I was a little busy doing things to take care of and comfort my sick kid brother for a while today, so here, have a speed drawing YouTube embed by the guy who made the Armed With Wings games. (It has music.)
He apparently never used this design in a game, or something... It's a drawing of Vandheer Lorde, though, so it's automatically awesome even if it doesn't look like any version of him from a specific game.
-Signing off.
Showing posts with label armed with wings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label armed with wings. Show all posts
Friday, November 16, 2012
Monday, November 12, 2012
Game Review: Heir
Heir is a game I played some time ago and came back to recently because I was thinking about the Armed With Wings series, mainly because I'd mistakenly believed that Heir and Armed With Wings were created by the same guy. They aren't (obviously, since I just said that they weren't), but they have some odd similarities in their construction and style.
In Heir, you play as a little dude who is basically a white silhouette, and it's fairly obvious if you watch him in motion that he's been designed this way to make him simple to animate.
That's him there, in a kneeling, praying position. That's his default resting pose, which is certainly interesting in a game like this.
According to the story, the character is a "pale man from the North" or some silliness like that; this reminded me of the unnecessary justification for Armed With Wings to explain the silhouette people, and this is the primary cause for the aforementioned assumption I'd made on their mutual origins. While I can understand this case a little better (as it's a little more egregious that the character looks like this in a world full of color), I still think it's pretty silly, and honestly I didn't feel the need for a justification. (Then again, my blasè attitude might just come from playing a lot of visually simplistic flash games. I dunno.) He does tie it into the story a bit with the plot essentially being driven by the fact that apparently the "pale men" are widely hated in the region where the game takes place, but... eh. Whatever.
Now, you might notice that the guy is sitting on a boulder that's next to several other boulders in an oddly regular pattern. There's a reason for this: They're toes.
This thing's toes.
And that little white speck in front of it is the protagonist.
Now's about the time that I ought to mention that the game's creator explained that he created it as a tribute to Shadow of the Colossus, the game in which you fight over a dozen monsters that are so big you have to climb them to attack them, and has no other enemies in it at all. This game is somewhat similar, in that you "fight" a total of three giant monsters.
Note the quotes. This is a platforming game where the platforming environments are designed to look like monsters, with periodic shaking and roaring distracting you, and when you reach a goal point, your guy pulls that sword off his back and stabs it into it...
...and because it's apparently the monster's weak point, the monster will then die in a spout of blood and a series of explosions.
As platformers go, it's an interesting and inventive one, since it actually makes sense for there to be these daft stuctures that you're leaping across (albeit naturally also suffering from its own form of illogic), and the instant death spikes make a kind of sense as the immune system/defensive adaptations of a giant monster against pesky little adventurers, certainly more sense than there being somebody with a deadly spike fetish scattering them all over the land for the sake of making places treacherous to traverse. Making less sense in world-logic terms but a lot of sense gameplay-wise is the fact that there are save points scattered all over their bodies as well; this is the main reason the game is playable, because I sure wouldn't want to play a game where you had to start over from the beginning crawling all over a great big darned giant monster every time you died falling off/into spikes or ended up being set back somehow.
The platforming is also much more fair than it is in certain games (*cough* Red Moon *cough* Armed With Wings *cough*), although there's a particular place on one monster that makes me a little crazy, because when you die there, you tend to then randomly teleport-fall into a save point that happens to be positioned in just the wrong spot and then finish dying, and this save point is on the wrong side of some of the trickier platforming. I'm willing to chalk that up as a fluke and move on.
Aiding you in platforming across the great monsters is a "scout" button. Since these monsters are so large and oddly shaped, it can be difficult to see where you're going, and to alleviate this, you can use the scout button to zoom the camera out a bit. There will still be places where you'll need to make blind jumps, but the game is fair about this once again, and you'll rarely jump to your death this way. (If you do, it'll be because you goofed and missed the target; it's generally just a slap on the wrist, though, so don't worry about it.)
As seen above, at certain points, the camera zooms out automatically. In the case of the above screenshot, it did so because of a particularly long fall, but it will also do so when you slay each monster. This is the only way you can get a good look at the second and third monsters, in fact. (The zooming camera bits are yet another thing that made me think of the Armed With Wings series, incidentally.)
I decided to be nice and show off screenshots of the remaining two monsters. It's actually kind of fun to play a guessing game and figure out what they are.
I didn't have much trouble figuring out that the second monster was a turtle.
There were some rather obvious clues in the shape of its back; it was either a turtle shell or stegosaur plates, and the turtle was a more obvious choice for a fantasy setting.
The hard one was number three.
Number three had been underwater, and suddenly rose up out of it. I wondered at first if this meant it had just stood up.
Then I saw something flapping. A bird, perhaps?
Then I saw its head, and it reminded me of an elephant. Had those been ears?
No. None of those things.
This monster...
...was a flying seahorse.
That's kind of cheating.
Anyway, on another note, there's kind of a neat thing that goes on with the underwater/out of water transitions. The water largely behaves as one would expect, with you moving differently through it (though hardly swimming), and you have an oxygen meter. The real thing that makes the water feel different, though, is that all the sound suddenly muffles and goes silent, and starts again when you come out. That's the real thing that makes the water segments feel unique and water-like.
To wrap up, the story (SPOILERS LOL) involves an heirless king offering his throne to whoever could slay the monsters who were supposedly causing trouble (we see no actual evidence of the trouble in question, by the way); a "pale man" shows up and offers to try, and so even though his people mock the pale man because people hate pale men, he silences them and tells the pale man to give it a shot. Then, when the pale man comes back to the king on his death bed after taking care of those monsters, the king stabs him and throws him out a window, because he certainly wouldn't give his throne to a pale man after all.
And that's the final reason why this game reminded me of the Armed With Wings games; story that cheats you of accomplishments, like about half the final boss fights from those games.
So, yeah. I don't like the story.
On the other hand, the game is interesting and has solid gameplay, and I personally think it's pretty fun. The monsters are a little bit... I don't want to say boring or poorly animated, but they're certainly not particularly complex, and except for the seahorse's wings, they don't really move at all, though you don't generally notice much because you're usually only seeing a tiny bit of them at a time. Considering that the game was created (as I understand it) as a class project, though, that's really not too bad.
The game's atmosphere is wonderful. It conveys a feel very well, and I think the game is worth playing just for that, even with my complaints about the story.
-Signing off.
In Heir, you play as a little dude who is basically a white silhouette, and it's fairly obvious if you watch him in motion that he's been designed this way to make him simple to animate.
That's him there, in a kneeling, praying position. That's his default resting pose, which is certainly interesting in a game like this.
According to the story, the character is a "pale man from the North" or some silliness like that; this reminded me of the unnecessary justification for Armed With Wings to explain the silhouette people, and this is the primary cause for the aforementioned assumption I'd made on their mutual origins. While I can understand this case a little better (as it's a little more egregious that the character looks like this in a world full of color), I still think it's pretty silly, and honestly I didn't feel the need for a justification. (Then again, my blasè attitude might just come from playing a lot of visually simplistic flash games. I dunno.) He does tie it into the story a bit with the plot essentially being driven by the fact that apparently the "pale men" are widely hated in the region where the game takes place, but... eh. Whatever.
Now, you might notice that the guy is sitting on a boulder that's next to several other boulders in an oddly regular pattern. There's a reason for this: They're toes.
This thing's toes.
And that little white speck in front of it is the protagonist.
Now's about the time that I ought to mention that the game's creator explained that he created it as a tribute to Shadow of the Colossus, the game in which you fight over a dozen monsters that are so big you have to climb them to attack them, and has no other enemies in it at all. This game is somewhat similar, in that you "fight" a total of three giant monsters.
Note the quotes. This is a platforming game where the platforming environments are designed to look like monsters, with periodic shaking and roaring distracting you, and when you reach a goal point, your guy pulls that sword off his back and stabs it into it...
...and because it's apparently the monster's weak point, the monster will then die in a spout of blood and a series of explosions.
As platformers go, it's an interesting and inventive one, since it actually makes sense for there to be these daft stuctures that you're leaping across (albeit naturally also suffering from its own form of illogic), and the instant death spikes make a kind of sense as the immune system/defensive adaptations of a giant monster against pesky little adventurers, certainly more sense than there being somebody with a deadly spike fetish scattering them all over the land for the sake of making places treacherous to traverse. Making less sense in world-logic terms but a lot of sense gameplay-wise is the fact that there are save points scattered all over their bodies as well; this is the main reason the game is playable, because I sure wouldn't want to play a game where you had to start over from the beginning crawling all over a great big darned giant monster every time you died falling off/into spikes or ended up being set back somehow.
The platforming is also much more fair than it is in certain games (*cough* Red Moon *cough* Armed With Wings *cough*), although there's a particular place on one monster that makes me a little crazy, because when you die there, you tend to then randomly teleport-fall into a save point that happens to be positioned in just the wrong spot and then finish dying, and this save point is on the wrong side of some of the trickier platforming. I'm willing to chalk that up as a fluke and move on.
