Game Review: Mighty No. 9

As you may have noticed, I've taken a hiatus from the SDP over the past year.  I've kind of been focused on other projects, especially my other blog, the Sekai Ichi Japan travel blog.  But I've finally reached a point where I can put that on hold and return to this.  To herald my long-awaited comeback, I'll start off by reviewing a couple of games that came out just last year.  I've had these reviews in the oven for quite a while longer, but haven't found the inspiration to finish them until now.  Maybe I should have published these reviews when they were still relevant, but putting enough time behind me gives me the benefit of cooling down any passions that may influence my criticism for better or worse.  ...Sure, let's go with that.  Now with no further ado, I present to you...

Mighty No. 9

• Publisher: Deep Silver 
• Developer: Comcept / Inti Creates 
• Release Date: 21 June 2016
• Systems: PC, PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, XBox 360, XBox One, Wii U, Nintendo 3DS
• Genre: 2D Action (Platformer)
• Players: 1 
• Cost: US$20

Yup, almost three years since its debut announcement on Kickstarter, Mighty No. 9, the second coming of Mega Man in-all-but-name is upon us. And seeing as how I wrote an editorial on this game, in addition to funding it when it was on Kickstarter, I feel an obligation to review the finished product. I endorsed said project back then, but in retrospect I'm not sure why. In that very editorial, I even said I had gotten bored of the original Mega Man formula embraced by its spiritual successor. In fact, I'm actually more of a Sonic and Legend of Zelda kind of guy. (Which explains why I took to Mega Man Legends the way I did; it's basically Zelda with guns.) My expectations weren't the highest, but thankfully I managed to stay out of the drama concerning its repeated delays despite the inordinate amount of money thrown at it by its backers ("Beckers", if you will).

Mighty No. 9 is a jump-and-shoot platformer developed by Comcept and Keiji Inafune, the co-creator of Mega Man.  In other words, Mighty No. 9 is a jump-and-shoot platformer developed by Comcept and Keiji Inafune, the co-creator of Mega Man, or at least as close as it can be without the keys to the licence.  In a world where humans and robots live together, a mysterious event causes robots across the country to go haywire, including the Mighty Numbers 1 through 8, created by Dr. Light Dr. White. But some robots were unaffected, like our player character: the titular Mega Man Mighty No. 9, a.k.a. the not-so-titular Rock Beck. And faster than you can say "soy un perdedor", Beck and Dr. White are on the case to, respectively, restore the mad robots and get to the bottom of all this. In case you haven't figured it out now, the plot is exactly like any given Mega Man game, with the names changed around a bit.

Beck needs to dash into enemies to finish them off.

And so is the gameplay: Beck jumps among platforms, shoots enemy robots, and collects special weapons from defeated bosses. But even this formula gets shaken up, ever so slightly, by Beck's new ability: the dash. This move can be used with the press of a button and is unlimited in use, so if nothing else it is deeply incorporated into the game's design. Dashing is used not just for platforming, but also for attacking: shooting enemies enough turns them unstable, at which point you can dash to finish them off, and get a temporary stat buff in the process.  These boosts not all that noticeable however, and something like extra health or ammo would be much more appreciated.

Sometimes, it's not even worth the effort, especially if an enemy you've just stunned is hovering over a bottomless pit or other trap.  Try tp give it the ol' coup-de-grace, and there's a good prospect that you might mis-time your dash back to the starting platform, and fall to your doom.  But the thing is, you're pressured to do this anyway, since dash-killing baddies right after you disable them builds up a combo counter, which leads to extra points, which lead to... nothing in particular.  So much for that, then.  You could say this approach does help the gameplay stand out among the many other Mega Man titles, but when you get right down to it, is it just extra busy work, when we used to be able to just shoot targets into oblivion? Yes, yes it is. But who am I to complain about new mechanics? Lord knows we had enough Mega Man sequels to prove that making so many games without such a unique selling point isn't the way to go either.  But that doesn't mean I have to like it.

