Super Crate Box makes that easy to test-just hit a button as soon as you die and the game starts immediately. The randomness is a stroke of genius, as it psychologically encourages the player to believe that the next game will be different and better. Each crate increases your score and gives you a different random weapon. You move a character to get those crates, killing or avoiding the enemies. On a constrained, unchanging level, a bunch of randomized enemies and boxes drop onto the screen. Super Crate Box is also a platformer from a side view, but its structure is quite different. Dying is even amusingly rewarded at the end of each level, as you see a replay of all your attempts at once, with dozens or even hundreds of little Meat Boys exploding as they hit spinning blade after spinning blade, except for the one who's successful. Immediately the level starts again, with no waiting, no worrying about number of lives, letting you learn and experiment without issue. But there's no punishment for the player. They're also filled with traps, enemies, and obstacles that will kill your little Meat Boy immediately. Super Meat Boy is a platformer filled with small, difficult levels lasting around 5-25 seconds. That's not the case in these three Super indie games. Death was still a consistent punishment for the player. Games also got bigger more than they got faster, making reloading take longer in a technical sense, especially once cartridges went out of style. As technology improved, many vestiges of these systems remained in games out of tradition-number of lives in platformers based on arcade heritage, or checkpoint systems constraining the ability to reload. Games at home punished player death by forcing them back to the beginning of level, ending the game entirely, making you reload your game slowly, or worst of all, requiring a password in order to “restore” your game. In the arcades, you literally purchased more lives with money. These three games may have a throwback presentation, but they're actually in the vanguard of a new and positive trend in gaming.įor the bulk of video games' existence, life and death have been the primary currency players use to interact with the games. But that “Super” referent in their title is somewhat deceptive. Three fairly recent indie darlings- Super Meat Boy, Super Crate Box, and Super Hexagon- all seem to follow this model. There, most every sequel became Super, like Super Metroid or Super RBI Baseball or Super Punch-Out! These indie games slyly reference their influences here: fast-loading cartridges, two-dimensional graphics, and limited 16-bit/chiptune soundtracks. I'm trying to get my play to be more reliable because I feel like my skill isn't really solid if I can't do very well every time.The use of “Super” in indie game titles seems like it's a joke, a winking nod to the naming conventions of the Super Nintendo. I wonder if most players are like that or if the truly good players have consistently long runs without errors. Invisible, that is certainly a very respectable score, and I'll have to work hard to beat it! When I play Hexagon and Hexagoner I often feel as though I should be able to keep going forever, but I always wind up making a mistake at some point despite it seeming fairly easy to me at this point. Just a quick thought that may yield elucidation later if it turns out to be substantial. Actually, it seems highly ironic that mobile platforms have been demeaned as cesspools of casual gaming that threaten to sink the foundation of hardcore games on the PC and major consoles if Super Hexagon is anything to go by, the drive towards simplicity, which is incentivized by the technical and user-interface parameters of mobile development, may wind up saving hardcore games. Thinking a little more, it occurs to me how happy I am that games are so often striving for simplicity nowadays. I absolutely agree about gimmicks, but I think that, inasmuch as they are directly comparable (there isn't much reason to pit one against the other), I would have to argue that Super Hexagon is a stronger game design than Tetris due to its greater mechanical and conceptual elegance. Cynicologist, thank you so much for the encouraging words! I promise you that they will not be forgotten.
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