NES Replay: Arkista's Ring

Have you ever played a game where it feels like everything should fit together, but never quite does? As you're playing it, you say, "I should like this. Everything about it is objectively OK, but I don't like it at all and can't exactly put my finger on why."

That's how I felt while playing Arkista's Ring. The controls in Arkista's Ring are solid. The music is passable, and the graphics are clean. So why does it leave me so cold?

Arkista's Ring is an overhead action-puzzle game in the same vein of Legend of Zelda. You play as a warrior woman who wields a bow and arrow. You must fight against hordes of monsters and make your way to pick up the titular ring of Arkista that you can use to save the world or something. Along the way you pick up different tools that can improve your armor and health and help you lay waste to your enemies.

Unlike Legend of Zelda, there is no overworld in Arkista's Ring. Instead, it's divided into a bunch of discrete levels. Each level is similar: Navigate a simple labyrinth while killing enemies. Once you reach a certain amount of enemies that you've killed, a key will appear. Pick up the key and find the door to get you to the next level.

There are two things that Arkista's Ring tries to do: Action and puzzles. Neither of them are very good. Let's look at the action first of all.

When you kill an enemy, there's a good chance that it'll drop a goodie bag. Inside those bags, you can find various consumable magic wands and health restoring potions. Some of these wands are almost game-breaking. For example, one of the wands kills all the enemies on the screen. That's fine if you get these wands every once in a great while, but they're constantly throwing these at the player. At one point in the early going, my inventory was full of magic wands that I had no use for.

Once the game gets harder, you start needing to lean on the wands, but that makes everything almost too easy. For example, why bother fighting the scary vampire in the middle of the room? Why not instead use a fireball-shooting wand and pelt him to death from across the level?

OK, so what what about the puzzles?

Here's a real example of a puzzle: You fight a couple of baddies at the bottom of the screen. You see more enemies on the top of the screen, but you're separated from them by a row of trees. One of the trees looks a little different than the others. You walk up and touch the tree and it disappears, giving you access to the top of the level.

That's the puzzle, folks.

So many of the "puzzles" are so brain-dead that they won't even slow you down. Compare that to The Legend of Zelda, where some of the puzzles actually make you think about what you're doing. What a concept!

One other major gripe: There's no level flow whatsoever. For example, the first part of the game starts out in a bombed-out village, then moves to a cave. After that, the levels change constantly: You're in a cave, then you're outdoors, then in a fortress, then outdoors, then in a cave, then a castle. There's no rhyme or reason to it. The levels don't feel like part of a whole, but rather distinct areas with no relation between them. It makes Arkista's Ring feel less like an epic quest and more like a series of places that you just sort of go to.

That's a big problem for a game of this type. An action game needs to have some sort of stakes involved, like, "If you don't win, this really bad thing will happen." Think of all the great action games of the NES era: If you don't get to the end of Super Mario Bros., the princess stays with Bowser. If you don't finish Zelda, Ganon wins and destroys Hyrule. If you don't finish Mega Man, Dr. Wily destroys the world with his robots.

This is accomplished almost entirely by level flow. While the instruction manual might tell you the motivation, the levels are what propel you through the game proper. Everything in the game is supposed to move you toward a final confrontation, so when you finally reach that point, all that you have learned and experienced prepares you for that moment.

I'm sure there's a plot behind Arkista's Ring, but you would be hard-pressed to find it in the game itself. Within the game, you instead feel like an aggressor who's killing a bunch of creatures at random and hoping to move on. Some of them aren't even trying to attack you, just standing there and minding their own business when you brutally murder them.

With better level flow, this feeling could have been avoided. The first levels could sttill have taken place in a bombed-out village, but then it could have diverged from there. You could have moved through the village and reached the elder's house. Inside the elder's house, you could have fought a vampire. Then, in the house, you find a cave. Go through the cave, reach a mountain. Climb the mountain, reach the clouds. Navigate the clouds, find a tunnel. Take the tunnel, go into a volcano. Meet the boss. Boom.

