Piyotama Review (PSP)

     I'm dreading writing this review. I might have to put this game in the bad category, which would be upsetting, the first game I've done that with. We'll see. Keep in mind that this review is for the PSP version of the game. The PS3 version may have more features that would affect the score.

     Piyotama is a puzzle game. I was even in the mood for a puzzle game when I played it. Even so, after about 7 rounds of play, I'm done with it. The first was confusing. The 2^nd through 5^th round were entertaining. The last two were boring.

     I like some puzzle games a lot too. I love Lumines. I had a bitter high score rivalry with my brother in the original. I ultimately lost, but I'm convinced I could beat his high score if I wanted to put in the effort. I had a brief flirtation with Hexic HD that I enjoyed. And I played a huge amount of the truly remarkable Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, one of my favorite PSP games ever.

     So let me describe Piyotama to you briefly. It's set up kinda like Tetris. There are a bunch of eggs all in stacks. More drop in from the top from time to time. You control a cursor that highlights a row of eggs. You can press left or right to move out three eggs from the left-most or right-most section of the rows. Those three eggs stay with your cursor, so you can move them to other rows by pressing up and down and then left or right to put them back in while taking three others out from the other side. Matching up four or more in a row of the same color highlights them, meaning they will hatch. Hatching occurs at set points, or you can speed it up by pressing R or L, although this gives you less points. You can also switch around the order of the three eggs that are outside of the rows with your cursor by pressing cross or circle. One cool feature is that once an egg is highlighted to be hatched, it stays highlighted, even if you move it out of its group of four. This means you can go and grab every egg of one color and plug them all into the same spot on top of three other eggs in turn, and they will all hatch even though they end up all over the board. There are special rare eggs that hatch all eggs of the same color, eggs that lock rows so you can't move them, and eggs that are worth extra points. Also, I should point out that the columns are diagonal only, eggs are staggered, not directly on top of each other. There is a mode that gives you 300 seconds of play, and a mode that stops when the eggs reach the top of the screen like Tetris.

     Does that make sense? I hope so. If this was a better game I would try to explain it a little more clearly. I didn't like it because it's really random. You will get tons of matches accidentally as you move eggs around. I thought that might be cool at first, but it turns out it's not. It makes you feel like you don't know what you're doing; kind of the opposite of what I want to feel while playing a puzzle game. Or any game, really; it makes the game feel like it is playing itself without your input. There also just isn't any depth or hook that I could find. It's a bit different, but also basic. While I like the mechanic of keeping eggs highlighted so that they will hatch even if you move them out of their grouping, nothing else was doing anything for me.

     The art style is decent; cutesy chickens, I guess you could say. There are a few skins you can download for free that change the background and dress up the mama chicken. They are beach and holiday themes. It's cool how when the eggs hatch, cute little chickens fly out and hang around on the side of the screen.

     The music is about half cute, half grating.

     I've seen positive reviews of this game praising its price. I guess it costs like $2. Totally irrelevant since it isn't fun after a few sessions. Games should only get praised for being cheap if they are good. I got this for free; what good does that do me if I'm not going to play it anymore?

     I don't regret the few play sessions I had with Piyotama, I'm just not going to play it anymore. I need to show that it is quite a few steps worse than some of the games I've put in the mediocre tier. I'm going to give it a Bad Game, Tier 1 rating. I feel mean, but it wouldn't be fair to sugar coat my honest opinion. I'm sure people worked hard on this, and I respect that. It just wasn't very fun to me.

Canabalt Review (PS3, PSP, PSVita)

      I would probably give Canabalt a higher score if I wasn't playing Bit.Trip Presents Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien (review pending) at the moment. Canabalt is really cool and fun, but I feel like Runner 2 is better in most ways, with a few exceptions.

     Canabalt is an infinite runner. I think it is one of the first. You play as a guy in a business suit running on rooftops. You jump from rooftop to rooftop as you automatically run faster and faster. The only control you have is when you jump and how high/long you jump. Holding the button down makes the leap longer and higher, while tapping it quickly produces a quick hop.

     You're running because the city is under attack. There are giant robots in the background running amok, and sci-fi aircraft are flying by at high speed as well. As you are propelled forward, you must time your jumps to make it to the next rooftop (or crane, or billboard). Missing means instant death. You go until you die, the goal being to make it a longer distance. The game measure how far you get in each run in meters. It keeps track of how long your best run ever was and how long your most recent run was. When you die, the game very specifically tells you what happened ("You ran 329 meters before somehow hitting the edge of a crane"). Basically, there is a message for any and all of the strange ways you will die in the game. A very nice touch. 

