Smash Hit

Yes it's free, no I didn't pay.

In a change of events, I thought I would take a look at Smash Hit. Oddly for me, it's a new game and was released recently upon the iPhone. As a medium I've yet from which to properly take a review. Released in the last few months, Smash Hit is one of those games that's proudly wearing the "experimental" tag on its game, which is to that it's a game with a gimmick that has been invented and then fashioned a game around that gimmick hoping to make a game, rather than make the game and building the engine into that game. In so far as to say, there's one thing you do here and that's it.
 

The further you go, the more devious yet intriguing the designs become

In what seems at first to be one of those tunnel flying games, where one would expect to navigate around obstacles and traps by turning or tilting the controller; you instead take the guise of travelling on a straight path through the Z axis while watching a rather surreal landscape pass you by. On your way you'll encounter various objects that for some reason have irked you enough that you can hurl large steel ball-bearings at them to break them and reward yourself with more balls. If you've ever been the kid that went they threw a rock through a green-house, wanted to throw more instead of running away, this game is for you. 

Hitting the edges and such won't help, the one point you need to worry about is in the dead centre

Each time you hit one of the crystals, you'll be rewarded with more balls, while the game will also throw at you various translucent obstacles made of glass that you'll have to hurl balls at in order to smash, obliterate and remove from your pathway otherwise you take a hit from the glass and spew out ten balls right there and then. Run out of balls and you run out of game and have to start over. If you manage to hit ten consecutive crystals without missing any of them, you get to fire more and more balls per shot at the cost of a sole ball to your collection, up to a maximum of five balls at a time in a large 'X' formation.

The whole game reeks of that pseudo-futuristic cleanliness, which does add to the atmosphere, admittedly

Like a lot of games on the iPhone, it's quick to pick up, quick to play and quick to learn. Which is essential given the fast and rapid flow of gaming these days on mobile devices where the gamers will want to be in the game, playing and out again before the next bus stop, or by the time they're called in for their usual VD clinic check-up. This game is of no exception to that situation and fulfils the requirement dutifully.

 

It's a shame I can't show this as a fluid animation, it's impressive to see

Graphically speaking, it's impressive to see in action. The movement remains fluid through out and glass in the game has that slightly refractive surface while being at the same time, translucent to seem like the panes of glass in bathrooms. The physics engine happily gives room for breaking parts of the glass and watching large chunks of it fall away as one might expect but don't get your hopes up for having breathtaking shatter effects. Chunks will disappears around where your ball hits and as long as you can get your view point through the obstacle, you won't really have to worry about much else.

 

Yes, I lost a combo just to take this shot, but the translucency was impressive

The difficulty ramps up suitable with the first few areas just an exercise in aiming the balls and gathering more by destroying crystals, before stationary glass obstacles begin to appear. Later levels have sliding glass, glass that flips up into position, glass swinging from ropes, glass hanging from ropes in suspension and will break and move depending upon where the tension gives up first, glass that rotates and spins and an assorted host of different shapes and structures to smash your way through.

 

Each zone has a doorway that has one or more buttons that require to be hit, good luck

Some parts of the game allow for a rapidfire item to be collected while gives you ten seconds to effectively "machinegun" your way through the game, spewing out ball after ball towards whereever you have your finger pressed down upon the screen. This doesn't make you invincible however and you can still crash into things, lose more balls, or miss crystals and lose your multiplier effect and becomes a little jarring the first time it happens and realise that the power-up isn't that much of a power-up.

 

It does get hard at times to judge what's going to actually hit you are be a near miss

The music jaunts along merrily enough in the background as an ambience to the game and doesn't really add much to the experience but then again it doesn't really subtract from it either. The glass breaking sound effects have just the right pitch and frequency to be satisfyingly close to what you're seeing and don't seem to be muted down or overblown in that regard.

 

Spinning glass, another problem is working out WHICH glass will hit you and making sure not to waste shots

Overall it's a fun little arcade style romp that's found a gimmick within an engine and put it to fairly good use. You'll likely play this a few times to see the effects and feel somewhat impressed by what your device is capable of doing and a fair few people will play it to see it through to the end or to score higher and higher against their friendslist. But without something new to challenge people, there's little replay factor beyond a week or so at most for the majority of players. Give it a go, you might be surprised.

