June 7th, 2004
I’ve got a bit of writer’s block re: “Car Battler Joe” (aka Car Battles at Joe’s Repair, thanks Richard 🙂 I played that game like crazy for a week, and I think I’m worn out with it now. Quick review – it’s a great game, very much a modern remake of one of my favourites (Autoduel), and is the closest yet to my “dream game” I want to make one day. I’ll try to get into it’s strengths and shortcomings sometime.
After I finally pulled CBJ out of my Gameboy Advance SP, I started playing the only other cartridge I have for the GBA, called “Konami Collector’s Series: Arcade Advanced”. It was less than $20 at Superstore, and it has 6 classic Konami arcade games on the one cartridge. The games are “Frogger”, “Yie Ar Kung-Fu”, “Time Pilot”, “Gyruss”, “Scramble” and “Rush’n Attack”. Each game appears to be an extremely faithful recreation (or more likely, emulation) of the actual arcade game.
Before I get to a couple ideas about a couple of these games, I want to explain a couple of other ideas – sort of video game theory (for couples? Unlikely.)
At the Midwest Gaming Classic, Twin Galaxies (apparently the leading record-keepers for video game world records, such as who holds the highest score in Pac-Man) was there, doing their thing. My friend Jason mentioned that he doesn’t play for score, he plays to progress through the game. You might think that high scores and progressing through the game would go hand in hand, but depending on the design of the game, they can be two very different goals.
If you are playing for a high score, you’re going to make the most of every level, trying to squeeze every last point you can out of it while you’re early in the game, because most games become more difficult as you progress, and those extra points will be harder to obtain later.
If you’re playing to progress through the game (like, get to a very high level) you probably won’t bother getting those points as you’re risking your lives/turns by lingering on the level – this risk could be better applied to progressing through the next level. I tend to play to progress as well – I really like seeing what’s new in the next level – new abilities, new enemies, new scenery, whatever.
The other game theory ties in here – some games reward you with extra lives/turns when your score reaches a certain level. “Extra man at 10,000 points” (and possibly “and every 50,000 points after”) is a typical message displayed during an arcade game’s “attract mode”. The difficulty in obtaining these extra lives can vary immensely. I wonder how the game designers decided on this factor.
So back to my Konami Arcade Advanced cartridge. Funny how I could be so wrong about a couple 22 year old games. Frogger is a game I always dismissed as being too easy, or at least not having enough depth to be challenging. Strangely, I thought this without playing it all that much. Time Pilot, on the other hand, seemed like an extremely difficult game.
So I found myself playing Frogger a lot, even feeling somewhat addicted for a few days. There’s a lot more to this game than I had previously realized. It’s quite cool how crossing the road, and then crossing the river are opposites of one another. On the road, you’re avoiding the moving objects, while on the river, you must stay on the moving objects. Particularly while crossing the river, there’s all sorts of quick planning and pattern recognition that has to be done on the higher levels. The snake and crocodiles and disappearing turtles all add that little bit of extra variety and challenge. And trying to get into that top left “frog home” can be really difficult. Plus, there’s a time limit (maybe 50 or probably 60 seconds) per frog, to get them home. There’s a neat twist that you can collect the female frog (?) and (possibly) the fly at home for 200 points each. On the other hand, you get 10 points for each second remaining on the clock when you get home. So if you spend 20 seconds trying to get either of these you end up breaking even. This game has an interesting balance to it – a lot of time must have been spent balancing the scoring in this game.
Frogger is a game that has me playing both for score and for progress too, because there’s little seperation between the two, mainly because of the time limit.
However, I think the extra life being awarded at 20,000 points is way too difficult. I’ve gotten a lot better at Frogger in the last week, often making it to level 5 (which is really difficult) and my best score is only 18,230.
On to Time Pilot later…