Tag: Difficulty »

This week at 148Apps.com, Eli Cymet plumbed the depths of difficulty with his interview of Super Hexagon creator Terry Cavanagh: "Talking to Terry Cavanagh (pictured, left), the first thing that jumps out at me is how pleasant he is. How soft-spoken and thoughtful he comes across as. Particularly for somebody who tortures people.

An award-winning independent developer from Ireland, Cavanagh has become known for wonderful, mercilessly difficult games like VVVVVV and Super Hexagon. The latter is Cavanagh’s first iOS game; a low-fi arcade gauntlet that challenges players to move left and right to survive an incoming barrage of lines and shapes for as long as possible. It bent our brains in circles and became a surprise cult-hit on the App Store, moving about 72,000 copies since release, according to Cavanagh’s last look.

Wonderful. Mercilessly difficult. The two don’t quite go together, do they? Against all odds, however, it seems that driving people mad is what’s driven sales for Super Hexagon. It’s a phenomenon that beckons the question: why is a game that’s so hard so very easy to love? What makes difficulty so satisfying?

Read the full conversation at 148Apps.com.

Meanwhile, over at GiggleApps.com, reviewer Amy Solomon explored Magic Forest HD Pro, a physics-based game for kids: "There are many variations of this style of game in the iTunes store such Cut the Rope, but I enjoy the look of this app, with backgrounds reminiscent of water color or batik artwork and include forest motifs that I find appealing and a little different from what is commonly found in a game such as this. Here, one is looking to help these pets into their basket, breaking glass bricks or other obstacles that prevent these animals from typically falling into where they belong."

Read Amy's full review at GiggleApps.

And at 148Apps.biz, Carter Dotson reported on the growing need for native language support in apps geared for eastern audiences. He writes, "It’s easy to think about the App Store as largely a western, and largely American phenomenon: it’s one of the largest revenue drivers, and success or failure there often means international failure. English is thus the most supported language in apps, particularly as it is such an international language as well now. But Distimo has put out information in their latest report that suggests while English may be the dominant language in the western world, success in the east requires apps to speak the native tongue."

Want to know more? Read the complete story at 148Apps.biz.

Talking to Terry Cavanagh (pictured, left), the first thing that jumps out at me is how pleasant he is. How soft-spoken and thoughtful he comes across as. Particularly for somebody who tortures people.

An award-winning independent developer from Ireland, Cavanagh has become known for wonderful, mercilessly difficult games like VVVVVV and Super Hexagon. The latter is Cavanagh’s first iOS game; a low-fi arcade gauntlet that challenges players to move left and right to survive an incoming barrage of lines and shapes for as long as possible. It bent our brains in circles and became a surprise cult-hit on the App Store, moving about 72,000 copies since release, according to Cavanagh's last look.

Wonderful. Mercilessly difficult. The two don’t quite go together, do they? Against all odds, however, it seems that driving people mad is what’s driven sales for Super Hexagon. It’s a phenomenon that beckons the question: why is a game that’s so hard so very easy to love? What makes difficulty so satisfying?

“I think it really comes down to a couple of small things,” reflects Cavanagh. “The main one is that it’s fair. It never feels like...” he pauses for a moment. “Put it this way: whenever you mess up in the game, it always feels like it’s your fault, and that’s really, really important.” We’re talking about his game, but Cavanagh’s first guiding principle speaks to a fundamental shift in values within the industry.

Where once it was understood - embraced, even - that quarter-sucking games would be hard-wired for player failure, notions of ‘cheapness’ have taken over. Blistering difficulty can still exist, but with less erratic exceptions and more dependable rules. If dependability is one piece of the difficulty puzzle, it becomes clear in talking more with Cavanagh that simplicity is its interlocking mate.

“With [Super Hexagon], the sort of things that can happen in the game are very simple, very learnable. In a sense, nothing comes out and surprises you.” Almost immediately, he corrects himself. “Well I suppose that’s a lie...waves are decided randomly at the edges of the screen... [but] every pattern in the game is discrete and learnable. That’s a big part of the game; training your muscle memory and getting to know the patterns.” An important distinction, it seems. Nailing down the difference between too hard and just hard enough means understanding that systems can be complex, but that learning them shouldn’t be.

Playing Super Hexagon, it’s easy to see the way that approach informs every layer of the game. Case in point? The score. Far from recycling the bloated arcade method left over from the coin-op era, Cavanagh gives players only one measure of success: time. An ever-present reminder of the true game at work...survival of the fittest.

Soon after the game’s release, it became apparent that this choice just may have been the unexpected ace in the hole. Players would tweet out their latest time, wearing it like a badge of honor. Super Hexagon has no formal social features, no “tools for virality,” but armed with their hard-fought numbers, players began jostling for position in a metagame of milliseconds. I ask Cavanagh if that was part of his plan all along, and while he won’t speculate as to the social impact, I may have just discovered a third rule of difficulty.

“I think you’re dead right about the score being an exact measure of how good you are,” says Cavanagh. “If you’ve lasted for 14.36 seconds, that’s an exact measurement; it tells you a lot of information, which is not like the kind of scores we’re used to seeing. People are used to seeing exaggerated scores, scores that are multiplied by a million. Scores where there are all sorts of measures in place to prevent you from knowing how you’re actually doing. I think having a score that means something makes the score important to players.” Something to strive for. Arguably, difficulty becomes easier to cope with when success isn’t obfuscated by jargon, when players feel like they’re being rewarded for of their work.

