The Stack

I’d like to expand on something I said earlier: that the level layout affects how Zuma plays. I already pointed out how the geometry of the path makes some parts more difficult to aim at than others, but that’s a relatively small matter — I do occasionally fail to put a ball where I want it, but, as I’ve said before, aiming is not the game’s primary difficulty.

More relevant is how the path allows or blocks shots. For example, consider the level called “Long Range”: the path is open on the right side, allowing the player to easily dispose of any balls that aren’t immediately useful. Other boards, such as “Rorschach”, make this convenience contingent on how you play: the path ultimately closes around you, but it’s possible to keep the balls from advancing that far, or to maintain a gap if they do.

Also significant is the ability of the path to cross itself. We see this used to great effect in “Shrine of Quetzalcoatl”, where the part that the player can reach is quickly divided into three non-adjacent pieces. In the levels that simply spiral or zigzag without crossing, you pretty much always have access to the same balls, which is to say, the ones that have been there longest. The player comes to remember which colors are needed where, and this knowledge helps the player to act with appropriate quickness. But when the path weaves in and out like this, the run of two yellows that you remember seeing a moment ago may not be available at the moment.

It should also be noted that these crossings rely on the path going through tunnels. Balls in these tunnels are inaccessible even when there’s nothing blocking the way. “Sunstone” is notable for putting a tunnel near the very end of the track, exactly where it prevents you from doing anything effective at the game’s most desperate moments, when your marbles are about to disappear into the sunskull’s maw.

But the level designers don’t really need tunnels to do that. I just encountered for the first time the board “Zumaic Exodus”, possibly the last new level in the game. Its concept is so simple, I should have been anticipating it: it starts in the middle and spirals outward. Thus, it makes you deal with the newest additions to the board, while the oldest disappear out of reach. There’s a sense of helplessness there, as runs of color that you hoped to smash slip away, even though the player’s power to affect things really hasn’t changed all that much.

So, I was all set to write a post on how Zuma fits into, and how it fails to fit into, the common patterns found throughout PopCap’s early games, such as the screen layout with a square play area on the right and a sidebar with stats and controls on the left, or the great quantities of thematic titles awarded to the player as their score advances, or the way that combo sequences are signaled by a rising pitch in the sound effects, or the sequence of colors — in games where you match colors, an easy way to make things harder is to add more colors as the game progresses. Early PopCap games shared a lot of code and a lot of conventions, and I’ve long felt that Zuma was a sort of transitional game between this formulaic style and the more freeform stuff that they’d do later, keeping some parts of the formula and throwing out others.

The thing is, in researching this, I’ve gone back and tasted some of the earlier PopCap demos, and the formula isn’t nearly as strong as memory suggests. Some of the early games award titles, some don’t. (Zuma doesn’t, except for a vestigial remnant in one-infinite-level mode.) Zuma seems to use the same color sequence as Alchemy and Dynomite, but Bejeweled uses a completely different sequence, making white one of the basic colors available from the beginning where the other games introduce it only after magenta. And I was surprised to see how few of the early games do the rising pitch thing, even when they have mechanics well-suited to it. This is one of the things I think of as identifying the PopCap style, and one of the pieces of the formula to survive intact to later games (such as Peggle, where it’s produced in pretty much every shot), but maybe it’s a more recent innovation than I thought.

The only thing that really seems consistent throughout early PopCap is the sidebar, which Zuma rejects in favor of a full-screen playfield. I suppose that if you’re constantly evolving your style, every game is transitional. It’s just that I remember them all seeming pretty darned formulaic back when they were new. Perhaps it’s just that the sidebar was a strong enough and constant enough presence to make them seem so. In which case, its absence from Zuma would plausibly be enough to make it seem like more of a break from the past than it really is.

Still, there’s one way that Zuma definitely acts as a transition from old to new PopCap: as far as I can tell, it was the first of their games to include jokes. They’re not a big part of the game, but they’re there, heralding things to come.

