob which becomes essential for some of the tougher puzzles as the levels progress.
During the hour I spent playing this game, I easily encompassed the tutorial and enough levels to start to need several tries to clear an area. I was even able to conquer 2 boss fights. It is definitely fair to say the game has a steep learning curve. Rather than being frustrated while playing, and failing several times, I started to see the brilliance in the game. It is the first game where I found myself not having direct control on my character and it’s movement through the game. We are allowed only indirect control, and it’s an absolutely fresh and fantastic idea for a game mechanic. I find myself more and more interested to see how the game will show me to stretch, bend, curve, and express the flexibility of my little blob through the future levels. With the modest price tag, this game is an absolute steal for hours of mind-bending gameplay.
A Solid 9/10
The only reason it’s not a 10 is because I really like a story and it has none. But Otherwise, this is an amazing game!
Whatever happened to the damn good guy? I liked the damn good guy, the damn good guy was a…Damn. Good. Guy.
You’re probably wondering what I mean by “the damn good guy”. What I mean is pieces of entertainment that aren’t huge, massive, world changing, innovative behemoths that somehow seem to fail living up to the expectations of the creator. The damn good guy refers to pieces of media that are just enjoyable because they’re well put together, well written and don’t try to cast a net so wide and cast that they can’t possibly hope to be considered a success.
Example, Tomb Raider 2013. That was a good game, really good in fact. Solid gameplay/mechanics, great voice acting, very good atmosphere and was a nice long length. Square Enix however deemed the game a failure despite it selling a whopping 3.4 million units worldwide. Seriously Square? How big were your expectations of the game that you needed to re-release it for Playstation 4 and Xbox One just to beef up the sales? How much was the budget for this endeavour?
According to an article from Eurogamer.net the budget for Tomb Raider was $60 Million…HO-LY FUCK!!
I think we can all agree that’s pretty tall order to fill, a really tall order to fill. And there’s my point, set the bar too high and the chances of you hauling your arse over it decreases, don’t get me wrong I really enjoyed Tom Raider, but to have it deemed a failure due to unreasonable expectations just seems rude (for the lack of a better word), I’m no game designer but even I can see effort when it’s right in front of me.
Square sadly seemed to act like EA is constantly acting with their Battlefield franchise which ends up with a game that makes a huge amount of money and sells an insane amount of copies but is deems a failure anyway. Instead EA just end up aping Call of Duty in order to try and win over their audience, which they seem to keep failing at. These developers can clearly dominate in their fields of work but they’re tunnel-visioning so hard that they forget that they’ve still made a metric fuckton anyway. There’s nothing wrong with 2nd place is what I’m saying and there’s also nothing wrong with not releasing a game every fucking year, yeah I’m looking at you Assassin’s Creed, I love you but slow the hell down, you make tons of money with what you have maybe you should take the time to enjoy it? You know make some use of that company yacht you undoubtedly have, maybe take it for a sail and unwind?
See, this is why I love the damn good guy. The damn good guy gets their budget and knows exactly what to do with it, the damn good guy thought process I imagine would be something akin to this:
“Ok, I’ve been given $25,000,000 to make a piece of entertainment”
“My piece of entertainment will be about this”
“I will spend the money accordingly in all the necessary areas in order to make this piece of entertainment as appealing to its target audience as possible”
“The product has been released, sales figures are strong and we’ve made the budget back plus a little extra, even the reviews are positive I’m going to spend some time with my kids as I’ve been coming home late recently”
The damn good guy thought process probably does not resemble,
“OHDEARGOD, WE’VE BEEN GIVEN $70,000,000 TO MAKE A PIECE OF ENTERTAINMENT, WE MUST BE BETTER THEN EVERYONE ELSE IN ORDER TO BECOME ANY KIND OF SUCCESS”
“But sir we’re making a ton of money anyway…”
“DAMMIT HENDERSON NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR YOUR INSANE RAMBLINGS ABOUT THIS MYTHICAL MONEY NONSENSE, WE MUST BEAT THE COMPETITION OR BE BRANDED AS FAILURES AND BE CAST OUT FOR ALL ETERNITY BY THE HUMAN RACE”
“Sir we’ve been getting ratings up in the 90% range…”
“WE NEED TO TRY AGAIN AT BEATING THEM, WE’VE ONLY GOT A FEW MINUTES”
At this point Henderson has defected to a Studio that isn’t staffed by impatient tunnel-visioning weirdos who scream a lot.
This is why we need to support the damn good guy, the damn good guy takes their time, evaluates their options and sets themselves a reasonable goal and when all is said and done, the result is damn good. The result is
Batman: Mask of the Phantasm
Solomon Kane
Dishonoured
Darkman
Hellboy
Dredd
The A-Team (2010)
The Grey,
Do you see what I’m driving at? Not to say that giant bits of game changing innovation are a bad thing, they can just get out of hand fast and end up bloated, fat and always hungry for more.
Bottom line, support the Damn Good Guy. Because he’s a damn good guy.
Cheltenham, in the leafy Cotswolds of England, has a long history of Music, Art and Gaming. It was the home of developers Acclaim, way back in the day and artists like Jimmy Hendrix, The Beatles and more, over the years have regularly played at the various venues and events held at the yearly festivals the beautiful spa town holds.
