The Stack

Galaga: Destination Earth is old-school enough in its sensibilities that it extends its gameplay not by providing lots of content, but by making the player start over repeatedly. It’s like a coin-op arcade game in that respect, and, like a coin-op arcade game, doesn’t provide any way to save your progress. It provides a limited number of “credits” that let you continue from the beginning of the current stage instead of the beginning of the whole game if you run out of lives, but that’s as far as it goes. And even that may be inadvisable, for reasons I’ll get into.

That said, on the PC version, it’s pretty easy to cheat a little. (This may be the one way in which the PC version is superior to the Playstation version.) In the game’s main folder, there is a plain text file named “levels.txt”, containing nothing but a series of short strings in capital letters: SWRECK, SATURN, EUROPA, MARS, etc. Experiment shows that this does in fact govern the sequence of missions you go through, and that by editing the file you can skip straight to whatever mission you want. I’ve been severely stuck on the Moon mission, which has two sections that I find extremely difficult, and I’ve been taking advantage of this cheat to practice it without having to go through five other missions first.

But I probably won’t just cheat my way through the game like this and declare victory, and not just because it would feel illegitimate. That’s a factor, sure. But cheating is also impractical, because of the upgrade system.

See, every mission contains at certain points “merit medals” that you can consume. Some of them are just floating in open space where you can fly through them easily. Some are in difficult crannies that you have to go out of your way to reach and run the danger of crashing into stuff. Sometimes it’ll put a merit medal and a shield repair power-up level with each other, so that you can’t nab them both and have to choose which is more important to you. Most insidiously, sometimes it’ll put one immediately to the left of a solid barrier, so that you can only get it by destroying any ship you’ve captured. But you want to grab them anyway, at least at first, because for every ten merits you grab, you get some kind of permanent benefit.

Admittedly, some of the later merit tiers just award points, which seems kind of useless to me. I basically only care about the score when it has some tangible gameplay benefit, like providing extra lives or whatever. But the first three tiers actually unlock your starfighter’s full potential. At 10 merits, you get ability to Thrust, that is, to go faster. I haven’t actually figured out how to get any benefit from this, but it’s nonetheless something you can do that you couldn’t do before. 20 merits activates Maneuvers, which is to say, the ability to dodge-roll left and right. This is fairly useful for surviving barrages. At 30, the number of shots you can have on the screen at a time increases from two to three, and this is a very big deal, something you definitely don’t want to be without.

And if you start from the moon, you won’t be able to get enough merits to have any of those things by the difficult parts. This applies both when you start there because you cheated, and when you start there because you lost all your lives and used a credit.

Galaga: Destination Earth is pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum from Robotron X when it comes to faithfulness to the source. It’s not even really in the same genre as the original Galaga. Galaga was a Space-Invaders-like, a fixed-camera shmup where you move left and right at the bottom of the screen and shoot at enemies in a grid formation above you, and G:DE is only intermittently that. It varies the perspective: at the start of a wave, you might hear a computery voice announce “ATTACK PATTERN DELTA” or whatever, followed by the camera shifting. Attack pattern gammaa is Space Invaders view, attack pattern delta is side-scrolling, and attack pattern alpha is a 3D “over-the-shoulder” view with a reticle to line up your shots. What happened to attack pattern beta? Well, there is in fact a fourth perspective: the fully first-person stationary-but-swiveling view you get in the occasional deck gun sections. So maybe that’s attack pattern beta, but if so, it’s not announced.

But attack pattern alpha is the primary view, the one where you spend the majority of the game, swooping through open space or various tunnels, canyons, and other obstacle-filled environments. Thus does the game reveal its real inspirations. It doesn’t want to be a sequel to Galaga, it wants to be a sequel to Rebel Assault.