Blood

Sometimes, you just want to blow everything up. Sometimes you want to play the hero and save the world, beat the bad guys and just be all that is "awesome". Sometimes, you just want to cause as much misery and suffering on everything standing in your way through physical, electrical, magical and incendiary manifestations and as many of those combined as possible.

Welcome to Blood, please wipe your ichor-stained feet.

Built using the same engine as Duke Nukem 3D, with a few bonus features in the engine such as seeing through sector teleporters, Blood offers 4 episodes of chaotically filled levels with enemies, weapons, power ups, gore, keys and horror references. Yep it's one of those games. If Duke Nukem took the hero genre through sexist tones of adrenaline and muscles in gaming, Blood takes the horror genre through guts, gore and some of the blackest humour to grace a computer game.

It's hard to tell where the references stop and where the originality begins at times, even the enemies pay homage to zombies everywhere, evil dead films with the dismembered hands running around trying to choke you, cultists in garbs firing shotguns and tommyguns at you while tossing dynamite back and forth, gargoyles of various ilks from basic to boss standards, fire breathing dogs, spiders, rats, fish creatures, mimes, innocents (unarmed idiots), malevolent spirits and more await to be dealt with in many, many guises.

The plot and premise of the game is very simple. You're a former badass bastard in a Demon-God's army; you get thrown out along with your 3 pals and killed. Sometime later you awaken and go on a revenge spree against the creatures that took your place in the army and the God/Demon of the cult you had previously signed up to, while not realising the severance plan was rather harsh. Starting off by quoting straight from Army of Darkness with "I live, again", before running outside to stab a zombie to death with a pitchfork. There's no messing about here, if you down it, it will likely get back up again and attack, which if you're not expecting this, can be a killer. It's a quick and fast lesson on the subject of "Watch out, this game might be slightly more than you're expecting".

Blood does boast quite the assortment of ass-kicking and pain inducing weapons one could expect to find in a game. Pitch forks for the melee stabbings, flare pistol to light up enemies and have them running around screaming in various guises from pseudo arabic-latin to the hilarious "it burns it burns", shotguns and tommyguns for the bullet and pellet crowds, Napalm Launcher for the rocket fans, dynamite bundles for grenade fans, prox mines and remote mines for the wankers in multiplayer, aerosol can and lighter for a flame thrower or explosion of fire, Tesla cannon for the electric fans, the life leech which takes health off enemies or yourself if you've no ammo for it and the Voodoo doll while hits enemies when you stab or can kill them outright with obscure effects. There some extra items in there for scuba gear, health packs, reflective shields and so on though some of these cause a game to crash depending on the patch you have in the software.

The potential for causing mayhem and pain is nothing short of over kill. Blow enemies up and watch their flesh get ripped from their bodies, set them on fire and have them running around, use magic to disintegrate them in ways that the Nazi’s from Raiders of the Lost Ark would be proud of. Though the real interest comes when you're up against enemies that are outright immune to specific attacks or just very resilient to them. The Cerberus dogs and boss is a fire breathing monster group, so flame and explosions aren't going to be useful against them. While the Stone Gargoyle is rather resilient to bullets, and guess what you're only really going to be armed with the first time you fight one. (Though an alternative attack with the voodoo sorts the men from the boys on that one)

It still gives me a chuckle to have someone run out from cover, on fire, screaming.

The game's enemies also have a selection that not only cause damage but can mess your visuals up. Dismembered hands, if they get close to you, can choke you and turn the screen black; green spiders blind you with poisons while the red spiders make your view shake slowly back and forth. Sadly, that's it, which leaves you feeling there were some ideas and greater potential that just wasn't utilised to the fullest, even in the update/add-on pack where there's newer enemies but no newer effects.

Oddly for such a game, the music within it is rather fitting, suitably haunting within specific levels and even catchy to the point of becoming an ear-worm and having you humming along to the music while you set about murdering everything in sight.

