Game reviews: Towerfall, Monaco and Nidhogg

Sorry to take so long getting around to these, I've been a bit under the weather. Previously, I reviewed the card and board games I played at the gaming marathon for SpecialEffect. There were Poo, Tsuro and Ricochet Robots and Love Letter, Forbidden Island, King of Tokyo and Dobble. Now we're onto the video games. Since I moved onto the video games later in the day, I was increasingly exhausted, but nonetheless, I had a really great time at many of them.

Towerfall

Towerfall deserves a place among the greatest 4-player versus games. It combines the headstomping dexterity of Joust or Mario Bros with the artful ballistics of Worms and the dancing wall-jumps and swift deaths of Super Meat Boy. Each player controls their own archer and has a limited number of arrows with which to defeat their opponents on the single screen arena. If you run out of arrows you can pick up those embedded in the walls and floors, perform a risky maneuver to pluck your opponent's arrows out of the air, or just try to stomp on their head instead. Rounds are swift and deadly. The pixel art is beautiful, the characters charming. The controls are easy enough to pick up but surprisingly deep, with wall-jumps, dodges, slides and a variety of advanced dodge-cancelling techniques available. The game is great at making you feel like your victories are works of art and skill while your losses are just passing moments of bad luck, even when you're losing.

Monaco

Monaco is a 4-player co-op heist game. Screenshots don't really do it justice - every screenshot looks chaotic and inscrutable, and it's only when you start playing that it begins to fuse together in your head. Each player assumes a different role with different special abilities: the locksmith with a talent for picking locks; the lookout who can sense the presence of guards behind walls; the cleaner who can knock out unsuspecting guards with his bare hands; and the pickpocket, whose pet monkey can snaffle coins undetected. You generally have to get in, steal some treasure and then get out. Everything begins with careful planning, stealth and coordination. But it's the most fun when everything is in chaos and everyone is desperately trying to run and hide. Even if some players are shot and killed, so long as at least one player survives, they can resurrect their friends. Assuming of course they can reach their bodies without dying themselves.

I love this game. Especially once you unlock the advanced characters: the gentleman, the master of disguise; the mole, an expert at tunnelling; the hacker, able to subvert cameras and security systems with no more than access to a power socket; and the redhead, able to seduce any one guard. The co-op play is rich and rewarding, and feels very different depending on which combination of abilities your team has available. Depending on how well your team is doing you can just worry about completing the levels at all, or try to get trophies for getting every coin or having nobody die. The single player mode is also great, but the co-op game is really where it shines.

Nidhogg

Ah, Nidhogg. How to describe Nidhogg? A surreal and brutal duel. It's a bit like if you took the sword-fighting and smooth rotoscoped animation from the original Prince of Persia, added some depth and dirty tricks, and endlessly respawned the two contestants to die over and over, at least until one gains enough ground to... uhhh... get eaten by a giant flying worm? It's fun for a while, but tends to get quite one-sided. Did you ever play the original Street Fighter 2 and your friend would spam hundred leg kicks or fireballs and even if you can figure out a way to hurt them it feels like you have to do a lot more work than they do? Nidhogg feels a bit like that when you're losing. There probably is a whole lot of strategy and finesse involved, but it tends to feel like fast-paced rock-paper-scissors.

Next time: Rock Band, Nintendoland and Sports Friends.

Game reviews: Love Letter, Forbidden Island, King of Tokyo, Dobble

Okay, time for some more game reviews! I'm reviewing the games I played during our charity gaming marathon for SpecialEffect. Last time I looked at Poo, Tsuro and Ricochet Robots. This time I'm looking at four more board and card games: Love Letter, Forbidden Island, King of Tokyo and Dobble.

Love Letter

In Love Letter all the players are suitors trying to court Princess Annette, and the single card in your hand represents which figure at court is holding your love letter to her – your goal is to end the round with your letter in the hands of someone she trusts the most, and without your letter being found and thrown out. On each player's turn they draw a new card and choose which of the two characters in front of them should hold their letter. The other is discarded face-up for the other players to see, and generates an effect, such as the priest, who lets you see another player's card; the guard, who will eliminate another player if you can correctly guess their card; or the king, who lets you trade cards with another plater. The game rewards careful observation of the discarded cards (which remain visible on the table – you don't need to memorize them) to deduce or guess what cards other players are holding.

It's a simple game, and perfect to fill some time between longer games. I think we played a couple of games during the marathon, and I've played it perhaps a few dozen times. It feels like a good balance of luck and skill – in the short term there will definitely be rounds you can't win, where you're knocked out without even taking a turn or you start with a high value card that you cannot keep concealed for long but that will cause you to lose if you discard it – but over the course of a game there is plenty of time for the luck to balance out. It's not my favourite game, but it's fun and easy to play when you don't have the time or space for a bigger game.