I’ve just been making unexpectedly fast progress in Zuma‘s Adventure mode, reaching the game’s ninth and possibly final ¹I don’t really believe this. For one thing, it’s identified as “The Last Stage (?)”, complete with question mark, and for another, why would you stop at a symmetric nine level (three groups of three) when you can round it off with a nice climactic boss fight? plateau. (Adventure mode is organized around a series of nine chambers, each holding a progressively longer series of levels. You can start a game at any chamber you’ve gained access to, but you always start at that chamber’s first level.)

I find that progress in this game comes in bursts and lulls: either you’re in the “zone” or you’re not, and if you’re not, you’re probably not going to make it out of the first level you attempt. The zone is of course the fabled state of utter concentration on the task at hand, possibly akin to what Buddhists call “single-pointedness”. In this particular game, aiming being a relatively trivial matter due to the mouse controls, the zone manifests mainly as an ability to quickly and easily spot the most promising spots to place a ball of a given color. (The potential for cascades is usually the most important consideration: not only does a cascade delete more stuff, it also makes balls move backward to close the gap, granting the player some respite from imminent doom.)

At any rate, it’s an extraordinarily zone-based game. It seems to me that even the superficial design assists here, the garish colors and relentless music producing a sensory overload that’s conducive to altered states of consciousness.

Pursuant to the previous post, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised that Zuma, like most of PopCap’s earlier works, took its core mechanic from prior art. Also, despite the fact that I bought it because it seemed original, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. Progress often works through incremental improvement, and even just looking at those screenshots of Puzz Loop, it’s easy to see that Zuma improved on the basic idea in at least one respect: breaking the spiral.

The core idea of the game is that a row of colored balls advance slowly along a groove. If they reach the end of the groove, you lose. You can fire additional balls from a rotating hub at the row, where they’ll stick; if you form a sequence of three or more of the same color, they’re deleted, possibly triggering cascades if the edges of the gap you’ve just created are the same color. In Puzz Loop, and in Zuma‘s first level, the groove is a spiral with the player’s ball-shooter at its center, making it necessary to get through the oldest balls before you can get at the newest additions. (The oldest parts being, much of the time, a bunch of isolated singletons, because you’ve already deleted all the pairs.) Making the groove go in different patterns may seem superficial, and probably wouldn’t have been a substantial enough alteration to win over the jurors in the K. C. Munchkin case, but it really does change how you approach the task. For example, where the angle of the groove is steeper relative to your shooter, it’s difficult to put the ball exactly where you need it to go. More strikingly, some boards feature more than one groove, so that you have to divide your attention.

Now, just on the basis of precedent, I suspect that Zuma provides more innovations on the model than that, but I can’t say for sure without more knowledge of the original. I am, however, puzzled by their decision to not alter it more in theme. Puzz Loop looks to have a general ancient-civilizations theme: those screenshots show backdrops of Egyptian art and the Nazca lines. Zuma has a vaguely Aztec theme. This might be considered reasonably far from Puzz Loop‘s theming if something about the game constrained it to rely on lost tombs and ancient artifacts, but that’s not the case. The gameplay is almost completely abstract. You could theme it around anything from space opera to gourmet cooking, and it would make exactly as much sense and have exactly as much relevance to the player.

And yet, when I look at MobyGames’ list of Puzz Loop variants, I see that lost ruins are the dominant paradigm, whether of Atlantis or Tír na nÓg or what I can only assume to be some kind of dinosaur civilization. Even when it’s used as a minigame in a larger work, it’s invariably a work about an archeological expedition. What gives? Are they all just imitating each other and not messing with the proven formula, or is there something about the scenario that I’m missing? Perhaps it’s just that grooves suggest stone carvings?

And while we’re on this end of the alphabet, I might as well look in on Zuma. Or, to give it its full title, Zuma Deluxe — this was made back when PopCap released most of their titles in two versions, a free web-based one and a downloadable Windows-native shareware version with additional features. I think Zuma was the first “deluxe” PopCap game that I actually registered, rather than just playing the demo for the hour allowed and then deleting it. ¹Or possibly that was Dynomite. Heck, maybe I did them both at once.