Aiding you in platforming across the great monsters is a "scout" button. Since these monsters are so large and oddly shaped, it can be difficult to see where you're going, and to alleviate this, you can use the scout button to zoom the camera out a bit. There will still be places where you'll need to make blind jumps, but the game is fair about this once again, and you'll rarely jump to your death this way. (If you do, it'll be because you goofed and missed the target; it's generally just a slap on the wrist, though, so don't worry about it.)
As seen above, at certain points, the camera zooms out automatically. In the case of the above screenshot, it did so because of a particularly long fall, but it will also do so when you slay each monster. This is the only way you can get a good look at the second and third monsters, in fact. (The zooming camera bits are yet another thing that made me think of the Armed With Wings series, incidentally.)
I decided to be nice and show off screenshots of the remaining two monsters. It's actually kind of fun to play a guessing game and figure out what they are.
I didn't have much trouble figuring out that the second monster was a turtle.
There were some rather obvious clues in the shape of its back; it was either a turtle shell or stegosaur plates, and the turtle was a more obvious choice for a fantasy setting.
The hard one was number three.
Number three had been underwater, and suddenly rose up out of it. I wondered at first if this meant it had just stood up.
Then I saw something flapping. A bird, perhaps?
Then I saw its head, and it reminded me of an elephant. Had those been ears?
No. None of those things.
This monster...
...was a flying seahorse.
That's kind of cheating.
Anyway, on another note, there's kind of a neat thing that goes on with the underwater/out of water transitions. The water largely behaves as one would expect, with you moving differently through it (though hardly swimming), and you have an oxygen meter. The real thing that makes the water feel different, though, is that all the sound suddenly muffles and goes silent, and starts again when you come out. That's the real thing that makes the water segments feel unique and water-like.
To wrap up, the story (SPOILERS LOL) involves an heirless king offering his throne to whoever could slay the monsters who were supposedly causing trouble (we see no actual evidence of the trouble in question, by the way); a "pale man" shows up and offers to try, and so even though his people mock the pale man because people hate pale men, he silences them and tells the pale man to give it a shot. Then, when the pale man comes back to the king on his death bed after taking care of those monsters, the king stabs him and throws him out a window, because he certainly wouldn't give his throne to a pale man after all.
And that's the final reason why this game reminded me of the Armed With Wings games; story that cheats you of accomplishments, like about half the final boss fights from those games.
So, yeah. I don't like the story.
On the other hand, the game is interesting and has solid gameplay, and I personally think it's pretty fun. The monsters are a little bit... I don't want to say boring or poorly animated, but they're certainly not particularly complex, and except for the seahorse's wings, they don't really move at all, though you don't generally notice much because you're usually only seeing a tiny bit of them at a time. Considering that the game was created (as I understand it) as a class project, though, that's really not too bad.
The game's atmosphere is wonderful. It conveys a feel very well, and I think the game is worth playing just for that, even with my complaints about the story.
-Signing off.
Monday, November 5, 2012
Game Review: (Armed With Wings:) Culmination
(Armed With Wings:) Culmination is what appears to be the currently final game in the Armed With Wings game series, which is made up of (in internal universe chronological order) Red Moon, Armed With Wings, Armed With Wings 2, and Armed With Wings 3. (Considering that the chronologically last game involves the protagonist killing the villains, resurrecting the heroes, and declaring he'll eradicate all "evil" from the world forever, it kinda seems like there isn't much room for further continuation.) I was a little surprised to see a new one, but then I realized it didn't have "Armed With Wings" in its actual title, so I suppose it's not that much of a surprise after all.
As near as I can tell, Culmination takes place in the middle of Armed With Wings 3, during a rather hilarious/stupid bit of the story where the protagonist is trying to get help from the protagonist of this game, and he runs off to chase down another villain who's running around instead of being remotely helpful.
One of the things that immediately struck me about Culmination is that it's probably the most artistically polished of any of the Armed With Wings games. (I'm not sure when it was made, but it feels like the last game, and its title suggests further that it must be the last game.) Look at this screenshot and try to tell me that it's anything less than beautiful, and I'll insist you're prevaricating and suggest that your leg garments might in fact be rapidly oxidizing.
You have the ability to turn on color, which is also rather pretty, but I don't think it really adds anything.
This game is very good at making you feel awesome when you're doing well, and awful when you're doing poorly. I've complained about the jumping puzzle bull in this series in the past; it isn't quite as awful as Armed With Wings (the only game I've ever played with jumping puzzles where you can't actually [grawlix] jump) or the second half of Red Moon, but it's still often very annoying. On the other hand...
...sometimes the jumping puzzles make you feel fantastic. To elaborate: In the above image, the lines and circles represent the path taken by your most powerful attack, which pulls you to the location of each enemy in turn to attack them... so these enemies are arranged like this so that you can kill them all to ascend this jump. This is terribly fun.
On the other hand, I personally miss jumps all the time and fall to my death, and in Hard Mode you can't double jump except when you've got at least half the possible amount of Special (which you can only get from rare items or from beating up enemies), and when you die you automatically lose all your Special, and so, well, not fun because you need to start over and now you can't jump as well as you could when you died.
Oh, yeah, there's a funny thing about this game. In all his appearances in other games, the protagonist (who was sorta called Armed With Wings in the first game, in AWW2, and the first bit of AWW3, but is here known as the "hero of the earth" or the "lone warrior") cannot jump, even when he's manifesting his full powers as the avatar of a creator god. Here, he's able to jump as well as the protagonist of Red Moon or even a little better, and she's an awesome jumper.
(That's probably why the game's creator felt justified in giving her such horrible jumping puzzles to get through. If it weren't for those [grawlix] puzzles, Red Moon would unequivocally be one of my favorite games of all time.)
Even more hilariously ironic is that he talks about how he's "improved upon" a jumping technique "invented" by Vandheer Lorde (and sounds like a total boastful jerk and butthead while doing it). Dude, how do you even know how to jump all of a sudden? YOU ARE NOT IN A GOOD POSITION TO BOAST ABOUT YOUR JUMPING SKILLS.
(Neither is Vandheer Lorde, mind you, as the worst jumper in these games who can actually jump, even with his "attacking to get air" and super jump, but ah well.)
Okay, let's talk about good stuff again. Aside from the awesome ultimate attack, and a combat system that is similar in terms of how it enables your abilities to the system in Xenos (which is a happy coincidence, as it means I don't need to explain it very hard-you build up power by beating on dudes, and it gradually drops over time, meaning you need to stay in combat to keep it charged), which has a lot of fun potential itself, there's also the combo meter, which is wonderful for lifting one's mood after the jumping puzzles get you down.
When you land hits in sequence, "[x] HIT COMBO" pops up on the screen. What makes this fun is that the more hits you land, the bigger your combo meter's font is. Observe:
Incidentally, I only managed to get the combo meter to about 90 because it kept getting slightly interrupted, but I juggled that poor shadow monster for around two hundred hits. This is intensely satisfying, especially with the combo meter gradually expanding.
Now, a bit more bad: I hate the enemies.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with them; as this is the prettiest game in the series, they're graphically beautiful, especially these gorgeous miniboss monsters, whose only flaw is that they're a little too small.
Seriously, those guys ought to be huge. Instead, they stand slightly shorter than the protagonist if you're not counting the arms.
Anyway, the problem is that even the most basic enemy is very tough, and for some reason all of them are very good at countering your attacks, and that's in Normal Mode. (Ironically, the basic and most common enemy is tougher than any of the other common enemies; the other common enemies are smaller and quicker things. There are only three common enemies in this game, which is a bit on the low side even for a flash game. It doesn't hurt the game, though.) This isn't so bad, even if the basic enemy can counter you close to twenty percent of the time, though it is annoying.
What is bad is that over time, it seems like the rates at which everything counters you increases. Over time, that rate seemed to jump to perhaps fifty percent or more for the common enemies. The bosses are proportionately worse (well, not those miniboss guys-they're actually pretty inoffensive on this front). By the time I reached the final boss fight in Hard Mode (you can't play Hard Mode until you've completed Normal Mode in one go, and this issue continued through my entire playthrough), it was basically impossible for me to land a normal hit on the final boss, and I didn't have a way to perform any Special attacks as a result.
It's possible that it's just a fluke that was afflicting me, but it affected my experience with the game, so I needed to mention it.
Anyway, now it seems like a good time to talk about the boss fight at the end.
In both Normal Mode and Hard Mode, you play as the "lone warrior," who is basically my least favorite character from the entire series because of his terrible jumping skills and just generally being a stupid self-righteous jerk.
(Incidentally [WARNING: RANTY ASIDE INCOMING], I learned what the trick to the painful boss fights in the first Armed With Wings is supposed to be to keep them from smashing you into instant death spikes/pits is that you're supposed to block.
