The racing line, F-Zero X, and Super Meat Boy

I was thinking - if you designed a platformer around a racing line, would the result be Super Meat Boy? This was a spinoff of trying to apply the concept to platformers and quickly coming to the conclusion that I like it even less as an analytical tool. Dustforce is another obvious one, but anything from that hardcorer genre or whatever they call it. Crungeformers?

Basically, when you're looking solely for route optimization you're asking the player to minimize dynamism, and Super Meat Boy et al. just come straight out and say anything that isn't exactly right is death. I mean, if the player is always trying to avoid walls and ice and pits, why even assign them different dynamics, right? It's like Gamasutra's approach treating all hazards as "off course". A traditional racing game compensates by ramping up the mechanical complexity (or, to look at it the other way around, the mechanical complexity of traditional racing games requires restraining dynamism in order to present a coherent game space), which drives greater suspension, which multiplies the effect of any dynamics, even at a very simple level. Boosting makes F-Zero X seem incredibly dynamic, but increasing acceleration for a fixed time isn't really that complex.

I guess that accounts for the unique design space the meatformer occupies. High speed, high reflex route pruning with immediate payoff. It's stripped of all the suspension and context that nonlinear car mechanics create and makes it such that you actually can define, and quickly test, a meaningful racing line.

Also, I realize I'm not exactly sure what "dynamics" means in the Critical Design model (since it's any word at all in the English language, I'm assuming it's in there). I'm just thinking of it as second order effects. As in, accelerating/braking/steering are mechanics because they are static input/output mappings; machines can always accelerate/brake/steer. Boosting, drifting, ice, etc. are dynamics because they change how the mechanics work (acceleration higher under boost, steering less responsive under drift, etc.). I haven't put a lot of thought into applying this definition outside F-Zero.

Unretrofied for you: Retro City Rampage

Retro is all the rage these days. Sorta. It's getting to the point where it's losing any meaning because people forget to distinguish between genuine throwbacks and any game with pixelated graphics. For instance, as far as I'm concerned: Cave Story is retro; Super Meat Boy is not. La-Mulana is retro; Retro City Rampage is not. The biggest giveaways are modernized control and balance settings, in-your-brain's-face story presentation, cars, general lack of concept. As usual, we need a definition to get to the core of the issue. "Retro" can mean a lot of things to different people - clearly whoever titled Retro City Rampage doesn't define it the same way I do. I'm not saying Vblank's game is a failure to achieve its objective, just that the developers probably have some childish, pathetic, and completely wrong understanding of the term, and probably roger small mammals, burn Christmas cards, and drive fifteen miles under the speed limit FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER.

Back from my IRL barf break (how many times do you get to read a post where the author has to pause to vomit? That, my friends, is deadication). The dic' definition gives us nothing, simply that "retro" means "related to the past"- that doesn't tell us anything about function. I of course consider myself a budding dictionary, so face your demise:

retro (word, adjective): evocative of a specific time period or work.

Seems lazy, is lazy! At least it leaves plenty of room for both intentional and unintentional retrofication.

See the tiny blob? Okay, that's you. Now see the other tiny blobs? Okay, those are bad guys. Now see the other tiny blobs? Okay, those are civilians. Why is this game so much uglier than actual NES games?

Let's talk bad before good. Boy I hate Retro City Rampage. I'm here to admit to you that of course I only played the demo, because I would never put down cash for something so... well... stupid. RCR strikes me as moronic straight from the concept. "What if Grand Theft Auto was 2D and top-down?" [oh wait, it already was! It's called Grand Theft Auto 1 and 2]. So, well then it's kind of a remake/revival of those early crime-driving games? But instead of remaking it in the original visual style, or modern "technology-graphics", Vblank went with 8-bit micro-sprite RTS graphics. Huh? Then, when my brain is already completely lost, you throw me the twist that it's also a cover-shooter? Since open-car-world-games are so widespread today, and nothing screams "2012" like cover shooting, all RCR has done is arbitrarily amalgamate the safest and blandest forms of gameplay with the safest and blandest form of "retro" visuals, while evoking no classic era whatsoever.

God, like, if GTA 1 and 2 had never existed, I could be so much nicer, or at least understand a little bit what this game is going for. But instead it's as bizarre as someone sitting down to Super Mario Galaxy and saying "I wonder what this game would be like on the SNES".

And then as a result producing Plok.

In particular the game falls prey to all-too-common retro condescension - it's not revering or even evoking past days so much as mocking them. "Look at all the stuff they didn't have back then!" This (understandably) rubs me the wrong way, because developers in the '80s and '90s were just as smart (if not cleverer) than those today. See yesterday's bit on Panorama Cotton. Is GTA really a great example of where games have come in all these years? Seems the opposite - emblematic of the missteps and the taken-for-granteds. The notion that RCR would blow people's minds in 1987 is just kinda embarrassing. It's not like we didn't have NARC.

That was actually a tangent, not my main point. Retro City Rampage wasn't even in my outline for this post, I was planning to discuss Mutant Mudds, Rocket Knight, and Black Knight Sword. I've said before that I'd rather use the blog for conversation on those games I love, not shit on whatever doesn't work for me. Today I've Yahtzee'd, but tomorrow I'll return / to stand within the pleasure dome, decreed by Kublai Khan