There’s one other game I’ll cite as an influence, albeit a lesser one: Gyruss. This is a semi-obscure space shmup that’s kind of like a less-abstract Tempest: you move around the edges of a circular playfield with a rotary controller and shoot towards a distant center. Gyruss had a theme of journeying towards Earth from the outer solar system, starting at “2 warps to Neptune”, and G:DE‘s progression immediately reminded me of it. Mind you, it isn’t a strict progression from outer planets to inner ones here. You start at a shipwreck in open space, then proceed to Saturn, then Europa, Mars, then you leap to the surface of the sun (!), then the moon, and that’s as far as I’ve gotten. Apparently the next level is in Earth orbit, followed by the surface. So you may say that any Gyruss connection on that basis is tenuous. But there’s also a section in the Europa mission where you fly down some circular tunnels, hugging the edge, and it plays so much like Gyruss that it has to be deliberate imitation.

What does the game get from actual Galaga, then? First and most obviously, the insect-like aliens (or are they just aliens in insect-like spacecraft?) Apparently they’re not quite aliens this time, having a complicated and somewhat silly backstory involving fruit flies, nanomachines, and time travel that’s hinted at in the intro and spelled out more fully in the manual. Then there’s Galaga‘s one distinctive game feature. Not the aliens that break formation and dive at you — that had been previously pioneered by Galaxian. (Yes, that’s a different game, albeit by the same developers.) No, I’m talking about the boss aliens that can capture your starfighters with a tractor beam and use them against you. Skilled Galaga players would deliberately let their first ship get captured, because you could then retake it, with the result that you have two starfighters on the screen at once, doubling your firepower. G:DE keeps those mechanics, but also extends them. Sometimes destroyed bosses will drop energy cubes that, if you catch them, let you fire a tractor beam of your own, capturing alien ships to fly beside you and fire at your command. I haven’t been consistently able to make this happen, but when I do, it makes subsequent waves a great deal easier — moreso than even a second starfighter, because two ships that fire differently can cover more area. The main problem is that the captured ships are so fragile. Your own starfighter has shields that let it take multiple hits (which is another deviation from the original), but your captives do not. I feel like I could get a lot farther in the game if I could just keep them alive longer.

My success in applying DxWnd to Robotron X inspired me to give it a try on one of the more recalcitrant games of its ilk, Galaga: Destination Earth. To my surprise, it simply worked immediately, without needing to set it up in DxWnd at all! This was not my experience six years ago. But that was before several Windows Updates and a couple of major hardware upgrades. Had my system simply grown out out of the problem? Maybe.

It wasn’t completely working correctly, though. The FMV intro didn’t play, and the background music, which was supposed to loop, would instead play just once and then stop. I can do without the FMV — I’ve seen the intro before, and the rest of the video clips in the game seem inessential, just some brief establishing shots at the start of each mission. It’s all viewable in VLC outside of the game, and I’ve done the same for other games before. Playing without the music, on the other hand, greatly detracts from the experience. It’s not that it’s amazing music, really. It’s a competent soundtrack for an extended action scene. But that’s something that the game really needs.

Now, I didn’t mention this in my writeup of Robotron X, but it had exactly the same problem with background music, and I solved it there. The cause: both games play their background music from the CD, and apparently Windows just dropped the ability to play CD-audio tracks on loop back in Windows Vista. DxWnd to the rescue! All I had to do is extract the tracks to Ogg Vorbis files and configure DxWnd to emulate CD playback with those. And so I wound up using DxWnd for Galaga after all.

Convincing DxWnd to actually run the game proved more difficult than it should have been. Apparently it has problems with filenames containing spaces, which strikes me as a pretty glaring oversight, considering that it requires you to give it the full path to the executable, and Windows likes to install stuff to a folder called “Program Files”. I had to copy the game to a new folder called “C:\GAMES\GALAGA” before it would hook into it at all.

This done, I managed to reach mission 6 out of 10 in one night. I’ll describe the game itself in my next post. I’d kind of like to see if I can get the FMV working before finishing the game, though, even though I consider it inessential. Based on the logs, it looks like it’s still trying to get the video data from the CD, even though I have the files installed locally. I can believe that this is a problem in itself — that the Windows media library is giving up on waiting for the CD drive to respond while it’s still trying to spin up, or something like that. And if that’s the problem, it seems like it should be solvable.

