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The Great Flappy Bird Flap of 2014 (A Memorial)

February 10, 2014September 2, 2022 Michael Barnes 2 Comments

My son River (four) has this thing that he does where he will sneak into our bedroom in the morning and steal my iPhone. Usually he’ll play Lego Star Wars or one of the awesome Rayman runners I keep on it- he has good taste in games. Last week, I woke up and I heard him in his room laughing and his sister, Scarlett (two) was in there giggling as well. I had no idea what was going on. So I crept down the hall to spy on them and they were both watching the phone, River tapping it furiously. Then I heard a familiar punching sound and I knew what was up.

They were playing Flappy Bird.

Like most of the world, I downloaded it out of curiosity to see what the deal was with this weirdly popular, out-of-nowhere sensation that was earning its creator $50,000 a day in ad revenue until he pulled the game from the App Store over the weekend. I thought it was goofy and kind of dumb, but not without an odd charm mostly owing to its ridiculous difficulty and notably Mario-like graphics. I meant to delete it.

But I’m glad I didn’t, because my kids were playing together and having a ball with it. I sat down and played with them. We all took turns. I’d get the phone and say “alright, this time I’m gonna do it” and then crash out on the first set of pipes. We’d laugh. Then Scarlett would take the phone and do the same thing. River would clear one, and it was like a small miracle. They loved that you get a Wreck-it-Ralph style Hero Medal (with no actual value) for setting a record. I tried to be awesome dad, getting through 11, 12, 13 and finally 14 of the pipes. They were impressed. But there’s no way to do that consistently, regardless of your skill level.

It’s a “thing” for us now. When we have a minute or two, I’ll pull out the phone and we’ll pass it around, crashing and laughing about it. Every now and then, completely at random, River will say “Daddy, that Flappy Bird is too hard!” I can just imagine that in his mind he’s trying to reason out why he actually does pretty well with Lego Star Wars but can’t work out how to get that stupid bird through a a gap between some pipes that he probably recognizes from Super Mario Bros.

What can I say? We had un and are having fun with a game that has confused, angered and mystified everyone from the mainstream media to hardcore gamers. I have more fun playing this silly, frankly crappy game with my kids than I did playing just about any multimillion dollar AAA game made in the last year. I think I’ve played it longer than I had either Killzone 4 or Assassin’s Creed 4 in my PS4. My kids do not care about the politics of it being ad supported or the maybe-maybe not appropriation of Nintendo-branded sprites. They aren’t worried if the game demonstrated some kind of “dumbing down” of video games. They do not see it as a general barometer of how terrible and shallow mobile games can be. They do not view the game as another catastrophe in the casualocalypse that is supposedly destroying video games.

And you know, ultimately, I don’t either. Because we had fun playing a video game. It did exactly what a video game is supposed to do, regardless of quality, intent or depth. It entertained us. It didn’t try to make some grandly juvenile statement about The Way Things Are In America. Flappy Bird did not have a girl pack mule to escort in an attempt to show how not sexist the game is. There’s no DLC, IAPs or DRM. I was never called a “faggot” over a voice com every time I hit a pipe. Other than the ads, Flappy Bird might just have been a return to the kind of pure no-bullshit video gaming my generation grew up on- even if by accident rather than design.

Sure, Flappy Bird is a crude, single-mechanic game with no other goal than to see if you can get further than you did last time. It is punitive and intolerant of failure with a hard fail state. But you know, those qualities are perfectly in line with a lot of classic early video games. If it were 1981 and Flappy Birdd were housed in a cabinet festooned with gaudy artwork, there might have been a Bruckner and Garcia song about it.

Flappy Bird probably won’t be (and shouldn’t be) remembered as a classic like Pac-Man or Space Invaders but like those games, it will be remembered as a fad. It’s a very different cultural time, and that fad lasted for all of about a week and a half before it apparently fizzled out. Was Dong Nguyen, the game’s apparently reclusive creator, a marketing genius that got in and cashed out before the backlash? Or was he really just some guy that made this silly game that somehow went viral and went on to millions of downloads almost overnight?