That's level flow. Instead of having that flow, Arkista's Ring feels like, "A bunch of stuff happened, and now the game is over. Congratulations! Or something."

I will say that Arkista's Ring excels in one area: In stark contrast to the stingy games of the time, Arkista's Ring gives the player three lives and ten continues. That's pretty cool. Everything else needs work.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Asterix

Review: Starseed Pilgrim

Remember seeing a magic trick when you were a kid? The first time you saw a magician saw a lady in half, you were shocked. Then, when he put her back together, you were stunned. You wondered in amazement, “How did he do that?”

Then, someone showed you how the trick worked. They showed you that there are two boxes, and the lady bunches herself up in one box while another woman sticks her legs out of the other box to give the illusion of a woman sawed in half. There was probably a moment of excitement when you finally realized what had been happening the whole time. However, you no longer cared to see the trick afterwards. It no longer held your attention in the same way because you knew exactly what was happening.

Starseed Pilgrim reminded me of that. Starseed Pilgrim is a 2D platformer game with emergent gameplay, where you're expected to make your way around the world and explore for exploration's sake. The early instructions in the game are the equivalent of, "Here is how to move. Press the Space Bar to plant a seed. Go." You're dumped into an all-white world and that's it.
At first, you're confused and lost. You spend time wondering why you're playing this game in the first place. Then, you slowly start understanding what the game is all about. You figure out what the point of it is, and how it all works together.

Then there's a moment of realization where everything sets in. "Oh, this does this and this does this! I go here and do this, then I grab that, then open this!" That's when the pleasure center of your brain lights up, pats you on the head and tells you what a good boy (or girl) you've been.

Afterwards, you wander around and ask yourself, "OK, now what?"

That's where the designers of the game hope that the game really starts for you. If Starseed Pilgrim really has its hooks into you, you'll start poking around, getting more snippets of poetry (yes, poetry) to read, and going further and further through the world.

However, the problem is that there's no definitive goal to shoot for. I'm not saying that there needed to be little guideposts sprinkled throughout the world or a giant floating head telling you what to do next, or immersion-breaking achievements of any kind. Just a goal.

In other emergent games like Minecraft or Terraria, you're building something. You're affecting the world, like putting up a building or revitalizing a formerly dead area. When you're done, you can say, "I did that. I made that." When you open up a new area of Starseed Pilgrim, it looks pretty much like the last area you opened up. There are slightly different rules in the new areas, and you're going further, but for what? What is the ultimate goal?

This could have been solved easily. The stated goal at the beginning of game is to "bring back the sky." So how about when you plant a seed, the blank white blocks around it turn to a sky-blue color? Eventually, clouds start forming in the blue blocks and weather returns to the world. Now you have a goal to play towards. Your emergent gameplay has an endpoint, not just playing just to play.

You may read this review and think I didn't like Starseed Pilgrim, but that's not true. I thought it was an exceptional experience and I'd love to wipe my brain and start over from scratch, relearning the world and how it works. The sound design is really cool, like the sound of encroaching darkness that sounds just as ominous as it looks. Starseed Pilgrim also has a totally unique aesthetic that looks unlike any other game out there right now.

I'm only disappointed because Starseed Pilgrim came oh-so-close to being a knockout of a game. Instead, it ended up as a really neat one with some interesting and mysterious mechanics, which is a lot closer to perfection than a lot of other developers can get.

Final Rating: B

DLC Quest Giveaway Winner!

We've selected a winner in our DLC Quest Giveaway! It's Bernard H. with this response:

I'd like to see the consoles and hand helds give independent developers the ability to run and distribute their code without a gatekeeper.

Here are a couple other responses:

I would like to see the video game industry make games more cross platform. PC gamers would love to play the newer Halo games on PC for example, but are unwilling to buy an Xbox just for that. - Alex R.

Only thing i want to see from developers is that they change how they make their games and get suggestions from testers, consumers, etc. - M. Noku

Interesting ideas, folks. Thanks for responding, and thanks for playing!

