Valfaris: "Gazer Guard" boss analysis (phase 1)

Valfaris' "Gazer Guard" is a mid/late-game boss with a compact, elegant design. The first phase of the battle (see video) is composed of three sequential tests: reading, vision, and reaction.

NOTE: The video depicts a successful run of "Gazer Guard's" first phase, so some of the interactions described in the following paragraph aren't seen here. Valfaris expects the player to risk death during experimentation, so defeating this boss for the first time may take multiple restarts, refining and hastening the eventual successful run.

The majority of enemies in Valfaris take direct damage from weapon fire, but "Gazer Guard" does not, setting up a unique boss fight. When "Therion" fires upon the central eyeball which appears to be the boss's body, its blue shield aura* and static health bar indicate that damage is not being inflicted. This feedback is identical regardless of "Therion's" equipped weapon, ruling out direct attack and suggesting a more patient approach. While the eye remains invulnerable, six floating beacons dash around the screen, pause, and repeat in an ostensibly randomized pattern. "Therion" cannot interact with the beacons while they are moving; though they can be attacked during the final and longest pause. Attacking a beacon won't kill or damage it, rather it triggers one of two events. When a beacon is struck, the boss eye either fires a single aimed laser directly at "Therion", or it recoils and its health bar decreases by a fixed decrement. Afterwards, the beacons resume their pattern of shuffling and the eyeball remains invulnerable to direct attack.

The first test for the player is reading the scenario as laid out. Once they've experimented enough to determine that the beacons are vulnerable and not the eye**, they need to figure out why sometimes damaging a beacon hurts the boss and other times it triggers a counterattack. They may deduce that given six beacons, only one is a correct target, or they may simply continue observing and experimenting until they come to the same conclusion. This should draw their attention to the shuffle, at which point they need to observe that one and only one beacon glows blue at the beginning of each cycle, just before the shuffle. At this point, the player has passed the reading/observation test; their reward is the knowledge of which beacon to target.

Now the focus shifts to the shuffling pattern. The target beacon is indicated before the shuffle, but the vulnerability window comes after. The player needs to track the (now identical) target beacon as the pattern speedily and repeatedly reconfigures. It's a game of three-card monty, a fairly rudimentary and likely familiar test of vision. This is the second test; the reward for successfully tracking the beacon through the shuffle is again knowledge, this time knowledge of the target location when it becomes vulnerable.

The third test barely registers as such, it should be so ingrained into the player at this point. As the beacons finish shuffling and are fixed in place, they lose their purple glow, indicating a change in state that experimentation will have revealed to be their vulnerability window. If the player has passed the first two tests, they know now which beacon to target and where it is. If any other beacon is attacked at this point, the window ends, the eyeball attacks, and the cycle restarts. Striking the target beacon without damaging any of the others is the third test. This can be accomplished with a melee weapon by running and jumping to its location, or with a ranged weapon by aligning "Therion" with his target along one of his eight axes of aiming. This action needs to be accomplished in a short period of time (1-2 seconds), otherwise the cycle restarts. To pass the test the player needs to be able to quickly attack an arbitrarily placed element (the target beacon) while aiming around its cover (the other beacons). This time the reward is damage to "Gazer Guard" - irrevocable progress in the boss fight.

This ends the suspension of challenge and the cycle of tests returns to the beginning. Invoking the rule of threes, the player needs to complete this three-part test three times to end phase one of the battle. The beacon movement during the shuffle becomes faster through progressive cycles, increasing the difficulty of the middle test while leaving the other two consistent. This produces a linear difficulty  curve. Phase two will be discussed in the next video.

What makes this part of the "Gazer Guard" battle particularly elegant is the inverse relationship of complexity and suspension as the tests progress. The first test is highly specific to this boss and requires processing and filtering novel information. The subsequent shuffle challenge is a new way of testing visual tracking, a skill underpinning the entire game. The player is applying a developed skill to a novel scenario, which they ought to be more comfortable with than they were with the initial analysis. At the peak of suspension, the third test, the player needs to aim and shoot at a static target, something they've been doing against every enemy in the game. As more successes are suspended on the line, the abilities tested are increasingly fundamental - this gives the game cohesion and identity: victory in Valfaris is ultimately determined by running and gunning skills, not isolated puzzle solutions.

* the blue shield aura is an indicator the player should have learned by this point in the game, as it is used on every enemy that receives an attack but no damage (guarding).

** you could say experimentation is the first test, but I think that's implicit in any scenario where the player does not yet know how to progress.

