An angry blog post about Bit.Trip Runner
I'd heard lots of good things about the Bit Trip series from multiple sources, and the trailers always seemed neat and interesting. Then I read a forum post on the series, and I figured I'd give one game a shot - the trailer for Runner seemed most interesting, it had good music, it showed Canabalt style gameplay (which I love) and I do like Anamanaguchi. So one Wii system update and 800 wii points later, there I was.
I have to say - I have never before seen a game come so close to perfection and fail so violently.
The game is absurdly hard and absurdly punishing.
The game has a number of other flaws, but they could be forgiven if the game wasn't so goddamned difficult and unforgiving. This is ostensibly a game about flow and visual spectacle, so why the hell does the game make me start over the same three minutes of gameplay every single time I make a mistake? Humans make mistake - why the hell do I stop having fun every time I make one?
Now - let me make something clear. I like difficulty. I beat Demon's Souls seven times. I've beaten every game Matt Thorson has ever released. Hell, I made a game that's a serious contender for "most difficult game in the universe" (seriously). I've been playing games for over 20 years now. I have literally made a career out of video games. If the game is too hard for me, how hard is it for the average person?
Virtually every flaw in the game could be fixed with one simple change: Making a mistake removes all your gold things, and if you make a mistake without any gold things you go back to the start of the level. It's simple, it's easy to understand, it's elegant, it makes those gold things actually relevant to gameplay and it's even a Sonic reference in a game that's trying be retro. And this single change would make every other flaw of the game absolutely disappear.
That's because every single flaw in the game just serves to compound this horrible difficulty. For a game that attempts to be retro, it seems the level designer hasn't played a single good 2D platformer. In this game, there are gold powerups (which do nothing). But, they're shiny, so most players are going to instinctively try to grab them. And yet every other gold thing is placed explicitly to trip you up.
The worst part in that sentence is "every other", by the way. Every single good platformer, starting with Super Mario Bros, is going to use powerups to guide you along a level and tell you where to jump. Bananas in DKC tell you where to jump. Sirlin has an entire article on this, about the philosophy of banana placement. And yet in this game trying to grab the gold powerup will kill you. You know what other kind of game places powerups in counterintuitive locations to annoy the player? ROMHACKS.
This isn't always the case - sometimes the gold things are placed in spots where you get them naturally, they're placed to indicate "jump here" and they make beautiful musical sequences when everything goes right - and suddenly you're having an incredible experience. It's suddenly fun - it's absolutely beautiful. You're running at high speeds, meeting every obstacle with the proper response, the music is matching your every action, your body is dancing with the beat. You jump to grab another gold thing - and that gold thing was placed so that you couldn't catch the next jump pad in time. You're fucked. Stop having fun, and start the last three minutes over. Do it, bitch.
And the exact same thing will happen over and over, because you know what? You start the level over, which is three minutes long. And at the end of the three minutes (which will probably take more like 8-10 if you haven't completely memorized the entire level) you'll have forgotten all about the dick move that killed you last time. So you'll get screwed over again. And you'll want to throw the wiimote at the screen again.
I don't think there's anything quite as jarring as getting into the groove of things and then getting hit. It's painfully obvious they were going for flow, so why would they do this?
Why does everything in this game try to break flow? The end of level segments (which have asked me my initials about 50 different times now) do nothing other than break flow. I don't care about this arbitrary huge number, and my initials haven't changed since the last time you asked. The bonus levels are the worst offender - my reward for playing perfectly and grabbing every single gold thing feels like a punishment. Seriously; my reward, in a game that's about visual spectacle and great music is playing the same game but with static instead of music and atari graphics instead of quirky mock-retro graphics. Yes, I may have owned an atari at some point - that doesn't make the pitfall graphics interesting, and that certainly doesn't make them appropriate as a reward. I don't think I've ever managed to beat one of the bonus levels, and after a while every time I got into a bonus level I would just kill myself on the first obstacle just to get back to the main game. That's not how you do rewards.