Badly in need of distraction yesterday, I turned to Robotron X in earnest. I seemed to hit a wall between levels 30 and 40, though. Things just get a whole lot tougher there. Which is a shame, because that’s also where it starts turning up the variety. Levels 30-39 are the “Electrode Forest”, where the electrodes (stationary deadly obstacles) are shaped like abstracted pine trees and take 30 shots to destroy instead of just one. Levels 30-49 are the “Beam Maze”, where post-shaped electrodes are placed at grid points and periodically fire deadly arcs at their neighbors — something that has less effect than it sounds, because the posts are easily destroyed, so that it all just turns into an empty space from stray fire before long. There are a few other variations along these lines as you progress.

But like I was saying, I was stuck. You can last indefinitely if you’re gaining lives faster than you’re losing them, and I wasn’t doing that. I turned to something like save-scumming — I don’t know if this really fits the definition of that term; I usually think of save-scumming as repeatedly reloading a save until the random number generator provides your preferred outcome, and that’s not what I was doing. Rather, I was reloading my last save every time I died, and saving if I completed a level without dying at all. In this way, I hoped to build up enough lives to survive. But playing this way is laborious, less fun, and, most importantly, violates the spirit of the game. So I finally, reluctantly, turned the difficulty down to Easy.

Easy mode is so much easier than Normal that it almost seems like a different game. No scumming was needed here — the only reason I ever needed to save was to shut down the game for a while and give my fingers a break. I don’t know how many lives I ended the game with, but it was more than the ten that it’s capable of displaying. I feel like I might someday decide that I haven’t really finished the game, that Easy mode doesn’t count because it isn’t the experience that the developers intended. But then, I’m not sure that the experience that the developers intended includes finishing the game. It’s not like the ending is particularly climactic, or wraps up the story or anything. You just play a level like any other, then there’s a rather tongue-in-cheek cutscene, and that’s that.

A few more stray observations and I’ll call it finished:

The last level is actually level 199. There are more than 200 levels, though, because just before every level divisible by 20, there’s a bonus level where you try to shoot at stuff for points but can’t be killed, just like the bonus levels in various spaceship shmups. I speculate that this pattern is the reason we don’t get a level 200. Also, the second hundred are kind of a repeat of the first hundred: just as levels 30-39 are Electrode Forest levels, so are levels 130-139, and so forth. If you get to the midpoint, you’ve basically seen everything. This again makes me think that the devs weren’t designing for completists.

There are no bosses, exactly, but level 3 Brain robotrons are fairly bosslike. They tower over the other robotrons, they take 50 hits to kill, and there are never more than two of them on a level. If that’s a level 3 Brain, what’s a level 4 Brain like? It’s nothing but a huge brain that crawls on the floor like a slug. I appreciate the sense of progression from “humanoid with oversized brain” to “oversized humanoid with even more oversized brain” to “we can’t support the humanoid part any more, here’s just a brain”, but it does make it the one case where a higher-level robotron is less powerful than its predecessor.

I mentioned before that the game spreads out the spawning of enemies, teleporting in new ones over the course of a level to draw things out. I’m fairly sure now that this is linked to progress in shooting stuff, rather than merely timed. There are sections in the Grunt waves where it really seems like it’s spawning new Grunts specifically to replace the ones I’ve killed. Perhaps it’s really a response to technical constraints, rather than being primarily a design decision? This is a game meant to run on 1996 hardware. If you want to throw hundreds of enemies at the player, but can’t render that many 3D robotron models all at once, spawning new ones as you go is the best you can do.

Robotron X is not a greatly redesigned adaptation, like Frogger (1997) or Combat (2001). It plays basically like the coin-op arcade game: you run around frantically on a rectangular playfield, shooting in eight directions, while robotrons of various sorts chase you. Your goal on each board is to clear it of all enemies other than the indestructible Hulk robotrons. Various members of the Last Human Family mosey around, oblivious to danger, and you can eat them for points.

