Theology Gaming Posts
Project Totem turns platforming on its head by making you control two to four characters at once. That isn’t incredibly innovative, of course; other games have done this exact same concept at one point or another. I happen to like its implementation here for a variety of reasons.
Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
Philippians 4:6
I’ve got a penchant for shooters. No, not “first person shooters”, just shooters in the traditional arcade sense. They’re not my favorite genre due to lack of time investment and possibly difficulty, but I enjoy them thoroughly nonetheless. In that sense, I know what works and what doesn’t work in a style that become so insanely specialized, so wonderfully full of depth, that many of its developer stalwarts simply up and vanished from their specificity.
Western studios, of course, don’t often take cues from their Japanese forebears except in the most vague of nostalgia-induced senses. Galak-Z: The Dimensional follows more in the tradition of Asteroids than it does in CAVE’s bullet-hell wheelhouse. With a visual style (cel-shaded, if I had to take a guess) cribbed directly from 1970s anime such as Gundam and Macross, it tries to revive a certain generation of animated cartoons while also providing a unique two-dimensional shooting experience. The game seems structured enough, with missions akin to “episodes” and plenty of wonderful nostalgia-bait. A beautiful game deserves some beautiful systems, we hope!
Listen to counsel and accept discipline, That you may be wise the rest of your days. Many plans are in a man’s heart, but the counsel of the Lord will stand.
Proverbs 19:20-21
Since Candy Crush Saga basically conquered the “match three” game market, you can imagine just about everyone and their mother wants a piece of that multi-billion dollar pie. Most of these imitators and originators (I think of Bejeweled first, quite honestly) arose straight from the genre we used to know as the “puzzle” game. Remember Tetris? Everything after that just takes a variation off the original tile-matching puzzle game. It’s not hard to make one, of course, but it’s certainly hard to make a good one – and by good, I mean “not derivative”.
Indie developers, I’ve found, have started to throw themselves into predictable patterns a lot of the time. They take a nostalgic concept, throw in a few tweaks, add another traditional genre to the mix, and a game concept suddenly emerges. Even so, they tend to work within already existing categories, adding bits and pieces of traditional approaches that already work. Like mixing chocolate and peanut butter, or building your house on a rock rather than sand, it tends to work out better than the alternative.