The levels within Blood are a little disjointed in presentation. Some of the levels are rather generic and a few of them blend together too well in such a way that you can't help but feel "oh great, another fucking demon church" but the ones that stand out more are significantly more appealing to the player. From graveyards and churches, to churches and temples, to cathedrals (I'm not selling this well am I). Yes there's a gothic theme in the majority of levels but the variances can be rather vast. The most memorable levels are the Train, where falling off will get you killed; A theme park and secret level of a whole rollercoaster (yes you get to blow most of it up), frozen hotels that look like they're straight from the Shining (even has Jack frozen solid in a hedge maze at one point), War zone cityscapes, industrial complexes, maniacal genius' castles, a level of living flesh, and the final level... another fucking cathedral.

You cannot help but feel that there's something not quite heart-felt about the game when you're crawling through another frozen tundra, or another cave system. Yes, ok, plot wise the 4 big nasties aren't exactly holed up in cities and such but even so, why do the bosses reside in a mountain top cathedral, a cave, another cave and another cathedral? As you progress through the levels you start to realise at about level 7-8 that it's aiming towards the boss and it's getting SO very generic.

That said, the shopping mall level is hilarious with that muzak playing which later become elevator music in Blood 2. Given the music is so cheerful and upbeat, it somehow becomes more appropriate to the character and the game when butchering armies of zombies and cultists, watching them explode, burn and scream, to the sound of this piece of music.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L928CmhAPQY#

It just happily fits the game, giving me the idea that Caleb, our hero-antagonist, is gleefully just butchering people left and right and it just so happens to coincide with defeating a greater evil. There's no real "good vs. bad" here, it's just "Which is more evil?" I suppose it could raise questions of what is the definition of "bad" and "evil", is it merely relative to the situation or circumstance and is someone automatically good if they oppose evil? But ultimately it doesn't do that, we could pretend it does but it's just a kill fest with a nutcase character butchering everything else in his path. You don't root for either side, but you sit back and just go mental on anything that sticks its head up for the purpose of being gunned down.

As with any good single player fight fest of guns, there are bosses and a final boss. (Halo 2... can I see you over here please for a moment). The culmination of level after level after level of conflict resulting in a one-to-one showdown with the big bad of that episode. The Stone Gargoyle (later just an annoying shit you can find in the first level of some episodes), A giant spider (spawning more little spiders, annoying now and later) A 2 headed fire breathing dog (incorrectly named Cerberus, which had 3 heads, come on people do your fucking research!) and the final boss being the demon god that started the whole cult, Tchernobog, which has the ever-so-lovely ability to just set you on fire as soon as look at you. While launching fireballs.

Of course with any boss battle, the higher the difficulty, the more health it has. In some cases having nearly 5x as much health from easy mode to insane mode, though with the same ammo available as there was in easy mode, players can find themselves running out of ammo, meaning you'll fight the boss with weapons that won't do any damage, or have to use the pitch fork, which is an instant death if you're against the final boss as it kills upon contact.

The game is certainly entertaining but it does have need for a little of what one might call, an acquired taste. Particular with the pop-cultural references to horror films, and while the game gets older, the references of course, become more obscure to the younger audience. But that's not a criticism of this game, but any game that uses pop-cultural references. In this case, the game becomes a sort of treasure trove of hidden snippets of referential material, a bonus for finding it and even more of one for understanding the origins.

But then, in the case of this game, take away the humour, the references and the aesthetics and you're left with a Duke Nukem mod. Yet in Blood's case, this is such a heavily adjusted game that it does stand up in its own right and actually plays and feels more like a different game than just being a Duke3D modification. It's rare given the high population of modifications being nothing more than a few tweaks and adjustments, but Blood stands proud as a game apart, a sick sense of humour, claret pissing from every crack and orifice with a huge grin on its face inviting people to come and take part in the insanity.

I'll be there every step of the way.

Strife

Strife is one of those games that was forced into a situation without realising it. The promise and prospect behind the game is let down mainly by the limitations of the engine in which it was made. Strife is one of the last games made commercially on the Doom engine and it pulls out all the stops to become something far more than just another first person shooter.