Speaking of rewards - why the hell is there no reward for beating a boss? Seriously, the boss of the first world is dick move after dick move, and there's no ceremony when I beat him? Where are the colorful explosions? The celebratory fanfare? The overblown cutscene of me flying around in space? Why do I just get dumped to the next world?
Ah yes. World 2. If you thought world 1 had dick moves, wait till you see this. There are two obstacles in this level - one of them requires you to duck, the other one requires you to jump. Both of them are identically sized cubes. Both of them bounce in exactly the same way. They are indistinguishable, but one of them is brown and the other is orange. WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA? Does TF2 have the brown team fight the orange team?
That's not it, either. The background of world 2 is entirely filled with moving objects, most of which are either orange, red or brown. I'm not kidding. It gets better - the background is completely orange, and the powerups you have to touch to make the music play (the only thing that makes the this game interesting in the first place) are orange. I cannot count the number of times I have missed one of those because I just didn't see it. Oh yeah, and this world also has red fireballs which either hover 1 inch above the ground (you jump) or 2 inches above the ground (you duck).
Does no one get that when you're running at 70 mph and making split second decisions every split-second, it becomes important to quickly be able to identify things? Most obstacles are indistinguishable from background elements and encountering a new one will always kill you the first time. Things like shaking mine-lamps, weights-on-a-chain and brown stalactites that don't look the slightest bit dangerous, but are always glad to send you back to the start of the level. Which artist thought it was a good idea to put a dark brown background in a game where the main character is completely black?
And there's a particular bit of of dickery which I find just unforgiving: out of nowhere, a small orange squares flies out of the sky - not out of the spot where you're used to look at, but in a completely different spot - and hits your character square in the nuts. And you start over. Every single obstacle in the game appears in the same spot - ground level in front of you. This one - appears in the sky, a spot you never look at. This thing appears ABOVE you - every obstacle that appears above you is one you have to duck under. This one you need to jump over. Every obstacle in the game will be on the screen for about a second before it can hit you. This one will kill you about 400 milliseconds after giving you a warning. A human needs at the bare minimum 300 milliseconds to react. Anyone without excellent reflexes will literally be unable to play this game.
That's not even the worst part about this nutshot. Most obstacle types are introduced at the start of the level, then used frequently after that. This thing appears in the middle of one level, is completely absent from the next, then shows up halfway through the next level when you've completely forgotten about it. It will kill you over and over until you've memorized the whole level.
Canabalt is fun because you never know what's coming next. It keeps you on your toes, and it's constantly interesting to see what the game will throw at you next. There is nothing less fun in this game than to replay the same portion of a level over and over - it's rote memorization, it's boring as hell and the game forces you to do it.
Oh, did you bump into that ledge? Stop having fun right now. Did you try to catch that gold brick? Punch yourself in the face. Did you not see that orange square on that orange background? Throw your Wiimote into the screen..
This game is some sort of metaphor for abusive relationships. It starts out good and constantly gives you glimpses of utter perfection, but if you start having fun for more than 20 seconds it kicks you in the teeth.
God, I had to get all that out of my system. This is just a fraction of the anger this game causes in me - it comes so unbelievably close to being incredible, and given a single day with the game's source code I could turn into a game I'd want to play every day. Instead it just makes me post angry walls of text on the internet.
tl;dr; I hate this game because it's too hard, and if it was less hard it would be the best game ever.
EDIT: And one more thing, you know those bouncy platforms in world 2 that the game teaches you to jump on over and over? Once they've cemented that knowledge and you're trying to jump on every bouncy platform, they have a bouncy platform that bounces you into a deathtrap. You cannot see the deathtrap before jumping onto the platform. This dick move is placed right before the end of the level. They repeat the exact same dick move at the end of the next level. I swear to god they're doing this deliberately.
I have to say - I have never before seen a game come so close to perfection and fail so violently.
The game is absurdly hard and absurdly punishing.