I learned this, and then I thought "...you can block in that game? What?" And after a little more thought, I remembered "oh yeah, there was some kind of mention of blocking in one of the introductory levels, wasn't there?" And then I thought "including an important feature but not coming up with ways to encourage the player to use it more often earlier in the game is bad game design."
There is no goshdarned use for the stupid block up until the first boss fight, which is halfway through the game, and there's no way that the game hints to you that you ought to be blocking. By the time I'd slogged to the final boss fight with Vandheer Lorde, I'd totally forgotten, and that's the only way to survive being hit by Vandheer Lorde's ultimate attack in that game.
I am never going to make use of this information, by the way, because if you'll pardon my plain speaking, there's no way in hell that I'm ever going through the living hell of playing that game again.
Ahem. End ranty parenthetical aside.)
Anyway, after playing through the various stages, you come to the final stage, and have a chat with Vandheer Lorde. Now's a good time to mention that Vandheer Lorde is probably my favorite character in these games, because he's so unabashedly villainous and so casually and brutally batman that it makes me smile. (He also often fails to make much sense, which is also endearing.) This means that I was rather delighted at the bait and switch that follows in Normal Mode:
During the final battle, you suddenly switch to Vandheer Lorde.
It isn't all fun; you need to re-learn how to play, because Vandheer Lorde handles differently from the lone warrior; he's a little slower (as near as I can tell), his specials are completely different, and his ultimate is just terrible. (On the plus side, I'm not absolutely sure but I don't think his Special bar drains the way the lone warrior's does.)
And like nearly all the boss fights from all of these games, if you fall, you're dead, but if your opponent falls, he escapes. I will give the game maker kudos for making the escape animation more interesting than the generic teleport that every other boss from the games use, even if it once again reminds me of the irony of the lone warrior being so good at jumping.
Anyway, I had a hard time with this boss fight at first; when I used the basic special attack, Vandheer Lorde teleports over to attack the lone warrior from behind... and it turned out that took him off a cliff. Died immediately.
I tried using the next special... I don't remember what it did, but it didn't work very well.
I used the ultimate several times... It's so slow it never even came close to hitting anything, and the style of attack demands moving into place to use it (heck, it's a teleporting attack itself, so you ought to just teleport into the correct position to hit with it anyway, especially since it's your darned ultimate), so it pretty much just stinks.
Then I figured out the trick. Get your Special level built up to the basic level that lets you use the aforementioned teleportation attack, and use it several times in rapid succession. (I was able to get a few hits in, but the counter creep thing I mentioned made it unsuccessful; using it at a higher rate let Vandheer Lorde finally connect.) Then just MASH THAT S KEY LIKE THERE'S NO TOMORROW.
What follows is probably my favorite sequence from any of these games ever, so wondrous that I had to get help from my sister to make an animated gif (which... doesn't seem to be working here on the blog, darnit, so my sister helped out again with her Photobucket):
Teleport spam juggling. Even better, Vandheer Lorde (my favorite character) is teleport spam juggling the lone warrior (my least favorite character).
Of course, in Hard Mode, you play as the lone warrior for this fight; this is totally unfun, as Vandheer Lorde is basically the same version from AWW3, a tough and powerful foe, he does that super-countering thing I've mentioned so that you can't build up your Special bar, and he of course teleports to safety in the event that you knock him off a ledge. And which one you play as doesn't change the ending-Vandheer Lorde stabs the lone warrior through the chest by telekinetically flinging his neat hooked sword, and then goes off to fight the protagonist of AWW3 as that game's final boss.
So yeah, no matter what, you're playing most of the game as a character who gets brutally stabbed to death at the end, and there's no way to affect that, although as Vandheer Lorde goes on to be the final boss of AWW3 rather than disappear mysteriously partway through, of course it's not going to end well for the poor dope.
So this game is yet another in this series (the other offenders are Red Moon and AWW2) which renders your arduous boss fight victories completely irrelevant in a cutscene. Guy, this is bad storytelling for a videogame. It really is.
Anyway, seeing as how this is a bit of a retrospective on the whole series, I suppose I ought to comment on each of the previous games and compare them. Specifically, since each game's saving grace is whether or not fighting is fun in it, I'll be commenting on that.
Armed With Wings has a terrible one-dimensional combat system (literally, since you can't jump). Armed With Wings' combat system is a boring grind at best. It really is.
Red Moon's combat is light and easy. The word that keeps coming to mind is breezy. It's perhaps too easy at times, though my memories of the boss fight with Vandheer Lorde from that game aren't of an easy fight, they're of dying lots of times and of his attacks randomly teleporting both me and him around (which is obnoxious). Its easiness isn't a bad thing, though-it makes the game fun, at least up until the second half when there are these bizarre environments that you need to jump through that don't make any sense.
Armed With Wings 2 has a combat system which gives you lots of options (and also lets you play as Vandheer Lorde). You can kick, punch, swing a sword (and you can change swords several times in the game), grab and toss, fire a magic blast, and use a special magic attack/ability that's derived from your sword. Vandheer Lorde feels direct and brutal when you use him, from his animations to the effects of his abilities. Armed With Wings 2's combat system is visceral.
Armed With Wings 3 has a combat system that takes successful elements from the previous games (mainly aspects of Red Moon's breeziness and the customization of AWW2) and further adds an experience/leveling system. It's not quite as easygoing as Red Moon (thanks to a wider selection of actually competent enemies) and the character is nowhere near as brutal-feeling as Vandheer Lorde in AWW2, but gameplay is still very solid and fun. The keyword here is flexibility.
So how does Culmination compare? When you're doing well, you're soaring. When you're doing poorly, it's grindy, though thankfully not as bad as the first Armed With Wings, since you can slip past many enemies if you can't quite beat them. Culmination is a game of highs and lows.
Where would I rank Culmination relative to the others? It's pretty much above only Armed With Wings, which isn't difficult. If it hadn't been for the oddity of getting thrashed repeatedly by enemies that would have been easy prey in any of the other games, even the first one, it might well have been a lot better, possibly even the best.
It really is a good game in terms of gameplay and especially graphics, even with its rather inexplicable flaw which might not be a real thing. If you're a better player than me, you'd probably have even more fun. (As I've noted many times, I'm not a great player, and probably not even a "good" one, thanks to my fairly abysmal reflexes.) I like it, even if I'm not going to play it as often as the other games in this series.
-Signing off.
As near as I can tell, Culmination takes place in the middle of Armed With Wings 3, during a rather hilarious/stupid bit of the story where the protagonist is trying to get help from the protagonist of this game, and he runs off to chase down another villain who's running around instead of being remotely helpful.
One of the things that immediately struck me about Culmination is that it's probably the most artistically polished of any of the Armed With Wings games. (I'm not sure when it was made, but it feels like the last game, and its title suggests further that it must be the last game.) Look at this screenshot and try to tell me that it's anything less than beautiful, and I'll insist you're prevaricating and suggest that your leg garments might in fact be rapidly oxidizing.
You have the ability to turn on color, which is also rather pretty, but I don't think it really adds anything.
This game is very good at making you feel awesome when you're doing well, and awful when you're doing poorly. I've complained about the jumping puzzle bull in this series in the past; it isn't quite as awful as Armed With Wings (the only game I've ever played with jumping puzzles where you can't actually [grawlix] jump) or the second half of Red Moon, but it's still often very annoying. On the other hand...
...sometimes the jumping puzzles make you feel fantastic. To elaborate: In the above image, the lines and circles represent the path taken by your most powerful attack, which pulls you to the location of each enemy in turn to attack them... so these enemies are arranged like this so that you can kill them all to ascend this jump. This is terribly fun.
On the other hand, I personally miss jumps all the time and fall to my death, and in Hard Mode you can't double jump except when you've got at least half the possible amount of Special (which you can only get from rare items or from beating up enemies), and when you die you automatically lose all your Special, and so, well, not fun because you need to start over and now you can't jump as well as you could when you died.
Oh, yeah, there's a funny thing about this game. In all his appearances in other games, the protagonist (who was sorta called Armed With Wings in the first game, in AWW2, and the first bit of AWW3, but is here known as the "hero of the earth" or the "lone warrior") cannot jump, even when he's manifesting his full powers as the avatar of a creator god. Here, he's able to jump as well as the protagonist of Red Moon or even a little better, and she's an awesome jumper.
(That's probably why the game's creator felt justified in giving her such horrible jumping puzzles to get through. If it weren't for those [grawlix] puzzles, Red Moon would unequivocally be one of my favorite games of all time.)
Even more hilariously ironic is that he talks about how he's "improved upon" a jumping technique "invented" by Vandheer Lorde (and sounds like a total boastful jerk and butthead while doing it). Dude, how do you even know how to jump all of a sudden? YOU ARE NOT IN A GOOD POSITION TO BOAST ABOUT YOUR JUMPING SKILLS.