The premise is simple, Earth fucked itself up, life got shit and then a meteor hits to really slam a great fat throbbing fuck-you into humanities throat and blow it's alien invasion load down its throat for years to come. You are someone growing up in the aftermath of all this with humans living under a pseudo cyborg-cum-religious order that are steadily offering stability and enslavement in the same sentence. Humans are steadily being oppressed and the ruling factions are locked in an inner conflict of "entities" that are trying to outdo each other and defeat each other to rule over everything by themselves. Naturally, you'll have to take down each of these "entities" and in doing so you gain access to more and more pieces of a weapon that does huge damage but drains your health when you fire it.

The story unfolds with you joining the resistance, getting roped into other plots and plans and trying to determine who to believe and follow while being mindful of back-stabbed by other key players in the grand plot. Eventually leading armies to conquer other opponents and taking control of the resistance, before duking it out with the big nasties of the game, and some of the larger and more powerful opponents, that Strife has to offer. Various towns and locations initially will be friendly and accept trade though with enough hunting around inside other locations, you can acquire enough weaponry and ammo without the need to go the whole barter route.

The game can glitch up big time and if you set yourself on a course, backtracking upon yourself (i.e. realising two characters are about to fuck things up, you'll have to side with one, but if you go midway through that storyline and then opt to kill the other, you'll end up stuck with nothing to do and no progression), may cause issues the game hadn't been programmed to anticipate. A huge mood killer in a game with only one save slot and auto saving will cause everything to fall apart if you decide you don't like which new direction the game is going.

As a new arrival you're given a dagger/blade fist and that's it while someone is about to kill you for being you. What's not apparent straight off is that this game can't be played like doom. You can't run around killing everyone as you'll trigger alarms. Which stops the game from letting you trade and function, the first person you meet is going to kill you if you don't kill them, which is the wrong tone with which to start this game as playing on that line will just have unlimited enemies spawning in until you're brown bread. Likewise, some missions are designed to be traps and if you save along those missions and go the wrong route about it, you'll never be able to progress even if you escape the death-trap.

IF you can look past these bugs, you'll find there's a rich environment, carefully and in many cases, wonderfully designed areas that really do the most with the doom engine, a full inventory of items to help the player along and a fair selection of weapons with which to get the job done. In some cases you're planting rocks to blow up force fields, fighting giant mechs, infiltrating various dungeons for prisoners to save, fighting mechs... and fighting clouds of eyeballs that launch lightning... Ok so the variation isn't great and some of the opponents you'll fight are hugely overpowered compared to the things you as a player can do.

Engine wise, it's more in common with Hexen in that it utilises a hub system and quite an expansive one at that. There are a few quick movements and teleports but otherwise you'll find yourself running through a large part of levels with newer opponents and enemies in your quest to get to the bottom of the invasion, stop the plans and force back the alien invasion. You'll find yourself running from one area to another, through missions based around that area, then through a channel-level to get to another hub with more quests to do there. Thankfully the HQ moves depending on the point of the storyline you're in so there's less running about to do, though this breaks down when realising that there's teleports put in to move you around and leaves you wondering why they didn't just use them from the start.

Sadly, the levels do become less plot driven and less interactive as the game progresses, compared to the first few levels where you'll meet and encounter people, trade items with them or threaten them for answers, do various missions and submissions before the game soon becomes, "Hi, go to point B, kill dickface C, come back" upon which you get "umm... now go to point D as it's really important, then kill G go to H kill P eat J and take a dump on Y" and you're just running through landscapes killing everything. Especially jarring when you consider that earlier levels had a large focus on stealth, not alerting people to your presence and making silent kills rather than alerting the guards. In fact in some levels you're even given the opportunity to dress up and re-stealth the mission from there on; though some levels also have a compulsory alarm sector you have to walk over. You could run through and kill everything with a gun, but you could try harder to not have to.

But then that defeats the point, it's too difficult in places to try the stealth route that ends up with you going murder-death-kill spree on everything.