The most obvious differences from the original are cosmetic ones: everything’s modeled in 3D, there’s a pulse-pounding techno soundtrack (in CD-audio format!), there’s a fourth Last Human Family member (an old man, presumably Mikey’s grandpa), and various of the robotrons look very different from their 2D counterparts. Hulks were, in the original game, rectangular slabs with legs and a tiny head; here, they’re less exaggerated and more humanoid, which kind of ruins them if you ask me. I guess the developers thought the original design was too silly, but that’s what made it awesome. Spheroids and Quarks, the carriers that emit Enforcers and Tanks respectively, always seemed sort of wispy and insubstantial in the original, like they were made of energy or just warped space rather than physical matter. Here, they’re definitely physical. Spheroids look like flying saucers, and Quarks are just cubes with a texture pasted on. Here, though, I’m more inclined to blame the graphics engine than the developers’ design sense. Everything’s made of textured polygons. You can only get so wispy with that stuff. A proper Spheroid or Quark would be made of particle effects or something. Similarly, the original appearance of the sinister Progs was kind of intrinsically pixel-based, and so Robotron X just makes up something completely new for them, a sort of glowing stick figure.

As for changes to gameplay, I’ve already mentioned that there are powerups and a finite set of levels with victory at the end. The powerups appear at random, and they’re pretty basic: shields, three-way fire, etc. You can get extra lives from powerups, which strikes me as a pretty significant change. In the original game, the only way to get extra lives was from scoring points, and the biggest source of points was the Last Human Family. As a result, going after the humans was generally your top priority. But when there are extra-life powerups, they take priority over that.

The original game had a pretty small roster of enemies: Grunts, Hulks, Brains that create Progs, Spheroids that create Enforcers, Quarks that produce Tanks. The manual for Robotron X tells me that there’s one completely new enemy, the Byte robotron, but I haven’t seen it yet. How does it create 200 levels of variety and increasing difficulty, then? By giving you increasingly powerful variations of the basic ones. Every one of the original robotrons comes in four varieties, with later versions being faster or taking more hits to kill or having special abilities. For example, level 2 Enforcers can lay mines. Level 2 Grunts have jetpacks, which seems wrong to me: according to the attract screen of the original game, “GRUNT” stands for “Ground Roving Unit Network Terminator”, and any unit with a jetpack is not ground roving. Level 2 Hulks are red, which, coupled with their more-humanoid design, makes them way too easy to mistake for Grunts. It’s an unending problem for game design: there just aren’t enough easily-distinguishable colors. Also, it’s a little weird how the system is based on the idea that the original robotrons are basic elementary types. I mean, really the original game already had a harder variant of the Enforcer. It was called the Tank. But X has to pretend that Enforcer and Tank are two completely different species.

But if you ask me, the most significant change is this: The robotrons don’t all appear at once. They come in waves, more teleporting in periodically as you clear the level. It’s not clear to me if waves are timed or of they’re triggered by progress, but either way, the effect is to keep you on your toes. You can no longer rely on the Grunts to all cluster together in a big pack that you can run circles around, because there will be more spawning in front of you. I think this is probably to the game’s benefit on the whole, but it can get a little exasperating when you think you’re on the verge of winning a level and all of the sudden another wave of robotrons appears and stretches things out.

Yesterday, I briefly mentioned the difficulty faced by Robotron adaptations in the days before dual-stick controllers. This put me in mind of the one licensed Robotron game currently on the Stack, so I went and installed it. This in itself proved something of an adventure, so this is mostly going to be a tech post.