Of course, getting through the stages themselves is only half of the battle; the other half is knowing -- I mean, fighting the bosses. Like in Mega Man, Mighty Numbers 1 through 8 yield their weapons when you defeat them, allowing you to exploit the weaknesses of other bosses with them. Once again, this give the player the challenge of figuring out which boss is weak to which weapon... except not, because you can have the game straight-out tell you what their weaknesses are!  But the thing is, every so often, you have to hit them with a dash to finalize the damage you've just dealt, and if you fail that, they heal that chunk of health you worked so hard to chip off! There are even a number of bosses who possess instant-kill attacks!  Speaking of, there is no reason why spikes still need to be an instant kill, as they are in this very game. To quote the Zero Punctuation review of (the admittedly superior) Shovel Knight:

"We've got bottomless pits for a perfectly functional, if slightly ambiguous, instant kill; we don't need spikes muscling in on their turf! Five minutes ago, a bloke the size of a pregnant bus jumped down and hit me with the metal windsurfing sail that he seems to think is a sword, and it didn't even take off a whole health point. Now I'm being splattered across four dimensions because my elbow brushed against the stucco ceiling. I'm a trifle miffed! I think it's only an instant kill because spikes were an instant kill in Mega Man, but it was just as unnecessary then, too."

That may be true of both games, but you know what Shovel Knight has that Mighty No. 9 doesn't? Infinite lives! Let me quiz you readers on this topic:

Q: Where did lives systems in video game come from?
A: From arcade games, to let the next person in line play (and subsequently, pay) as soon as possible.

Q: Why do console games have lives systems?
A: Because they were ported from arcade games.

Q: Ah, but what if the console game in question was not an arcade port? Why would it have a lives system then?
A: ...I got nothing.

Dashing and precision platforming don't mix, especially when insta-kill spikes or bottomless pits are involved.

See, if you must include a lives system in your game, don't make it mandatory; just include it as an option, like Arcade Mode in Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. (Incidentally, why haven't they ever brought Arcade Mode back to CoD? Was their Special-Ops mission mode from Modern Warfare 2 just so revolutionary that they couldn't look back?) And sure, losing all your lives just forces you to restart the level in question, not the whole game, plus you can set your lives to as many as 10 right off the bat. But that's just putting patches on the problem instead of addressing the root cause.

But even if the game did offer infinite lives, there's one more problem which grinds my gears. Each time you die, the game docks you a penalty of 3,000 points. And by the game's standards, 3,000 is a lot of points. This matters because you get grades for your performance upon completing a level. And if you get killed enough that your score ends up at 0, all you get is a meager finishing bonus and a D rank. I guess the idea is that you get better at the stage so you can do it without dying even once, but getting that D the first time around does not leave a good impression of the game, and could very well discourage players from trying them again.

Let's change the subject to something which doesn't cause frustration. In comparison to the old Mega Man games, which couldn't afford a detailed story due to space constraints, Mighty No. 9 does a great job in building up its setting.  The boss characters all have some sort of utility purpose they could have been used for before turning evil, a concept which hasn't been explored since Mega Man 1.  The levels all take place within appropriately-themed industrial sites throughout the USA, plus a level set in the White House, of all places.  Then again, this same level has you chasing down a sniper in a long, looping corridor without checkpoints -- but with more insta-kill spikes, of course -- so they might as well not have bothered.

The limited character animations make most cutscenes feel unfinished.

World-building is one thing, but the graphics which bring that world to life fail to impress.  Sure, a game like this doesn't need too many visual gimmicks to work, but it's still well behind the times. On the one hand, animations like Beck's walk cycle are expressive and bouncy. On the other hand, the animation in cutscenes is considerably more limited, as characters don't move their mouths when they talk! Like, at all!  Even Mega Man Legends, a game that came out two decades ago, animated the character's mouths, and that was just with 2-D textures!  And yet despite it all, the game is somehow a bit poorly-optimised.  Maybe it's just on the PlayStation 3 version I played, but there are quite a few instances of slowdown and frame-skipping.  One such instance even made me miss a ledge and fall to the death!  It's these sort of thing which gives the impression of a game that's only half-baked, and make us wonder where the heck all that money we backed it with went.

