When I first started writing about games, I wrote about a lot of the bad games out there; I chose to focus on the
bad rather than the good, which makes the moniker “bitter” rather apt. However, these days I try to make educated
decisions about what I buy and play, if for no other reason than to conserve time. Who wants to waste time with
something sub-par? I also used to try to finish every game I played; now I don’t feel bad about quitting if the game
is junk.
The game I’m going to write about today isn’t bad, but horribly average — not bad enough for me to
simply drop, but not good enough for me to actually feel like my time was well spent. That game is, obviously,
Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin.
Portrait of Ruin takes two kids (Jonathan Morris and Charlotte Aulin) vaguely connected to the Belmont family on a quest through Dracula’s castle. Usually
when Drac’s castle appears, the bad dude himself makes an appearance as well. This time, however, another vampire
named Brauner is running amok through the castle, with nefarious plans to destroy humanity. The two vampire hunters
must explore the castle and foil Brauner.
I heartily applaud Koji Igarashi’s adherance to 2D gameplay.
There’s not much I like more than a well-made platform game. However, this game is almost exactly like every other
2D Castlevania game since 1997’s Symphony of the Night. I could accept the stale design if there were some new or
different environments to explore, but literally nothing has changed. A few minor additions do exist: there are two
playable characters, and one can be controlled by a weak AI for simultanious play (it follows you and tries to attack
enemies on its own). Some weapons are different (at least from the last GBA Castlevania that I played). Overall,
however, Portrait of Ruin is startlingly formulaic.
One (bad) change that the game actually made was abandoning the art of Ayami Kojima, who had done work on Symphony of the
Night and most of the GBA Castlevania games. The new art has an anime style that is not particularly appealing;
the characters look rather generic, and are kind of poorly designed. From an interview on
Gamasutra:
"... [I] wanted to change the style of the illustration to better fit [grab] that younger audience."
Well, I guess it remains to be seen if that younger audience is fit-grabbed, but it sure alienated me.
Sadly, it seems that I’ve spent enough time playing and writing about this game. If you’d like to play the
exact same darn Castlevania game that you’ve been playing for the last 10 years,
go pick up Portrait of Ruin. Otherwise, steer clear, and pick up some of the other great games the DS has to offer.
First off, I’ve finished Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin. It’s rubbish. I have the makings of a writeup on my computer somewhere, and now I just need to be bothered to finish it.
Uhh, I was going to put some other stuff here too. Ah, yes, OpenGL’s polygon offset feature. In many “programmer designed” games (i.e. stuff by Kenta Cho) polygon models are outlined to provide greater contrast. A simple way of doing this is drawing a filled poly, then drawing the same polygon as a wireframe over top. The problem with this, however, is that the wireframe will sometimes move in and out of the poly, resulting in “stitching.” Notice how the lines around the back edges of the cube are kinda spotty? Yeah, we don’t want that. So, by invoking a polygon offset, we can slightly reduce the size of the red cube, which means the wireframe is always on top. Slight difference, but it’s definitely noticeable. I hacked up this tutorial to produce the above images.
If I can somehow get my frozen hands to actually move, I’d like to write today about a game that I finished recently
called Ico. Ico was released in 2001 for the Playstation 2, so I’m only about five or six years late in actually
playing it — although if you can’t get your hands on the newest systems, you might as well go back and
play some old classics. Ico is definitely a classic, and perfect for a gamer who wants to play a short game of near-
perfect quality.