Robotron X, released in 1996 on Windows and Playstation, is one of the earliest examples of the circa-2000 Classic Arcade Game Remake genre, and fits the basic expectations of the genre perfectly — that is, it adds 3D graphics and powerups. It also adds winnability, with a final level of some sort, but looking at the files, it appears to be some 200 levels in. That’s the reason I didn’t beat the game back in the day, and also my main memory of the experience: that it’s as much a test of endurance as of skill. It does support saving progress, but you have to take your fingers off the gameplay keys to do it, and it’s difficult to convince yourself that’s a good idea in the heat of battle — particularly if you’re unsatisfied with your life count. Robotron is famously a game where lives are cheap, quickly gained and quickly lost, but how many will I need stockpiled for the final battle? I won’t know for a while. I had a notion that this would be a quick game to get through if I just devoted a day to it, but that day is over, and I’ve only survived through about 15% of the levels.

Mind you, it should get easier now that I’ve corrected the worst of the bugs. Without limiting the framerate, the game has a number of problems, including the camera shaking violently every once in a while, Enforcer robotrons being unreasonably deadly, and a few things, such as the bullets fired by Brain robotrons, simply not getting rendered at all. Some of this stuff, I wasn’t sure if it was intentional or not until I watched some gameplay footage of the Playstation version on Youtube, confirming that yes, the Brains do actually shoot at you and the Enforcers don’t shoot that often. If for some reason you’re thinking of playing this game and don’t have a copy already, I strongly advise getting the Playstation version instead of the PC version. Play it under emulation if you have to. It’s identical, but must be easier to get working properly.

In fact, just getting it to run at all on a modern PC took some doing. Running it directly off the CD, as it was designed to do, throws an error and exits immediately after the opening logo movie. Copying it to local storage and running it in Windows 95 compatibility mode gets it a little farther, but it still hangs before displaying anything 3D. Remembering my recent discovery of DxWnd, I tried running it there, and it managed to display some 3D intro animations, but got stuck immediately before showing the main menu. Now, DxWnd has a UI of commercial-airline-console-like complexity, with oodles of settings to tweak, and I tried randomly tweaking the ones with promising-sounding names, but ultimately had to seek help online. And for the most part, the internet doesn’t even know that a PC version of this game exists. Not even PC Gaming Wiki, my old standby for help running old games on modern systems, didn’t have so much as a stub of an entry for it. The one place that was of help? A four-year-old thread on the DxWnd forums, which told me that the magic setting for this game is “Palette update don’t Blit”. I’m starting to think that DxWnd is going to be my first and last resort on these matters for the foreseeable future.

Oh, and as for the twin-stick problem: Robotron X‘s controls are idiosyncratic. On PC, it lets you move and shoot from the keyboard, with two sets of keys, which default to ESDF and IJKL, plus optionally some weirdly asymmetric keys for diagonal movement that you can ignore if you’re accustomed to pressing two keys at a time for that like any modern gamer. Well, after all, this game predates the ascension of the WASD standard. It doesn’t support arbitrary key rebinding, but it does support a handful of alternate key combinations, all of which are worse. The closest it comes to WASD is WADX, combined with 2468 on the numeric keypad, which is just painful to contemplate. I’ve considered avoiding all the control layouts by running some software to make my trusty Logitech F710 emulate keypresses, but I’ve been getting used to the default keys, and they’re not so bad once you’ve had some practice.

(Added 7 Nov) Actually, it turns out that I wouldn’t have needed to install anything else to produce keypresses from my gamepad. DxWnd can take care of that too.

Stepping back a bit, I spent a substantial amount of time this fall on UFO 50, a collection of fifty retro-styled games written by a team of established indie auteurs over a span of years. There’s a Tolkien-like conceit to it, a pretense that the authors didn’t write the games, but discovered them — they were all supposedly created by a fictional company called UFOSoft, and each individual game has credits listing the individual fictional developers who worked on it. The game’s intro screen, which looks like an old crack loader, shows a series of photos of the dev team finding the fictional LX 8-bit console and its cartridges in an abandoned storage space. (The LX, by the way, has a built-in screen, handily explaining why games supposedly written in the 1980s run in 16:9.)