I almost don’t want to know. I want it to remain this kind of strange anomaly. I want to think that Mr. Nguyen really did pull the game because he wanted to be left alone to spend his unexpected fortune. I’m sure that some of the big IOS development houses are already either offering him jobs or trying to sort out how to duplicate the success of this short-sell, flash-in-the-pan phenomenon. Good luck with that, suits.

So Flappy Bird is gone after an 11th hour update that randomly changes Flappy Bird’s color and makes it night time over the mysterious city in the background. You can’t download the game anymore. It looks like there are already a horde of other Flappy games emerging on the App Store- and into the charts. You can already go on eBay and buy a phone from somebody for $650 with Flappy Bird installed on it. It’s obnoxious and absurd. But the whole Flappy Bird thing has been. That said, it’s made for a hell of a lot more interesting news then some corporate marketing bullshit like a “reveal” or trailer announcement masquerading as a video game news story.

Whether you hate the game, love it or are just bewildered by its success it doesn’t matter. I don’t really care about what it “means” for gaming and sensible people shouldn’t either. My kids love it, I play it with them and we laugh about it. It doesn’t really “mean” anything, don’t overthink it. That’s really all there is to understand about the Great Flappy Bird Flap of 2014.

Card Hunter First Impressions

September 12, 2013July 22, 2020 Matt Thrower 3 Comments

I don’t like grinding. Okay, so when it’s combined with epic detail and rich narrative, like in Skyrim, or with ball-breaking skill, like in Dark Souls, it can add a fantastically fun and addictive element to a game. What I hate are games based around grinding for it’s own sake, the endless repetition of kill monster, upgrade gear, kill tougher monster in the service of nothing more than pressing psychological buttons. The Diablo series is probably the worst offender, but so are endless cheap and free-to-play role playing games.

Card Hunter falls into that category. A free-to-play browser based flash game, with inevitable in-app purchases, it challenges you to assemble a team of three characters from the classic warrior, wizard, cleric archetype and send them into various brief encounters with enemies in search of loot. So I should hate it. I want to hate it. But I can’t. In fact it’s one of the most horribly addictive games I’ve played in ages.

In spite of its crack-like qualities, I’ve only played the preview version for a couple of hours, for reasons we’ll return to later. So this isn’t really a proper review. By the time you read this you’ll be able to check out the real live version for yourself: and you should do so.

There are two reasons why Card Hunter succeeds where so many other games of its ilk manage to be nothing more than dryly repetitive and tedious. The first is the infectious glee it takes in re-creating the feel of everyone’s first encounter with Dungeons & Dragons. Everything is charmingly steeped in sentimentality, from the fonts used mimicking those in 1st edition AD&D adventure modules, to the inexperienced and enthusiastic dungeon master who serves as your narrator. It doesn’t so much hit the nostalgia buttons, as crush them with a sledgehammer, and it’s wonderful.

But the second secret is there’s actually a decent game engine underneath the presentation. Each character has slots for certain types of equipment, and they gain more as they level up. Each piece of equipment that you loot or buy comes with a selection of cards, and the cards of each item an adventurer has equipped makes up their draw deck. Most of the game takes place on small tactical maps where you play move and attack cards to try and outmaneuver and kill the monsters.

Armour gives you defensive cards which you don’t play, but which take up space in your hand and sometimes absorb damage based on a dice roll. I didn’t come across a very wide range of different effects during my brief time with the game, but throw in different terrain types and there’s just enough to make each encounter something you have to stop and think about if you want to succeed, rather than mindlessly wade in with wands and weapons.

