Many people who went to film school will tell you that film school made them hate watching films. In a similar fashion, as someone who has worked on triple-A video games in the past, the only thing that impresses me about triple-A video games is the amount of work that goes into constructing them. Project managers and producers are the miracle workers of triple-A game development.
Iâm hardly being facetious when I say that the most impressive thing about Assassinâs Creed III is probably that they got 300 people to work together on one thing without that thing falling apart at the seams. And when theyâre done, triple-A games are virtual tourism at bestâand what an amazing place Assassinâs Creed III has made for us to virtually visit.
The Problem, as it were, for me, is that once Iâm in the beautifully-realized virtual tourist destination, my brain snags on all the little things I canât do. Before you comment about me being a hateful, snippy jerk who simply gets off on tearing things down, realize that âdetailsâ is actually my job description. If no one ever complained about not being able to talk to his mom from 500 miles away, would anyone have ever invented a telephone?
Having said that: Assassinâs Creed III as virtual tourism is, to me, like the police clamping a security collar on my neck the second I get off the plane a Honolulu International Airport: âThis will explode if you remove a single article of your clothing; enjoy your stay, [asshole].â For the sake of argument, letâs say I was wearing a pair of jeans, hiking boots, and a heavy leather jacket as I got off the plane: this is not an enjoyable surfing outfit.
My ideal video games are muscle-memory buffets, silver platters piled high with the finger-food of 20-millisecond-long psychic screen / finger coordination contests.
Prolonged exposure to the inner clockworkings of triple-A games has only heightened my sensitivity to my reason for engaging professionally with games in the first place: I enjoy games for their great âphysicalâ moments. My imagination thrives during momentary sparks no longer than a small multiple of 11 milliseconds, during which a turnabout occurs, and ânothing is happeningâ becomes âsomething is happeningâ. Parrying in Street Fighter III, aiming in Under Defeat, skidding and turning around in Super Mario Bros., and countless other similar actions inspired me to someday get involved with making games.
In other words, my ideal video games are muscle-memory buffets, silver platters piled high with the finger-food of 20-millisecond-long psychic screen / finger coordination contests.
Youâd think this makes me the perfect candidate for a guy whoâs going to call Halo 4 âThe Game Of The Yearâ.
I hate to let you down: I am an antisocial jerk; I canât get my head around the task of loving the modern first-person shooterâs faceless online multiplayer contest component. Every FPS these days feels like itâs trying to be chess, and forgetting how good Quake III was at being checkers. Quake III! Man, that game had such a viscerality about it. It was like soccer on a field the size of a hockey rink. It was like baseball played to speed metal. It was like basketball with guns. It was like Connect Four played to a metronome. It was like checkers, where youâre shooting the checkers. FPSes these days are like chess with chimpanzees, where the meta-goal of not getting feces crammed in your ear canal becomes more important than checkmating the other guy. (I mean that critically, metaphorically, and politically.)
So, in devoting my time to developing, designing, and consulting on mobile games, by playing tens of hours a month of mobile games, I have developed an appreciation for mobile games.
Gasketball
Gasketball (developed by Mikengreg for the iPad) is my favorite game of 2012. It is the âsilver platter piled high with the finger-food of twenty-millisecond-long screen / finger coordination contestsâ that I yearned for just three paragraphs up.
Gasketball is a touch-controls physics puzzle gameâyou know, like Angry Birds
Oh noâmaybe I scared you away. Come back!
First of all, now that youâre back: get over yourself. Angry Birds is not that horrible. Just because somewhere out there a die-hard Angry Birds fan rolls their eyes just as fiercely at the notion of a first-person shooter as you roll your eyes at the notion of Angry Birds doesnât mean you should write the game off. Just because Angry Birds isnât great art doesnât mean itâs trash. Wellâactually, yes, Angry Birds is trash, though itâs not, like, a half-eaten slice of pizza: itâs more like a perfectly clean chair that someone threw away.
What Gasketball Does is pull Angry Birdsâ lasting appeal kicking and screaming into constant urgency. It does this with Incredible Controls and Superlative Level Design.