Ico is a young boy born with horns – a singularly unfortunate physical characteristic for boys
in his village to have. Boys with horns are supposedly cursed, and have to be sacrificed to ensure the prosperity
of the rest of the village inhabitants. When he turns twelve, Ico is taken to a remote castle by some warrior-type
guys. They have a special sword which reacts to certain statues that act as barriers in the castle; it moves them
out of the way. After they proceed to a huge room filled with sarcophagi, Ico is locked in one, which apparently seals
his fate. However, after the men leave, an earthquake shakes the room, knocking over the sarcophagus Ico is
entombed in, and setting him free. He is knocked unconcious, and has a vision of a shadowy figure in a hanging gibbet,
whereupon he is grasped and dragged back into his own shadow by unknown assailants. When Ico wakes up, he explores a bit
and comes across that same gibbet that was in his dream, but this time it contains a pale girl. He releases her, only
to realize that they don’t share a mutually understandable language. She barely has time to speak one incomprehensible
sentence before real shadows start to emerge from the floor, grab her and drag her into some unknown abyss. She
obviously doesn’t want to go, and Ico grabs a nearby stick and fights the shadows off. Since Ico and the girl can’t
communicate verbally, he takes her hand, leads her around — and discovers that her presence will move the
statue-barriers in the castle. What next? Escape, of course.
Escape won’t be quite so easy, however. The shadow creatures don’t give up after their first defeat, and will periodically
try to recapture the girl under Ico’s protection (whose name, it turns out, is Yorda). In addition, the castle in which
Ico and Yorda are wandering is old and decrepit; with broken bridges and pressure-sensitive plates that open doors,
progressing can be a challenge. Of course, after Ico overcomes an obstacle, he must also think of how Yorda (who is
not as physically dexterous) can follow him.
After some experimentation, the physical limitations of Ico become known variables, and the player realizes what is and is
not possible in the game world. Before this point, there can be bouts of frustration when progression is seemingly
impossible (especially to those who didn’t read the manual, like me). However, after this point is overcome,
obstacles are viewed in terms of what Ico is capable of, which makes the game much easier. One interesting thing was
watching a roommate who didn’t yet realize the limitations of the game — he made everything just about
impossible for himself, and in general his problems were self-imposed.
Ico and Yorda’s progression through the castle is mostly linear. It may seem at some points that various paths are an
option, but usually the easiest and most obvious path is the one that you can actually progress down. This linearity
is something that I, of course, appriciate mightily. Although the scope of the castle and surrounding environment is
massive, most of it is explored in the course of the game.
All this is well and good, but when you boil down to it, the appeal of Ico is due to artistic ambience and
intriguing obstacles in the game environment, as well as the emotional connection developed by the player.
The castle has a palpable, lonely feeling to it — it seems that many of the structures within the castle
have no use for humans, which makes it that much more alien. Due to the lack of dialoge and character
development, players must speculate for themselves why Ico and Yorda are making the choices that are acted out
on the screen. This makes things much more interesting than they would be otherwise, if the designer decided
to be heavy handed about the plot.
Well, lame as it is, I’m tired of writing! Such a shame, too, as Ico is a pretty darn good game, and I’ve definitely
not done it justice here. The few downsides (I feel I might as well mention them) are mildly tedious
fighting (vs. the shadow creatures) and overall low difficulty/length (I beat the game in five hours). An
enjoyable five hours, though, as I believe I mentioned before. My final recommendation? It’s one you’ll want
in your collection.
I was just about to leave, when I remembered that I wanted to revert to my old page code on b-g.com, the one where people could actually write comments. However, I’ve got blog posts spread out in about 3 different database tables, and consolidating that seemed a bit too much for a Friday afternoon. Not that I’ve been working or anything, but it’s time for me to leave and go play Shadow of the Colossus. Things’ve been slow the past week, so to occupy myself I’ve been continuing my dabbling in OpenGL. This is the proposed control scheme for the game I’m half-assedly working on (space=move; esc=quit). One thing that I’ve come to realize from all this is that I’ve forgotten ALL the trig I ever learned in high school. Who knows if this will ever become anything of worth? Not me, that’s for sure.
I think Tim Rogers has a pretty succinct description of the game:
...a boy with horns is locked in a sarcophagus in an ancient castle. His captors disappear. The boy somehow escapes. He finds a pale girl, dressed in white, locked in a hanging cage, and he saves her. Black shadows rise from the ground. They want the girl. You beat them off with a stick. The girl reveals she can open doors with her magic palm. One such door leads toward what is apparently the exit of the castle. You're motivated: go.