In conclusion, Mighty No. 9 is basically this generation's Daikatana, for there are many coincidental similarities between the two games.  Both were developed by brand-new studios started by game designers with quite a bit of pedigree behind them.  Both were announced three years ahead of their eventual release, during which time their developments were plagued with accusations of mis-management amidst vast budgets, not to mention some insulting advertisements.  And when the actual games came out, their almost-admirable attempts at world-building were overshadowed by game mechanics which work against the player, graphics which seemed a whole generation behind the times, and were general disappointments at best.  Not to mention, they are both tangentially related to actually good games by developers who had their heads screwed on tighter.  For Daikatana, it was Deus Ex, by the "good" half of Ion Storm.  And for Mighty No. 9, that would be Azure Striker Gunvolt by Inti Creates, who coincidentally also did work on this game.  Perhaps I should review Gunvolt myself one day, but in the meantime, I think I've got the perfect tagline to describe this whole affair: "Keiji Inafune is about to make you his b!tch."

Suck it down, ladies and gentlemen.  But until next time, this is IchigoRyu.

You are the resistance.

Positives:
+ Promising world-building.
+ The bonus challenge missions.
+ Expressive characters and animations.

Negatives:
- The dash-to-kill mechanic is an unnecessary addition forced upon us.
- Relentlessly difficult, even without the lives system.

- Extremely basic graphics and sub-par optimisation.

Control: 3 spikes out of 5
Design: 1 spikes out of 5
Audiovisual: 2 spikes out of 5
Value: 3 spikes out of 5
The Call: 50% (D)

You might like instead: Azure Striker Gunvolt, Shovel Knight, Strider

Game Review: Shantae and the Pirate's Curse

Shantae and the Pirate's Curse

• Publisher: WayForward 
• Developer: WayForward / Inti Creates 
• Release: 
• Nintendo 3DS: 23 October 2014 
• Wii U: 25 December 2014 
• PC: 23 April 2015 
• Genre: 2D Action 
• Players: 1 

Previously on the SDP, I reviewed the first two Shantae games. So naturally, me writing a review of the latest sequel was inevitable. If you'll recall my review of Risky's Revenge, the second game in the series, my greatest complaint was its short length. However, I did try to give it the benefit of the doubt, assuming that WayForward had so much trouble trying to find a publisher after the commercial failure of the first game. Well, at the risk of spoiling this review, I'm pleased to report this is no longer the case for the newest entry, Shantae and the Pirate's Curse. Maybe they've gotten used to this whole digital-distribution thing now, so that they don't have to work their budgets around what a publisher will or won't give them. Or maybe it's because they collaborated on this game with Inti Creates, a Japanese development team famous for, among other things, the Mega Man Zero series, Azure Striker Gunvolt, and the upcoming Mighty No.9 (with Comcept). They even made a port of Pirate's Curse for the Wii U, thus beating the crowdfunded 1/2-Genie Hero to become the series' first console game, and later followed by a PC port, just like Risky's Revenge. So does this new influx of resources, man-hours, and/or willpower translate to a better game?

When a brand-new evil entity known as the Pirate Master threatens the safety of Sequin Land, our heroine, the half-genie Shantae, and her nemesis, the lady pirate Risky Boots, must form an uneasy alliance to take him down. Shantae's trademarked dance-powered animal transformations are unavailable this time around, due to a run-in with the plot last time around. So in lieu of those, progress is controlled by the acquiring of various pirate paraphernelia. There's a pistol to shoot switches and deal light damage, a scimitar to break blocks underfoot, a giant hat to glide with while jumping, and so on. And unlike the aforementioned transformations, which require you to stop and enter some form of dance mode to activate, each of these new moves has their own button input or inputs. It's like the developers said, "We've got six buttons to work with on this 3DS thing, and by gum, we're going to use them!"

New equipments like the Pirate Hat elevate the gameplay experience, pardon the pun. (3DS version.)

Control ergonomics aside, this decision was a good one in the interest of making the gameplay feel fresh again. They don't offer the same abilities as the animal transformations from the first two games, but nonetheless offer new possibilities for exploring the game worlds. But it's not all different: the series' traditional attack items such as Fire Balls, Pike Balls, and Storm Puffs are back again. Whereas attack items in Risky's Revenge were fueled by a magic meter, Pirate's Curse switches them back to being consumables. However, they can be dropped by defeated enemies as well as purchased from the shop, so things even out on that front. Once again, Heart Squids may be collected to extend Shantae's maximum health, although instead of instantly taking effect as you would expect to see in most video games, you have to bring them to the "squidsmith" in Scuttle Town, who will smash them four at a time to form new heart containers. Sadistic, yes, but it also clues you in to the level of comedy you'll be dealing with in Pirate's Curse.