This is because it was their first game that really seemed original, rather than a slight variation on things I had seen before. I mean, look at their catalog up to 2003. Dynomite is essentially the same game as Puzzle Bobble/Bust-A-Move, albeit with an interesting puzzle mode added on. Big Money is the same game as, er, Samegame. Alchemy is a variant of Ishido. Bookworm was admitted to be a cross between Scrabble and Bejeweled (although it always seemed to me that Boggle and Bejeweled is an apter description). Even Bejeweled itself, their flagship title, seemed to me at the time to be a mere variant of Columns. (I was quite surprised when it became a cultural touchstone, much like I was when the same thing happened with The Matrix.)

Whereas with Zuma, the most I could identify is where it stole various specific elements from. Its closest precedent is probably Dynomite, with its match-3 and explosions and gradually advancing doom, and, most particularly, with its swivelling ball-gun that fires in the direction of the mouse cursor. This mouse-based aiming, which would go on to be used in Peggle, is very important to the feel, and is the reason why I identify it as a descendant of Dynomite rather than of Puzzle Bobble.

There was a time when I thought I could see distinctive elements from other PopCap games in Zuma, but frankly, looking at it again now, all that stands out is the “match 3” aspect. Maybe I’ll remember what I was thinking of by the time I write my next post.

[UPDATE: Turns out that Zuma is no more original than the rest of PopCap’s early titles — see the comments for details. My statement that it’s not “a slight variant on something I had seen before” stands, but only because I hadn’t seen the game it was based on.]

Well, I found the Fire Card. Due to the twistiness and irregularity of the maps, there were a couple of largish regions I hadn’t noticed before (or possibly had noticed, then abandoned because it was too early in the game for them, then forgotten about.) You can always tell when a region is unexplored, because it’s still littered with loose coins and other treasures like so many Pac-Man dots. Ironically, the reason I found it is that I gave up on looking for it. I took the plunge and started seriously exploring the Shadow Realm instead — the Shadow Realm that Rafi had advised me not to delve into until I had finished exploring the overworld — and it turns out that the Fire Card isn’t optional. You need it in order to obtain the key to a certain locked door. Once this is your primary immediate objective, the location of the Fire Card gets marked on your map. (Mind you, even knowing where it was, I had some difficulty finding the path to it.)

The rest followed smoothly, due in part to all the time I had spent leveling up fairies while unable to progress. Carrots were also a significant factor. That’s the game’s quick-leveling consumable: where Nethack has Potions of Gain Level, where Pokémon has Rare Candy, Zanzarah has Golden Carrots. It’s actually kind of unusual how they work. Instead of granting an experience level, the carrot makes its recipient one experience point short of leveling. You can then earn this point by picking a fight, even with the most inferior foe. This puts a brake on how fast you can abuse it. You can’t just dump fifty carrots on a fairy to turn it from a wimp to a superman. You’d have to fight fifty fights as well. Perhaps because of this, the designers made the carrots a lot more easily available than their equivalents in other games, letting you simply buy as many as you can afford from certain magic shops. They’re expensive, mind you, but by the end, I had a big stack of cash and not much else to spend it on. (Again, this is partly due to the time spent stuck, but that just amplified the effect.)

In the end, there are a couple of fights with the White Druid, including the one I anticipated where he uses light fairies against you. After that, there’s just the Guard. What I didn’t anticipate, but should have, is that the Guard, being a thing of magitech, is defended by a team made entirely of robotic Metal-type fairies. Fortunately, I had three elements in my team that were strong against Metal: Air, Ice, and Energy (which seemed like a good choice for the fifth slot). And so I beat it first try.