It's as if the game can't make up its mind as to what it wants to be and then just decides to say bollocks and become a generic shooter. Which is a shame as the potential here was fantastic. The first half of the game, up until the death of the Programmer, is very plot driven. The levels are very well designed and you get the sense and possibly the feel of actually doing something towards helping to overthrow a controlling faction. The push towards attacking the enemy base is done with the support of other rebels, making it rather surprising the first time you see it, given the previous games hadn't had things like this in Doom, Doom2 etc (but had in Marathon), to see AI supporting you was quite the shock. Though they're shit at actually getting to the boss and help in no way at all.

Ignoring the dullness of the storyline towards the end, the game is rather expansive and harder to gauge on the account of hubs changing and levels adjusting as you progress through the game. Of the 31 maps, some of those are hub levels, some are just missions stemming from the hubs, and a few are changed for other maps depending upon the plot, such as the programmers lair being a point of destruction and battle, then becoming a HQ for the rebellion and looking like it's been torn apart through warzones while the old HQ is left very empty even going as far as to remove all the parts of the level that resembled storage crates and boxes. It's a very unique aspect and the surprising attention to detail is impressive to realise. IF it's realised at all.

That said, the game does take the doom engine into a much larger field than just grab guns and ammo. There's a whole host of items you can collect from suits and hazmat, health packs and targeters, gold for trading, quest items and so on. Some of which are really useful while others are just there because someone thought "let's put that in" and someone sadly, agreed. It does make for a rather redundant system in places but it also allows more choice on the player's part rather than just running over an item and automatically picking it up AND using it. Given that in some levels, hazmat suits are used to avoid poisonous areas found IN that level, stealth suits however can be used later in the game assuming you're not up against enemies that can negate the effects. (Read: Most of them by that point)

There are problems with the game, it can be very hard to work out where to go in a level and the waypoint guidance only informs you with written instructions which can be misunderstood or misleading. However it does make you explore things more thoroughly and when you check the map you'll start to identify where somewhere has not been seen or explored properly, at very few times will it be a case of "hit all switches" to progress but when it does, it reeks of the old Doom style of gaming that Strife has tried hard to distance itself from, then falls back to it with enough force to kill any engrossing sensations you might have had.

Having said that, it is rather surprising to hear a full audio accompaniment for the entire game with everyone's speech, which can get a little annoying when your built in ear-piece squawks off your mission like a parrot needing its head shoved up its arse, though given the scope of the game and effort put into the production, there's evidence of a LOT of work involved in taking something like the Doom engine and putting up and beyond expectations, while still a flawed piece of work, those with a keen eye on Doom and its engine's limits, will respect the work gone into this.

Otherwise it's an RPG that can be rather unforgiving and have a case of some of the most nasty traps of all time where players will need to start over by making a wrong choice at a wrong time, even as far as quite late into the game.

C64: Kick-Start 2

Nope, it’s not about a game where you raise cash for an old franchise to try to breathe so-called new life into it while keeping true to the roots and then realise the new game is just shit and you’ll never recapture the nostalgia with hundreds of thousands of other people’s cash. This game is about motorbikes. (Though I might start a kick-starter for that making a kick-starter game)

Back in the early 80s in the UK there was a television show about motorbikes, involving people riding bikes over dirt tracks, up huge barrels and obstacles to compete for the fastest times. Basically an assault course for motorbike riders, much like the last event in Gladiators, Krypton Factor and a whole host of physical based game shows that had people running like pricks through a meat grinder, only on motorbikes.

The game, much in the same vein as the former, has the player controlling a bike from a side-on view, using the joystick to increase and decrease speed with left and right, wheelie with upwards directions and jump with the fire button. Simple, effective and all that needs to be done in this game. Each level has a selection of ramps, jumps and obstacles the like of which were never in the TV show and thank god for that, we’d have had more dead kids.

For every obstacle the rider must drive over it, jump it, ride it or stay within specific speed limits upon the item. Some obstacles like the wooden bar cannot be ridden over quickly or landed on (but you can jump from it) some items have no speed limit at all but cannot be landed upon, while others cannot be wheelie’d upon (yes that’s a word now). Some items cannot be ridden on slowly or too quickly depending on the item, some will slow you down like mud and rough ground, water always makes you fall if you touch it and fire will make you explode.

