Getting my money’s worth: the $5 Viral Survival (review)
I follow NIS America like a hawk. Why? As a publisher, the games they bring to us tend to be one (or both) of the following:
a) quirky
b) awesome
In the case of VIRAL SURVIVAL, a $5 WiiWare title developed by Peakvox, we get a lot of a, but only a bit of b.
Much to my surprise, this game actually does come from Japan (original title, "Escape Virus"). It feels like an indie game developed in a basement. That's not meant to be a damning statement -- plenty of great games have had such a humble origin. But it does feel... small, and unrefined.
If you play this game for more than 30 minutes straight, your eyes will hate you, and the color orange, for days to come.
What is Viral Survival? It's a fast-paced action game that thrives on short busts of play and intentional limitations. You control a virus in a square-shaped petri dish. While swimming in a sea of orange goop, you can run into any of the following: other viruses, two or three varieties of bad guys (presumably anti-viral agents), and rockets. Grab a fellow virus, and he tags along. The more you grab, the longer your tail becomes. Hitting a rocket means rocket(s) go out and hit bad guys. If you, as the "head virus," make contact with a baddy, you're dead. Game over. If someone on your tail hits a bad guy, that segment of the tail and all segments after it go loose, like Sonic's rings.
You've fought segmented bosses in games before right? Remember every boss in 3D WORLD RUNNER, or those giant serpents that appear in every fantasy action RPG (up to and including YS SEVEN)? Yeah, well you're playing as one of those bosses. Except your form of regeneration is to find virus pals and grow longer, and you have no armor for your head.
And that's about it. The game comes in five modes: Normal, Progressive (up = forward, left/right = turn), Horde (lots of bad guys), 128 Zoom (um...), and Shooter. 128 Zoom mode is very specific: the camera is force-zoomed very very close so you basically have no idea where anything is. You have to collect 128 viruses and then the round ends. Shooter mode is my favorite, because you're equipped with missiles to shoot loads of bad guys and there are no viruses to collect. The drawback is that it's not twin-stick like, say, SUPER SMASH TV. You must face the direction you're shooting in. I think I could survive longer in shooter mode.
Horde mode = find power-ups, bowl through the enemies Pac-Man style (complete with inverted colors!).
The longer you play, the more you notice little quirks about the game. For example, your head virus has a little eye that will always look in the direction of the nearest "good thing" (either a rocket or a fellow virus). But I don't recommend playing this game in long spans of time. It will hurt your eyes.
All told, I'm not sure I can recommend this game. A part of me says "look at the price point: $5 really isn't that bad." But then I think about what else I can get with $5. In the land of XBLA, particularly in the "Indie" section, I can get games of equal or greater quality for less money (anywhere from free to $3). It's nice having an oldschool-style "run away!" arcade title on WiiWare, but then again, I'd just as soon play a free flash game on my PC.
If the game had more than one song, visuals that didn't make me want to hurl, and perhaps some sort of story/level/campaign mode, I'd be willing to rate it higher. As it stands? Nah. Only get this if the Wii i's the only console you got and most of your friends are too ADD to play anything that requires more than 45 seconds of concentration.
Played: 3 hours
Platform(s): Wii (WiiWare)
Price: $5.00
Interview: Telltale Games' Dave Grossman
Guybrush being heroic™, after his own manner.
Perhaps the best way to begin an anxiously anticipated interview is not to babble at your source about just how anxious you are and how much you can't wait to get home. But that's precisely what I did to Dave Grossman, who worked closely on THE SECRET OF MONKEY ISLAND at LucasArts way back when and is now design director at Telltale Games.
The company is almost halfway through TALES OF MONKEY ISLAND, the five-episode follow-up to SAM & MAX, STRONG BAD'S COOL GAME FOR ATTRACTIVE PEOPLE and WALLACE & GROMIT. Setting aside my exceptional professionalism for a moment, I'll say briefly that all of them are tremendous, often guffaw-inducing adventure games and that anybody with a mouse should play them.
I can't quite recommend the WiiWare versions (for technological handicaps detailed below), but the requirements for the PC versions are so modest that pretty much any computer with a video card should be able to run them smoothly.
Without further ado, here's my fully transcribed interview with Grossman from PAX on Friday.
GAMEOSAURUS: Did you get a chance to see Ron (Gilbert)'s keynote?