Although the games are retro-styled, their design sensibility, their mechanics and UX, are decidedly modern. Although many of them are clearly based on well-known games of the period, they always put some unique twist on them. And several of them draw from genres that hadn’t been invented yet when they were supposedly written, like idle games or tower defense. I’ve seen it asserted that it’s not actually appealing to nostalgia for 1980s console games, but rather nostalgia for the 2010s indie scene. And there’s something to that, not just in the content of the individual games, but in how they’re presented: as a smorgasbord. Those of us who were children in the 1980s remember games of the period as unitary things that you played monogamously until you had sucked all the entertainment value from them, because you probably weren’t going to get another until Christmas. Here, instead, you have a variety of games that you dip into as the mood strikes you, with no great commitment to finish all of them. So the overall experience resembles a games site like Newgrounds or Armor Games, or alternately, with its added framing UI, the various compilations that authors of Flash games have put on Steam since the death of Flash in the browser. It also resembles my Steam library, except that it’s of a manageable size, there’s a possibility that I’ll finish it all someday, and all of the games are highly distinct from one other, even when they’re a direct sequel to another game in the collection.

There’s some hint of a shared universe in some of the games, with recurring characters and reused assets and suggestively similar situations. Some of the links are pretty subtle, such that I wouldn’t have noticed them myself. It’s fun to overextend this and imagine that all of the games are linked, despite radically different genres: that whimsical kiddie fantasies like Magic Garden and Elfazar’s Hat exist in the same timeline as Fist Hell‘s zombie apocalypse and Avianos‘s post-human-extinction Earth. Apparently there’s an underlying mystery as well, a trail of clues that you can follow from game to game to unlock… something. I haven’t sought spoilers on this, since I found the entry point on my own and kind of want to follow it as far as I can independently. But solving the very first clue directs you to look for something in Mini & Max, a sort of adventure-platformer hybrid about exploring a closet while shrunken down to miniscule size, and this is one of the few games I haven’t made much headway in yet. It just has a level of complexity, of state you have to manage in you brain, that exceeds the threshold of what I can easily muster when I’m in smorgasbord mode.

But everyone’s going to find a different subset of the games grabs them. Here follows a list of the games that I’ve given the bulk of my attention to. The emoji indicate my progress. If you beat a game — whatever that means for that game — it awards you a golden trophy, and reveals an extra challenge that you can do, usually either 100% completion or some hidden secret goal. Beating this goal awards you cherries. Most of the games on this short list are ones that I’ve played enough to get cherries on.

🍒Party House: Probably my favorite in the collection. This is basically a deck-building game (a genre that didn’t exist in the 1980s) about throwing parties. Guests are drawn at random from the roster you’ve built, and most of them give you resources that let you buy better guests or expand your house, which lets you throw bigger parties. But some guests cause trouble, which can end the party without giving you anything. To deal with this, some guests have special abilities, like canceling out trouble or throwing out selected guests or summoning specific guests you select. You have a limited number of iterations to throw the ultimate party, which requires bringing in expensive “star” guests like aliens and mermaids. It all turns into an exercise in mastering a complex ruleset while adapting to circumstances, and, as with all the games, you have to figure it out without the aid of the manual which was presumably originally packaged with the game.

🍒Pilot Quest: Pilot is UFOSoft’s mascot character, their Mario, although this game plays more like a Zelda. It’s an action RPG, complete with Zelda-style dungeons, but it’s also the one with idle game elements, including a rudimentary ascension system, giving you special upgrades every time you complete the game. While you’re waiting for resources to accumulate, you can go exploring to find items that help with the resource accumulation. Or you can play other games! Time passes in this game while you’re not playing it, although not when you have UFO 50 as a whole closed. So it makes sense to try this one early so it’s advancing while you try all the other games. It’s grindy, but in a way that I found appealing.

🍒Warptank: An action-puzzler. In a side-view mechanized space-station environment, you control a tank that rolls left and right on whatever surface it’s on, and can additionally launch itself to the ceiling and roll around there. So it’s a bit like VVVVVV, except that you can also change your orientation by rolling over 45-degree bends in the surface you’re on. This one’s all about internalizing an unintuitive and disorienting movement system, while shooting at stuff.