Falling off, getting blown up or just crashing will make your rider dismount in an odd but often amusing digitised scream and the faster you bail the further they’ll be launched and the bigger the scream. The game then scrolls the level steadily until there’s a safe enough point to get back upon the bike while the time counter speeds up, effectively incurring a time penalty just like the show would have for riders dismounting or falling off things. So in some respects the game sticks to the TV show but the TV show never had ski jumps over flamethrowers and thankfully the game does.

A little extra variety comes in the guise of ice levels that make accelerations and deceleration more difficult and longer to achieve and night time levels are just hard to identify most things (except fire and you can expect fire on almost all of those levels).

The game is always split screen, whether single player or two player. Two player games are a simple affair of picking levels through selection of keys A-X, one level per letter, or going fully random for 5 levels. The winner will be the player with the fastest overall time of those 5 levels. In single player mode, there will be an AI rider who will travel each and every level in exactly the same way thanks to the algorithms used. They sadly will always balls up on the same place, at the same time, in the same way, they never jump off items earlier than they can so if you can jump over a log that would force you to be slow and land safely past it, do so. The AI never will do that. So there’s easy ways to beat the computer unless the level can be run at full speed from the start and only easy jumps, in which you can only pull a draw as they computer will never screw those ones up. Oh and its transition in speed will be flawless, unlike yours because you’re a berk with slower reflexes than a pixel perfect AI. Some levels you cannot win as a result.

So the real fun is in the 2 player mode you might think. Well yes, and no.

The biggest and best aspect of Kick-start 2, is the custom level designer. A fully functioning level designer is built into the game where players can create their own levels and throw in their own courses and traps. Bunny hops before fire? Do it. Brick ramp up and grass ramp down? Why not. Step jump up 5 steps to a ski jump ramp over water and flamethrowers to bounce on a series of springs before landing on mud just to MAKE the player fail? Laugh your arse off the whole time while you’re setting that up. There are almost limitless possibilities and combinations you can pull off that are not only playable but fit within the game’s maximum course size, you can even add items within items for odd set ups where a ski jump will have gaps in the middle and you’ll have to bunny hop the ski jump ramp just to get to the end of the jump where it leads into a ramp leading to another spring that will bounce you over several barrels (or make you crash.... actually quite likely make you crash but you can still make it).

In fact you can make a whole assortment of tricks and traps that were not in the original levels. Of course you could also make a level that screws up the AI straight away and leaves you to win the game while the AI is forced to travel slowly to the very end for maximum time penalties, if you want to win cheaply.

The key focus of the game of course, is the multiplayer and the level editor. Back in the day most of the levels could be made and used in the main game, over writing the original levels until the game was reloaded but some people could save the files to disc/floppy (5.25” for those with the age and memory, no... not the size of anything else)

The music, does stick rather faithfully to the original show’s theme while playing on the courses/tracks but after a while it gets painfully repetitive and dull though thankfully you can switch the music off and just have the sound of low buzzes for engines, screaming descending riders and the occasional pops of exploding bikes on fire. The other music used in the menu screen and level editor is a rather neat and inspiring composition that doesn’t wane as quickly as the original theme tune does.

As quickly...

For a game programmed back in those days, have multiplayer on screen at the same time AND a fully functioning level editor, was considered a rarity for such games. If you’re not careful, you could end up losing a lot of time tweaking, playing and testing the level you’re making instead of seeing the other levels already on offer or playing with a friend/against the AI. Nowadays though, the potential exists to have online gaming, with file sharing of pre-made levels like most other games of similar ilk.

Sadly though there’s other motorbike based games already doing that, with more elaborate set ups and stunts, in that pseudo 3D they call 2.5D (bullshit, it’s 3D and played on a single plane, let’s not make things complicated) such as The Trials series but if you’re interested in looking back to the very humble origins, you’d do well to re-visit Kick-start 2 and see how it was done right and some 25+ years earlier.

For now, I’m going to ski jump onto a telephone box just to see if I can land it.

Then later play kick-start 2.