Finishing with 3D plats, vehicle action, and GOTY - Part 2 of 2019 in review

Why doesn't anyone talk about Ape Escape, easily one of the top 10 and probably one of the top 5 3D platformers ever made? Yeah, the sequel is mush (I didn't bother continuing onto Ape Escape 3), but the original's tight focus on dual analog mechanics and evolution of collectibles into enemies with unique behavior paves a path for 3D action that was never followed up. Comparing this to Banjo-Kazooie (where I made the 100% clear with the assistance of the unimpeachable WarioFan63) is like comparing homemade ravioli in lamb ragu to a cold can of spaghetti-Os. The sixth console generation relegated the right analog stick entirely to camera control; Ape Escape posits a world that didn't need to be that way. Full-on dual-analog action games are something to consider for the future. (Keep in mind that the greatest 3D platformer series of all time, Super Mario, has always gotten by just fine without a camera stick). Other major 3D platformers cleaned up were Spyro (very solid), de Blob 2 (de Blob 2 long), Jumping Flash! 2 (identical to the first), and Psychonauts (not my thing). There's a ranking of the all-time top fifty 3D platformers coming sometime in the new year. And shout-out to Candleman, an awesome indie game from China doing something absolutely no one else in 2019 is doing - being a 3D plat that isn't a Banjo-Kazooie fangame.

To return to Psychonauts for a moment, I've added a new category to my table - forfeited games. Ones which will take too much effort to finish, or offer so little new information, that they just aren't worth wasting more time upon. Some of this year's forfeits were games that had been sitting on the list for years untouched - Axiom Verge and Popful Mail, both taken on only as part of the Commune - and the other three fill me with such utter disdain that they didn't seem worth the mood penalty - Psychonauts, Battalion Wars, and Rayman. Still, I'm reserving forfeits for games 1.) that have been half-cleared 2.) that I played at the behest of others, and 3.) that I severely dislike. It's a last resort.

Racing, flying, and all that great vehicle shit - these are the games I live for these days. Birds of Steel should've been the game of the year, as I finally wrapped my head around energy fighting and how to use a plane's traits to guide strategy (best represented by figuring out why everyone likes the Corsair so much - you don't fly it like a Spitfire). I knocked out the first three Aces Combat in what must've been January, since they seem such a distant memory. We got as close as we're going to get to a new Armored Core game in 2019 with Daemon X Machina - though I don't like the idea of using loot for tuning and the framerate can be a bit slow, it otherwise provides a great weapon set almost worthy of the almighty Custom Robo. Rogue Squadron on Steam was fun to revisit, more of an on-rails style Star Fox game thanks to the heavy use of linear canyon design, though it's ostensibly free-roaming. And the Commune played Pilotwings, ever the meditative experience.

GRID Autosport was my first real go at a racing sim - the previous two Codemasters games I played are the simcade ones, and though I love them quite a bit, Autosport clearly is operating on a far more nuanced level, showcasing that modern racing is really about how to use the brake. An important technique I picked up along the way is using an analog stick for acceleration/braking, which (for my hands at least) offers a finer level of control than analog triggers. I guess you could also call this the year of the right analog stick. I finished off the EAD racing line with F-Zero and Stunt Racing FX on the Nintendo Switch SNES Online, the former an unending frustration and the latter a treat that really deserves the Sega Ages treatment (as do all the Super FX games). Once I figured out how to driftcelerate I was also able to clear the hard modes of F-Zero X, a weird detail that makes me slightly less confident in calling it EAD's best.

But GOATY was not Birds of Steel, nor any of these others, but a game which is much narrower, a game with level design so tightly tuned that it is almost indistinguishable from the mechanical design, with dynamics worthy of any arcade-style action game, yet bounded such that they never overwhelm the universal technique driving the entire experience, none other than Virtua Racing. Specifically the Sega Ages variant, which takes a design that was perfect in its original form and upgrades the presentation not to match modern standards, but to let that design shine through all the more clearly. M2 didn't upgrade the game, they did something even better - stripped out all the downgrades, be they draw distance, framerate, or price. Around October I was thinking I'd pick Sega Ages Outrun for doing basically the same thing, in that case with a game I never liked to begin with and was finally for the first time able to grasp (also thanks to some graphing I did that makes me think I should be applying mathematical methods to game decoding more frequently). But the subsequent 120 hours of V.R. can't be ignored.

Some epochal FPSs slipped in there (Turok: DH and DOOM 3) and some not so epochal (Quake 4 and Battlefield Bad Company 2).