(Neither is Vandheer Lorde, mind you, as the worst jumper in these games who can actually jump, even with his "attacking to get air" and super jump, but ah well.)
Okay, let's talk about good stuff again. Aside from the awesome ultimate attack, and a combat system that is similar in terms of how it enables your abilities to the system in Xenos (which is a happy coincidence, as it means I don't need to explain it very hard-you build up power by beating on dudes, and it gradually drops over time, meaning you need to stay in combat to keep it charged), which has a lot of fun potential itself, there's also the combo meter, which is wonderful for lifting one's mood after the jumping puzzles get you down.
When you land hits in sequence, "[x] HIT COMBO" pops up on the screen. What makes this fun is that the more hits you land, the bigger your combo meter's font is. Observe:
Incidentally, I only managed to get the combo meter to about 90 because it kept getting slightly interrupted, but I juggled that poor shadow monster for around two hundred hits. This is intensely satisfying, especially with the combo meter gradually expanding.
Now, a bit more bad: I hate the enemies.
There's nothing intrinsically wrong with them; as this is the prettiest game in the series, they're graphically beautiful, especially these gorgeous miniboss monsters, whose only flaw is that they're a little too small.
Seriously, those guys ought to be huge. Instead, they stand slightly shorter than the protagonist if you're not counting the arms.
Anyway, the problem is that even the most basic enemy is very tough, and for some reason all of them are very good at countering your attacks, and that's in Normal Mode. (Ironically, the basic and most common enemy is tougher than any of the other common enemies; the other common enemies are smaller and quicker things. There are only three common enemies in this game, which is a bit on the low side even for a flash game. It doesn't hurt the game, though.) This isn't so bad, even if the basic enemy can counter you close to twenty percent of the time, though it is annoying.
What is bad is that over time, it seems like the rates at which everything counters you increases. Over time, that rate seemed to jump to perhaps fifty percent or more for the common enemies. The bosses are proportionately worse (well, not those miniboss guys-they're actually pretty inoffensive on this front). By the time I reached the final boss fight in Hard Mode (you can't play Hard Mode until you've completed Normal Mode in one go, and this issue continued through my entire playthrough), it was basically impossible for me to land a normal hit on the final boss, and I didn't have a way to perform any Special attacks as a result.
It's possible that it's just a fluke that was afflicting me, but it affected my experience with the game, so I needed to mention it.
Anyway, now it seems like a good time to talk about the boss fight at the end.
In both Normal Mode and Hard Mode, you play as the "lone warrior," who is basically my least favorite character from the entire series because of his terrible jumping skills and just generally being a stupid self-righteous jerk.
(Incidentally [WARNING: RANTY ASIDE INCOMING], I learned what the trick to the painful boss fights in the first Armed With Wings is supposed to be to keep them from smashing you into instant death spikes/pits is that you're supposed to block.
I learned this, and then I thought "...you can block in that game? What?" And after a little more thought, I remembered "oh yeah, there was some kind of mention of blocking in one of the introductory levels, wasn't there?" And then I thought "including an important feature but not coming up with ways to encourage the player to use it more often earlier in the game is bad game design."
There is no goshdarned use for the stupid block up until the first boss fight, which is halfway through the game, and there's no way that the game hints to you that you ought to be blocking. By the time I'd slogged to the final boss fight with Vandheer Lorde, I'd totally forgotten, and that's the only way to survive being hit by Vandheer Lorde's ultimate attack in that game.
I am never going to make use of this information, by the way, because if you'll pardon my plain speaking, there's no way in hell that I'm ever going through the living hell of playing that game again.
Ahem. End ranty parenthetical aside.)
Anyway, after playing through the various stages, you come to the final stage, and have a chat with Vandheer Lorde. Now's a good time to mention that Vandheer Lorde is probably my favorite character in these games, because he's so unabashedly villainous and so casually and brutally batman that it makes me smile. (He also often fails to make much sense, which is also endearing.) This means that I was rather delighted at the bait and switch that follows in Normal Mode:
During the final battle, you suddenly switch to Vandheer Lorde.
It isn't all fun; you need to re-learn how to play, because Vandheer Lorde handles differently from the lone warrior; he's a little slower (as near as I can tell), his specials are completely different, and his ultimate is just terrible. (On the plus side, I'm not absolutely sure but I don't think his Special bar drains the way the lone warrior's does.)
And like nearly all the boss fights from all of these games, if you fall, you're dead, but if your opponent falls, he escapes. I will give the game maker kudos for making the escape animation more interesting than the generic teleport that every other boss from the games use, even if it once again reminds me of the irony of the lone warrior being so good at jumping.
Anyway, I had a hard time with this boss fight at first; when I used the basic special attack, Vandheer Lorde teleports over to attack the lone warrior from behind... and it turned out that took him off a cliff. Died immediately.
I tried using the next special... I don't remember what it did, but it didn't work very well.
I used the ultimate several times... It's so slow it never even came close to hitting anything, and the style of attack demands moving into place to use it (heck, it's a teleporting attack itself, so you ought to just teleport into the correct position to hit with it anyway, especially since it's your darned ultimate), so it pretty much just stinks.
Then I figured out the trick. Get your Special level built up to the basic level that lets you use the aforementioned teleportation attack, and use it several times in rapid succession. (I was able to get a few hits in, but the counter creep thing I mentioned made it unsuccessful; using it at a higher rate let Vandheer Lorde finally connect.) Then just MASH THAT S KEY LIKE THERE'S NO TOMORROW.
What follows is probably my favorite sequence from any of these games ever, so wondrous that I had to get help from my sister to make an animated gif (which... doesn't seem to be working here on the blog, darnit, so my sister helped out again with her Photobucket):
Teleport spam juggling. Even better, Vandheer Lorde (my favorite character) is teleport spam juggling the lone warrior (my least favorite character).
Of course, in Hard Mode, you play as the lone warrior for this fight; this is totally unfun, as Vandheer Lorde is basically the same version from AWW3, a tough and powerful foe, he does that super-countering thing I've mentioned so that you can't build up your Special bar, and he of course teleports to safety in the event that you knock him off a ledge. And which one you play as doesn't change the ending-Vandheer Lorde stabs the lone warrior through the chest by telekinetically flinging his neat hooked sword, and then goes off to fight the protagonist of AWW3 as that game's final boss.
So yeah, no matter what, you're playing most of the game as a character who gets brutally stabbed to death at the end, and there's no way to affect that, although as Vandheer Lorde goes on to be the final boss of AWW3 rather than disappear mysteriously partway through, of course it's not going to end well for the poor dope.
So this game is yet another in this series (the other offenders are Red Moon and AWW2) which renders your arduous boss fight victories completely irrelevant in a cutscene. Guy, this is bad storytelling for a videogame. It really is.
Anyway, seeing as how this is a bit of a retrospective on the whole series, I suppose I ought to comment on each of the previous games and compare them. Specifically, since each game's saving grace is whether or not fighting is fun in it, I'll be commenting on that.
Armed With Wings has a terrible one-dimensional combat system (literally, since you can't jump). Armed With Wings' combat system is a boring grind at best. It really is.
Red Moon's combat is light and easy. The word that keeps coming to mind is breezy. It's perhaps too easy at times, though my memories of the boss fight with Vandheer Lorde from that game aren't of an easy fight, they're of dying lots of times and of his attacks randomly teleporting both me and him around (which is obnoxious). Its easiness isn't a bad thing, though-it makes the game fun, at least up until the second half when there are these bizarre environments that you need to jump through that don't make any sense.
Armed With Wings 2 has a combat system which gives you lots of options (and also lets you play as Vandheer Lorde). You can kick, punch, swing a sword (and you can change swords several times in the game), grab and toss, fire a magic blast, and use a special magic attack/ability that's derived from your sword. Vandheer Lorde feels direct and brutal when you use him, from his animations to the effects of his abilities. Armed With Wings 2's combat system is visceral.
Armed With Wings 3 has a combat system that takes successful elements from the previous games (mainly aspects of Red Moon's breeziness and the customization of AWW2) and further adds an experience/leveling system. It's not quite as easygoing as Red Moon (thanks to a wider selection of actually competent enemies) and the character is nowhere near as brutal-feeling as Vandheer Lorde in AWW2, but gameplay is still very solid and fun. The keyword here is flexibility.
So how does Culmination compare? When you're doing well, you're soaring. When you're doing poorly, it's grindy, though thankfully not as bad as the first Armed With Wings, since you can slip past many enemies if you can't quite beat them. Culmination is a game of highs and lows.
Where would I rank Culmination relative to the others? It's pretty much above only Armed With Wings, which isn't difficult. If it hadn't been for the oddity of getting thrashed repeatedly by enemies that would have been easy prey in any of the other games, even the first one, it might well have been a lot better, possibly even the best.