But while there’s tactics, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of strategy. Specifically I was hoping for an experience a little more like the aged Magic: the Gathering PC game from Microprose where you had to carefully plan your deck overall and hunt down the cards you needed to complete it. But in my limited play time I didn’t see much in the way of synergies or complementary card effects to build a longer-term strategy around. Rather, it seems to come down to making sure your party is equipped appropriately for the sorts of monsters they’re likely to encounter.

Although that’s a little disappointing, and may harm the long-term appeal of the game, there’s still plenty to enjoy. It’s accessible, fresh and fun, a delightful contrast to so many lofty new releases with their grandiose goals. And the reason I only spent a couple of hours playing it? Because on launch, all progress on my preview account is going to be reset, and two hours was enough to convince me this was a game I was going to play a lot, and I couldn’t stand the thought of putting in the effort and starting over. There’s a multi-player mode too, so grab your gear, and I’ll see you on the dungeon floor.

Free to Die – Time with Ravenmark: Mercenaries

July 24, 2013September 1, 2022 Brandon Leave a comment

When it comes to turn based strategy games, I pretty much suck at them. There’s nothing new to report there. I’ve been sucking at strategy games ever since I first sidled up to a keyboard. Sure, I managed to get through all of Fire Emblem: Awakening but I played that on casual and turned permadeath off. Had I played that game on the default settings I’d still be at the first mission.

Despite my ineptitude at strategy games I gave Ravenmark: Mercenaries a spin. It’s free to play so all it cost me was some bandwidth and storage space and my thinking was that maybe it would be lenient enough for a strategy lightweight like me to master.

Yeah, not so. This game is a Strategy game with a capital S and while the monetization schemes may irk some, if you’re into turn based strategy, you really should check it out.

Free to play games can be dicey with the amount of content given away, but this game has a pretty good amount of starting stuff to get you rolling into battle and, if you’re like me, getting destroyed by human and AI opponents alike. The game allows you keep various regiments of up to four brigades each and bring up to two of those brigades into battle. When you start the game you have enough money from winning your tutorial missions to fill up at least two full regiments of brigades. Sure, they’re not the best brigades out there, but they can get you going and earning more money as well as field a nice selection of ranged, ground and mounted units.

From here you can choose to take on small missions that succeed or fail based on some computations you’re not privy to (in other words, no combat), you can partake in a border skirmish against the AI or you can tackle real live humans in asynchronous online battles. Unfortunately using a brigade for any of these activities means they’re out of commission until they cool down, or, in the case of online battles, while they’re sitting idle while your opponent plans their next turn. As a result, it’s in your best interest to have as many brigades as possible, one way in which the game gets some real live coin out of you.

While in battle, the amount of tactical options are staggering. Units can be teamed up in various formations, with those formations wheeled, flipped and broken up as needed for maximum efficiency. Units can be given standing orders to advance or stand their ground or pursue an enemy unit so that valuable action points don’t have to be spent micromanaging every unit on the field. In addition, heroes and commanders can give passive buffs and units can have special abilities to help bolster your ranks when the fighting gets thick. Add to this the rock-paper-scissors style of unit strengths and weaknesses as well as needing to be mindful of things like flanking and attacking from the rear and well, you can see why I did not fare well in my battles.

If it all seems overwhelming, the extremely extensive codex is there to help illuminate things if you can get past the sheer amount of content available. Seriously, this thing is daunting. A tremendous amount of time went into the world building for this game and I applaud a mobile game that takes the time to give the player this much insight into the world should they want to read it.

Along with paying for more brigades, you can also pay for better brigades, maybe with a hero or two to keep yourself from getting slaughtered. You’re also free to grind away for these brigades if you don’t like the idea of paying for your content, but it’s going to be a long haul if you decide to go this route based on how long it takes brigades to recharge. Me, I’m fine with that idea. They clearly put a lot of time and effort into this game and if I decide that I don’t want to pay for it, I shouldn’t expect to get everything the exact moment that I want it. You also get some ads when playing for nothing, but you can pay five bucks for the ads to go away and for some unique brigades and some customization options. The ads never bothered me if that’s any indication.