     There are a lot of interesting obstacles that pop up as you go. There are buildings that collapse as you run across them. There are tall buildings that require you to jump through a window and run through a floor of the building and jump out of the other side (I find this especially difficult). There are bombs that drop out of the sky and land in front of you that you need to jump over. There are also giant objects that sheer buildings right in half right before you go to jump on them. I can't figure out if they are giant missiles or giant robot arms or what. It happens really fast and you either die or run away from it and it is far behind you. There are also boxes, chairs, and other small obstacles that you can run through but slow you down if you do. I've found that hitting them to slow down on purpose if you get going really fast is a necessity.

     That's the whole game. It's sublimely simple and very addictive. Once you start playing, you want to give it “one more go...” over and over until you've played a lot longer than you thought you would. Breaking your record is thrilling, as is the many times you will just barely make it through an obstacle or over a tight jump. You'll run along a long building as it collapses and just barely jump up to the next one as it sinks below the bottom of the screen, or slow yourself down too much by hitting boxes and then barely be able to make that next long jump, or go on a long run only to have a building ripped out from under you by a falling obstacle...but then you miraculously make it and keep going! You will also die a million times, but that just spurs you on to keep going. Quitting can be difficult. I had to use caution when writing this review that I didn't just play and play without writing.

     The graphics are really great pixel art done in just a few shades of grey. The animation is really great. Your character parachute rolls really smoothly after long falls and flails his limbs wildly during long jumps. The whole screen shakes as huge ships fly by just overhead at high speeds. The way bombs drop in and then explode if touched is really great looking, and when buildings collapse or are suddenly chopped up by falling stuff, it looks and feels really awesome.

     A big part of that feel comes from the sound design. Despite the pixelated graphics, the sounds (shattering glass, rapid footsteps, bombs falling from the sky, buildings being torn apart, grunts of exertion) are designed to sound realistic. This is an interesting choice that adds a lot to the game.

     So do the backgrounds and various graphical touches. There always something crazy to look at in the background, be it a giant robot, a million varieties of smashed buildings and structures, or... what is that floating in the sky? Birds sometimes fly off of rooftops as you run by and debris falls off buildings as they collapse. And what made those massive claw marks in that billboard? Great attention to detail.

     There are three music tracks you can pick from the main screen before starting your run. They are all appropriately epic and/or fast paced and/or exciting, or at least they start slow and build up to epic. All three are worth listening too. I would rotate them as I played.

     The main problem with this game, if you want to say it is a problem, is that there isn't really a reason to keep playing it for any period of time. Once I played for a few days, I didn't feel the need to fire it up again. I can tell that I will probably play it randomly from time to time over the years when I see it there on my hard drive, but I won't be seeking it out on any regular basis. And that's fine, really. There should be some games like that. This game is simple and fun, but not super deep. I can't really knock it for that. But comparing it to Bit.Trip Runner 2, which I invariably must, it comes up a little short, as Runner 2 has so much that you want to do and unlock, not to mention how beautiful it sounds and how great and varied it's gameplay is, but more on that in its own review in the future. Runner 2 also throws you back into the action almost instantly when you mess up, while Canabalt has you sit through an auto-save screen that's a few seconds longer than it should be (and shouldn't trigger if you don't beat a record, as there are no other stats being tracked). There is also some slowdown when playing on PSP, usually at the start of a level where it won't mess you up.

     One thing Canabalt has that Runner 2 doesn't that I really like is procedurally generated levels. Every time you play, things will be different, and you will run into new situations that surprise and challenge you even after you've played for several hours. Runner 2 features stellar pre-made levels, but it would be really cool if it had some randomly generated content or a random mode t0o, as the emergent situations that pop up in Canabalt are really awesome and I can tell that awesome situations would come up in Runner 2 as well.

     I feel like it's hard to rate Canabalt on my scale as for me it's a game you play every once in a great while for a few obsessive sessions. I guess it's a Great Game, tier 3. I want to say that it should have more content or trophies or something, but its lack of all that in favor of pure, focused gameplay is an asset as well. It's a different type of game in that way.  Oh, and in case you are wonder or want to compare yourself to me, my longest run (so far) is 12,177 Meters. Beat that! Actually, I have no idea if that would be considered good or not.

Closure vs. Where is My Heart?