It really is a good game in terms of gameplay and especially graphics, even with its rather inexplicable flaw which might not be a real thing. If you're a better player than me, you'd probably have even more fun. (As I've noted many times, I'm not a great player, and probably not even a "good" one, thanks to my fairly abysmal reflexes.) I like it, even if I'm not going to play it as often as the other games in this series.
-Signing off.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Game Review: Armed With Wings 3
Armed With Wings 3 is the final game in the Armed With Wings set of games (Armed With Wings, Red Moon, and Armed With Wings 2 are the others).
This game has a few advantages over the previous titles in the series: Its gameplay is a bit more nuanced and has taken on an upgradeable RPG aspect; the art style has had an upgrade; and the protagonist is capable of most feats that the previous ones were with the right ability sets. (The exceptions are the useless distraction ability from Armed With Wings [no loss at all], Vandheer Lorde's throw attack and super jump from AWW2, and the Red Moon protagonist's double jumping.) But I'll get to the gameplay in a minute.
The first thing to note is that you briefly play as the first Armed With Wings (SPOILERS-Also known as "Blackmist," the creator god of the setting), and even though he is now glowing white instead of a shadow like everyone else and has sprouted enormous wings from his back, he still can't jump. This is hilarious: A physical god, and a frikkin' foot-wide spike pit would be a completely impassable obstacle.
This doesn't actually let you do anything, it just goes straight into a cutscene once you walk far enough in one direction. I'm not sure what's up with that. In said cutscene, a monster/villain named Network shows up, the two have a big fight, and both of them seem to be destroyed (sadly, I can't cheer here as much as I'd like to because I actually kind of hate Network, too); then, we see Eivana, the protagonist of Red Moon, lying mortally wounded where Vandheer Lorde and Hawken left her during Armed With Wings 2, apparently being healed by magic energy.
Some years later, we learn she has a son who has a suspicious resemblance to Armed With Wings. Kinda creepy, guys...
Gameplay is basically a "fixed" version of Armed With Wings at first-you control a protagonist who can actually jump this time around, and you can use a magic, remote-controllable bird to scout and solve annoying puzzles, although fewer of them are quite as annoying this time around.
The enemies have been improved graphically, and the only regular foe who is unambiguously repeated from a previous game is this zombieish thing, which I suppose must be related to Network somehow, as they have similar shadow tendril things on them.
They aren't even remotely threatening; the only way they can kill you even at the start of the game is if you stand still against a wall for at least thirty seconds or they knock you into a spike pit, and even the latter is extremely rare.
As noted, the bird puzzles are usually a bit less annoying; the worst are a complicated level that seems to have been designed just to annoy the heck out of me personally, and this one, where the spikes will force you to start over, though thankfully they don't take away any health like the buzzsaws from the first game.
Every now and again, there are typos, which are more noticeable in this game than in the others for some reason (other than this title card, I think my favorite is Eivana calling the protagonist's conception and birth a "miracale").
Most enemies have at least one feature that makes them annoying-better reach than you, an attack pattern that's quick and difficult to respond to, etc.-but there's also a first for the Armed With Wings games, a ranged non-boss enemy.
They wouldn't be so annoying if the level design didn't always have them places where they'll get a good shot at you and you can't attack them.
The jumping puzzles are, of course, back in this game; while none of them are as horrific as in the other games, a few of them are subtly insidious, such as this jump, which should be super-easy but killed me quite a few times.
You're supposed to just wall-jump up onto that platform over there, but once you've upgraded your speed and jumping a few times, your default jump will overshoot it by a wide margin.
Actually, the hardest jumping puzzles involve a trick with placing the bird correctly and then using it for a boost. All the jumping puzzles benefit from the protagonist being able to grab ledges and climb up automatically; they also all suffer from a slight misfire causing a wall jump in the opposite direction.
The final part of regular gameplay are the bosses. Here, I'm actually using screenshots obtained in Survival Mode, which I'll talk more about in a second, because it's much easier than playing through the whole game to reach them.
There are basically two kinds of bosses in these games: "Slow-walkers" and "dual-phase" bosses. (There are a couple of bosses that don't quite fit either description in Armed With Wings 2, but only because they run instead of slow-walk.)
"Dual-phase" bosses are most common in AWW2, but they pop up here, as the simple but dangerous... flaming skull thing.
It has a sort of "meteor" bombardment attack that keeps you from holding still for too long, and then caps its attack phase with a shadow ball attack, which gets more deadly if it's lost a lot of health; then, it passes out and you can beat on it. Obviously, if you're reasonably good at evasion, this is pretty simple.
Most of the bosses are "slow-walkers," though. By this, I mean that they simply slowly walk towards you, occasionally firing off special attacks and trying to maul you if you get close. They are generally considerably more dangerous, merely because some of them have really strong attacks that can potentially reach you no matter where you are, and most of them also have the ability to move faster under some circumstances. Also, you fight nearly all of them in arenas with edges that have lethal drops, and if you manage to knock them off, they auto-teleport back to safety.
The main villain of AWW3 himself, Network, is this type of boss; his "speed move" is teleporting, and he has a number of special attacks that can hit from a distance. By the time you face him, though, you'll be powerful enough that he probably doesn't pose much of a threat; he really doesn't have anything that can strike over a great distance or take you by surprise. I've only ever lost to him by falling over the edge, in fact. (A few of those instances involve the fact that his arena initially only has one deadly edge, and if you're too close to the other one when you knock his health to the halfway point, you'll go down as the floor sinks away and be unable to save yourself.)
The main attraction as bosses go, though, is the final boss, Vandheer Lorde.
This boss fight is genuinely hard, but it rarely to never feels cheap; you'll get thrown off the edges from time to time, but it feels fairer here, and he doesn't have any completely sickening attacks like in Red Moon or Armed With Wings.
All of the regular gameplay pales, however, in comparison to Survival Mode.
In Survival Mode, there's none of that darned puzzle stuff; you just have to fight to defeat as many enemies as possible. Large numbers of regular enemies will show up in waves punctuated by rotating versions of the game's boss fights in original gameplay order. (My current personal best is 355; Vandheer Lorde has been responsible for most of my defeats.) And that means that this kind of stuff is going to happen a lot.
The best part about Survival Mode other than the completely crazy awesome hectic combat is that you get to ditch the bird for a second special power. After playing AWW2 and having access to Vandheer Lorde's six different abilities (punching, kicking, sword strike, "grab," ranged attack, and an ability determined by your weapon), the four in this game (punch, sword strike, bird, and one of seven special abilities, most of which you must unlock) feel a bit meager by comparison; replacing the non-combat ability with another ability adds a lot. (It should be noted that Armed With Wings and Armed With Wings 2 both have Survival Modes, but that they aren't even fractionally as fun because of a lack of huge, splashy combat abilities that can blow away small armies.)
An additional note is that the game has "new game plus" capabilities, meaning you can cruise through the game with all possible upgrades and slaughter the early-game enemies rapidly. There is also unlockable content that you can acquire, most of which allows you to play music on a music player on the game site. (The best songs are "The Final Fight" and "Enter, Vandheer." I can't tell you which environments have the unlock items for them, but I can tell you that I unlocked both of them on my first playthrough without any difficulty.)
All in all, while I think that this game has a silly story, it's well-worth playing as long as you like or can at least endure annoying jumping puzzles, and if you like sidescrolling game combat, Survival Mode is a blast and a half.
-Signing off.
This game has a few advantages over the previous titles in the series: Its gameplay is a bit more nuanced and has taken on an upgradeable RPG aspect; the art style has had an upgrade; and the protagonist is capable of most feats that the previous ones were with the right ability sets. (The exceptions are the useless distraction ability from Armed With Wings [no loss at all], Vandheer Lorde's throw attack and super jump from AWW2, and the Red Moon protagonist's double jumping.) But I'll get to the gameplay in a minute.
The first thing to note is that you briefly play as the first Armed With Wings (SPOILERS-Also known as "Blackmist," the creator god of the setting), and even though he is now glowing white instead of a shadow like everyone else and has sprouted enormous wings from his back, he still can't jump. This is hilarious: A physical god, and a frikkin' foot-wide spike pit would be a completely impassable obstacle.
This doesn't actually let you do anything, it just goes straight into a cutscene once you walk far enough in one direction. I'm not sure what's up with that. In said cutscene, a monster/villain named Network shows up, the two have a big fight, and both of them seem to be destroyed (sadly, I can't cheer here as much as I'd like to because I actually kind of hate Network, too); then, we see Eivana, the protagonist of Red Moon, lying mortally wounded where Vandheer Lorde and Hawken left her during Armed With Wings 2, apparently being healed by magic energy.Some years later, we learn she has a son who has a suspicious resemblance to Armed With Wings. Kinda creepy, guys...
Gameplay is basically a "fixed" version of Armed With Wings at first-you control a protagonist who can actually jump this time around, and you can use a magic, remote-controllable bird to scout and solve annoying puzzles, although fewer of them are quite as annoying this time around.