And that’s that. The world of Zanzarah is restored to balance, as tends to happen in fantasy worlds when the right thing dies. Without the Guard, all the portals to the human world are open again, presumably meaning that fairies will start attacking people in the street soon. Mind you, by the end, I was far more often the aggressor than they were. There’s a special item for use in power-leveling, a magic horn that you can use to wake up any nearby sleeping wild fairies. (Encounters tend to occur the first time you step on their unmarked trigger spots, but there’s some sort of delay before you can trigger them again. The horn bypasses the delay.) Pity the poor defeated fairies who have given up on violence and decided to sleep out the rest of the crisis, only to have Amy, the alleged hero, deliberately goad them into attacking her just so she can beat them up again. No wonder the humans got kicked out, if this is how their prophesied heroes behave.

Since I have fairies for every single element now, I should probably figure out the ideal combination. See, you can only carry five fairies at a time. Those that aren’t in your inventory at any moment hang out at Amy’s home in London, which is therefore the only place where you can swap different fairies into your inventory. Whenever you go back there, you can see them all fluttering around ¹Actually, it’s kind of unsatisfying how they basically just stay in place and turn to face Amy all the time. I’d rather see them flitting hither and thither on their own business, getting into the kitchen supplies, making mischief, etc., providing a colorful contrast to the first-twenty-minutes-of-The-Wizard-of-Oz decor. One wonders what will happen when Amy’s parents get back from wherever they’ve been for the entire game.

Now, Shadow Elves tend to favor Dark and Chaos-type fairies, but really, they can be armed with any type. Sometimes unexpected types are found roaming wild as well — for example, there are bits of greenery capable of supporting Nature fairies even in the Realm of Clouds. So an ideal loadout has a combination of fairies that’s strong against every element. There are many combinations that do this, but it’s also a good idea to try to have some redundancy, and to minimize the number of elements that each is weak to. It’s notable that those Dark and Chaos types are weak against a lot more elements than they’re strong against. The designers really want you to favor the “good” types.

There are a couple more constraints beyond that. Magic cards, needed to overcome terrain obstacles, can only be used by a fairy of the appropriate element. So if you need to clear thorn bushes, you need a Nature fairy with you, and if you need to smash boulders, you need a Stone-type. Once a bush or boulder is gone, however, it stays gone, so the need for nature and stone is temporary. The Air card lets you ride updrafts, but doing so doesn’t alter the terrain at all, so an Air fairy will likely be in my final pack. Presumably the Fire card also won’t wreak any permanent changes when I find it, but its utility is limited to a single area, the lava caves, while those updrafts are found all over the place, and are sometimes the only way to cross chasms to where you need to go.

So, my final team will have an Air fairy in it. Probably a Light fairy as well, because of the preponderance of Dark and Chaos types in the Shadow Realm, and because there’s only one element that Light is weak against: Psi. Also for that reason I’ll need a Psi fairy. I haven’t had to fight many Light-types yet, but I’m willing to bet that the White Druid has some and that I’ll need to beat him before this is over. That leaves two slots, and the only potential foes not covered are Nature, Air, and Energy. An Ice fairy covers all those gaps, leaving me one slot free for a back-up fairy. Or for whatever I’m trying to power-level at any given moment in order to evolve it and complete my Fairédex (which, despite what I’ve said before, does seem to be completable — some of the “unique” fairies aren’t really.)

My last session was short and uneventful. I made a more thorough exploration of a couple of locations, and I managed to level up a couple of my fairies, and that’s it. It strikes me that this is not a bad way to play RPGs — a little bit of incremental progress now and then, as time allows — but that I haven’t been doing it lately, because of this blog. If I’m committed to writing about each session until I finish the game, I feel every session has to yield something worth writing about. But how many insights can a game like this provoke? Thus, I try to save up my Stack gaming for longer sessions, and on days when I can’t do that, I just play games that are already off the stack, or demos, or free web-based stuff. (Moneysieze has been a particular obsession of mine lately, and I should probably write something about it at some point.)

Thus, to the extent that this blog was meant to be a way to encourage me to finish up older games, it has failed. It is sometimes actually discouraging me from playing them. I’m not sure what to do about this. A modification of the Oath might be in order, or maybe just a shift in attitude.

If it weren’t for that little fink Rafi, I’d still be making progress in this game.

