Hero Core is an intense action shooter borrowing concepts, graphics and sound from the olden days of gaming. What makes it interesting is that it also has elements of exploration and upgrades, often described as the Metroidvania genre. As the creatively named Flip Hero, you land on the asteroid base of your nemesis, Cruiser Tetron, explore its caverns and factories, defeat bosses, and earn upgrades that enable you to explore further and further until you are face-to-face with Tetron himself.

But the way that Hero Core approaches this style of gameplay is absolutely brilliant. For most of games of the Metroidvania genre, there is an explicit secondary goal not just to beat the game, but to collect all the items as well. Hero Core certainly accomplishes this – the “best” ending is only achieved by getting all the hidden items – but yet in Hero Core, this is not the same level of challenge as in other games. By default, the map shows you where the next boss to fight is, and will also show you the location of the hidden items if you find a secret that’s out of the way but likely to be found by anyone who is relatively thorough. Tetron himself, while not a cakewalk, is also easier than some of the later bosses if Flip is fully powered up.

The relative ease of accomplishing the secondary goal, however, is an implicit but strong hint towards the tertiary goal of Metroidvania games – what is the least number of items you can obtain and still win the game? This is where Hero Core shines. In most Metroidvania games, there are usually some opportunities for a skilled player to skip powerups and sections of the game, but for the most part it involves players trying to find unintended holes in the game. Yet Hero Core is built around this concept. The entire map is non-linear; in particular, Tetron’s lair is accessible from several different areas in the asteroid, including areas you reach well before the end of the game. There are a few powerups that open up access to new areas, but most of them simply make it easier to survive. As a result, the only thing keeping you from advancing is whether you have the skill to make it where you’re not supposed to.

So all in all, I think Hero Core is an absolutely admirable game. It brings in many of the things I liked about Iji – the upgrades, the secrets, the replay value, the intense and memorable boss fights – yet still stands as its own game. I have only beaten it twice – once with the best ending, once without – but rest assured I will rise to the real challenge of the game!

• Small Worlds won both the judging and the audience award, and with good reason.  Although not much of a “game” in the traditional sense, it is absolutely astounding how much atmosphere Small Worlds packs into just fifteen minutes of heavily pixellated graphics.  The titular worlds are so vibrant and well-realized, and the inclusion of a beautifully-implemented zooming effect truly fills you with a sense of wonder and even horror as you explore.
• Full Moon came in second place.  It’s a good, solid, stylish puzzle effort from Bart Bonte, who just seems to crank out great puzzles woven together in a common theme.  Outside of a few puzzles which were frustrating (dragging is a pain in the butt even if you have a mouse, and nigh impossible if you’re on a laptop), I enjoyed it a lot.  It’s just tricky enough to stretch your brain without breaking it.
• How My Grandfather Won the War has production values that are simply off the charts and a great concept that is fantastically realized.  But I found the gameplay way too frustrating to be fun.  The collision detection is dodgy, the weapon recharges too slowly, and restarting the level every three lives was not fun.  Sorry, I didn’t think this deserved to be third.
• The Fantasy of the Sord [sic] was my sentimental favorite.  It takes everything you hate about old console games (endearingly low-quality graphics and sound, tricky jumps, random enemies, bad grammar, nonsensical story), sautes it in a thick marinade of irony, and serves it up in a big, unmapped world of fun.  You select a character (white knight, rock man, wood sexer, etc.), choose your trusty sord from an overtly ridiculous list of weapons (including a tree branch, a shovel and a boxing glove), and set off to…um, slay some enemies.  And get even more sords.  Or something.
• The Fabulous Explorationsland is a cute Zelda-ish game of finding secrets in ruins.  Its cheesy sense of humor really endeared itself to me, even though it wasn’t very difficult and kind of short too.
• Hell Tour was really interesting.  It’s a wayfinding game with some really neat strategy and RPG elements to it.  However, it’s a bit too random and the ending, while a neat concept, basically undid all the work I did during the game.  That said, this was my third favorite game.
• Following Footsteps is interesting in that it was designed in DHTML, not Flash (which I, of course, have a special interest in), but the gameplay seemed kind of poor from the little time I played it.  I didn’t particularly care for it.

So that’ll do it for the games that I played – now to wait for the next competition!

What catches me about Eufloria is its unique theme.  Instead of rehashing one of the three common RTS themes (medieval / fantasy war, modern / realistic war, or future / space war), Eufloria shows off its own.  You are in command of a race of seedlings, which are insect-like self-replicating machines.  You colonize asteroids by sacrificing seedlings to build Dyson trees that automatically mine the resources in the asteroid and produce more seedlings.  Each asteroid has a unique combination of resources that determines the seedlings’ power, speed and health.  You have to fight off other races, as well as mysterious grey seedlings, for control of the sector.  It sounds closest to the space war genre, but the floral spin on the presentation and abstract visuals make Eufloria stand out.