NES Replay: Arkanoid

Developer: Taito
Publisher: Taito
Released: 1987
Who Came Up With These Game Names:
Arkanoid? Amagon? Astyanax? Did they
just pick out of a bag of Scrabble letters?

The "Breakout clone" is one of the oldest game genres still in existence. Breakout was originally made in 1976, and it's basically single-player Pong. You control a paddle, and you bounce a ball off that paddle against a bunch of bricks. When the ball touches a brick, the brick disappears. The object is to get rid of all of the bricks in the level.

Since it's such an easy game to clone, other game companies rushed to copy it almost immediately after it launched. The most successful of these clones is Arkanoid, made by Taito. Arkanoid became so successful that it's almost eclipsed Breakout in popularity and notoriety.

Fun fact: The original arcade came used a trackball to control the paddle, which allowed for really great fine-grained control. It meant that if you were caught out of position, you could quickly scramble back to the right place if you needed to. I could never get the hang of the trackball myself, but my dad was awesome at it.

To Taito's credit, they didn't just copy-and-paste Breakout wholesale. In Arkanoid, breaking blocks can sometimes produce powerups, like making the paddle longer, slowing down the ball, shoot multiple balls, shoot lasers, or causing the ball stick to the paddle. There are also penalties that can be picked up, like making the paddle shorter or speeding up the ball. A good player will have to identify the powerups quickly in order to avoid getting the bad ones. Eventually, there's even a final boss, which was rare in the arcades at the time.

Like every arcade game at the time, it got a port to the NES. While the port of Arkanoid fares better than most arcade ports of the age, it's not quite perfect. For example, the fine-grained control that the trackball provided is obviously missing in Taito's NES port of Arkanoid. There was an optional controller you could buy that would try to duplicate the arcade controls, but it was very rare. While the directional pad was normally great for every other type of game, for Arkanoid, it was inexact. The ball also races around the levels at crazy speeds, which means that you'll frequently find that you've moved yourself just a little too far to the left or right and completely miss the ball.

In order to succeed, you have to force yourself not to follow the ball with your paddle but instead look at the angle of return. However, your angles can get messed up because almost immediately in the first level, you're not only breaking through blocks but also fighting off alien ships that pour through the top of the screen. No sooner that you've destroyed the ones coming in, another three or four come streaming through. Therefore, you can't just focus on the blocks at the top of the screen, but also the aliens coming after you, which frequently changes the angle that your ball returns at and catches you completely out of position.

The playable area is also very narrow, as almost 1/4 of the screen is taken up by the score, the level, and extra information that doesn't really need that much room. You have very little time to plan ahead and figure out where the ball is going to go, and since your natural inclination is to follow the ball with your paddle, and the ball moves faster than the paddle does, it can take all of two minutes to lose your lives. It really makes Arkanoid much more frantic than Breakout, as you always feel you're on the precipice of failure.

For those reasons, I wish that the first couple of levels were a little more forgiving, as it takes time to get used to the speed of Arkanoid. However, since Arkanoid came from the arcades, they had no interest in helping players along, just crushing them and taking their quarters.

Still, that frantic feeling of impending failure is actually pretty entertaining on the NES when you're not pumping quarters into a machine. Once you get the angles down and force yourself to think ahead, Arkanoid turns into a delightfully harried game that will force you to try just one more time. It certainly helps that the underlying game of Breakout invented is still fun over 40 years later. Just think of Arkanoid as Breakout in Hard Mode, and you'll have a good time.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Arkista's Ring

Review: Gunman Clive

Developer: Horberg Productions
Publisher: Horberg Productions

Gunman Clive is the best hand-drawn platformer featuring a cowboy who goes to space and fights robots that I've ever played on the 3DS.

All facetiousness aside, Gunman Clive is pretty great. It's a platform/shooter game where you play as the titular Clive and rescue a damsel in distress. Or, if you prefer, play as the damsel in distress and rescue Clive.

The first thing you'll notice when you start up Gunman Clive is the unique graphical style. Everything looks like a "Wanted" poster in the Old West, which gives it a look that's instantly distinguishable from any other game on the eShop. It uses a limited color palette of yellows and oranges that you would think it would get boring to look at, but it doesn't.