The game has a number of other flaws, but they could be forgiven if the game wasn't so goddamned difficult and unforgiving. This is ostensibly a game about flow and visual spectacle, so why the hell does the game make me start over the same three minutes of gameplay every single time I make a mistake? Humans make mistake - why the hell do I stop having fun every time I make one?
Now - let me make something clear. I like difficulty. I beat Demon's Souls seven times. I've beaten every game Matt Thorson has ever released. Hell, I made a game that's a serious contender for "most difficult game in the universe" (seriously). I've been playing games for over 20 years now. I have literally made a career out of video games. If the game is too hard for me, how hard is it for the average person?
Virtually every flaw in the game could be fixed with one simple change: Making a mistake removes all your gold things, and if you make a mistake without any gold things you go back to the start of the level. It's simple, it's easy to understand, it's elegant, it makes those gold things actually relevant to gameplay and it's even a Sonic reference in a game that's trying be retro. And this single change would make every other flaw of the game absolutely disappear.
That's because every single flaw in the game just serves to compound this horrible difficulty. For a game that attempts to be retro, it seems the level designer hasn't played a single good 2D platformer. In this game, there are gold powerups (which do nothing). But, they're shiny, so most players are going to instinctively try to grab them. And yet every other gold thing is placed explicitly to trip you up.
The worst part in that sentence is "every other", by the way. Every single good platformer, starting with Super Mario Bros, is going to use powerups to guide you along a level and tell you where to jump. Bananas in DKC tell you where to jump. Sirlin has an entire article on this, about the philosophy of banana placement. And yet in this game trying to grab the gold powerup will kill you. You know what other kind of game places powerups in counterintuitive locations to annoy the player? ROMHACKS.
This isn't always the case - sometimes the gold things are placed in spots where you get them naturally, they're placed to indicate "jump here" and they make beautiful musical sequences when everything goes right - and suddenly you're having an incredible experience. It's suddenly fun - it's absolutely beautiful. You're running at high speeds, meeting every obstacle with the proper response, the music is matching your every action, your body is dancing with the beat. You jump to grab another gold thing - and that gold thing was placed so that you couldn't catch the next jump pad in time. You're fucked. Stop having fun, and start the last three minutes over. Do it, bitch.
And the exact same thing will happen over and over, because you know what? You start the level over, which is three minutes long. And at the end of the three minutes (which will probably take more like 8-10 if you haven't completely memorized the entire level) you'll have forgotten all about the dick move that killed you last time. So you'll get screwed over again. And you'll want to throw the wiimote at the screen again.
I don't think there's anything quite as jarring as getting into the groove of things and then getting hit. It's painfully obvious they were going for flow, so why would they do this?
Why does everything in this game try to break flow? The end of level segments (which have asked me my initials about 50 different times now) do nothing other than break flow. I don't care about this arbitrary huge number, and my initials haven't changed since the last time you asked. The bonus levels are the worst offender - my reward for playing perfectly and grabbing every single gold thing feels like a punishment. Seriously; my reward, in a game that's about visual spectacle and great music is playing the same game but with static instead of music and atari graphics instead of quirky mock-retro graphics. Yes, I may have owned an atari at some point - that doesn't make the pitfall graphics interesting, and that certainly doesn't make them appropriate as a reward. I don't think I've ever managed to beat one of the bonus levels, and after a while every time I got into a bonus level I would just kill myself on the first obstacle just to get back to the main game. That's not how you do rewards.
Speaking of rewards - why the hell is there no reward for beating a boss? Seriously, the boss of the first world is dick move after dick move, and there's no ceremony when I beat him? Where are the colorful explosions? The celebratory fanfare? The overblown cutscene of me flying around in space? Why do I just get dumped to the next world?
Ah yes. World 2. If you thought world 1 had dick moves, wait till you see this. There are two obstacles in this level - one of them requires you to duck, the other one requires you to jump. Both of them are identically sized cubes. Both of them bounce in exactly the same way. They are indistinguishable, but one of them is brown and the other is orange. WHO THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA? Does TF2 have the brown team fight the orange team?