Forbidden Island

This game is hard. It's a co-op game with all the players on the same side – there's no traitor. You're all reckless treasure hunters trying to gather loot from a rapidly sinking island. You need to cooperate to shore up the sinking island long enough to find clues and excavate the four great treasures and escape the island before its inevitable ruin. The clever sinking mechanics mean that some areas of the island will be more vulnerable than others – once an area partially floods you know there's a good chance its card will soon be reshuffled and placed back on top of the flood deck to be drawn again, so you get a sense of panicked desperation as you realise that a critical location is sinking and you need to do everything you can to keep it shored up.

Unfortunately, it's a bit easy to get the rules wrong. The first time we played it seemed quite easy, until we realised that we were incorrectly retaining flooding cards for areas that had been permanently lost to the sea. Instead you're supposed to remove those cards, so the more of the island that sinks into the sea, the faster the rest becomes vulnerable too. Once we had that rule correct we played two more games and failed completely each time.

Each player gets a distinct character with their own unique ability. For example, the diver can swim freely through submerged areas, the engineer can shore up the island faster than anyone else and the helicopter pilot can fly to another point on the island. These help to make sure each player has something different to think about, but they can't entirely stop the game from feeling like one big game of solitaire. Each player shares exactly the same information and has exactly the same goals, and is under no time pressure, so there's some risk that one or two players dominate the decision-making process.

Overall, great fun. I am a bit worried that I'd get bored of it before I got good at it.

King of Tokyo

The is an awesome dice-rolling game that really needs a clearer set of instructions. Players compete as giant monsters stomping through the city causing general mayhem as they vie to become King of Tokyo. On each turn, players roll six dice and may elect to reroll any number of them twice before taking whatever they end up with. The different symbols have different effects - matching numbers score victory points, hearts heal you, lightning bolts charge you up with energy and claws allow you to attack the monster at the centre of Tokyo, unless that's you, in which case you get to attack everyone else. In theory you can win by scoring twenty victory points, but I think every game I've ever played has been won by knockout.

The game gets interesting once you get enough energy to buy new abilities from a selection available to all players. Some abilities might just score points or deal damage, but the most interesting ones give you mutations or powers that might let you roll more dice, spend energy to manipulate the dice or trigger special attacks when you roll certain combinations of symbols. If one monster can get enough special powers they can become almost unstoppable.

My only real complaint with the game is that the rules are so jumbled up that it's really hard to consult them to resolve a point of contention, and sometimes they're sufficiently vague that it's not clear how some combination of abilities interact. They could definitely be better laid out. Still, once you've played a few games you'll be fine.

Dobble

Dobble is an ingenious little all-ages matching game. Each circular card has eight symbols on it, at different orientations and sizes. By some mathematical witchcraft, any pair of cards will share precisely one symbol in common. From that foundation, various different games are derived that all involve racing to spot matches before the other players in order to acquire the most cards, or to discard your own cards first, or something similar. It is surprisingly hard to spot the common symbol. Sometimes it will be obvious quickly, but other times it somehow hides there in plain sight, invisible to you. Good fun, and much more interesting than Snap if you need to play card games with kids!

Next time...

That's all the board and card games. Next time we're onto the video games: Towerfall, Monaco and Nidhogg.

Game reviews: Poo, Tsuro and Ricochet Robots

Last week I participated in a 24 hour gaming marathon to raise money for SpecialEffect, a charity who help people with physical disabilities to play video games. I played lots of games throughout the day, and I promised a short of review of all of them. Some of them I've never played before and only played for a short time, so I want to be clear that these reviews are very subjective, and I'll try to be clear what sort of experience I'm basing each on.

I mostly played board games for the first part of the day and video games for the latter part. I was lucky I declined to play Risk, since that particular game was interminable. They played with classic rules, hence there were no secret mission cards to bring the game to a conclusion - only complete elimination of all other players.

I'm going to split this up and do a few at a time, and I'll start with the first three games I played, while I was still fresh and alert and able to think.

Poo

Poo is a card game about monkeys throwing their poo at each other. I wonder if maybe the rules were also written by someone throwing poo at a page. It's charmingly illustrated, and thankfully does not actually feature poo on the cards, only the implication of poo. It's supposed to be a fast-paced game, but the rules and card wording leave a lot of situations quite ambiguous, with little to clarify them. Especially when a card affects multiple players, it's really unclear who can respond and how their responses interact. I think the underlying game is all right, and if you have kids who enjoy the idea of throwing poo it would probably be fun, but I just wish they had made the cards and rules a little easier to agree on. Before the gaming marathon I'd played Poo once before. I probably will not play it again. Still, I enjoyed myself well enough.