Inevitably, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Feeling rewarded. Yet in some ways, that leads me back to square one, wondering what could be so rewarding about frustration. About losing. Pausing again, Cavanagh responds simply.

“I don’t know if I really think of the game as frustrating.” Only then do I realize, I’ve never asked what he does think of the game. So I ask.

“I feel like you’re trying to get into a rhythm with the game; when you’re playing the game really well, it has this sort feedback, and your senses are going off at the right time, and you’re making all the right moves, and everything...just feels right. And the game is about trying to get into that frame of mind.”

And perhaps that’s when something that’s so hard becomes so easy to love: when the pursuit of that feeling is more satisfying than the experience of not always finding it.

Image: DistractionWare

Lemmings fans can finally rejoice… well almost. While Caveman isn’t exactly the same game, it’s pretty darn close. It’s possibly the closest gamers will get to playing Lemmings on an iOS device unless Sony actually does their own conversion.

Mobile 1UP had originally planned to bring the Lemmings game to iOS, but unfortunately a Cease & Desist Order from Sony Entertainment put a damper on things. The developers didn’t let this stop them, though, and worked hard to bring users a new game based on the original known as Caveman.

Anyone who isn’t familiar with Lemmings has missed out on possibly one of the most awesome computer games released in the ‘90s. In both Lemmings and Caveman, the game is divided into a number of levels that are grouped into four different difficulty levels. Each level has an entry point and an exit point.

There are different land elements in each level. Some elements are destructible while others are not. There are also obstacles along the way like water, holes and lava. The goal on each level is to guide the required percentage of Cavemen from the entrance to the exit in a set amount of time by creating a safe passage for them. Gamers do this by assigning a task to each Caveman or else they will walk in one direction and ignore everything in the way. The mindless characters die by falling from a great height, burn in lava or find another way to die or get trapped unless gamers guide them to safety.

In order to successfully beat a level, gamers must assign tasks to the Cavemen. The tasks are located at the bottom of the screen and there are only a set number that players can use. There are eight tasks that must be assigned carefully: climber, floater, bomber, blocker, builder, basher, miner and digger. Failure to assign tasks properly will result in having to restart the level. Instead of restarting a level by pushing a button, gamers will have to use sudden death to make them all blow up.

There are a few perks that fans of the original game will enjoy such as the ability to assign skills exclusively to Cavemen, the option to zoom in and out of a level, a release rate to increase or decrease how fast the Cavemen enter the level, three assignment options, secret timewarp codes and four unlockable difficulty levels: easy, medium, obscure and insane.

As a huge fan of the original Lemmings game, I can vouch that Caveman is the next best thing. While the “Let’s Go” and squeaky sounds have been replaced with Cavemen grunts, it’s still pretty fun to blow them up. The only recommendation that I can make is that the controls need tightening as it’s easy to accidentally assign tasks. Overall, I highly recommend this game to everyone looking to relive a piece of their childhood. Be sure to check out Caveman HD for the iPad and Caveman Lite.

Firstly, a clarification. This review is of the iPad version of Cosmica, a scrolling maze game which can boast freshness, fun, and challenge as parts of its quality. The denoted score is not for the iPhone version. While it boasts the same qualities, those qualities are heavily negated by that version being presently borderline unplayable.

More on that later.

Before all that, let's celebrate the derserving iPad version. It's a simple enough idea, a top-down scrolling maze game. In Cosmica, however, I have to keep my finger held on the screen at all times, dodging and weaving my way as I automatically move up through the labyrinth. It's much like how I'd hold down a pen to draw a line through a maze on paper, and it's that parallel that gives Cosmica an instant click. And yet conversely as an iOS game it feels strangely fresh (or maybe even freshly strange).

There are also little spins on traditional obstacles, things like walls that move from side to side, one-way gates, and some very knotty revolving doors. These spins, alongside the sweeping speed at which the maze scrolls down the screen, force me to stay on my toes (or in this case on my fingernail), especially given how I'm only allowed to make three errors per run. This turns Cosmica into a kind of memory game in which the maze's specific twists and turns have to be memorized, especially when there are flocks of one-way gates to be negotiated, set out in deliberately confusing, dexterity-heavy ways. It reminds me of Bit.Trip Beat, except it's not as tricky as that particular gem.

Except, however, on iPhone... and here's where I lay my beef with that version. The smaller screen means that I need to be far more careful with how steady I keep my finger. That would be OK in and of itself, I don't mind an especially difficult game that's still doable, but when you couple it with frequent and often ill-timed stutter and slowdown, it makes for the kind of experience that leads to a smashed up iPhone/wall/fist. Way too infuriating. Maybe some laxity in the form of extra lives would help. Certainly far less pushing of the device's graphical power - even though it's top down Cosmica's pause menu reveals that it's running in a 3D engine - would do wonders for the iPhone version.

So while I can't recommend it for iPhones as it is, I definitely recommend checking it out on iPad. If you liked Bit.Trip Beat but wished there were more mazes (and less beats) in it, Cosmica is the game for you.