Instead of the singular overworld map employed in the first two Shantaes, and indeed most every Metroidvania-type game, the world of Pirate's Curse is laid out across six or so islands, one of them being the main town and the others each containing one of the games dungeon levels, and connected by a hub menu. This was also a great decision, as it cuts down on travel time quite a bit. Besides, Dust: An Elysian Tail also did this sort of thing, and that was one of the few video games I gave a perfect score to! There were still a few fetch quests which had me lost the first time around, and some of the pre-dungeon events drug on just long enough to be not fun. For example, a mid-game episode on Tan Line Island forces you into a stealth section. Still, my first play-through clocked in at about 8 hours, and if I may say so, it was 8 hours well-spent. Beating the game once unlocks the Pirate Mode, where you get all the pirate acccessories from the start of the game. If nothing else, it lets us laypeople experiment with speed-running through the game.

The character portraits look neat in stereoscopic 3D. ...Take my word for it. (Wii U version.)

The pseudo-16-bit art style of Risky's Revenge has gone largely unchanged for Pirate's Curse, although I suppose it's neat to see more enemies from the first game returning with a visual upgrade. For a game whose graphics engine relies mainly on 2D sprites, the few times that stereoscopic 3D effects in (the 3DS version of) Pirate's Curse are used are all the more notable, especially on the character portraits during dialogue scenes. Obviously this doesn't apply to the Wii U and PC ports, where said portraits were re-drawn to take advantage of the higher screen resolutions, but the other art assets were not. WayForward has done HD graphics before, even on games ported from smaller-screened platforms, so this was a curious oversight. I don't know, maybe they're saving all that work for Half-Genie Hero. The soundtrack, once again composed by Jake Kaufman, is also partly recycled from the last game, but it was cool then and is still cool now. Once again it takes melodies from the first game, along with new ones, and jacking them up with Middle-Eastern and other influences. Pirate's Curse is also the first Shantae game to introduce voice acting, tastefully limited to a few sound bites in gameplay and cutscenes. In case you're interested, the leading lady is played by Christina "Vee" Valenzuela, also known for playing Cerebella in Skullgirls, and Sailor Mars from the new Sailor Moon dub.

Still, I must stress that gameplay, not graphics, is nine-tenths of the law. Apart from the new abilities and streamlined world layout, I like how the little damage point numbers that pop up like from a classic RPG, or the halfway-decent map screen, including maps for dungeons, a glaring omission in the last game. It's the little details like those which take the experience over the top, although there are other details I wish had been cleaned up. I wish that I could leave notes on the maps when I find a place to come back to later (maybe I've been spoiled by The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds). It would certainly help me keep track of the numerous, and often unintuitive, trading-game fetch quests needed to progress through the game, as it's easy to ignore places you'll need to put things later on. Then there's the smaller stuff, like how the sub-menu automatically switches pages when I find a key item or something. But smaller stuff aside, Pirate's Curse ranks up there with sequels such as The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, Mega Man Legends 2, or Just Cause 2, which don't reinvent too much, but fine-tune the experiences of their predecessor whilst offering far more of it. Pirate's Curse is clearly the best game in the Shantae series thus far, offering a challenging hurdle for 1/2-Genie Hero to clear. But whether or not it does, the SDP and I will be all over that like black on a Tinkerbat.  (...Don't look at me like that. Risky Boots's minions aren't African, they're literally black-skinned monster thingies.)

Positives:
+ More content than the first two games (combined).
+ The pirate tools offer up new abilities for exploration.
+ Tasteful introduction of voice acting.
+ Retains the series' sense of humour.

Negatives:
- Some of the fetch quests can leave you wandering aimlessly to solve them.
- A few sections of the game appear to drag on, if only for being less fun than the rest of the game.
- The lack of upscaled graphics in the Wii U and PC ports seem like a missed opportunity.