The enemies have been improved graphically, and the only regular foe who is unambiguously repeated from a previous game is this zombieish thing, which I suppose must be related to Network somehow, as they have similar shadow tendril things on them.
They aren't even remotely threatening; the only way they can kill you even at the start of the game is if you stand still against a wall for at least thirty seconds or they knock you into a spike pit, and even the latter is extremely rare.As noted, the bird puzzles are usually a bit less annoying; the worst are a complicated level that seems to have been designed just to annoy the heck out of me personally, and this one, where the spikes will force you to start over, though thankfully they don't take away any health like the buzzsaws from the first game.
Every now and again, there are typos, which are more noticeable in this game than in the others for some reason (other than this title card, I think my favorite is Eivana calling the protagonist's conception and birth a "miracale").
Most enemies have at least one feature that makes them annoying-better reach than you, an attack pattern that's quick and difficult to respond to, etc.-but there's also a first for the Armed With Wings games, a ranged non-boss enemy.
They wouldn't be so annoying if the level design didn't always have them places where they'll get a good shot at you and you can't attack them.The jumping puzzles are, of course, back in this game; while none of them are as horrific as in the other games, a few of them are subtly insidious, such as this jump, which should be super-easy but killed me quite a few times.
You're supposed to just wall-jump up onto that platform over there, but once you've upgraded your speed and jumping a few times, your default jump will overshoot it by a wide margin.Actually, the hardest jumping puzzles involve a trick with placing the bird correctly and then using it for a boost. All the jumping puzzles benefit from the protagonist being able to grab ledges and climb up automatically; they also all suffer from a slight misfire causing a wall jump in the opposite direction.
The final part of regular gameplay are the bosses. Here, I'm actually using screenshots obtained in Survival Mode, which I'll talk more about in a second, because it's much easier than playing through the whole game to reach them.
There are basically two kinds of bosses in these games: "Slow-walkers" and "dual-phase" bosses. (There are a couple of bosses that don't quite fit either description in Armed With Wings 2, but only because they run instead of slow-walk.)
"Dual-phase" bosses are most common in AWW2, but they pop up here, as the simple but dangerous... flaming skull thing.
It has a sort of "meteor" bombardment attack that keeps you from holding still for too long, and then caps its attack phase with a shadow ball attack, which gets more deadly if it's lost a lot of health; then, it passes out and you can beat on it. Obviously, if you're reasonably good at evasion, this is pretty simple.Most of the bosses are "slow-walkers," though. By this, I mean that they simply slowly walk towards you, occasionally firing off special attacks and trying to maul you if you get close. They are generally considerably more dangerous, merely because some of them have really strong attacks that can potentially reach you no matter where you are, and most of them also have the ability to move faster under some circumstances. Also, you fight nearly all of them in arenas with edges that have lethal drops, and if you manage to knock them off, they auto-teleport back to safety.
The main villain of AWW3 himself, Network, is this type of boss; his "speed move" is teleporting, and he has a number of special attacks that can hit from a distance. By the time you face him, though, you'll be powerful enough that he probably doesn't pose much of a threat; he really doesn't have anything that can strike over a great distance or take you by surprise. I've only ever lost to him by falling over the edge, in fact. (A few of those instances involve the fact that his arena initially only has one deadly edge, and if you're too close to the other one when you knock his health to the halfway point, you'll go down as the floor sinks away and be unable to save yourself.)
The main attraction as bosses go, though, is the final boss, Vandheer Lorde.
This boss fight is genuinely hard, but it rarely to never feels cheap; you'll get thrown off the edges from time to time, but it feels fairer here, and he doesn't have any completely sickening attacks like in Red Moon or Armed With Wings.All of the regular gameplay pales, however, in comparison to Survival Mode.
In Survival Mode, there's none of that darned puzzle stuff; you just have to fight to defeat as many enemies as possible. Large numbers of regular enemies will show up in waves punctuated by rotating versions of the game's boss fights in original gameplay order. (My current personal best is 355; Vandheer Lorde has been responsible for most of my defeats.) And that means that this kind of stuff is going to happen a lot.
The best part about Survival Mode other than the completely crazy awesome hectic combat is that you get to ditch the bird for a second special power. After playing AWW2 and having access to Vandheer Lorde's six different abilities (punching, kicking, sword strike, "grab," ranged attack, and an ability determined by your weapon), the four in this game (punch, sword strike, bird, and one of seven special abilities, most of which you must unlock) feel a bit meager by comparison; replacing the non-combat ability with another ability adds a lot. (It should be noted that Armed With Wings and Armed With Wings 2 both have Survival Modes, but that they aren't even fractionally as fun because of a lack of huge, splashy combat abilities that can blow away small armies.)An additional note is that the game has "new game plus" capabilities, meaning you can cruise through the game with all possible upgrades and slaughter the early-game enemies rapidly. There is also unlockable content that you can acquire, most of which allows you to play music on a music player on the game site. (The best songs are "The Final Fight" and "Enter, Vandheer." I can't tell you which environments have the unlock items for them, but I can tell you that I unlocked both of them on my first playthrough without any difficulty.)
All in all, while I think that this game has a silly story, it's well-worth playing as long as you like or can at least endure annoying jumping puzzles, and if you like sidescrolling game combat, Survival Mode is a blast and a half.
-Signing off.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Game Review: Armed With Wings 2
Armed With Wings 2 is (duh) the sequel to Armed With Wings, which I recently reviewed. In it, there's an interesting and entertaining twist: You play as Vandheer Lorde, the final boss of Armed With Wings.
Also, the final boss of Red Moon and (SPOILERS!!) Armed With Wings 3. It's a little inexplicable how he got here, because I'm not sure that Armed With Wings Vandheer Lorde is actually a beatable boss by anyone without absurd gaming skills, but whatever.
Vandheer Lorde used to be emperor, but Armed With Wings apparently beat him up and took the throne. What really annoys me about this story-wise is that Armed With Wings is instantly accepted by just about everyone as somehow better as emperor than Vandheer Lorde, despite coming across in most cutscenes in this and Armed With Wings as a whiny little [expletive deleted].
I'm not going to make a secret of the fact that Vandheer Lorde is pretty much my favorite character from these games, partly because his dialogue is hilariously over the top, partly because he looks interesting and rather evil, and also because he's the most fun character to play, notwithstanding the fact that this game is, like most of them, crammed with super-annoying jumping puzzles (and Vandheer Lorde isn't very good at jumping compared to the Red Moon or Armed With Wings 3 protagonists).
(On a technical level, even Armed With Wings had at least one jumping puzzle, and you couldn't actually jump in that game.) I died a few hundred times here (that is, that single last jump there alone), only getting past by luck, before I remembered that you can "get more air" by attacking in mid-air, and started getting across consistently.
Part of the fun in controlling Vandheer Lorde is that he's got a lot of fun and useful abilities, which are fueled by a rapidly refilling "special" bar. He's got an "ice blast" for long-ranged attacks, which aside from being very useful against most enemies and for puzzles is great for whittling down bosses from a distance.
It's interesting to note that this attack is used by Vandheer Lorde in all of his boss fights.
He also has this great kicking animation.
There are a variety of weapons that you can use in the game, and all of them grant you a special ability. Other than one that requires you to finish the game and then start over, only your starting sword is actually useful, because it lets you heal-the others have ridiculously expensive and narrow magic attacks.
Perhaps a little disappointingly, the default sword is a little boring-looking; on the other hand, it's one of the more realistic video game swords you'll ever see.
I mentioned that Vandheer Lorde (you must ALWAYS type out his full name!!1!) isn't very good at jumping generally; his one saving grace in this department is his "super jump," which I nearly always use over his regular jump: You just hold down the jump button (the "up" arrow key) for a few seconds, and he jumps much higher.
With the additional boost from "attacking to get more air," he actually can get pretty high.
Perhaps his single most fun ability, an equivalent to which is not available to the protagonist of any of the other games, is his "grab" attack, which involves him seizing somebody and tossing them, possibly across the equivalent of three or more screens.
It was one of boss Vandheer Lorde's attacks in the first Armed With Wings, although it was only used in the "kills you every time mega attack" sequence as the opening part. While it doesn't work on bosses and on a few other odd enemies, it instantly kills the basic enemy and if used correctly can instantly kill even the elite guards from Armed With Wings, who here are merely a mild nuisance instead of worse than the game's midboss.
(Momentary aside: In Red Moon, which I reviewed previously without finishing because of difficult annoying jumping puzzle junk, Vandheer Lorde as the final boss has a powerful attack which is more super-annoying than it really should be. Why is it super-annoying?
Because, while it can't knock you off the platform [in fact, Red Moon is the only Armed With Wings-related game with a final boss fight where you don't fight on a platform where you can be knocked off by a cheap shot], whenever Vandheer Lorde uses it, he teleports to theright left [EDIT: Whoops, misremembered while I was typing this what he did!] end of the arena, and you're teleported to the middle.