Angry Birds is a game about âselectionâ: you select an angle and power level at which to launch a projectile toward a pile of objects. The goal is to knock the objects over, crushing targets. The projectile is a âbirdâ, and the âtargetsâ are pigs.
I say Angry Birds is a game about âselectionâ, and I put âselectionâ into quotation marks lest you mistake this for my saying the game is about âchoicesâ. Itâs not about choices: you have no choice. This isnât Bioshock, where you choose to kill the innocent little girl or not. The âchoiceâ in Angry Birds is already made for you: kill the pigs.
In Angry Birds, you donât even face the choice of how to kill the pigs: you kill the pigs by shooting a bird at them.
Angry Birdsâ levels are puzzles during which you must select which objects to aim your bird at: either the pigs themselves, or numerous breakable or bumpable blocks or walls which can fall over to either damage the pigs or cause them to fall to their death.
Angry Birds gets inside peopleâs brains because it turns a tiny, seemingly frivolous selection process into an adventure. You âwind it up and watch it goâ: you pull the bird back and release. The bird then journeys quickly rightward, and for a few breathless seconds you either doubt or believe in your aim. Sometimes the bird begins to deviate from your grand plan, and you groanâand then become hopeful: maybe some weird miracle will happen? Your brain is never exactly able to figure out the gameâs physics; its unpredictability will keep you guessing for tens upon tens of hours.
Hereâs the thing, though: Angry Birds is by no means a âmobileâ or âtouchâ game: you could play it with a keyboard. You could be pressing up and down to angle the bird, and left and right to pull the slingshot back or push it forward a degree at a time. You could press the spacebar to fire: this is how we played Scorched Earth and Gorillas on our PCs way back in the days before Doom
What Gasketball Does is pull Angry Birdsâ lasting appeal kicking and screaming into constant urgency. It does this with Incredible Controls and Superlative Level Design
Letâs start with the level design. Angry Birdsâ levels are structured questionably:
The player can zoom the game in and out as they see fit
The level can be any number of screens in width
The level can allow the player any number of birds
The level can allow the player any number of different types of birds
The level can allow the player any quantity of each different type of bird
From start to completion on a successful play, an Angry Birds level can take up to a minute
Gasketballâs levels, on the meanwhile, leave no questions:
Levels are one iPad screen in size
The screen never zooms in our out
The player can finish every level in one shot
Finishing a level in one shot is, in fact, the gameâs foremost goal: the goal is always, always to shoot the basketball through the hoop
Players have one type of ball: it is a basketball which behaves like a basketball
From start to completion on a successful play, a Gasketball level can take up to five seconds
The Gasketball User Experience for the single-player mode is not unlike many other physics puzzle games: the game gives the player five levels to complete, and five balls to complete said levels in. If the player completes the five levels in less than five balls, the game gives the player a ranking (bronze, silver, gold) and unlocks the next five stages.
Important: the game allows the player infinite balls to complete the five levels. This is important because it means that any player, regardless of skill level, is allowed to, at least, see all five levels in the current deck. The trick to unlocking the next deck, of course, is obtaining enough skill to complete the five levels with no more than five balls.
Once youâve unlocked all the level decks in a set, the game lets you undertake a speed trial: with unlimited balls, try to finish all 20 levels in less than 90 seconds. Though at first 90 seconds feels like not enough time, after 50 hours with Gasketball, the time limit basically doesnât exist anymore: thatâs how good you are.
Clear all of the level sets in a world, and you open the next world. As you progress through worlds, the game adds new obstacles into and subtracts old obstacles from the level design rotation. Advance further, and old obstacles come back with higher prominence. The game becomes a chunky soup of brain activity. Polishing your skillsâat shooting specific angles, at shooting versus particular objects, at shooting versus specific combinations of particular objects, at shooting in generalâbecomes a soul-engulfing endeavor. It is all training for Something Much Bigger.
Of course, it wouldnât work if the gameâs only player action werenât so spectacularly perfect.
Shooting in Gasketball
The reason Gasketball is better than any other physics puzzle game is in its milliseconds: shooting the ball is a perfectly realized, ocean-deeply nuanced action.