Controls: 5 pirate tools out of 5
Design: 4 pirate tools out of 5
Graphics: 5 pirate tools out of 5
Sound: 5 pirate tools out of 5
Value: 4 pirate tools out of 5
The Call: 90% (A-)

Shooter Month: Summer Carnival '92: Recca

Summer Carnival '92: Recca

• Publisher: Naxat Soft 
• Developer: Kid 
• Release: 
• NES, 17 July 1992 (Japan only) 
• Nintendo 3DS, 5 September 2013 
• Genre: 2D Action (Shoot-em-up) 
• Players: 1 
• Save: N/A 
• Rarity/Cost: 
• NES: Very rare, US$300-1,000 
• 3DS: DLC, US$5 

You know when a new video game console comes on the market, but its predecessor still has a good deal of life left in it? That can lead to some awkward, even unfortunate, moments. For example, Shantae has been cited by some as the best game ever made for the Game Boy Color -- I believe I may have implied something of that nature. The problem was, by the time it was released, the Game Boy Advance had been on the market for a year, so for the sake of putting their resources where the hip new thing was at, Capcom made only a limited production run of the game. Oh wait, this was the same Capcom that cancelled Mega Man Legends 3... okay, bad example.

Let's move on to the actual subject of today's review: Summer Carnival '92: Recca, a shoot-em-up released only in Japan for the Nintendo Famicom, but two years into the lifespan of the Super Famicom. From what I've read, Recca was made for an annual shooting-game competition, something which apparently was all the rage in early-90s Japan. [1]  So, it's sort of like Nintendo World Championships '90 and those other multi-game challenge carts, right? Not exactly; it has a fully-featured single-player campaign, albeit a short one, and it had its own production run, with a box and everything. A very limited production run, mind you; a hard copy of the game will either cost you hundreds or even thousands of US dollars. Or you could visit nesreproductions.com and see how you could get a reproduction copy made for around $20. #NotSponsored  Thankfully, that all changed in 2013, when Nintendo offered the game on the 3DS eShop for a mere $5. #StillNotSponsored  But even at that low price, is Recca worth it?

Letting go of the trigger button charges a bomb, and also builds your score.

Recca offers three modes, all designed for one player: a standard campaign consisting of four stages, a Score Attack mode where you have two minutes to score as many points as possible, and a Time Attack mode where you have five minutes to score a million points. No matter which mode you select, your ship has a main weapon which can be changed and upgraded with blue-coloured items, and will thankfully auto-fire when you hold the B button. But let go of B, and an energy meter at the bottom of the screen will fill up. Press B again when it is full, and you launch a bomb which lingers on the screen for a few seconds. Furthermore, you can pick up red-coloured items to gain and power-up a secondary helper gun, which fires when you hold the A button. Think the Option modules from Gradius or R-Type and you've got the idea. But these extra turrets offer more than just added firepower. Recca has a peculiar scoring system: in addition to earning points for shooting targets, your score increments automatically -- as long as you're not firing your main weapon. So while running through the levels with B held down and guns blazing is a perfectly acceptable strategy for survival, it would not have won you the tournament this game was made for.

And your skills would need to be of tournament-ready caliber in order to thrive, nay, survive in Recca. As I said before, there are only four stages in the main game, each of which last five to ten minutes and host at least two bosses, so it's not much for length. (Unless you beat the game and reset, in which case you get to play a second campaign, like The Legend of Zelda's second quest.) But what it lacks there, it more than makes up for in challenge -- specifically, in its pace. Enemies fly onto the screen from all directions at a tremendous rate, so there will be many, many ships and bullets for you to dodge. And you lose all your power-ups every time you get hit. A lot of games do that, so I'm not gonna single out Recca on this offence, but still, I'm never a fan of this decision. If our ship's gonna be a one-hit-point-wonder anyway, why not let us keep our upgrades until we continue? Or maybe I'm just not good enough to appreciate this game, whatever. Ironically, most bosses tend to be easier than the stages leading up to them, since you only need to drop a few bombs on them to win. Which is why I feel no shame whatsoever in sharing with you an infinite-lives cheat. Ready? Here it goes: Hold Select during the opening Naxat Soft logo. This will open a menu where you can change the score target for Time Attack mode. Before leaving this screen, press Start while holding A, B, Select, and Up. Start a game in any mode and you will have infinite lives.