There’s no real story to speak of, if that’s your thing and I have no idea if one will pop up at some point, but there wasn’t a story in Summoner Wars either and there isn’t one in Ascension and I don’t care. Ravenmark: Mercenaries gives you plenty of bits and bobs to make your own epic tales of I Have Met the Enemy And He Is Very Good At Killing Me, and all for nothing more than some time and some data. I’d say it’s well worth it.

The Forest of Doom Review

July 12, 2013August 9, 2020 Matt Thrower 2 Comments

It’s one of the great ironies of modern gaming that the venerable format of paper gamebooks has made such a huge comeback on mobile devices. And riding the crest of this coolingly nostalgic wave is Tin Man Games. Authors may come and go, designers may build peculiar experimental magic systems into their apps, but the steady Tin Hand ensures a pleasing experience no matter what the content.

Their gamebook adventures engine improves with every release, making combat faster and the interface smoother. And I’ve always loved the eye for detail that goes in to their wonderful collections of achievements and book art, always with knowing winks to consumers of nerd minutiae hidden amongst the titles and the pictures.

Their latest game is a digitisation of hoary Fighting Fantasy title Forest of Doom, originally authored by Ian Livingstone in 1983, before he became officially omniscient in the world of gaming and the engine is as brilliant as usual. They’ve even added an auto-map function which is an absolutely joy, as I’ve always wanted to see a physical map of my path through a gamebook but am just too lazy, or maybe just too excited to keep turning the pages, to bother.

But sad to say that whatever mechanical innovations it provides, this latest jaunt into Fighting Fantasy land isn’t up to the quality of their other recent releases. It’s not the fault of the developer, but, bizarrely, that of the author. When signing the franchise rights over to Tin Man, he insisted this be one of the early releases. This is somewhat inexplicable, since it’s one of the weakest in the original run.

Forest of Doom is a no-holds-barred trip down into the worst excesses of 80’s adventuring. The overarching plot, which involves collecting pieces of a magical hammer to save a Dwarfish kingdom, is right out of fantasy boilerplates 101. The forest itself is just series of sequential encounters with mythical creatures with little to string them together into a meaningful whole, and few clues toward making good choices in the decisions you’re offered.

I have to admit that a part of me did enjoy this return to straightforward adventuring, written before the days when every monster needed a motivation and every dungeon a scientifically plausible ecosystem. But it wears thin with time. Especially when you discover that the book has an utterly nonsensical looping structure should you make it through the forest without collecting all the items you need.

And that map, that wonderful auto-map that so excited me when I first began to explore the forest, ends up inadvertently adding to the woe. Because the best I can tell the book never allows you to turn south. So if you make a wrong turning and miss a location you know you need, you can’t go back to find it. The map taunts you with its prescience, showing the desired location in all its glory, but the text just won’t let you get there.

I think I’m right in saying that the original Forest of Doom was the very first Fighting Fantasy book I ever played. If so, I would have been nine at the time, which makes me thankful I wasn’t old enough to care about its literary shortcomings and went on to enjoy many other books in the series. But my modern day experience chimes with my recollection: I don’t remember it being as good as most of its peers with their imaginative settings and cunning puzzles.

I also remember it being easy, but that’s clearly something I made up. Or, more likely, without puzzles to stand in the way I just cheated my way through the whole thing. But the book does have a reputation amongst series fans for being relatively straightforward, so Tin Man have packed the hardest difficulty mode with a welcome tougher ending. At least it’s welcome until you actually try to get through it. My word; but it’s certainly a fun addition.

It’s a testament to the brilliance of Tin Man’s engine that I got engaged enough by the book to bother trying again on the hardest setting once I’d seen it through on an easier one. They’ve made the experience entertaining in spite of the weak book beneath it. But this is one for genre fans only: most gamers would be better off picking up their frankly superb conversions of Blood of the Zombies or Trial of the Clone, or their cracking in-house commissioned Assassin in Orlandes. And if you’ve not tried a Tin Man gamebook before, you really should do just that.