DAVE GROSSMAN: I did. I got a chance to look at it before he gave it. He actually sent it to me for comment a few weeks ago, I guess. I thought it was really good. It was a very charming look into Ron, you know?
When he got into the Grumpy Gamer persona, I guess in the second half, he was talking about Secret of Monkey Island, seven people, $135,000.
Yeah.
How many people are working on the Tales episodes?
You know, it's hard to say because the team kind of grows and shrinks as it needs to. At the maximum size, I think we probably got like 20-plus on it, because we're working extra fast. We're actually plucking people who ordinarily would be working on something else and dropping them on there when we need the backup. A typical size for one of our teams is probably between 15 and 20 people.
In orders of magnitude, how much bigger is this, now that you've got a 3-D engine and blocking and things like that to work out, versus the 1990 games.
(ed.: Dave presses me to make sense of my question. I fumble helplessly, and he eventually helps me settle on man hours as a metric.)
So let's see, Secret of Monkey Island, he said it was seven people? I'm not sure I actually believe that, but it seemed like that sometimes. There were a few artists actually on it. It took us about a year to make that. For a season, which is probably a comparable amount of gameplay and a similar amount of dialogue and all that, we usually use a varying team size. It starts out as only a couple of people, but then it kind of ramps up. We get into production, and it ramps up quickly to a team twice the size, but it only takes us about six months to get to the end of the season. So it's actually probably pretty comparable, now that I do all that math in my head. It's probably not that different in terms gameplay size or the amount of effort. Of course, everybody makes more money now, so dollar figures vary.
Vertically Conscious Review: "My Life as a Darklord"
If Square simply would concede that Crystal Chronicles is its own universe, we wouldn't be stuck with the tongue-tying title FINAL FANTASY CRYSTAL CHRONICLES: MY LIFE AS A DARKLORD. On the bright side, the unwieldy name is this game's biggest shortcoming.
At its heart, FFCCMLAD — you know what, let's just go with "Darklord." At its heart, Darklord is a tower-defense game. Waves of adventurers assault your tower, and you must build defenses to dispatch them before they reach the top. Instead of building towers, you build floors in your own tower and fill them with monsters. You are given an army of Goblins, Bombs and other Final Fantasy favorites. Between levels, you level up your monsters to make them stronger.
Every floor comes with an artifact, each of which has its own powers and effects. Some poison your enemies; others shield your monsters from damage, and so on. Adventurers climb the tower fighting the artifact and whatever other monsters you've placed on each floor.
Evil Puppet Show may be a useless floor, but it's the most satisfying.
Battles between adventurers and your monsters are governed by simple rock-paper-scissors rules. Melee beats ranged, ranged beats magic and magic beats melee.
Enemies, meanwhile, move at differing speeds, stay on floors for different amounts of time and use different tactics. For example, an illusionist will stay on a floor casting spells on all monsters and artifacts for 25 seconds, whereas a thief fires off two shots at the floor's artifact and moves on. The adventurers skip any floor already occupied by one of their friends, so when and where you build a floor becomes just as important as what you build. The upshot of all this is that no level requires the same floors as the one before it. You need to think long and hard about what floors you're going to need, where they should go and when you should build them. Ultimately that's what makes any tower defense game worth your time.
The game balance does teeter a bit toward the end. You unlock new floors and monsters as you progress through the game and some of these are ripe for abuse. Also the new monsters are simply better then the ones that come before them. Instead of giving you new tools the game basically has you level a new set of monsters and discard the ones you used in the first half.
Cutesy graphics don't mean people aren't about to be viciously mauled by a Behemoth.
Graphically this game is as polished as you would expect from Square. The Crystal Chronicles trademark style of bedtime-story-meets-Final-Fantasy is back and looks great in action, though cutscenes between battles do suffer from the Japanese belief that a portrait with text underneath is an acceptable storytelling technique. It doesn't detract from the game, but moving characters would have been nice. The writing is a little juvenile and the plot makes absolutely no sense, but I didn't find myself sweating it.
For 10 bucks, Darklord is the perfect length — I wrapped up the final levels just as the game started to drag. I had a blast playing through it, and anyone who likes puzzle or tower defense games will find it engaging. I haven't had a chance to play the expansions, but Square will need to throw a few new tricks into he mix to keep the game feeling fresh. I don't know that I'd buy 20 more levels of the same, but the standalone package gets a recommendation with no reservations.