Recca employs various background effects and doesn't often slow down.

Summer Carnival '92: Recca is a well-put-together shooter, don't get me wrong. But for some reason I just couldn't connect with it. Maybe it's the visual aesthetics; the colour palette seems to focus on reds, blues, and violets, making for a somewhat monochromatic affair. And even though I will give credit to the graphics engine for employing special effects to the backgrounds every once in a while, and only suffering slowdown in rare, specific instances, the combination of warping backdrops and limited colours makes the visual action hard to make out, or at the very least a little ugly. Maybe it's the soundtrack; it seems to be going for a house/jock-jam feel, with intricate beats and lots of sound-effect samples. It's impressive in theory; you don't see, or rather hear, many NES soundtracks emulating real-world musical genres. But it suffers a similar problem I had with 1942 in that with the NES's sound hardware, it just isn't rendered in a pleasing manner. I don't know, maybe if this soundtrack got a remake with some real production, I'd like it a lot more. Or maybe I'm just the type of gamer who demands a difficulty curve on which I can ride a game to the end without relying on cheat codes. Oh well, practise makes perfect, I guess.

Positives:

+ A unique scoring system that values making your shots count.

+ The bosses are breathers compared to the rest of the game.

+ Innovative graphical effects with limited slowdown.

+ An ambitious house soundtrack.

Negatives:

- Insane difficulty.

- An ugly colour palette.

Control: 4 minutes out of 5
Design: 3 minutes out of 5
Graphics: 4 minutes out of 5
Audio: 3 minutes out of 5
The Call: 75% (B-)

---

[1] ZZZ. "Recca". Hardcore Gaming 101. 21 April 2007 http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/recca/recca.htm.

Indie-Cember: VVVVVV

VVVVVV

• Developer/Lead Designer: Terry Cavanaugh*
• Release:
• PC: 11 January 2010
• Nintendo 3DS: 29 December 2011
• Genre: 2D Action/Adventure
• Players: 1
• Rarity/Cost: DLC, US$5

*3DS port published by Nicalis.

As a gamer from the post-Nintendo generation, my experience with, if not knowledge of, everything that came before the NES is spotty at best. For example, as of writing this, I've never played anything on a Commodore 64. Shame, I know. And that's merely a reflection of my personal history as a gamer; I'm not understating its success or anything. For instance, I hear the C64 was way popular in Europe, so it's a very real possibility that an indie game developer from, say, the British Isles may have grown up with it, let its style shape his earliest concepts of a video game, and use that mental image to shape his own products. And what do you know, that just so happens to be the case with the Irish-born, currently England-based Terry Cavanaugh, and his most notable title to date, VVVVVV (pronounced "The Letter V Six Times").

In VVVVVV, you play as Captain Viridian, a grayish-blue humanoid who is forced to evacuate his spaceship along with his crew, only to come out the other side sans crew. It is then up to you to rescue the remaining five members of your crew, wherever they may be. And how is this to be done? Why, in the context of a 2D platformer, simple enough. The game is divided into an open world which you get to explore at your leisure, and various sub-levels in which your crew members may be found. Ah, a Metroidvania format, nothing we haven't seen before. Oh, and instead of jumping, you get to flip the gravity to get past obstacles.

Wait, what?

Yes, because jumping is too mainstream, pressing the action button (default: spacebar) flips Captain Viridian from the floor to the ceiling or vice-versa. This is not a new concept in gaming controls, having been represented in titles like Metal Storm (NES, 1991), Wendy: Every Witch Way (GBC, 2001), and Messr. Cavanaugh's own freeware title, Sine Wave Ninja (PC, 2009). But VVVVVV goes all-out with the concept, since nearly everything in this game revolves around this manoeuvre. After having eased you into the game's mechanics by letting you explore parts of the game freely, new concepts are thrust upon you, primarily in the aforementioned sub-levels. Tricks are introduced at just the right pace, like wrap-warping from one side of the screen to another, lines which automatically flip you upon touching them, and spikes.

Later areas gradually introduce you to concepts like wrap-warping.