Cracked LCD- IOS Review Rodeo- Agricola, Immortal Heroes, Magic ’14, Rivals for Catan

July 4, 2013September 1, 2022 Michael Barnes 5 Comments

There’s been a couple of high profile IOS board games not called Warhammer Quest released recently and I thought it would be a good time to resurrect the ol’ Review Rodeo for another roundup.

First up is the biggest and best of the lot- Playdek’s long-awaited Agricola app brings Uwe Rosenberg’s widely beloved- and really quite complex- tabletop farming game to IOS devices. Playdek’s tradition of high quality ports with top notch UI (witness Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer, for example) is evidenced once again and although there’s a lot of hidden information and multiple screens involved in storing all of the information that would be available at an eyeball glance of the table, it’s really kind of amazing how smoothly the game plays once you get accustomed to how it’s presented. It plays just fine on the iPhone, surprisingly, but the iPad is definitely the way to go.

The really neat thing about Agricola in terms of bringing over its high-end Euro gameplay to a tablet is that the game’s heart and soul shine through, and not just in the charming animations of the game board. Contrary to popular belief, Agricola is one of the most thematic and narrative of the post-Princes of Florence style games in that genre. There’s a very concrete sense of what you’re doing in the game. It makes sense that you send family members out to perform certain tasks (in other words, worker placement) and processes like the procuring of seed to plow in sowed fields to bake bread in an oven with remaining crops seeding the fields next season creates a very clear storyline with quite a lot of detail. You’ll build rooms onto your house to accommodate a growing family, build pens and stables for livestock, get jobs, and worry about having enough food to go around in the winter.

It’s not quite as complex as something like Le Havre but new players will definitely need a break-in period in games versus reasonably competent AI and a solitaire challenge game before taking the game online. I’ve found the game immensely playable and enjoyable at a level the board game never was, and I think even folks that dig games like Farmville might appreciate what Agricola has to offer. This game- like Eclipse- is a perfect example of the potential of IOS board gaming to really leverage the platform’s strengths for a very high quality, top-of-the-line experience that doesn’t necessarily replace the tabletop experience but makes for a great video game.

Second up is another Playdek release, the new Ascension expansion Immortal Heroes. Followers of this outstanding deckbuilding app will be pleased to hear that the new $2.99 add-on offers some interesting new mechanics that shake up the base game and previous expansions while also offering a new two-player experience with just the new cards. The main addition to the game is a new Soul Gem mechanic, wherein certain cards, abilities, trophy effects, and so forth allow the player to draw a card from the Soul Gem deck. These cards are “ghost” versions of core cards but the catch is that they’re one-shot deals. They give you their effect or resources for that turn, and they vanish.

Since the card pool with all three expansions (and promo bundles) is so big, it’s hard to see how they effect overall strategy in the “complete” game. But played as an individual set, you can really see how deciding when to spend a trophy monster to get a soul gem- and possible that one extra resource you need- adds a new strategic layer. There are also new trophy monsters that have ongoing effects, like one that gives you a soul gem every turn. You really, really want to kill this guy and take him if he shows up in your game.

It’s a great add-on to an already great game. I thought I had burned out on Ascension after Storm of Souls, considering that I played more Ascension in 2012 than I did any other game I own. But the new set is definitely worth reloading the App and diving back into it. I had some issues with Playdek’s new multiplayer sign-up, it took me a couple of days to get an email confirmation and none of my friends are showing up. But I’m in the hunt for online games again, regardless of the setback.

magic

Unfortunately, however, Immortal Heroes is releasing the same time as Magic: Duels of the Planewalkers 2014. Magic 2014 is kind of the nuclear bomb of IOS card game apps. Why? Because it’s Magic, you doofus. Like, the best card game ever made, duh.

