58 - Games about games
My review of Half Minute Hero is now up at Ready-Up. It is, according to me, a “self referential, fourth wall shattering, utterly meta parody”. It’s deeply satirical, wickedly funny and slots nicely into one of my favourite genres - games about games.
Basically, it distils everything that I hate about role playing games - the meandering pace of it all, the deadly boring grinding and the melodramatic back stories - into lightning quick 30 second bursts. You run through enemies instead of picking attacks from a menu, shops only sell one type of weapon so there’s no agonising stat-swapping and there’s that whole 30 second thing, so no faffing about the overworld.
There are snide jokes about the genre, a wicked sarcastic tinge and each tiny level has an epic opening logo and culminates with a full credit roll. Maybe it’s a striking commentary about today’s RPGs being way too short - I don’t know the genre well enough to know for sure - maybe its just another kooky stylistic choice.
With its archaic graphics and tongue-in-cheek humour, Half Minute Hero easily reminds me of Retro Game Challenge (both games are published in America by XSeed, but UK pub Rising Star Games has only bought out HMH). This was a shockingly cool DS game that teleported you back to the 80s and let you to play through a series of fake 8bit NES games.
It didn’t just parody ancient console games, from Galaga to Ninja Gaiden, though. It was a parallel version of the entire gaming culture of the time. Between challenges your in-game buddy received new magazines - more parodies, this time of EGM and GameFan - complete with previews of upcoming games, developer interviews and cheat codes. The games also matched the progression of Nintendo releases, starting with simple single-screen games before reaching massive adventures.
If you just want pure gaming commentary though, look no further than Armor Games’ Achievement Unlocked. This addictive flash game is an achingly cool satire on the industry’s obsession with Achievements (look no further than Xbox Live, Steam, PS3 Trophies, World of Warcraft and a handful of iPhone games for proof).
Playing as a little elephant in a sandbox world, the entire object of the game is to unlock every achievement in the sidebar’s extensive list. From “finding” the main menu to killing yourself hundreds of times, it’s a simple little giggle at gaming culture, but a lot of fun at the same time.
In the same vein, flash game You Have to Burn the Rope pokes fun at easy, short games (with songs at the end).
The “game about games” genre is pretty under populated, as you can imagine. There are tonnes of TV shows about TV (like Extras, Dead Set and, hey! Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace!) and plenty of movies about movies (like Tropic Thunder, Adaptation and The Aviator), but doing a game about games is a little tougher, and requires a confident developer and a unique concept. It’s all too easy to just settle for observational parody (the insipid Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, for example) or naval gazing banality.