Tsuro

Tsuro is an abstract and beautiful game where each player follows twisty tracks on the tiles they play onto the board - the object is to be the last player to fall off the board due to the track in front of them being completed. Players must always play a tile to move their own piece, but that might also move other players or put hazards in their way. The board inevitably fills up and all paths will sooner or later lead to oblivion, the only question is who can last the longest. I'd never played it before and I quite enjoyed it, although I don't think I would get a lot out of repeated play. Most of your choices feel arbitrary and abstract, and while it's beautiful to look at, it does feel a bit empty and nihilistic.

Ricochet Robots

Ricochet Robots has long been one of my favourite games. It revolves around the mechanism familiar to many video gamers of characters on a slippery floor that can start moving in any of four directions but will slide in that direction until they collide with an obstacle, before they can move again. In this case, the characters are four robots: red, green, yellow and blue, and you need to navigate them in concert around a sparse metal arena to get a specific robot to come to rest on a specific tile on the board in as few moves as possible. The trick is that players compete simultaneously to figure out the best solution in their heads, with the player claiming the best solution getting the first opportunity to demonstrate it on the board.

I love the simplicity of the idea and the sometimes deeply complex solutions that are needed. I love that it's an easy game to watch and learn - if you're not sure whether you want to play, just watch while others play and see if you can solve it in your head. If you're not too fussed about the overall scores and just enjoy playing it's even quite a good game for people to drop in and out of. I used to play it during lunchtimes at work a lot.

Next time...

Love Letter, Forbidden Island and King of Tokyo.

Why I don't like Elysium

I will be discussing the plot of Elysium. If you haven't seen the film, well, I wouldn't particularly recommend that you do, but don't read the rest of this if you don't want it spoiled for you. I'm going to talk about elements from all parts of the film, don't say you weren't warned.

Elysium is disappointing. It takes a promising setting which raises difficult political, social, moral and logistical questions, and then almost entirely ignores it to tell the story of some guy whom we have little reason to care about trying to save his own life.

Plot summary

It's 2154 and the rich have built themselves Elysium, a habitat ring floating in orbit around Earth, to escape the nasty overpopulated and overpolluted planet below. Citizens of Elysium have access to miraculous technology that can cure any disease, citizens of Earth have primitive and thinly stretched medical services and are terrorized by unfeeling robotic police.

Max, lucky enough to actually have a job, is injured in an industrial accident and given days to live, although with potent pharmaceuticals he can remain mobile for those few days. He turns to his old criminal colleagues and agrees to pull off a daring data theft in return for getting smuggled into Elysium to access the machines that can save his life.

The heist goes badly, but Max escapes with the data stored in his brain, hunted by Kruger – a war criminal, psychopath and officially disowned agent of Elysium. Eventually Kruger kidnaps Frey, Max's childhood friend, and her daughter Matilda, who is dying of leukemia. Everyone ends up on Elysium, there's fighting and backstabbing and whoever ends up with control of the data can use it do disrupt or control all of Elysium and its amazing technology.

Max

I don't like Max as a lead character. What do we know about him? He has been a thief since childhood. He's good at stealing cars. He had a childhood friendship, but he hasn't seen her in a long time. He has somehow gone straight and gotten one of the precious few precarious jobs available working in the robot factory, despite many run-ins with the law. He has a friend who is not particularly good at being a car thief.

The thing is, there's nothing much to make you feel anything about him. He's not really an underdog – until his accident, he is actually relatively privileged compared to most of the people around him. He has no strong relationships to anyone else. He has no strong personality. He has no particular direction. So when he suffers a terrible industrial accident, I feel a bit bad for him, but I don't feel attached or invested or even particularly interested.

Kruger

While I think Sharlto Copley made a good performance of Kruger, I am really uncomfortable with the way his character is introduced and written. I don't buy that the Elysian government don't mind (1) the discreet murder of illegal immigrants, but object to both (2) their overt murder by surface-to-orbit rockets, and that (3) the guy firing the rockets is a rapist. These three positions do not give any coherent view of the Elysians' priorities and principles. As far as I can tell, the only reason they are concerned that he's a rapist and war criminal is so that viewers will know this and understand that his subsequent threats of rape are not hollow.