The app, which is also available on pretty much every other platform apart from Wii U and Ouya, follows on from previous DOTP releases for better or worse. I’m still not satisfied with the speed, which I find to be slow, and I get awfully tired of watching these card float around. There are also some lingering UI issues, like the incredibly stupid decision to put the “skip combat” button the same place that the “attack with selected creatures” button appears. And it’s still not the full, freewheeling deckbuilding experience that everybody in the world wants.

But the kicker is that M14 has sealed play, and it rules. You start with a pile of virtual boosters and you actually get to open them. This may sound really stupid for folks that have never gotten into a CCG, but even just watching the cards spread out on the iPad so I can see what I got recaptures some of that fun from cracking boosters. From your initial set, you build a deck and add lands. The game kindly tells you if your deck is weak, average, strong, or awesome based on creature and land counts among other criteria. I don’t know about everybody else, but I can’t stand to go forth with anything ranked less than awesome. If you can’t build a decent deck, you can have the game make one for you.

From there, you progress through a short ladder battling AI sealed deck players and unlocking extra boosters. You can take your deck online and play against friends over Game Center with chat, which pretty much rules. If that doesn’t satisfy your “I want to play Magic but never buy another booster pack again” desires, there are also theme deck campaigns, Two-Headed Giant modes, puzzle challenges, and more.

The only catch to the whole deal is that you only get two sealed deck slots and once you play through the campaign you’re locked into the cards for that slot that you pulled from boosters. If you want more slots, they’re $1.99 each. I never buy these kinds of add-ons, but I bought two more slots for sealed play just because I liked going through the ladder and working out decks so much. The app is actually a free download with a $9.99 unlock. It is well, well worth it. There is simply no better card game to be had on IOS, and this is the best edition of it so far regardless of legacy issues and the fact that it does not include every single card of all time and completely freeform deckbuilding.

Now, let’s shift from the greatest card game of all time to the card game version of one of the greatest board games of all time. Rivals for Catan is the new IOS edition of what used to be called the Settlers of Catan Card Game. The Settlers card game was initially designed by Klaus Teuber to be a way for two people to play Settlers, but rather than just repeat the core design as a two player variant it’s actually a more complex and completely different card game that only shares the resource mechanics- and features a hell of a lot more cardplay and more potential for aggressive play well beyond moving the robber.

Both players lay out a tableau with two initial settlements, a road between them, and six resource cards. Just like in the board game, you roll two dice but one is to determine which resource cards tap and add supply and the other is an event die that corresponds to a couple of game functions including some basic majorities/superiorities along a couple of rankings such as Strength and Commerce. Using card drawn from multiple stacks (a kind of weird but compelling concept), the idea is to build your way to a set number of victory points while trading, improving efficiencies, and doing awful things like burning down abbeys.

The game is actually pretty great, and I love that they included some of the most important material from the game’s many small expansions. The AI is decent and will put up a good fight, and I’m very pleased to be able to play this game again since it’s one of those that has sat on my shelf for years with no one expressing interest in a F2F game.

The app, on the other hand, is not so great. It’s a good example of sloppy implementation, and not just in terms of silly things like the game stating that someone is “paying” a card. It’s a kludgy interface that relies far too much on tapping checkmarks to advance the game and I can not for the life of me explain why it tells me that it’s the other player’s turn when they’re getting resources for rolls on my turn. It feels slow, particularly after playing full games of Agricola in half the time it takes to play one game of Rivals of Catan. Speed is of the essence with IOS games, as far as I’m concerned.

The biggest blunder, however, is the lack of async multiplayer. This is such a tragic mistake because it would play better async than in real time over Game Center. I’m not as inclined to play games with a lot of back-and-forth action like Magic asynchronously, but the longer turns of something like Rivals of Catan make it much better suited for it. The pass and play option is there for those so inclined. I’m not very inclined, if I’m going to play the game with someone in the same room then we’re going to break out the cards. Simple as that.