🏆Overbold: This is a twin-stick shooter in spirit, even though the LX didn’t have a dual-stick controller. I remember this being a problem for console adaptations of Robotron back in the day. Like several other UFO 50 games, Overbold takes the fairly elegant approach of letting you shoot and move in two different directions by not changing your shoot direction while you have the fire button held down. The interesting thing about the game is that it’s really all about bidding strategy. The premise is that you’re being forced to fight in an alien gladiatorial arena. Winning fights earns you cash, which you can spend on upgrades. But also, the amount of cash you win depends on how many enemies you choose to fight at a time. To survive the final round, which is the only one where you don’t get any choice about what you’re fighting, you’ll need a whole lot of upgrades. So there’s pressure to make your fights as hard as you think you can manage, to earn enough cash for the upgrades you’ll need in the end. But it’s very easy to overestimate your abilities — hence the title — and a single mistake can mean game over, putting you back at square one. It’s a very addicting loop, one that I had some difficulty pulling myself away from.

🍒Porgy: A metroidvania where you play as a cute yellow submarine. That’s about all I can say about it, and all that needs to be said. It takes a cue from Ecco the Dolphin by starting off calm and soothing but ultimately linking the marine environment to unsettling aliens. The style is mostly friendly, though, and it makes a transparent and unconvincing attempt at making the violence nonviolent by giving you torpedos that are somehow nonlethal and merely pacify the unnaturally violent sea life. You basically just have to accept this as part of the style, a nod to other 1980s games that pulled similar stuff.

Rock On! Island: The only game on this short list that I haven’t beaten, this is a tower defense about cavemen fighting dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals. I just enjoy tower defenses in general, and this is a pretty difficult one, largely based around balancing your resources defending multiple pathways. Also, the player avatar can move about and attack in battle, and can be upgraded to a much more powerful attack than any of the statically-placed defenders, so a big part of the strategy is about deciding when it’s worth it to spend resources on yourself and when to spend them on more defenders. I’m pretty sure that part of why I haven’t finished it yet is that there are elements that I haven’t figured out, too — see again the implied existence of manuals that you don’t have.

It’s been a while. What have I been playing? Well, just in the last few days, I’ve mostly been absorbed by the “Road to Elysium” DLC for The Talos Principle II. There are three separate scenarios, and each one takes a different approach to the problem of adding more puzzles to a story where the source of the puzzles has been defeated.

The first scenario, “Orpheus Ascending”, is basically a side story: it has you going back into the simulation where the entirety of Talos 1 and the opening of Talos 2 take place, there to recover soul fragments of a destroyed robot, so she may be reconstructed. Apparently this resolves a subplot in the main game, but not one that I remember at all. It’s explicitly called out by a character in the intro cutscene as resembling Orpheus’s descent into the underworld — I haven’t said much about it, but Talos 2 is chock full of references to Greek mythology. So it’s a little strange that it takes place in the Egyptian-themed section of the simulation rather than the Greek-themed one. But the Egyptian one is the only part that’s ever seen in Talos 2, and apparently it’s appropriate here because its name is the “Land of Death”. (The other sections of Talos 1 are called the Land of Ruin and the Land of Faith. It’s not clear to me where these names come from — they’re never referenced in the game itself.)

Going back to the old simulation means the puzzles are constrained to only use elements from Talos 1. But it delves deeper into their mechanics than we’ve seen before — in particular, how beams behave when they clash, when they collide midair or compete for the same connectors. Previously, you generally only saw this sort of thing when your solution was set up wrong. Here, you induce failure deliberately. It’s very well-tutorialized, too. It doesn’t assume that you already grasp how it works, but builds up from simple deliberate failures to more complex ones.

The third scenario, “Into the Abyss”, I haven’t looked at much yet, and only mention it now to get it out of the way so I can spend the rest of this post talking about the second scenario. It seems to have no particular puzzle theme other than very difficult puzzles, which is a good thing after the ones in the main game turned out unexpectedly easy. Narratively, it’s a flashback: there’s a point at the end of the main story where an NPC’s consciousness is trapped in a new simulation, and now he describes what he experienced there.