      I want to write a brief comparison of the gameplay in Closure to that of Where is My Heart? If you don't know about the games' mechanics, this post will make no sense. Go read my reviews, or better yet, just go play them first! I think they are both excellent games, and although their story themes are quite different, the way they play is similar and complimentary. Both heavily involve perspective and reality.

     In Where is My Heart?, the level layout exists. You perceive it through the panels given to you in any given level. The arrangement of the panels does not affect the layout. You perception does not affect reality. You are kind of battling your own mind just to understand the layout of the levels.

     In Closure, the level has a layout, but it is manipulated by your perception. Only what you can see is reality. The layout of the level bends to your perception of it. Reality changes to match what you are seeing.

If Where is My Heart? Followed Closure's rules, you could rearrange the panels to change the layout of the level. If Closure followed Where is My Heart's? rules, you could walk around in the dark and run into objects you couldn't see, and the light would just be manipulated to help you see the level. Both would be totally different games if they switched rules like this. It would be very interesting to see. I'd would love it if the creators of both of these games got together and messed with the rules of each others' games, or made a new game (or games) exploring these ideas even further.

     I was going to throw in comparisons to Quantum Conundrum and The Unfinished Swan too, but I think keeping it to just these two favorites of mine makes it a more streamlined and interesting post. I just thought it was really neat how these two games both deal with perception and reality in regards to their gameplay. I played them relatively close together, and when I realized that they were almost opposites gameplay-wise it made me appreciate both of these great games even more.  

Where is My Heart? Review

     It seems to me like I've been playing a lot of games in the puzzle platformer genre lately, or at least plenty of games in the “get from point A to point B” school of puzzling thought. I reviewed Quantum Conundrum last week, and the Unfinished Swan and Closure are coming up next. This week is Where is My Heart? You already know what I gave Quantum Conundrum (great game tier 3). While all of these games are great, two of the three others are going to get perfect or near perfect scores. Obviously, you'll know by process of elimination by the end of this review, but do you care to take a guess before you get to the end?

     Where is My Heart is a Playstation Mini, playable on PSP, PS3, and PSVita. It's a 2d puzzle platformer done in a wonderfully serene and beautiful 8-bit style. I think it's the color palette that really makes it stand out. There are lot of purples and yellows that are not quite pastel and a lot of browns and grays that almost are. You play as three monsters, a family consisting of mom, dad, and their young child. They are searching for a special tree that has flown away, and seem to be getting lost as they go. Each of the three are really beautiful sprites with great animation.

     In each level, you control all three monsters, and you must get them all to the exit in order to move on. You move with the d-pad, switch which monster you are controlling with triangle or circle, and jump with cross. Puzzles often involve stacking the monsters on each others' heads to reach certain areas, basic platforming, and getting to certain blocks that you can activate to have hearts fly out and fill in silhouetted blocks or clear out blocked off areas, allowing you to proceed. There are also some advanced things you'll be doing, which I'll talk about in a sec, but first we need to talk about what really sets this game apart.

     The game's gimmick (and I use that word without any negative connotation) is that each level is chopped into frames, and frames that are adjacent to one another do not necessarily depict areas that are adjacent or even near each other in reality. Adjacent frames are not necessarily even at the same zoom level. The frames themselves are often times not the same size. Some are large, some are tiny. It's as if the real level is in there somewhere, and there are several cameras on it. Some are at different zoom levels, and some are displayed on smaller or larger monitors. And the monitors are scrambled. It's hard to describe. An example would be a level that is just a straight walk from the entrance to the exit. There are four frames. When you walk forward, you will go through frame 1, then appear in frame 3, then 2, then 4. In other levels, these frames might be on top of each other, or across the screen from each other, and the level might have a lot of verticality (even though you might pop out in a frame at the bottom of the screen after you jump up a bunch of platforms). Once you understand the idea, it's quite an ingenious thing. You might think it's something that you'll be able to play right through, like your gamer brain can unscramble the images and allow you to play normally. You'll quickly see that isn't true, it's going to confound and surprise you the whole way through.