Unlike Angry Birdsâ slingshot, it is not possible to map Gasketballâs shooting mechanic to a keyboard. Moreover, you couldnât even map Gasketballâs shooting to an analog stick, or a combination of analog sticks, or even to two analog trigger buttons. Trust me: Iâve sat around trying to figure it out. It canât be figured out: Gasketball is a touch-screen game for touch-screen devices (or for two analog sticks and two analog trigger buttons simultaneously, though letâs not get into that particular 20,000-word description).
Hereâs how you shoot in Gasketball: you touch the ball, push it, and then release it.
The ball in Gasketball sits inside what I call a âcontrol areaâ. Different stagesâ control areas have different shapes and sizes, though letâs not get into that.
Slide and release the ball within the control area to shoot. Smaller control areas give you less range of motion in which to apply nuance to your shots.
Shots, however, are never just about their direction. Between touch and release, you can affect the shot by pulling, twisting, swishing; the ball controller logs the acceleration and speed of your finger over such-and-such number of pixels of distanceâso that every time you let go, the ball flies in a snowflake-unique trajectory, at a snowflake-unique velocity.
It takes you no more than 18 thousandths of a second, most of the time, to touch the ball, apply a nuanced swishing English, and release.
Shooting the ball into a hoop a quarter of a screen width away from the starting point will at first feel like grocery shopping in figure skates.
Hereâs where you say, hey, that sounds like something you could control with a mouse click, a quick wrist flick, and then a release. And Iâll tell you: yes, you could. Though it just wouldnât work the way it works with a finger. Thereâs that part in Steve Jobsâ biography where someone insists on packaging a stylus with the iPad, and Jobs says no, that humans have 10 styluses right there on their hands. Gasketball is like that.
At first the game might feel mosquito-bite sensitive. Shooting the ball into a hoop a quarter of a screen width away from the starting point will at first feel like grocery shopping in figure skates.
âWhy canât this just control just like Angry Birds?â a friend asked. The friend, for the record, doesnât even like Angry Birds
The answer is simple and complex: this game wants you to master its deliberately difficult yet purely intuitive control implement. You will love to shoot the ball because the ball loves to be shot.
You might, at first, have trouble getting the ball to go roughly in the same direction two shots in a row. Eventually, the game will present you obstacles you must interact with before swishing into the hoop: bounce the ball off walls, through teleporters, into speed-boosters, around buzzsaws, onto conveyor belts . . .
Games like Rovioâs Amazing Alex want to wow you with a Rube Goldberg Effect: look how long it takes these few objects to interact toward a mundane purpose! With Gasketball, itâs an inverse Rube Goldberg Effect: look how quickly this many objects interact toward⊠the same purpose every time (the ball, through a hoop).
At the very center of that are the golden milliseconds during which you exert your will over the ball. For as long as a minute beforehand, you sat thinking, contemplating, carving a solution out of the marble in your mind. Just when you think youâve got the order of bounces straight in your headâlevels will almost always require you bounce the ball against at least one object firstâyou now face the task of actually doing the deed: put your finger down, slash your psychic swish, and set the ball flying hopefully toward a happy ending. Youâll know in less than five seconds if you were right or wrong.
Gasketball Is Not Like Riding A Bike
With all due respect to bicycles (they are zero-emission vehicles of the future) and all things ever compared to bicycles, probably the best part about Gasketball is that it is not like riding a bike: it is not something that you can never forget. Gasketball is an earworm for your motor cortex (in a good way): if you do not feed it, it will die. Gasketball is a concentration match game for your muscle memory. At the same time, it builds a bonfire inside the part of your brain that loves solving problems. Yet your problem-solving center and your capacity for fine-tuned muscle memory must grow up in the same house, best of friends, in order for your skills at Gasketball to grow meaningfully: no matter how good you are at calculating bounces, youâll need an equally sharp sense of speed and spin when launching the ball.
Gasketball is Words With Friends with the all the nuance of a first-person-shooter moving-target headshot in the player action of its every second-fraction.