Because it's a retro-styled game, of course they have to have instant-death spikes. I mean, how else are you going to ramp up the challenge? Put more animate obstacles on the screen? Not with this hardware! ...At least not the hardware Messr. Cavanaugh is trying to evoke. But before the more noobish of you get up and walk away from this article, to retreat behind the cover of your chest-high walls and suckle on the teats of regenerating health, hear me out. The difficulty of VVVVVV is balanced out by the presence of checkpoints -- and lots of them. And despite what I called you out on earlier, I applaud this approach. A major source of frustration in video games is failing a challenge and have to wait a long time before you can try it again. I've actually up and quit video games that made me sit through an unskippable cutscene every time I tried to face a boss *CoughKingdomHeartsNotTheHDRereleaseMindYouWhichThankGodfullyHasThisFeatureCough*.

If you remember the beginning of this article, I didn't write that spiel about the Commodore 64 just to fill up space. VVVVVV does, in fact, draw inspiration from the aesthetics of the C64 and its software. The visuals are presented in a limited colour palette, individual objects are drawn solely in shades of the same hue, and instead of camera scrolling, each room in the game's map fills the screen area, no more, no less. And you know what? I kinda like this approach. Each room has a different name (courtesy of the guy who made QWOP, no less), and non-spiky obstacles are patterned after these names. You can expect to dodge ghosts, clouds, stop signs, and even words and numbers in your journeys. I don't know about you, but that leads to far more memorable experiences than just facing down identically-uniformed humanoids.

It's nice to see creativity in the colours and object designs.

What's more, this was more or less intentional. The word from the horse's mouth (so to speak) is that not only was this an opportunity for Messr. Cavanaugh to indulge in his own personal "retro fetish", and to "make something that looked and felt like the C64 games [he] grew up with", but to avoid the hassles of modern graphics and make visuals that are genuinely interesting. [1]  And if the latter were the only reason, then I dare say this is one corner I wish was cut more often. It's not just how they're presented here in VVVVVV, but it's a bucking of one of my least favourite trends in modern full-budget game production: the "Real Is Brown" trope. Maybe it's allow advanced lighting routines to run without bringing down the entire graphics engine, maybe it's to reflect the stylistic choices in other media, maybe it's a stylistic choice for its own sake, I don't know. All I know is I hate it. Limiting yourself to a short slice of the colour spectrum makes for forgettable moments in your work, and when everyone's trying to do it, well, it's one of the many reasons I fear for the safety of our beloved industry. And to bring this review back to the point of Indie-Cember, it's one of the many reasons I've stuck my head under the surface of the indie ocean and drowned in its innovative pleasantness. ...Try not to think too much about that metaphor.

...

So yeah, VVVVVV. Yes, its controls may be overly-dependent on fast-twitch timing, and may occasionally be a bit slippery. Yes, it may be a little short -- I managed to finish a bare-bones run in just over an hour, in one sitting -- if you don't spend any time hunting out the optional Trinkets or playing the unlockable challenge mini-modes. Yes, being trapped in those cut-away sections drags down the pacing a bit, keeping you from the freedom of exploration until you finish them. Although, I will give them credit for eliciting an emotion of desolation. And yes, this business of spikes killing you when you simply brush up against their side needs to stop. But by all other accounts, VVVVVV is a well-oiled machine that pulls you into the zone with just a few rooms. Maybe it's Magnus Pålsson's club-ready chiptune soundtrack that does the trick. Or maybe it's the pacing which puts you back in the action as soon as possible after each mishap which keeps the intensity flowing. Either way, it's got all I could ask for in a platformer: something innovative, something thought-provoking, and above all else, being really, really good at what it's supposed to be.

Positives:

+ Delivers many variations on a simple gameplay mechanic.

+ Frequent checkpoints balance out its difficulty.

+ Creative characters and room names.

+ A thumpin' chiptune soundtrack.

Negatives:

- The cutaway sections drag down the pace a bit.

Control: 3 trinkets out of 5
Design: 5 trinkets out of 5
Graphics: 5 trinkets out of 5
Audio: 5 trinkets out of 5

Value: 3 trinkets out of 5
The Call: 95% (A)

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[1] Rose, Michael (2010-01-06). "Intervvvvvview: Terry Cavanagh". IndieGames.com.