I cannot even express how much it cheesed me off every time he used that frikkin' attack, although I suppose it's better than getting blasted off the screen anytime you're a little too eager to beat up the boss.)
The bosses in this game are probably the easiest out of any of the Armed With Wings series games, partly because nearly all of them have stages where they just sit there so you can beat the tar out of them. The exceptions are Armed With Wings, who is the final boss-he's effectively immune to all your special attacks, fast, and can easily knock you off the platform the fight is on, which makes nearly all of your losses feel like cheap shots-a dude named Hawken who is like a weaker, quicker Armed With Wings who can't block your ranged attack, and the hilarious Smoking Martillo.
I say that Smoking Martillo is an exception to the attack phase/vulnerable phase boss rule, but that isn't actually to Smoking Martillo's benefit: He actually is too lame to have an attack phase. Pretty much all you have to do to beat him is stay back and lob ranged attacks at him, and he'll just sit there and take it. He'll periodically launch an attack where he turns into a projectile and flies towards you, but if you shoot the projectile, he'll just change back and stand still again.
My point is, most of the bosses? You don't have to work very hard.
Once you've completed the game and sat through the ultra-annoying final cutscene, which shows that all your hard work was meaningless and tells you that you stink, you get to use the incredibly awesome Lightning Blade, which can cut the time it takes to finish the game in half or better, because it lets you spam an attack that KOs bosses in one hit. Yes, even that cheap Armed With Wings. I recommend trying a second playthrough just to have the satisfaction of doing that.
A few peripheral gameplay notes, which I'll mention because I know I'll forget if I don't talk about it now: Some of these games have very good music (at least a little bit of the music is apparently nabbed from somewhere, but I don't mind too much) and there's some very interesting camera actions going on relative to most side-scrolling games in all of the titles. If you're close to a boss, the camera zooms in; if you're far from the boss, it zooms out; if there's treacherous jumping stuff going on, it zooms out; and there's a default distance that works for most other things. It actually works to make the cutscenes a bit less jarring.
This at least borders on my favorite of this series of games, and I can recommend it. (The only reason I say "borders" instead of saying it's my favorite is because Armed With Wings 3 has an incredibly fun gameplay mode that, if you've finished the game at least once, makes the playthrough worth it in spades, even though that playthrough will probably be less fun than playing through this one.)
-Signing off.
Also, the final boss of Red Moon and (SPOILERS!!) Armed With Wings 3. It's a little inexplicable how he got here, because I'm not sure that Armed With Wings Vandheer Lorde is actually a beatable boss by anyone without absurd gaming skills, but whatever.Vandheer Lorde used to be emperor, but Armed With Wings apparently beat him up and took the throne. What really annoys me about this story-wise is that Armed With Wings is instantly accepted by just about everyone as somehow better as emperor than Vandheer Lorde, despite coming across in most cutscenes in this and Armed With Wings as a whiny little [expletive deleted].
I'm not going to make a secret of the fact that Vandheer Lorde is pretty much my favorite character from these games, partly because his dialogue is hilariously over the top, partly because he looks interesting and rather evil, and also because he's the most fun character to play, notwithstanding the fact that this game is, like most of them, crammed with super-annoying jumping puzzles (and Vandheer Lorde isn't very good at jumping compared to the Red Moon or Armed With Wings 3 protagonists).
(On a technical level, even Armed With Wings had at least one jumping puzzle, and you couldn't actually jump in that game.) I died a few hundred times here (that is, that single last jump there alone), only getting past by luck, before I remembered that you can "get more air" by attacking in mid-air, and started getting across consistently.Part of the fun in controlling Vandheer Lorde is that he's got a lot of fun and useful abilities, which are fueled by a rapidly refilling "special" bar. He's got an "ice blast" for long-ranged attacks, which aside from being very useful against most enemies and for puzzles is great for whittling down bosses from a distance.
It's interesting to note that this attack is used by Vandheer Lorde in all of his boss fights.He also has this great kicking animation.
There are a variety of weapons that you can use in the game, and all of them grant you a special ability. Other than one that requires you to finish the game and then start over, only your starting sword is actually useful, because it lets you heal-the others have ridiculously expensive and narrow magic attacks.
Perhaps a little disappointingly, the default sword is a little boring-looking; on the other hand, it's one of the more realistic video game swords you'll ever see.
I mentioned that Vandheer Lorde (you must ALWAYS type out his full name!!1!) isn't very good at jumping generally; his one saving grace in this department is his "super jump," which I nearly always use over his regular jump: You just hold down the jump button (the "up" arrow key) for a few seconds, and he jumps much higher.
With the additional boost from "attacking to get more air," he actually can get pretty high.
Perhaps his single most fun ability, an equivalent to which is not available to the protagonist of any of the other games, is his "grab" attack, which involves him seizing somebody and tossing them, possibly across the equivalent of three or more screens.
It was one of boss Vandheer Lorde's attacks in the first Armed With Wings, although it was only used in the "kills you every time mega attack" sequence as the opening part. While it doesn't work on bosses and on a few other odd enemies, it instantly kills the basic enemy and if used correctly can instantly kill even the elite guards from Armed With Wings, who here are merely a mild nuisance instead of worse than the game's midboss.(Momentary aside: In Red Moon, which I reviewed previously without finishing because of difficult annoying jumping puzzle junk, Vandheer Lorde as the final boss has a powerful attack which is more super-annoying than it really should be. Why is it super-annoying?
Because, while it can't knock you off the platform [in fact, Red Moon is the only Armed With Wings-related game with a final boss fight where you don't fight on a platform where you can be knocked off by a cheap shot], whenever Vandheer Lorde uses it, he teleports to the
I cannot even express how much it cheesed me off every time he used that frikkin' attack, although I suppose it's better than getting blasted off the screen anytime you're a little too eager to beat up the boss.)
The bosses in this game are probably the easiest out of any of the Armed With Wings series games, partly because nearly all of them have stages where they just sit there so you can beat the tar out of them. The exceptions are Armed With Wings, who is the final boss-he's effectively immune to all your special attacks, fast, and can easily knock you off the platform the fight is on, which makes nearly all of your losses feel like cheap shots-a dude named Hawken who is like a weaker, quicker Armed With Wings who can't block your ranged attack, and the hilarious Smoking Martillo.
I say that Smoking Martillo is an exception to the attack phase/vulnerable phase boss rule, but that isn't actually to Smoking Martillo's benefit: He actually is too lame to have an attack phase. Pretty much all you have to do to beat him is stay back and lob ranged attacks at him, and he'll just sit there and take it. He'll periodically launch an attack where he turns into a projectile and flies towards you, but if you shoot the projectile, he'll just change back and stand still again.My point is, most of the bosses? You don't have to work very hard.
Once you've completed the game and sat through the ultra-annoying final cutscene, which shows that all your hard work was meaningless and tells you that you stink, you get to use the incredibly awesome Lightning Blade, which can cut the time it takes to finish the game in half or better, because it lets you spam an attack that KOs bosses in one hit. Yes, even that cheap Armed With Wings. I recommend trying a second playthrough just to have the satisfaction of doing that.
A few peripheral gameplay notes, which I'll mention because I know I'll forget if I don't talk about it now: Some of these games have very good music (at least a little bit of the music is apparently nabbed from somewhere, but I don't mind too much) and there's some very interesting camera actions going on relative to most side-scrolling games in all of the titles. If you're close to a boss, the camera zooms in; if you're far from the boss, it zooms out; if there's treacherous jumping stuff going on, it zooms out; and there's a default distance that works for most other things. It actually works to make the cutscenes a bit less jarring.
This at least borders on my favorite of this series of games, and I can recommend it. (The only reason I say "borders" instead of saying it's my favorite is because Armed With Wings 3 has an incredibly fun gameplay mode that, if you've finished the game at least once, makes the playthrough worth it in spades, even though that playthrough will probably be less fun than playing through this one.)
-Signing off.
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Game Review: Armed With Wings
Armed With Wings is a game created by the same guy who made Red Moon, a game that I recommended with reservations. (The positive aspects were artistic style and the combat system; the reservations involved the "jumping puzzle" aspect of the later levels and the fact that there's a dumb justification used for the artistic style [my position is that no justification was necessary whatsoever]. Having since made it to the end of the game, albeit only with extreme suffering, I can also add "has a dumb story" to my reservations.)
Armed With Wings is an older game in the same art style, and it shows: It's still pretty, but the gameplay is rougher. For instance, your guy (who is actually named Armed With Wings, a name that even my kid brother thinks is stupid) can't jump at all.
His default speed is "flat-out run," which sounds like there's nothing wrong with it until you remember that if he goes off a ledge, he'll always go down... and of course every other ledge in the game has a bunch of instant death spikes beneath it.