It’s also the home, of course, to Sanitarium.FM and lots of great business’, and has been the venue for Guinness World Record attempts over the years too. This weekend will add to that list as Joe Kelly, of Flaming Paper, a local video production company, is attempting to beat the CURRENT WORLD RECORD for playing Minecraft. The current record for this stands at 24 hours and 10 minutes. Joe hopes to beat this, and will be streaming his attempt live online from the Holiday Inn Express in Cheltenham. It all starts this Saturday at 8:30am and I will be standing as an expert witness to the record attempt aswell, which I am immensely proud to do.
Joe is attempting this record in order to raise money for Cancer Research UK. You can visit his Just Giving page for more information, plus Sanitarium.FM will be donating any of the station’s monthly donations (for October) to this cause aswell as it’s a great cause.
Joe will be livestreaming the record attempt to his Youtube channel over the weekend while he plays, but he has also made a series of films on his Youtube channel about the difficulty of record attempts and how to not only prepare for them, but survive the attempts
Once again, myself and the Sanitarium.FM are very proud to be supporting this attempt and we wish Joe every luck possible with it!
IO Interactive show us the latest installment of their hit assassination’em up, Hitman!
The developer session kicked off showing us some pretty standard gameplay for a Hitman game, however there are options, lots and lots of options. It seems that as per the words of Travis and Sven, the two employees of IO Interactive who took us all through the Showstopper Level of Hitman,
“You will experience a rich and detailed sandbox, every person has a name”
It certainly looks like they’re correct at least on the rich sandbox part of that statement, the level is very densely populated, the crowds move, mill and mingle around as one would expect a large crowd of posh twats to and the level itself is pretty bloody expansive, including a large manor house with two floors, large garden grounds, numerous balconies (with vantage points of course) and plenty of staff members and civilians with nicely tailored clothes to steal.
Keeping with the whole options angle I mentioned earlier it doesn’t stop there. We’ve been given numerous types of poison, the ability to have weapons and equipment dropped into the level before the player begins and even ways to smuggle weapons and equipment past security checkpoints. Which is something I look forward to utilising, even Metal Gear Solid doesn’t have a feature like that and that’s pretty much the franchise that wrote the book on stealth. We’ll undoubtedly have the usual staples of the series however, I’d hate to see 47 without his Silverballers and Garrotte wire.
But there is a ton to see and do in this level, it isn’t just kill one target, in this Showstopper level we have two. One is the man behind the fashion show and the other is his accomplice who is holding a secret auction to sell off “deadly secrets” to some very unscrupulous people and of course all these options can come into play. Maybe you’ll drop one of your Silverballers that’ll get picked up by a security guard, taken past a checkpoint which you will then bypass and retrieve your gun afterwards which you will then utilise in a trigger pulling fashion to silently kill someone…maybe. There’s even more than one escape option, a chopper or a speedboat though you will have to find the keys. You may decide to get a Sniper Rifle smuggled in, camp out on a vantage point and shoot your way out afterwards or my personal favourite, attempt to bypass everything in a disguise and get discovered almost instantly. Almost mind you.
So allow me to summarise. Options. You need to take out the target, pick a path and get to it.
You can watch the full developer session below, Enjoy!
This year’s EGX featured games of all genres and titles, and I was lucky enough to be assigned Hellblade. Presented by Ninja Theory’s Dominic Mathews, this developer session was as much about the process of creating a game as it was about the game itself. For their latest game release, Ninja Theory are taking the novel approach of allowing the audience to follow the production of Hellblade from concept to animation and story-building to completion. Whilst they realise this can leave the small team of 15 staff open to a lot of criticism, it also provides people outside of the games production industry a unique insight to how our beloved games come to be realised.
Another unique aim of the team who created ‘Devil May Cry’, is the type of title they want to release. Dominic detailed the main draw-backs of triple A titles being a set budget, spiralling costs and a loss of creative ownership in order to deliver a product expected from customers of triple A titles. Instead, the team are aiming for a title hallway between triple A and Indie, lovingly named “independent Triple A”. This will allow the developers to take creative risks and ensure an immersive storyline and gamer experience, without limited their production values.
The game Hellblade, follows the fantasy adventures of Celtic warrior “Senua”; a female protagonist plagued by psychosis and visual and auditory hallucinations. The thing that impressed me most about tackling such a controversial subject is the amount of research the team conducted to portraying the reality of mental illness in everyday life. Not only did the team interview people who deal with psychosis on a daily basis, but they worked with prominent psychiatrist Professor Paul Fletcher to create a truthful representation of psychosis. In this author’s opinion, mental illness is a subject that is only just receiving the attention it requires in wider media. The developers of Hellblade are striving to disband the usual stereotypes and to really help those with no experience, understand what sufferers all over the world have to cope with.
Continuing with the open development style, we were shown a ‘vertical slice’ of the game. This is a small cut scene created to demonstrate the sound, graphics and storyline standards the game will eventually be made to. To stay true to the Independent Triple A title, the team have created an in-house performance capture studio using materials obtained from Amazon and Ikea to keep costs down. Using Vicon 30 technology, not only have the actors portraying in-game characters been captured, but also rocks and trees in the real world have been scanned. The single environment artist on the team will be using these objects to create the background to Senua’s adventures, allowing a realistic environment for the player to experience.
The journey of Hellblade has already begun, and you can follow them at www.hellblade.com. Here you can catch up on developer’s diary videos, weekly blogging and Q and A sessions. All in all, Hellblade promises to be an immersive, creative experience, which I can’t wait to play.
To watch the entire developer session for yourself, click below:
