Baud Attitude

I am rather beginning to suspect that I may choose games to play based solely on the amount of time it would take to explain them to my mum.

For example, Call of Duty, which I could explain in the time it takes to say “it’s like playing army men, but with strangers on the Internet” is something that I’ll play for long enough to see the end of the single player campaign – so a lazy afternoon – and then put aside, while something like Miku Flick/02, which is more along the lines of “I’m choosing characters from a Japanese cell phone keypad in time with an artificial girl singing and dancing” could probably take the same lazy afternoon to explain what I’ve just said and why I keep coming back for one more go.

Obviously we need a rhythm game involving funny cat videos. That one I could probably explain pretty quickly.

“You see, if I press these buttons fast enough and in the right order, he jumps into the box and falls over.”

After playing through Battle Cats this last week, I decided that I would check out the other games that Ponos had developed.

I wound up downloading Do Do Egg!, a 0.99 color match sort of game that does its level best to scratch the human need for bright colors and energetic cheery music and happy animations.  Digital sugar is what we’re talking about here, delivered in heaping spoonfuls.

I kind of assumed that it would be yet another bejeweled sort of thing and was rather happy to find that it has a bit of a twist to it – you’re not making threes or fours of a kind but rather stringing together connections of like color.

Here’s a sample game screen that may help explain:

The goal is to match pieces that are separated from each other by two pieces which can be of any color, and then to hopefully keep making chains to boost your score.

So, for example, if we started with the blue piece in the upper left corner here, we could skip over two pieces to find the other blue piece, skip down two to make a chain to the blue piece on the fourth row, go right and down to the blue piece on the fifth row on the very right side, go left and down again to the blue piece on the sixth row and then release to make a chain of four matches, removing all the blue pieces we just used and all the pieces we had to cross over to make those chains.

It plays with the mind a bit and it takes a little while to start seeing the connections – and, unlike most match-three style games, there’s no accidental awesome chaining as stuff cascades from above.  You have to explicitly make each connection yourself.

Making matches is rewarded with colorful and charming explosions as pieces are flung off the board and new ones spill in to take their place.  More digital sugar.

I was a bit surprised, when I bought it, to discover that several of the game modes were locked off behind my choice of a skill gate or a pay wall.  When you buy the game, you get a mode that is your standard endless, timed game where you have a constantly running clock that can be pushed back by making matches.  Do well enough in that – or pay another buck – and you open a mode that gives you a minute to make as many points as you can.  Do well in THAT – or, yes, drop another buck – and you open “mission mode” where the game constantly throws challenges at you “Make three chains using blue pieces!” and you have sixty seconds to do what it tells you to do in order to get it to hand you the next challenge.

Oh, and FINALLY, if you do well enough on Mission mode – or fork over another dollar – you unlock a relaxed endless un-timed mode that only ends when you run out of moves.

I unlocked them all through skilled – and occasionally lucky – gameplay  and take great pride in this.

The “mission” mode was particularly vexing to clear because you have to clear twenty missions in a row and I kept having it say “OK, now make five chains in a row using red pieces” when there were almost no red pieces on the board, meaning that I had to clear frantically in hopes that red pieces would drop onto the board for me.  Fun the first couple of times, not so fun after a dozen.

Since almost every mode is timed, it makes for an intense and frantic game that really demands you think on the fly.

If you want something a little less stressful, there’s also a puzzle mode, where you get a set arrangement of pieces and have to clear the board.  In this case, you get twenty puzzles, with eighty more locked behind a shopping cart button.  I had hoped that it would follow the same pattern as the other game modes and let you work for them by playing the game, so I set about getting three starts on all the puzzles…

…and, sadly, it didn’t work.  To be honest, I wouldn’t have minded if this was just a 1.99 game that came with all the puzzles from the get-go, but there’s something annoying about paying for a game – even if it’s only 0.99 – and being asked to pay more for these extra puzzles.

Finally, there’s an amusing button on the game’s main screen that must be pointed out, as it engages “Summer Mode.”

In Summer mode, the game is more or less identical, but the little chunks of happiness shrapnel that fly out when you make matches are replaced with icons of a generally-beachy motif.  Sand umbrellas, crabs, watermelons, that sort of thing.

There is also a subtle change to the main menu which I’ll present here.  See if you can catch it.

Oh, Japan, there’s just no help for you.

I didn’t try the multiplayer modes.  Oddly enough, they all seem available from the beginning, so at least you don’t have to worry about unlocking them.

Final summation: A fun take on the matching-color game genre with the caveat that some stuff is locked behind shopping cart buttons so it’s not REALLY a 0.99 app.

It’s been a long 50 years since Spacewar first burned through CPU cycles on a PDP-11, and there have been a lot of games written and played in those years.

There’s a temptation to ask, sometimes, if there was any point to all of it.  I mean, when it comes right down to it, computer games have just been another way of wasting the precious few heartbeats any of us get in our lifetimes.

Then I find a game like Battle Cats and I realize that it’s all been worth it.  This game – if it is appropriate to call the culmination of 50 years of man’s collective endeavors a game – makes it all seem like it had a deeper meaning, like, like, like I’m writing a blog post at 3 in the morning and having trouble with vocabulary.

That’s pretty deep, huh?

Anyway.

I would not dream of summarizing Battle Cats without first giving it a chance to describe its own story:

…yeah.

Battle Cats is a tower defense sort of thing from Ponos, a Japanese company whose other games seem pretty biased towards 5-minute finger exercises and whose developers either have an absolutely terrible grasp of English or who are deliberately trolling me.  I honestly can’t be sure either way.  They definitely have the typical Japanese attitude towards western religions…

…which is to say, I don’t think they’re DELIBERATELY being offensive, but again I cannot be sure.

Anyway, this is a hell of a weird game.  You are in command of a force of cats and cat-like creatures who invade Japan from Nagasaki and move, roughly, east and north, conquering all cities in your way.  Each city costs a certain amount of energy to attack, you have a limited store of energy, and your energy takes a while to recharge – though, of course, you can always drop a few bucks to instantly refill your energy.

OR, you can play the game for 15 or 20 minute stretches at any given time, generally make consistant progress, and get to the end credits without spending a penny, which is what I did and which I feel a little guilty about.

But enough about the game’s theoretical revenue stream.

Play is simple enough.  You have a tower, the defending city has a tower, you have to attack the opposing tower while it throws out defenders and one or the other of you is going to wind up a pile of rubble.

Your units are, of course, adorable for the most part.

Seriously, it’s a kitty cat with a big axe.  Its name is Axe Cat.

Some of your units are a little less adorable, like these tall “Gross Cats” shown assaulting the enemy base in Okayama.

You’ll get a lot more out of this game if you know a little bit about Japanese cities, by the way, because the bases are usually modeled after a local specialty food or – in this case – Momotaro, since Okayama is the home of Momotaro.

It’s a pretty deep game .  You have nine units that can be purchased and upgraded using XP gained from clearing levels, but you can use the same XP for quite a few other purposes –  buying upgrades to your tower, improving your money gain rate, lowering cooldowns on summoning new cats or increasing your energy tank so you can play more at a time, for example.  In the early game, when you don’t have a lot of XP, you wind up making a lot of tradeoffs and agonizing over which cats to upgrade first.

Cats do have a level cap – once they hit level 10, they evolve into their final form which generally looks quite odd but also kicks all kinds of arse.  The bean-shaped “Tank Cats” and long-legged “Gross Cats” from the previous image, as an example, look quite different in this next one:

This represents a pretty common mid-game opening, by the way.  The rectangular cats are very tanky, they take a lot of beating but don’t put out a lot of damage.  The long-legged cats cat hang out behind the tanky cats and kick things with relative impunity.  This works until about level 40 (of 48) when the game suddenly turns into a damage race, which is quite a shock if you’ve gotten used to turtling up and building up your reserves before venturing forth.

Not that I would know anything about that.  It uh happened to a friend.  A friend who suddenly had to go back and do a lot of grinding in earlier levels.

Anyway, it’s bizarre, it’s free, it’s generally adorable and it has killer seals in it.

Oh, and it’s even available for Android devices in addition to iOS, so – for once – Android owners aren’t being left out in the cold.

Anyway, since this represents the pinnacle of video games for now and for all time, and since the only direction we have to go from here is downhill, you should probably check it out.

Nothing much to add to my previous comments about the game other than that I discovered that the rocket launcher is a gleefully satisfying way to make aliens go boom and I earned enough to buy the leopard print outfit that I’d been curious about.  I’m happy to report that it is even less combat-practical than the Nova outfit default costume.

If you tap your character in either the shop screen or the main menu, shown above, she blows you a kiss.

Action shots!

Over-the-shoulder and top-down views.  It’s the kitty ears that really make the outfit, I think. I’m astonished that the developer didn’t add a tail, but that probably would have taken extra effort to animate.

The little blue floaty thing on my right is a power-up that floats next to you for a minute or so adding extra firepower.  You can get a pair of them going and it’s great fun to mow down advancing zerglings alien beasties until it expires and you’re back to running backwards while shooting ahead.

Sadly you really don’t get the same impact in the top down view.