Okay. As I suspected, I was newbing out regarding Ninja Gaiden Sigma. Forget I said anything.

Actually, don’t. Don’t forget. Let’s talk about this a bit further. It’s a hard game, granted — and it’s got a gazillion combos and stuff, great. And many weapons (cool), with choice of advancement (nice) and secrets (awesome) and stuff (oh yeah). Oh — and it’s fun. It really is. It’s lots of fun…

…once you get the hang of it. Ay, there’s the rub! It’s a matter of practice, really. Studying the combo list (which should be more readily acessible, methinks — and particularly, should not “forget” where we were once we leave the menu and return) — and slashing and kicking away. As a friend pointed out, this game seriously lacks a “practice arena” of some sort — we had to New Game it repeatedly to catch the curve.

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It *is* about learning. Danc has an interesting essay on the subject, available on GamaSutra, which I happened to read a while ago. As it goes, your brain rewards you with pleasure every time you test a hypothesis and you were right. So when you figure, “hmm, if I press this button, the plumber jumps. My head hits that platform. I wonder what happens if I jump at it from the side…”, that’s your brain trying to find a way to reward you with preciousssss chemicalssss. Yeah, baby, yeah.

I guess that’s what I find off-putting about Ninja Gaiden Sigma’s bosses.

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Asteroids had it right — wrapping is the way to go. And Super Stardust’s (PS3) take on it is the best. Their excuse for wrapping is perfect — no more disappearing off the screen to show up on the other side. No more Euclidean mishaps. It’s all about the orbit, and it’s all about the sphere. It is of such geniality that one can easily forgive the perspective and size issues.

Wrapping means action won’t be hampered by such trivial things as borders. No abrupt stops, no screeching to a halt. It’s all swerving, all the time, all around — and the only obstacles are, well, everything in sight. But no rigid, unmoving lines.

It’s interesting to contrast this characteristic with the Geometry Wars (X360)  field. The borders create a two-fold sense of security (”this is MY corner — MY CORNER!”) combined with an acute claustrophobia (”oh no, that’s the wall! Nowhere left to run!”). The limited field works well there, but it’s a different kind of thing. Stardust seems to me to be more oriented towards drive-by players, what with the boost capabilities and all.

Or maybe that’s just my personal playing style — I’m watching the automatic demo as I type and I see pro players moving in very little increments.

After trying the demo of Medal of Honor: Airborne (PC) a couple of times, I can already tell it’s not what I’d want it to be.

It does seem like fun. I love the freedom to land wherever I want — be it the top of a church tower, where one can snipe the opposition, the safe area, where you can get supplies and lead troops, or a dark alley, from where you can assault a flank or rear in close range. I like the way I can pick the order in which I want to complete my objectives. I like choosing my weapon set and getting unlocks due to shooting skill. That’s all good.

But it’s still not what I’m waiting for. Confrontations are only simulated within your reach; enemy soldiers holed in a cellar don’t come out unless provoked; and worst of all, at least in the demo, primary objectives require the player’s direct interference.

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“It’s a haaaard life,” singed Freddy Mercury. Hard games are good. It’s part of what makes it fun — the challenge, the difficulty, the stuff that makes people watching you play go “oh my god how did he do that that truck was coming at him full speed and he dodged the two cars while slamming into the third he’s psychic”. Be it bullet-speed reflexes at work dodging 8 lanes of traffic coming your way, frame-counting prowess so you start the combo counter at the precise moment your opponent starts raising his katana, or being so used to the square grid and movement rates that your monk reaches both enemy archers for a spin attack without ever getting hit, we find it lots of fun when we are able — nay, required — to hone our skills to a point we didn’t think ourselves capable of. It’s just way cool, and it’s what we do — we’re hardcore gamers.

But people sometimes seem to lose sight of the fact that there’s hard, and there’s dumb. Ninja Gaiden is hard. No problem there. It takes work and lots of replays to beat the toughest bosses (and frankly, some of the easier minions as well). Ikaruga is hard. Having to switch colors with lighting speed to avoid getting popped by a single shot in the middle of a sea of enemy fire? That’s cool.

Ghosts’n'Goblins (PSP), however, presents what I think is a dumb kind of difficulty. Don’t get me wrong — I think it’s a great game, well done and lots of fun. But the fixed-length jumping just doesn’t make sense. It never did, and it doesn’t now. It’s not a hard game per se — it just has a bad and outdated control scheme. The PSP version inherited the jumping style from the original arcade et al, versions, and it just sucks way too much. For those who are not familiarized with it, jumping involves choosing a direction (left, right, or straight) and pressing the button. That’s it. No air control, no shortening your jump, no nothing. Once you started the jump, you’re committed to it.

This, of course, creates an arbitrary difficulty decision. I’m not talking about dodging bullets mid-air — one wouldn’t be able to do that in real life, either. But it’s hard to get your jumps right. If you just want to climb the step in front of you, you have to step back and jump on top of it. Jumping across lava stones becomes a frustrating affair — where in real life (well, ok, not many of us jump over stones on lava streams, but anyway) one could mentally measure the distance and jump accurately without even thinking about it, in G’n'G one has to step onto a precise spot so the jump will come out right.

Some people argue, “that’s good. That’s what makes the game hard”. I disagree — that’s what makes it have a bad control scheme. It loses playability.

You want to make a game hard? Make it more complex. Throw in more enemies. Make things go faster. Make the opponents smarter. All of the above! But don’t hurt our ability to play… please.

(cross-posted from Handling Framerates on J2MEForums)

I’ve recently had the opportunity to play a high-budget game of quite some fame on two phones: a Moto V550, about 800k heap, and an SE W810i, more than 2Mb heap.

The game is based on building placement. So you have a beautifully rendered isometric map screen and a cursor. Click the cursor on a spot, and the whole screen changes to a piece-selection menu that shows one building at a time as you press left and right. After you choose the building, you click the button again and it goes back to the map screen, this time with the building placed.

Bear in mind this is all 176×2** isometric, map screen and selection screen alike.

Ok. Here’s the catch — in the SE W810i everything fits on memory. So you see the map screen, you choose the piece, and you go back to the menu (almost) instantly. It gets a bit clunky because of the “maximized” selection menu with a black background — no overlay — but it works.

The peril lies in the way it’s done on the Moto V550. The pieces for the map screen barely fit the memory — which is understandable, I’ve done isometric for that Moto and it’s a lot of trouble — which means that everytime you want to select a new building the game:

1) Unloads everything;
2) Loads a single building;
3) Unloads the single building and loads the next one as you press the arrows;
4) Reloads the whole map screen (with its tiles) when you select the building.

Can you spot the problem? Every load is a createImage(). In a Moto. Yeah, right, THAT’S going to work well.

So here we have it — an absolutely unplayable game (trust me, I tried, I really wanted to play it, I love the genre) that is being sold as “Moto Vxxx compatible”. Hah. And meanwhile, since the implementation is the same, the SE version suffers with a clunky interface.

GAH. I *hate* fragmentation issues.