The second scenario, “Isle of the Blessed”, is the game’s beach episode. A bunch of characters get together on a tropical island hosting a massive puzzle-based art installation inspired by the events of the main game. We’re repeatedly reminded that solving the puzzles here is completely inconsequential, a diversion you pursue for its own sake alone. Which, of course, has really been the case all along for the player, just not for the characters. Ironically, this means that the puzzles are in a sense more consequential for the player than for the characters: as in the main game, progress in solving puzzles triggers advancement in the plot, even though there’s no logical connection. The plot you’re advancing is fairly trivial, mind. The most dramatic thing I’ve seen happen is that a pair of old friends who had a disagreement back in the main game finally reconcile. And yet, I am no less motivated to solve these puzzles than when the world was at stake.

Through the NPC chit-chat, though, this scenario references the events of the game more than the other two. And in the process, it references things that the player had the opportunity to influence. As such, it establishes certain possibilities, certain choices, as canon. There’s an entire major NPC, very important to the plot, whose very presence is only possible under the assumption that you solved a bunch of optional puzzles back in the main game. Heck, even the existence of these physically-implausible puzzles in reality outside the simulation is only possible if you decided to make the necessary technology available at the end of the game, instead of sealing it away or destroying it. It all goes to reinforce what I said before about the game pushing the player toward specific choices, and a specific point of view.

Anyway, I haven’t finished this stuff yet, but I don’t intend to do another blog post about it (unless it does something really surprising). Expect the next few posts to be about other stuff I played during the summer but didn’t get around to documenting.

This is just to say: I intend to resume posting to The Stack on November 1. I say this in the hope that making this intention public will help me to go through with it.

In 1989, Konami released an arcade game based on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise. Everything about it was tailored to the source material. In the cartoon, there are four ninja turtles, who usually fight together as a team, so it was a four-player co-op game, even though this required a larger-than-standard cabinet. The turtles frequently fight their way through masses of faceless goons, so it was a scrolling brawler. Each of the turtles carries a different weapon, and this is reflected in differences in how the characters handle in the game. (I favored Donatello, whose bo staff gave him the longest reach, but I know people who preferred the speed of Raphael’s sai.)

The TMNT game was a hit, so of course they decided to apply its formula to other franchises. The 1992 X-Men is essentially TMNT with a coat of paint, and it too is remembered fondly, but the format designed for mutant turtles doesn’t fit mutant humans as neatly. There are a lot more than four X-Men — even in the game, where Konami could have just picked out four of them for us, they apparently couldn’t narrow it down to any less than six, only four of whom can be active at a time (plus a couple mainstays who appear in cutscenes but aren’t playable). And the six they chose were chosen more for recognizability than for fitting well into a brawler. The turtles had their slight differences, but they were all still fundamentally ninjas. The characters chosen for the X-Men game vary wildly in their abilities, but the constraints of the format require that Dazzler’s hand-to-hand combat ability is approximately on par with that of Colossus and Wolverine, and that Cyclops’ main power, his eye beam, is treated as a special action with a limited number of uses, rather than something that would be active all the time if he didn’t have special headgear to suppress it.

But perhaps we were more prepared to accept such concessions to format because of what had happened in between TMNT and X-Men: Konami’s 1991 four-player brawler adaptation of The Simpsons. This is an IP that doesn’t fit the format at all. It makes about as much sense as basing a brawler on pease porridge. But the fact that it doesn’t make sense is why it makes sense. The absurdity of the idea perfectly suits the source material’s sense of humor. In the show, Springfield’s arcade featured games based on such unlikely things as Doogie Howser and My Dinner with Andre. The Simpsons arcade game isn’t just an arcade game based on The Simpsons, it’s an arcade game that fits the sensibilities of the Simpsons world. So what I’m postulating is that the large but appropriate inappropriateness of the Simpson arcade game paved the way for the many smaller but less appropriate inappropriatenesses of X-Men.