These weaknesses are mildly mitigated by a few... er, make that one nice ability, the ability to somehow generate a little bird thing and send it out to scout and solve annoying puzzles.
You can also distract some (by which I mean "exactly one type who is mostly harmless, so what the heck is the point?!") enemies with the bird, but it's rarely really relevant.
As the bird is generally invulnerable, albeit with a short "lifespan" that limits how far from you it can travel unless you pick up a certain powerup with it, it's pretty good at the scouting job.
Of course, scouting is useless when you might get randomly dropped through the floor for a boss fight.
It took me thirty-plus tries to beat this silly looking boss (the victory was followed up with a seizure-inducing cinematic, by the way). Why? Because he spends up to two-thirds of his time spinning his sword like that, which makes him completely invulnerable, while also pushing you back towards a wall of spikes that he can knock you into.
As the game goes on, a tougher enemy type, the elite guard, shows up, and boy do I hate them. I think they're slightly nastier than that boss.
Why? They attack really fast, meaning you may not be able to retaliate, can take all of your health in about ten seconds unless you get in hits first, often respond to power attacks with their own power attacks (power attacks are only really relevant for a few minor purposes anyway), and can dodge like the dickens. Their only positive feature is that, since the only way they can dodge is by withdrawing, they're easy to drive into spike pits. That that's their one saving grace says a lot, doesn't it?
I mentioned solving puzzles with the bird, right? For some reason, the bird can pick stuff up, including stuff that even your larger character shouldn't be able to (though you need the infinite flight powerup in order to actually make use of it).
At least once, the puzzle is a huge pain, moreso than some of those enemies: A flying maze, where the limited flight duration acts as a strict time limit.
Oh, yeah, and you know what happens in the second-to-last level unexpectedly? Suddenly, things can hurt the bird, and this drains your life whenever it happens.
So what's the final battle in this game like?
Well, if you pound too much on the boss, he does this to you, and you always lose instantly when he does.
Because you get knocked into the spikes. Or occasionally inside the ceiling, which isn't any better even though you don't die.
So why am I playing this game at all? Well, obviously I like parts of it. It has potential. But this is definitely the weakest of the games this guy has set in his silhouette world. (I think he might be aware of the weaknesses of this game, because the third "Armed With Wings" game [Red Moon is also part of the series, more or less kind of] has the central mechanic of a summonable, controllable bird without any of that other stupid stuff.)
I don't really recommend it. (I kinda wanted to take a screenshot or two of the main villain's speech to the hero, because it was frikkin' hilarious, but unlike every other cutscene in his games, it's completely uncontrollable.) But I'll be talking about the other two games soon enough.
-Signing off.
Armed With Wings is an older game in the same art style, and it shows: It's still pretty, but the gameplay is rougher. For instance, your guy (who is actually named Armed With Wings, a name that even my kid brother thinks is stupid) can't jump at all.
His default speed is "flat-out run," which sounds like there's nothing wrong with it until you remember that if he goes off a ledge, he'll always go down... and of course every other ledge in the game has a bunch of instant death spikes beneath it.
These weaknesses are mildly mitigated by a few... er, make that one nice ability, the ability to somehow generate a little bird thing and send it out to scout and solve annoying puzzles.
You can also distract some (by which I mean "exactly one type who is mostly harmless, so what the heck is the point?!") enemies with the bird, but it's rarely really relevant.
As the bird is generally invulnerable, albeit with a short "lifespan" that limits how far from you it can travel unless you pick up a certain powerup with it, it's pretty good at the scouting job.Of course, scouting is useless when you might get randomly dropped through the floor for a boss fight.
It took me thirty-plus tries to beat this silly looking boss (the victory was followed up with a seizure-inducing cinematic, by the way). Why? Because he spends up to two-thirds of his time spinning his sword like that, which makes him completely invulnerable, while also pushing you back towards a wall of spikes that he can knock you into.As the game goes on, a tougher enemy type, the elite guard, shows up, and boy do I hate them. I think they're slightly nastier than that boss.
Why? They attack really fast, meaning you may not be able to retaliate, can take all of your health in about ten seconds unless you get in hits first, often respond to power attacks with their own power attacks (power attacks are only really relevant for a few minor purposes anyway), and can dodge like the dickens. Their only positive feature is that, since the only way they can dodge is by withdrawing, they're easy to drive into spike pits. That that's their one saving grace says a lot, doesn't it?I mentioned solving puzzles with the bird, right? For some reason, the bird can pick stuff up, including stuff that even your larger character shouldn't be able to (though you need the infinite flight powerup in order to actually make use of it).
At least once, the puzzle is a huge pain, moreso than some of those enemies: A flying maze, where the limited flight duration acts as a strict time limit.
Oh, yeah, and you know what happens in the second-to-last level unexpectedly? Suddenly, things can hurt the bird, and this drains your life whenever it happens.
So what's the final battle in this game like?Well, if you pound too much on the boss, he does this to you, and you always lose instantly when he does.
Because you get knocked into the spikes. Or occasionally inside the ceiling, which isn't any better even though you don't die.So why am I playing this game at all? Well, obviously I like parts of it. It has potential. But this is definitely the weakest of the games this guy has set in his silhouette world. (I think he might be aware of the weaknesses of this game, because the third "Armed With Wings" game [Red Moon is also part of the series, more or less kind of] has the central mechanic of a summonable, controllable bird without any of that other stupid stuff.)
I don't really recommend it. (I kinda wanted to take a screenshot or two of the main villain's speech to the hero, because it was frikkin' hilarious, but unlike every other cutscene in his games, it's completely uncontrollable.) But I'll be talking about the other two games soon enough.
-Signing off.
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Game Reviews: Red Moon
Red Moon is a game that's graphically beautiful that tries to make dumb excuses for why it isn't beautiful.
The game's graphics are simple and elegant, and they do what they need to do extremely well. And they look good.
But apparently the guy who made them is defensive about how he's not good at animating things that aren't silhouettes, because he came up with some stupid backstory about how the characters in his games are made of shadows (although this game doesn't mention that).
It's totally unnecessary, and almost completely irrelevant. You won't care what the characters are supposed to be made of, you'll be enjoying the game, including the graphics.
Anyway, gameplay is quite simple. You can perform very rapid attacks that generally stun your opponents; most combat is pretty one-sided even if you use only the most basic attack. You can crouch and hold down the attack button to do more damage with fewer attacks, although this is not often relevant-most enemies will go down quickly to a flurry of your weaker attacks. This includes lesser bosses.
A few areas into the game, your mentor tells you how to use power attacks, and here's where things get fun. Your power attack bar is filled by hitting enemies; the more you hit enemies, the faster it fills. When it's full, you can do this...
...which is even more awesome than it looks like, because it travels more than a full screen and kills most enemies instantly, throws back any enemies it somehow doesn't kill, and takes half of even a full-fledged boss's health. (Of course, you generally only get one per boss fight, even though the power attack will partly refill your power attack bar when it hits an enemy. If you hit enough enemies with it, you can potentially get something like half a bar back from a power attack.)
The game features wall jumps and double jumps, and while these are perhaps the most seamless implementations of such I've ever seen in a game, unfortunately the obstacles in later parts of the game are such that I personally can't get past a certain area which looks like it ought to be passable.
Up to that point, though, Red Moon is a blast to play and a visual treat, and I can heartily recommend it.
-Signing off.
The game's graphics are simple and elegant, and they do what they need to do extremely well. And they look good.But apparently the guy who made them is defensive about how he's not good at animating things that aren't silhouettes, because he came up with some stupid backstory about how the characters in his games are made of shadows (although this game doesn't mention that).
It's totally unnecessary, and almost completely irrelevant. You won't care what the characters are supposed to be made of, you'll be enjoying the game, including the graphics.
Anyway, gameplay is quite simple. You can perform very rapid attacks that generally stun your opponents; most combat is pretty one-sided even if you use only the most basic attack. You can crouch and hold down the attack button to do more damage with fewer attacks, although this is not often relevant-most enemies will go down quickly to a flurry of your weaker attacks. This includes lesser bosses.
A few areas into the game, your mentor tells you how to use power attacks, and here's where things get fun. Your power attack bar is filled by hitting enemies; the more you hit enemies, the faster it fills. When it's full, you can do this...
...which is even more awesome than it looks like, because it travels more than a full screen and kills most enemies instantly, throws back any enemies it somehow doesn't kill, and takes half of even a full-fledged boss's health. (Of course, you generally only get one per boss fight, even though the power attack will partly refill your power attack bar when it hits an enemy. If you hit enough enemies with it, you can potentially get something like half a bar back from a power attack.)The game features wall jumps and double jumps, and while these are perhaps the most seamless implementations of such I've ever seen in a game, unfortunately the obstacles in later parts of the game are such that I personally can't get past a certain area which looks like it ought to be passable.
Up to that point, though, Red Moon is a blast to play and a visual treat, and I can heartily recommend it.
-Signing off.
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