That's not it, either. The background of world 2 is entirely filled with moving objects, most of which are either orange, red or brown. I'm not kidding. It gets better - the background is completely orange, and the powerups you have to touch to make the music play (the only thing that makes the this game interesting in the first place) are orange. I cannot count the number of times I have missed one of those because I just didn't see it. Oh yeah, and this world also has red fireballs which either hover 1 inch above the ground (you jump) or 2 inches above the ground (you duck).
Does no one get that when you're running at 70 mph and making split second decisions every split-second, it becomes important to quickly be able to identify things? Most obstacles are indistinguishable from background elements and encountering a new one will always kill you the first time. Things like shaking mine-lamps, weights-on-a-chain and brown stalactites that don't look the slightest bit dangerous, but are always glad to send you back to the start of the level. Which artist thought it was a good idea to put a dark brown background in a game where the main character is completely black?
And there's a particular bit of of dickery which I find just unforgiving: out of nowhere, a small orange squares flies out of the sky - not out of the spot where you're used to look at, but in a completely different spot - and hits your character square in the nuts. And you start over. Every single obstacle in the game appears in the same spot - ground level in front of you. This one - appears in the sky, a spot you never look at. This thing appears ABOVE you - every obstacle that appears above you is one you have to duck under. This one you need to jump over. Every obstacle in the game will be on the screen for about a second before it can hit you. This one will kill you about 400 milliseconds after giving you a warning. A human needs at the bare minimum 300 milliseconds to react. Anyone without excellent reflexes will literally be unable to play this game.
That's not even the worst part about this nutshot. Most obstacle types are introduced at the start of the level, then used frequently after that. This thing appears in the middle of one level, is completely absent from the next, then shows up halfway through the next level when you've completely forgotten about it. It will kill you over and over until you've memorized the whole level.
Canabalt is fun because you never know what's coming next. It keeps you on your toes, and it's constantly interesting to see what the game will throw at you next. There is nothing less fun in this game than to replay the same portion of a level over and over - it's rote memorization, it's boring as hell and the game forces you to do it.
Oh, did you bump into that ledge? Stop having fun right now. Did you try to catch that gold brick? Punch yourself in the face. Did you not see that orange square on that orange background? Throw your Wiimote into the screen..
This game is some sort of metaphor for abusive relationships. It starts out good and constantly gives you glimpses of utter perfection, but if you start having fun for more than 20 seconds it kicks you in the teeth.
God, I had to get all that out of my system. This is just a fraction of the anger this game causes in me - it comes so unbelievably close to being incredible, and given a single day with the game's source code I could turn into a game I'd want to play every day. Instead it just makes me post angry walls of text on the internet.
tl;dr; I hate this game because it's too hard, and if it was less hard it would be the best game ever.
EDIT: And one more thing, you know those bouncy platforms in world 2 that the game teaches you to jump on over and over? Once they've cemented that knowledge and you're trying to jump on every bouncy platform, they have a bouncy platform that bounces you into a deathtrap. You cannot see the deathtrap before jumping onto the platform. This dick move is placed right before the end of the level. They repeat the exact same dick move at the end of the next level. I swear to god they're doing this deliberately.
Nagna Zul fucked around
Holy fuckballs! Your post summed up EXACTLY what I thought of this game. Bit.Trip.Beat was tons of fun, hard at places, but it didn't make you start at the beginning when you screwed up. This game should be renamed to: Rage.Trip.Runner. It has some serious potential, but I want to kill puppies when I make a basic error during a level and have to restart at the beginning.
ReplyDeleteCompletely agree. I love the concept, it can get really fun, but I think I'll just dump it because I'm tired of replaying the same level 40 times (half of them because I'm doing the same chunk half asleep because I got bored of it).
ReplyDelete