Mersey Remakes

Hermit Games latest went into review this morning. As soon as it drops, you really should play it.

I’ve posted a ruck of pics from my play session this morning over on xnPlay, full review to follow when it drops.

I’m not sure how or why the Indie game has become bizarrely synonymous with the platform game genre over recent times yet reading a few idle comments across the internet you get the feeling that for some folks, Indie and platform games are a tiresome and wholly expected combination that has little to offer to the universe at large.

Whilst I’d struggle to agree that they’re an expected combination, with one eye on what gets released on a daily basis I can’t help but fear that sort of mindset is similar to the grouchy old retroheads who say that all modern games are the same and it were better in the old days when it were all black and white or something, I’d equally struggle to argue that generally Indie games as a whole don’t always offer anything exciting enough to pee your pants over. As much as it may seem to some readers of this fine blog that’s not really a slight, more an acceptance that 99% of anything is really a bit crap. The same logic can be quite happily applied to the more mainstream releases, the arthouse arseratti and just about anything that gets thrown up onto the internet.

What I suspect might be the case here is that at some point, the mainstream abandoned the platform game. Once upon a time, when I were but a lad, a week wouldn’t go by without a new single screen or multiscreen platform game dropping into our laps. From my first gaming love of Manic Miner to the 16 bit revolution, you were never really shy of something leapy and boundy to amuse yourself with. With the advent of 3d, this sort of fell on its arse a bit.

Actually, with the advent of 16 bit platformers, it really started to fall on its arse for me. Ok, ok, with the advent of Rick Dangerous it totally fell on its arse for me.

Personally, I lost a lot of love for the genre over time.

I grew up with a love of a certain type of platform game. I could never get to grips with the Jumpman’s or the Bounty Bob’s or the more American style of platform game, huge sprawling worlds (now retconned as Metroidvania because nothing on the internet gaming history charts can be traced back to anything other than a Nintendo revolution of some sort) never really got my juices flowing and whilst admittedly my first glance at Mario came with a massive “hey, this is fun” grin it couldn’t replace my love for the Great British Surrealist Platformer. The fact that it led to such atrocities as Impossamole probably didn’t help.

From Miner Willy to Dynamite Dan to Technician Ted (we pretend Costa Capers never really happened) to the various adventures of Monty Mole there was something a little bit special about the Great British Surrealist Platformer. By modern standards, most would be deemed broken in some way. Technician Ted’s brutal “the time limit and your lives are one and the same” system makes grown men cry (and it did), Monty On The Run’s freedom kit where you had to select items to progress further into the game with whilst having no clue if they were the right ones until you hit upon a point where you can’t progress further is design insanity at its worst (escape kit thankfully removed from the remake, phew), Dynamite Dan had impressive sprite work which had the unfortunate side effect of making avoiding a collision with a nasty somewhat harder work than it should be and well, we all know by now how bugged Jet Set Willy was upon release and the less said about the infinite death loops the better (something that was first on the list of design fixes when we were putting together Jet Set Willy: Online).

Yet, for all the silly, silly design decisions they were special. No other genre seemed to allow for such out and out insanity, no other locale on this globe of ours seemed to throw stuff out into the world with such a wild and almost Pythonian abandon. They were distinctly ours. Then they stopped getting made.

When they stopped getting made, I pretty much stopped playing platform games. Not that it mattered because it wasn’t long before we were into the decline of the genre as a whole so even if I wanted to, I’d have been a bit starved.

Shuffle forward many a year and hey, those pesky indie developers have exhumed the corpse of the platform game and it’s cool once more (or tiresome and predictable, depending on your point of view). Over recent times I’ve played a fair few of the buggers but most of them have left me a little bit cold. I miss that whole surrealist tint to games in general (you’d have never guessed from my own output, eh?) but I miss it a whole lot more in the universe of platform games. Dave’s Day Out came perhaps the closest yet still felt like the bootleg Mark Chapman rather than the real deal.

And then came VVVVVV.

Oh, lost 24 hours, oh the hand cramps, oh the swearing. Oh VVVVVV, how I love thee.

Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV may be a more mechanics-led entry into the universe of the platformers, its central conceit being that you don’t actually jump, you flip your character upside down to traverse the world instead yet wonderfully, it feels like the great lost game that never was but always should have been. Were it released 25 years ago, I have no doubt it’d be discussed in reverential tones.

Of course, it couldn’t really have been pulled off with such aplomb 25 years ago. The passing of time has allowed for Terry to paper over the worst of our platform gaming sins with the accumulated knowledge of what should and shouldn’t be at his disposal. It’s the game that many of the early platform games I fell in love with aspired to be but could never be because we were still floundering, still making mistakes and still throwing in really stupid things to artificially extend the games life, still throwing in daft things to see if they worked and still feeling our way around this games malarkey.

With the fuck ups of the past behind us, it’s allowed Terry the freedom to create something that works and works to the point of brilliance yet is strangely timeless. Like the crew members you’ll be charged to rescue in the game, it seems to exist in an alternate dimension, one where our gaming history took an entirely different course.

The story is a simple one – there’s a disaster of sorts on a space station and your accompanying crew appear to have disappeared. Your task is to rescue the little ladies and pixelfolk from whatever their fate may be and discover what happened to cause such an accident. The story unfolds with computer terminals providing snippets as you traverse the topsy turvy world of VVVVVV, rescue a crew member and they’ll tell you a little bit more. Rightly, whilst the story is a nice extra, it’s the platforming, exploration and gravity flipping that comes to the fore. The map is pretty hefty with plenty of nooks and crannies to explore but with nary a room wasted. From cramped “how the hell am I going to do this?” screens to ahhh, no, I’m not going to spoil it.

And it’s hard.

VVVVVV will test your button pressing skills, it’ll test your timing, it’ll make you call Terry some rather rude names along the way. The ace up its sleeve is the removal of lives. If you fail to make a leap, if you go careering into a bus or Hunchback-esque guard or land in a pit of spikes, you’re dropped back at most one screen to try all over again. So no matter the frustration, you’re always mere seconds away from success. It’ll still tally up your many suicidal leaps but the deaths become just another statistic at the end of the game. Unimportant except for bragging rights. So the difficulty level becomes, ultimately, pretty unimportant in the grand scheme of things yet it’s forever hanging over you.

Rescuing your lost crew members isn’t going to be an easy task but it’s a do-able task. VVVVVV gives you hope at all times, it may be a slither, a distant star in the vast night sky but it’s always there.

You can do this. You will do this. It’s worth doing this.

There’s a few stand out moments along the way when the game doesn’t as much fuck with your expectations but fuck around with the gravity flipping itself and in the final run, you’ll need to utilise everything you’ve learnt so far in a perilous high speed partygasm. (It’ll make sense when you get there, trust me).

The satisfaction, the relief and the feeling of freedom upon the games completion is masterfully handled. Whilst in the final run of the game, myself and compadre Mr Tam Toucan tweeted back and forth about our progress, how many times we’d come a cropper on a screen, the swears, the fun, the room names…

Ah yes, the great lost art of the Great British Platformer. The naming of individual rooms. Lost to our scrolly explorotron gaming cousins and for me an integral part of the old school platform game experience. In Jet Set Willy, you didn’t get stuck on Room 12 – you got stuck in The Banyan Tree or on The Boat or at We Must Perform A Quirkafleeg. In VVVVVV you’ll find yourself getting stuck in Langdell-tribute rooms that offer more of a clue as to how to grab a shiney trinket than you’ll first imagine, you’ll drift through a film and TV inspired series of rooms and curse Alfred Hitchcock’s name and you’ll smile at some of the evil humour Terry weaves into the room names. And you’ll think “shit, why don’t we do this more? It’s ace.”

But then, that’s VVVVVV. Ace. And you can play it right now in beta form with a small donation to Terry, getting a head start on the rest of the universe.

You really, really, should. VVVVVV is a game you should play and you should play it because it’s amazingly well put together, it’s 30 years of platforming history with one foot in the past and one foot firmly in the now and it deserves your love.

Go give it some.

When carrying Gnome Chomsky back to the helicopter, do not put him down at the last minute to defib a fallen teammate in the hope of getting everyone home.

Bastard.