     This amazing concept is executed brilliantly throughout the game in many ways. There are frames that show the same thing, but in different sizes. You might walk out of a frame and into one that shows your character at a bigger size (you can really see the pixelated details of the sprites in these shots). Frames might also show the same thing in the same size. So if you move too quickly, that platform you think you need to jump to in the next frame might actually be the platform you are already on. You might jump forward only to land in a frame behind where you started. Some parts of the level seem to not appear in any frame. Some levels feature teleporting blocks or big leaps that take you to seemingly distant areas, until you discover that you are really right next to where you were and that there is a barrier between the two areas that is only seen in some tiny frame in the corner of the screen. Each level has the frames laid out in different ways and shapes as well. As a way of making you feel lost (as your characters are) this is ingenious. As a gameplay mechanic, this is also ingenious. You may think you understand how it works, but you need to experience it firsthand to understand what it feels like to play this game. And since there are so many implementations and variations of this idea in the game's levels, it's never going to wear out its welcome. It only gets more compelling as you go on.

     Each character can transform to an alternate form by finding certain blocks and standing all the monsters on the blocks on each others' heads in a certain order, which is dictated by colored silhouettes that appear over the blocks. Two of the monsters gain some cool abilities that could be featured in a normal platformer. I'll let you see for yourself what they are. Those abilities are great, but the one that interacts with the whole frame concept is the orange monster's alternate form, the Rainbow Spirit. While controlling the Rainbow Spirit, you can press L or R to rotate the frames. This, of course, does not change the layout of the reality of the level, only your perspective on the level. Simply rotating the screen may reveal frames that were partially offscreen, but is generally just a viewpoint change. The real magic is pressing L or R while jumping. This makes the Rainbow Spirit stay in place on the screen as the frames rotate around her. Meaning when you stop rotating, she will land in whatever frame is under her (unless she lands inside a solid object or outside of all the frames, which will kill her).

     This ability is a whole nother brain bending idea built on top of the first. To get somewhere in this form, you have to go to a place in the areas you can go to that will line up with the spot you want to get to in another frame when it comes around. I'll just stop explaining it now, because once again, even a video wouldn't do this concept justice, you have to actually experience it yourself. And once again, it is brilliantly executed.

     The levels are all very short, but have just the right amount of difficulty. Just like I said in the Quantum Conundrum review, you're never stuck for long enough to get frustrated, but you never get unstuck early enough that you are bored or just blazing through. The pacing is pretty much perfect.

     There is the additional gameplay element of scoring. Each level has a certain amount of hearts in it that you can collect. This is totally optional, as you only need to get to the exit to continue. Getting a heart increases your score for the level by 1. If you die (by falling off a cliff, or hitting spikes), the character you were playing respawns at the beginning of the level, but first their skeleton sprite produces a dark heart, which lowers your level score by 1. At the end of the level, the level score (rounded up to 0 if you were in the negative) gets added to your total, which is tracked on the pause menu. A lot of these hearts are in out of the way spots, and collecting all of them without dying is a challenge. Once I beat the game, I immediately played it again in the quest to get a perfect score. I had a blast going to every corner of every stage to collect hearts and forcing myself to start each level over if I had any deaths, and I highly recommend trying for a perfect score. The game is quite short (which I'm not saying is bad. In this case, the length is perfect), so playing again is totally feasible and just as much fun as the first time. Did I succeed in getting a perfect score though? That's where my one and only complaint about this game comes in. It is glitched so that you can only get a score of 171 out of 172 hearts. The designer, @bushghost, confirmed to me on twitter that one of the hearts is unreachable due to a design flaw or glitch (apparently it's off screen too, as I never even saw it). This may seem like a superficial flaw, but I was surprised at how much it affected my sense of satisfaction and completeness at the end of my perfect run. Not getting to see my long sought after 172 of 172 was very disappointing.

     But like I said, that is literally this game's only flaw. The game's subtle music and ambient nature sounds lend themselves perfectly to the pace of the puzzling and exploring. The games theme of being lost, emotional distress and depression, family, and nature are subtly shown to the player in the short screens that tell you the name of the level when you get to a new one. One of the characters is on this screen each time along with a quote from them. It's less about what is happening in a story (although there are a few events in the story, and those are great) and more about a mood that you get from these on-screen quotes, the graphical style, and the sounds of the game. It's hard to put into words what this mood is, but it's something we've all felt and everyone whose paying attention will recognize.

     To me, that one flaw in the scoring system is kind of a big deal. That's my personal feeling. If that doesn't bother you, then this is a close-to-perfect game. I would give it a perfect score if the scoring system was patched or if a new version comes out with this problem fixed. As is, I have to dock it ever so slightly and give it a score of great game, tier 2. It's really a tier 1 game though if a tiny fix was implemented, which means, in my opinion, it is approaching gaming perfection.