Gradii, Mega Man reboots, and 2D action - Part 1 of 2019 in review

In the year of our lord 2019 I completed 43 games, I believe exactly the same total as 2018. I'm not going to talk about the "games started" metric anymore - I've been trying that out a while and I just don't think it adds any useful information. The theme of this year was cleanup: cleaning up the list one chunk at a time.

First the co-op plays - Golem and I started the year on Hitman 2, the rare title so utterly useless we abandoned it halfway through - a guess-what-I'm-thinking adventure/strategy game that doesn't even have the courtesy to tell you when you guessed right. Adventure games use locks and keys to direct progression, strategy games use numerical metrics, Hitman 2 has neither. It's a completely unordered mess, a guess-if-you-guessed-what-I'm-thinking game. Things took a turn for the better with Mega Man Maverick Hunter X, the PSP remake of Mega Man X. The core gameplay of the best Mega Man is hard to ruin, though the gigantic new weapon set is the type of playground I'd love at age 12 but lacks the challenge I now prefer. The second Mega Man reboot of the year was Mega Man 11, the first since X2 to provide a decent contest for best in the series. The superhoned buster weapons and tightly tuned boss fights make this the first I genuinely want to call a run-and-gun (which is to say, a game more about bullets and aiming than about gravity and timing). Mega Man Legends was the third of the set, a strangely orthogonal leap for the series that is good at rivaling Zelda for a Playstation game, but still not great at rivaling Zelda. The element design is high quality, but Golem would say it's badly proportioned (too many weapons and too few enemies), and I'd say it's lacking in structure. Some sense of what will comprise a session is doubly important with content that demands experimentation (Volnutt's arsenal) - the player wants to be able to answer "when should I try this out?", "when should I switch?", and "when am I going to get a new one?".

I'm burying the lede. The largest and best part of our sessions in 2019 were the co-op 1CCs, first of Bio-Hazard Battle and then Gradius Gaiden (links to replays). BHB is a real gem of concrete design, the kind of game that looks and sounds like nothing around it, even if the shooting gameplay is fairly simple. Absolutely worth picking up a Genesis collection to try out. (Golem thought it was lame, but he's blind and deaf and plays games by smell alone). Gradius Gaiden was like learning a beautiful dance; a beautiful dance that you perform with a man. Truth be told, it was probably the instant startback offered by co-op mode (like Life Force) that made this so much more approachable and enjoyable than other Gradii. I'll reserve any more comment on Gaiden, as we're presently working on a commentary track for the game that'll be posted here and on Golem's Youtube when complete.

Onto solo clears - for shmups proper it was a light year, with just a few runs of the unspeakably easy Deathsmiles II X and a closeout of the NES Gradius. It's hard to say I've completed the Deathsmiles games, as I enjoy their scoring systems so much that I'd like to eventually play competitively. But my BFS mind won't let me settle down til I've cleared the majority of the Cave catalog, and that's a long way to go. Gradius was a 1LC mostly because there's simply no other way to play. Golem says hit points are a good thing for a shooter, and it took me clearing Gradius to understand why I've never felt the same. Gradation of punishment makes sense, but the problem with the shield system present throughout the series is that it absorbs an aribtrary number of hits not one-to-one with mistakes - or mistakes are judged at a much finer level than my ability to register - so punishment isn't graded by the severity of the mistake, but largely at random. That's complicated even further by the variable speed, which can carry you through more bullets for the same input if it's set higher. That is to say, it's very easy to make a single mistake (say, dodging a bullet in the wrong direction) and take three hits, and then later to make the same mistake and take only one hit, or none at all. This is not only poor feedback, it also undermines planning for errors. If you know there's an area you're likely to make errors, but don't know how harshly those errors will be punished, how do you use the power-up system to plan for that? I don't know, so beating Gradius required a zero tolerance approach. Setting that aside, it has good, clear level themes, and runs exactly the right length for a shooter (~20-30 minutes).

The more difficult classic clears I put aside were in the Contra Anniversary Collection and the Castlevania Anniversary Collection. With Hard Corps available for the first time digitally I had to 1CC that, and NES Contra followed. Though I wouldn't tag them with the 1CC label, I also made it through Belmont's Revenge and Kid Dracula for the first time, and more importantly, the white whale is dead! Castlevania III haunts my conscience no longer. (Then I made it about halfway through Lament of Innocence and kind of lost interest, it's a boring one. I'll be back to it later. It's uncomfortable to admit that that was the closest I came to a beat-em-up clear all year). While we're still talking classic 2D, I ran the original Klonoa - one of the all-time greats - and 100%ed New Super Mario Wii U Luigi Bros. Deluxe.

Tomorrow: the 3D lineup from the past year.