I really don't like the rape threats. If you're going to write rape threats into your film, you had fucking well better be making an important point. This film has nothing to say. The threats to rape and murder Frey and Matilda are there solely to build up Kruger as a bigger villain for Max to fight, and perhaps because otherwise there would be a risk the audience might actually sympathise with Kruger.

Kruger is entertaining to watch. His enthusiastic cruelty in a fight, and his nasty sense of humour do make him a good villain. I think I might have appreciated him more in another film. I just felt that the context in which he is presented made me uncomfortable, and not for any good reason.

Frey and Matilda

I didn't find Frey much more interesting than Max. She's a bit more sympathetic, but no more interesting. Her motivation is her sick daughter, but that doesn't really matter because she has almost no agency. She gets to provide healthcare, become kidnapped and carry her unconscious daughter, all with stoic resolve and all due to the actions of others. Matilda gets one good scene and spends most of the rest of the film unconscious.

I have a problem in that I have no reason to care about anything that anyone does. Even if I did care about Frey and Matilda, they are just incidental support and collateral damage through the majority of the film. Max only turns to their side near the end. Until that point, their plight only serves to disinterest me in Max's story. And really, none of their stories feel interesting in front of the backdrop of extreme inequality that the film presents.

The ending

I found the ending actually offensive. So everyone on earth is now a citizen of Elysium. Hurrah! Inequality is over! A single act of technological trickery has solved a deeply entrenched social and political problem. This ending makes no sense to me. I don't understand what we're supposed to believe:

1. The Elysians have spent their vast wealth building the infrastructure and resources capable of healing not just themselves, but every sick person on earth, for no reason other than to show how rich and evil they are when they keep it to themselves. Now everyone can benefit from it and all their problems are solved. This is the everybody wins ending.
2. The Elysian systems have only the resources to heal and support a tiny fraction of the people on earth, and will quickly be overwhelmed by demand. Even with their massive wealth and technologoy, the Elysians have no mechanism whatsoever to reprogram them again and so their system will inevitably collapse. This is the everbody loses ending.
3. The Elysians can in fact just call tech-support to take back control of their systems and nothing much is changed, except that a lot of the Elysian government was murdered by a crazy person and for a short while a number of poor sick people were healed. This is the 'the rich people win' ending.

I don't know which they're going for. The 'everybody wins' ending is fanciful and oversimplifies the problem of inequality. The others are pretty miserable, but if that's what the film is going for I feel it is dishonest in portraying a superficially happy ending that is nothing of the sort. I would have preferred that they either blew up Elysium or were all deported. I wouldn't have liked those endings, but I've have disliked them less than what we got.

Suspension of disbelief

The following are all little things, and I think I would forgive them if the characters and plot were more engaging. But it wasn't and so these things were all the more obvious and confusing, making it hard to suspend disbelief.

• I cannot understand the status quo of illegal immigration to Elysium. Clearly enough people get into Elysium that it's a problem. But Elysium is tiny. There's nowhere to hide. Do they only go there to break in and use the medical machines? What percentage get through? If it's that easy to get there, why don't terrorists just blow it up? If the Elysians are happy enough to murder them on the way there, why not murder the detainees too? Surely that would stop desperate families from sending their sick children?
• I don't understand Spider's willingness to send Max on his data-stealing plan. Max's only apparent value to Spider at this point is that he's an expert car thief and that he is completely desperate. But he then insists on probably the single most difficult target – the man who controls the entire technological infrastructure of Elysium. From Spider's point of view, isn't this poor judgement an indictment of Max's capacity to pull off the stunt?
• I simply don't believe that the invasive exoskeleton installation surgery can possibly work without even a feeble attempt at hygiene. In another film I might be willing to credit this to some kind of invisible super medicine, but the whole point here is that people on earth don't have access to good medicine.

I will say there are a number of things I don't mind. I'm happy to ignore the lack of any apparent mechanism to generate sufficient atmospheric pressure in the habitat ring. I'm not too bothered about storing information in brains and the weird lethal decryption mechanism. I'm not even particularly bothered that the head of the robot corporation appears to write his software from scratch in assembler. These things might be funny to point out, but they don't affect your understanding of the film and the context in which characters make their decisions.

Lack of curiosity

I probably would have liked the film better if I'd been expecting just a dumb action movie. But my expectations were coloured by District 9 and the politically charged science-fiction setting. I'm frustrated because the film introduced important, intriguing ideas and systems, but showed a lack of curiosity to explore them. I'm frustrated that of all the stories you could tell in this space the one they told is old and tired. I'm angry that it looks superficially like social commentary but that in the end it doesn't really have anything to say.