The context of it all comes into acute focus with the shot-matching asynchronous multiplayer mode: you set up obstacles, and then you take a shot. Your friend has to match the shot. You send shots back and forth to one another over the course of a day or a week or a month (or six months). In order to keep your skills primed for murdering your friends on the court, you will absolutely need to bodybuild âto failureâ in the single-player shot attack modes. Again: this game is not like riding a bike. Just because you golded a particular shot attack two weeks ago doesnât mean you can do it today (unless youâve been playing for 13 consecutive days).
In recent years, these âasynchronousâ multiplayer games have really taken off. Some of the same game-enjoying people (sometimes called âgamersâ) who foul-mouthedly blast Zynga, mobile games, and Facebook games will admit to playing Words With Friendsâwhich is a Zynga game that exists on both Facebook and mobile. âItâs just Words With Friends,â theyâll say, like itâs no big deal. And itâs not a big deal: Words With Friends may be a âripoffâ of Scrabble, though itâs got a community of devoted players, itâs technologically reliable, and many of your friends are already playing. And since you donât need to be in the same room as your friendsâor even playing at the same exact time, itâs easy to find competition. Which is good, because competition is what the game needs in order to exist (at all).
Gasketball is Words With Friends Without Words. Gasketball is Words With Friends with the all the nuance of a first-person-shooter moving-target headshot in the player action of its every second-fraction. Neither checkers nor chess, Gasketball is a super-deep virtual re-rendering of a ball and cup toy. It is hardcore, and it is socialâlike me and many of my friends. It is my Game of the Year for 2012.
Meanwhile, Your Games Of The Year
Now, if youâll let me be a jerk for a couple of minutes, Iâll defend Gasketball as better than other alleged Best Games Of 2012.
Nintendo Land: Okay, so I donât really know anyone who says Nintendo Land is the best game of 2012. Well, itâs important enough, and I like it enough to pick on it. I have had spectacular fun with Nintendo Land; however I have only been able to have that spectacular fun when Iâm in the same room with four people who want to play a video game . . . and a Wii U is also present. Gasketballâs challenge modes are a party ready and waiting for me every time I feel like opening the app. No need to orchestrate a social function: Gasketball, technology, and the internet orchestrate it for me. And if I am in a room with a bunch of people, I just turn on the one-iPad multiplayer mode, where two players compete for the most baskets in a timed challenge.
Far Cry 3: People sure were talking a lot about this game! Just talking and talking and talking. Apparently it has a âcontroversialâ plot. Well, fortunately for me and my wallet, I have read a book before, and I also have âGame of Thronesâ on Blu-Ray. I might have played Final Fantasy VI (then called âFinal Fantasy IIIâ) all the way through on the Super Nintendo maybe 12 times when I was 14 (through 17), though as I get older I have grown to want my games and stories separate. Iâd rather read the Wikipedia biographies of a couple dozen mountaineers who died on K2 (note: this is fun) than explore the island of Far Cry 3, and Iâd rather shoot hoops in Gasketball than shoot people in Far Cry 3. Not saying Far Cry 3 isnât a neat bundle of technical achievementsâjust that Iâd rather enable conversations with Gasketballâs challenge mode than create conversations centered on Far Cry 3âs plot.
Halo 4: I love the feeling of driving the Warthog in the Halo gamesâI love it more than most people love it, and I love it more than most other actions in games or in real life. However, joy arises through manipulating the Warthog successfully around obstacles, and that joy deepens as time goes on. With Gasketballâs perfect physics and lusciously nuanced shooting mechanic, the joy rushes in all at once, the instant I release a shot.