Unfortunately, Eufloria’s gameplay is lacking.  It shares the “slippery slope” problem endemic to so many RTS’s.  If you’re doing well, it becomes easier and easier to win until victory is just a foregone conclusion.  On the other hand, if you are doing poorly, it is basically impossible to come back.  The strategy in Eufloria typically boils down to getting enough asteroids under your command to build decent-sized army, then just throwing increasingly ridiculous numbers of seedlings at your enemies until you’ve finally conquered them all.  What tends to happen is that you spend the first one quarter to one third of the game building up your empire, waiting painfully slowly to accumulate the ten seedlings to build each new Dyson tree.  Then you manage to conquer one or two other empires, marking the most challenging part of the game.  Once that’s done, you usually have a large enough empire to win the game just by force of numbers.  It can be incredibly satisfying to attack your enemy’s last outpost from three different angles with 200 seedlings each, but it doesn’t feel challenging.  The gameplay is not helped by the fact that other empires ordinarily do not attack you until quite a bit of time has gone by.  Instead, they will happily sit and watch, even if your empire is adjacent and is defended by only three seedlings which could easily be crushed by their 40 seedlings.  If they do get to a point where they attack you, chances are you’ve already done so poorly that you’re going to lose the game anyway.  It’s kind of a shame because there are a few really good gameplay hooks (Do you specialize in power, health, or speed?  Do you build a tree now, or do you hold onto those 10 seedlings to defend?) that never seem to be explored.

I’m also a bit disappointed by Eufloria’s game modes.  At the start, you only have access to the main campaign / story mode, which isn’t so much a story as a series of gimmicky scenarios arranged in roughly increasing order of difficulty.  If you get far enough in the story, you can unlock eight skirmish levels where you battle multiple enemy races.  I unfortunately cannot be any more specific than “far enough”, as I have yet to unlock a single skirmish level even after completing almost half of the levels in story mode.  Furthermore, there is no multiplayer mode, which is something that RTS’s in general just cry out for.  I do agree, however, that Eufloria’s rules as they are now would not lead to a great multiplayer experience.

On the other hand, I think Eufloria functions very well as an experience, rather than a game of strategic decision-making.  The abstract visuals and ambient soundtrack make for an atmosphere of beauty and calm – quite an accomplishment for a war game without diplomacy or compromise.  As minimalist as the graphics are, they convey a huge amount of information about the location and size of armies the condition of each asteroid.  Even the seedlings themselves are informative – fast seedlings have large wings, strong seedlings have large bodies, and powerful seedlings have long stingers, enabling you to size up an enemy’s army at a glance.  The interface is a perfect example of minimalism, too.  Everything is done with the mouse – a drag and drop sends your seedlings to another asteroid, and you can select subsets of your seedlings with a double-click, a right click, or a drag and click.  The mouse wheel zooms in and out in a smooth motion, and it’s very satisfying to go from seeing the entire campaign all at once to taking in all the action on a single asteroid.  I may have said a lot of negative stuff about Eufloria’s gameplay, but I don’t want to ignore the fact that it really does connect with me on a different level from most other RTS’s.

To sum up, I do have mixed feelings about Eufloria.  I’ve seen a suggestion that the loose gameplay and beautifully realized atmosphere makes it more of a toy than a game – something to run in the background and play with sporadically while you do your bank balance – and I am inclined to agree.  If you are expecting a deeply strategic game where the fate of your campaign constantly hinges on carefully considered decisions, do not get Eufloria.  But if you’re looking for an enjoyable experience with some RTS elements thrown in, Eufloria is certainly worth a try.

Anyway, the basic idea of Braid is that it’s a platform puzzle game, like Super Mario Brothers, only your character has the ability to move backwards in time.  In other words, if you make a mistake, you can reverse time, go back to where you were before, and try again.  It sounds pretty gimmicky, and that’s exactly what I thought when I first heard of it.  Indeed, in the hands of a lesser designer, a game with the same feature might’ve been a complete add-on.  But the way that this game mechanic is handled in Braid is nothing short of brilliant. The puzzles seem intimidating and even impassible at first, but as you study the level you begin to get a vague idea of how you might solve them, then start working through the details and finally, you get it right.  The ease of reversing your actions makes it possible to test out so many broad ideas, and to such a great level of precision (as Jakob Nielsen would tell you).  Contrast that with typical platform games, where the slightest failure is punished by forcing you to repeat the entire sequence – you could not do most of these puzzles without the ability to try again so easily.

On top of that, the game is wrapped in a story about regret for one’s past actions.  Having not played the full game, I don’t know how it ends, but it’s keyed on such a human emotion – knowing that you did the wrong thing and wanting to be able to go back and do the right thing instead.  In this game, you can do exactly that, but is it really enough?  I think it’s a great example of what I talked about with my last post, in that the game mechanics are such that they naturally bring out a strong feeling in the player, rather than relying on plot devices and the like.  The graphics are beautifully detailed as well, giving the game a pastoral feel that you don’t often see.

So, in short – if you haven’t given Braid a try, do it!  And be on the lookout for more posts like this.  Really.