Clive does almost everything right for an action /platformer. The controls are really tight. I never ran into a situation where I missed a jump or got myself killed because of the controls. The levels are varied and interesting, with tons of little surprises along the way.

I only have two complaints. One, the music is a little bland in parts, but it's not awful. I played the whole game with the sound on and I didn't regret it. Two, Clive is awfully short. I finished the whole game in an hour. However, it's only $1.99, so you can't get too angry about the length.

I didn't know what to expect from Gunman Clive, but I'm glad I played it, and you'll like it too.

Final Grade: A-

NES Replay: Archon

Developer: Bulletproof Software
Publisher: Activision
Released: 1989
Yes: I'm really that bad at chess

I am legendarily bad at chess. It's not that I don't know the rules. I know the rules about as good as anyone else. It's not that I don't know that you're supposed to plan ahead, either. I read about chess and look up information about the best strategies, and yet, for some reason I just can't play chess no matter what I do.

Quick story: A friend of mind wanted to play chess against me. I warned him that I was really bad at chess, and his response was, "That's OK, I'm bad at it too." As the game dragged on, it got so bad that he actually said, with some annoyance, "Do you even know how to play this game?" I explained that, yes, I've been playing chess since fifth grade, and no, I have not improved in the intervening twenty years. He quit in disgust.

So that makes me uniquely unqualified to review Archon, a chess variant that was published by Electronic Arts for the PC in 1983 and then ported over the NES. It's clear that Archon was supposed to combine the best of chess and the best of video games into one package. Did it succeed?

Crap, don't revive that piece! It took me
forever to kill it!

In Archon, you're given several units that are laid out on the chessboard just like normal chess pieces. In the front row are your pawns, and in the back row are units with more special abilities, like the ability to call forth a fire elemental or teleport. However, here's the quirk: When a piece moves onto an opponents piece, a minigame begins where the two opposing pieces duke it out with magic and weapons. Whomever wins gets the square, and the other piece is dead.

It's an interesting combination of chess and video games, but Archon isn't perfect. For example, the interface in Archon is very clunky. Every time you need to select a piece to play, none of the pieces themselves are highlighted. Instead, the selector icon begins way off the board, and you have to move the selector over several spaces before you can even select a piece. That's kind of inexcusable, since there doesn't appear to be any specific reason that the selector needs to be off the board, at least from what I can tell.

Archon isn't very intuitive, either. It absolutely demands that you have the manual nearby, since it's really hard to figure out what each piece does, what its weaknesses and strengths are, and all of those details that are really important to a game like this. I suppose I can't judge Archon too harshly for that, since that was the way these games typically played back in the day.

A pitched battle between two water
elementals. I'm the one who's dying.

Also, playing against the computer is ridiculous. It's not that the computer makes really good moves. It doesn't. The problems start once combat begins. The microsecond that the computer player has you in its line of sight, it's like Liam Neeson in Taken: It will find you, and it will kill you. The computer immediately knows when it can take a shot at you, and frequently fires before you have a chance to move out of the way.

However, Archon is still a pretty good idea. It reminds me of the sport of chess boxing: Whomever wins by knockout or checkmate wins first. For someone as strategy-stunted like myself, it's nice that good strategy alone doesn't guarantee a win, and good action-game skills don't guarantee a win either.

If I was playing this game against a human opponent, I could see getting over Archon's quirks and having a lot of fun. There's a lot of depth to it, and it's the kind of game that would lend itself well to obsessive fans. It's actually the kind of game that would be perfect for a revival, but that's par for the course with a lot of these sort of games.

It takes guts to take a game as storied and steeped in tradition as chess, then ask, "How can we make it better?" I want to make it clear: Archon is not better than chess, and it has numerous flaws. However, it at least tries to meld two different types of game into one in a unique and exciting way. That at least counts for something.

Final Rating:

Next Week: Arkanoid

Read This: Football's Worst Nightmare

Here's an article about the last professional football player to die on the field. Sobering stuff.