Rafi is the first inhabitant of Zanzarah you meet, and if you keep visiting him (which is optional), he functions as an advisor, telling you at each turn of the plot what your current main objective is. There’s usually an equivalent piece of feedback in the form of an exclamation mark on the place you need to visit next in your in-game world map, but that doesn’t tell you why you need to go there. Rafi does.

Ever since I started playing again, Rafi has had just two pieces of advice. The more important one is that I must go to the Shadowlands to confront the White Druid’s Guard. (It seems to be common knowledge that the Guard resides in the realms of Shadow. Why didn’t anyone remember this when the Shadow Elves came? Zanzarans are a little dopey, I guess.) But also, Rafi tells me to explore everything else first, and, in particular, to try to find the Fire Card, which will allow me to explore the game’s lava caves without dying.

It seems like good advice. A fire-themed dungeon is exactly what I need to round out my roster of fairies, as I have only one Fire-type at the moment. The problem is that I have no idea where this card is. My only clue is that it was owned by the Dwarves at one point, but they lost it. Supposedly I can find it by exploring the land’s secrets, but I’ve pretty much run out of secrets to explore.

My stance here is kind of unreasonable, really. If I find I need a Fire fairy, I do in fact already have one. And it’s not like venturing into the Shadows will prevent me from coming back to the fire areas later. There’s a teleport-to-checkpoints system that’s pretty basic to the game, and it’s always worked in the few sallies below I’ve made so far. But Rafi, blast him, has ideas about what order I should do things in, and I’m really not inclined to argue with the guy. Doing things out of order in a CRPG generally just means abnormally high difficulty for a while, followed by abnormal lack of difficulty when you go back.

I have a couple of corrections to my last post. The Guard (not Guardian) is specifically the thing that keeps humans out of Zanzarah. Its malfunctioning is the reason that the elements are out of balance. The White Druid knows this, but was trying to keep it secret, because he knows that if anyone else knew, they’d try to turn it off, and he thinks that insane fairies are a small price to pay for keeping Zanzarah protected from grubby humans and their chain stores and jazz music. Well, it’s not like he has to endure the consequences personally. He lives in the clouds. (This is one of those moments where I sincerely wonder if the authors intended the symbolism or if it’s just a happy coincidence.) And the missing dwarf king, Quinlin, who was framed for the whole tribulation? Held captive by the Druid, to keep him from talking. Quinlin knows all about the Guard, because he helped build it.

Now, you’re reading that recap as a neat little chunk of text. For me, recovering the information involved revisiting a bunch of locations, some infested with wild fairies. Fortunately, I’m at a stage of the game where I wanted to revisit places anyway. I have a bunch of fairies that need to level, and a bunch of tools for opening up secret areas that I couldn’t get to the first time round. This is part of how this sort of game extends play time, and how much you enjoy it depends on how much you enjoy executing this kind of diligent thoroughness.

In fact, I’ll go a step farther than that and say that exercising diligence is probably a big part of the reason that people find CRPGs enjoyable. Or, at any rate, the reason that the sort of person who finds CRPGs enjoyable finds them enjoyable. Not everyone does. But tastes differ. I’ve seen it claimed that, by and large, the activities people enjoy are the ones that exercise the skill they’re good at. This seemed possibly backwards to me — isn’t it that people become good at the things they enjoy doing, because they’re so much more motivated to practice them than the things they don’t enjoy? Regardless, there’s a correlation between skills and pleasure. Solving puzzles is a skill, and there are entire genres of puzzle-game for the people who are good at it. Tactical decision-making, precise timing, quick reflexes ¹Does it make sense to separate timing from reflexes in this list? I think it does. Reflexes are what you need in a two-player fighting game, to react to the opponent’s moves the instant they’re launched. Timing is what you need in a Mario-style platformer: everything is deterministic, and the same sequence of moves performed in the same way will work every time, provided you can execute them just right. , spotting visual patterns: all skills with games to appeal to them. Diligence is a skill. But it’s not a skill that requires a great deal of brainpower or physical coordination, and for that reason games that appeal to it are denigrated by those who enjoy exercising those skills more.