Dishonored: Dishonoredâs world design is really clever. Itâs sort of âsteampunkâ and itâs also not exactly like anything real. Itâs a blend of a wide variety of styles of games and fictions, and I respected a majority of the elements of the experience. Gasketball is pretty steampunky itself, though, and with Retina-Display-compatible graphics. Is Dishonored in 1080p? No, itâs not. Therefore Gasketball is the clear winner. (Please understand the âjokeâ here please)
XCOM: Enemy Unknown: What a tenacious locomotive of a game is XCOM: Enemy Unknown. First of all, itâs a triple-A turn-based strategy game, and it was released in 2012. Second, it is constantly clever and has excellent level design. Itâs a game I could gladly play in two- or three-minute increments. âWaiting for a phone call! Hmm, might as well make a couple moves in XCOM.â However, my PlayStation 3 is not optimized for playing in two- or three-minute incrementsâIâd have to stop âFriday Night Lightsâ and quit Netflix . . . My iPad, meanwhile, is always right there and ready for 30 seconds of game. And you sure canât get a more intense 30 seconds than in Gasketball
Trials Evolution is the Sonic The Hedgehog Game We Deserve; itâs this generationâs rightful heir to Super Mario Bros. At the same time, it is the vanguard of the iPhoneization Of Triple-A Video Games: it thrives in simplicity, sensitivity, nuance, and friction that moms approve of, while also possessing the Big Graphics kids love
New Super Mario Bros. U: Okay, Iâm pretty darn sure no one is calling New Super Mario Bros. U the âgame of the yearâ, though I sure had a lot of fun with it. I like Mario games, and New Super Mario Bros. U seems to find the right sorts of level designs for New Super Marioâs weirded-out jumping physics. The level designs ramp up in difficulty with reckless quickness, and the gameâs a weird mix of challenges and lulls, in a strikingly organic way that fills me with admiration and respect. Yet Gasketball wins with its potency: the nuanced flicking of a single shot condenses the collective thrill of a series of successful jumps, stops, and slides into one sharp, impactful icicle point.
Trials Evolution: Were it not for Gasketball, Trials Evolution would be my game of the year, and not just because, to paraphrase QWOP creator Bennett Foddy, failure is hilarious. Even success in Trials Evolution is hilarious! The physics are hilarious all by themselves in Trials Evolution. This is a game about a Guy On A Dirtbike, with control implements so simplistic (squeeze the analog triggers to accelerate or brake) and so sensitive (like a puppyâs nose) that the title screen should carry a high blood pressure warning. It occurs to me that Trials Evolution is the Sonic The Hedgehog Game We Deserve; itâs this generationâs rightful heir to Super Mario Bros. At the same time, it is the vanguard of the iPhoneization Of Triple-A Video Games: it thrives in simplicity, sensitivity, nuance, and friction that moms approve of, while also possessing the Big Graphics kids love. However, unlike Gasketball, I canât play it under the table during a business meeting. If the PlayStation Vita had analog triggers, this would have been a completely different article.
The Walking Dead: Iâll admit that it is incredibly well put-together. Iâve been a proponent of the âJapanese Visual Novelâ genre of games since before Iâd ever played one: I love good stories probably more than I love good games or toys. Iâve always sensed the possibility of a story-centered game genre rising to blockbuster levels of popularity, and it is with glory that I behold the success of The Walking Dead: by this time next year, thereâll be a million games just like it, and in five yearsâ time thereâll be an HBO-worthy back catalog. For the meantime, my Christmas list this year consists of HBO series Blu-ray collection boxes. I donât want to be snippy and say that âzombies donât really do it for meâ, so Iâll say that this game requires me to be in a specific mood, and it sucks me in slowly. Not to say Iâm the kind of person who just wants it all over with as quickly as possible, though I am never not chilled out enough for Gasketball
Okay; I feel like a little bit Too Much Of A Jerk for my justification of Gasketball over The Walking Dead, so let me continue to dig myself into this here hole: both The Walking Dead and Gasketball are heralds of genres which will see exponential enrichment in the coming years. The Walking Dead is the beginning of many genuinely great video game stories full of genuinely meaningful choices; Gasketball is the beginning of the hardcore social game genre, of asynchronous game play as meaningful as FPS deathmatches. The Walking Dead is the 1990sâ promise of âinteractive televisionâ, finally arrived and in superlative form; Gasketball is a perfectly executed toy of the future.
Iâve read Moby-Dick 12 times so I am sort of over narrative triumphs; meanwhile, the only perfect toy Iâve ever played with was a Rubikâs Cube, and I like Gasketball moreâat this exact momentâthan I like Rubikâs Cubes, so that settles it. It was a great year for video games! Yay!
tim rogers is the director of action button entertainment, makers of TNNS, and two upcoming games (one of which is better than Gasketball and one of which is better than Super Hexagon). follow him on twitter!
