In which I talk about a early game created by Jonathan Mak, who also created Everyday Shooter.

Jonathan Mak is a Toronto videogame maker best known for Everyday Shooter which was recently released for the PlayStation 3 Network (downloadable content good times). I don’t have a PS3 yet so I haven’t had a chance to check it out. It’s won a bunch of awards and the trailers look amazing. Geometry Wars / Asteroids style SHMUP with a weird haunting guitar soundtrack? Yes please!

One of his earlier games ToJam Thing gives a glimpse of his special kind of vision. Like Everyday Shooter, it’s an abstract SHMUP. You play a small quadrilateral, surrounded by blobs. Instead of bullets, you fire a short range beam that inflates the blobs around you. If you inflate them quickly, they pop. If you inflate them slowly, they can grow quite large.

When a blob pops, it leaves you some collectible squares and spits out a bunch of comet-things that pop other blobs, which will in turn spit out more comet-things and collectibles. The number of collectibles and comet-things is proportional to the size of the blob. The smallest blobs don’t spit out any comet-things at all.

The blobs have physics, and bump against one another. You can push them around a little with your inflating beam. Of course, if they touch you, you die.

My favourite touch is that the game level (there is only the one) is tied to the length of the song. When I died, (which was often) I found myself going back over and over again, driven by the need to finish the song.

What I love so much about this game is how layered it is. At every moment, you are presented with a bunch of goals in conflict and mastering the way these play against one another is the key to success.

The top layer is the one common to all games: Survive!

The next layer down is the one common to most SHMUPs: Get points! You get points by popping things (which matches well with Survive!), by collecting the collectibles (which puts you in harms way of the blobs) and by causing chains (see below).

Causing chains is accomplished by making sure there are a bunch of at least somewhat inflated blobs on screen when you pop one of them, in the hopes that the comet-things will trigger explosion after explosion. This also tends to clear the screen of threats and set you up for big points and collection sprees.

So the best way to rack up points is to cultivate a healthy field of Large-Things-That-Kill-You. Once you work this out, you find yourself farming the blobs, gently pushing them away from you with a few blasts of the inflating beam. All the while, you are slipping between the other blobs, which, because you aren’t popping them are appearing in greater and greater numbers.

The longer you wait and the bigger you make your blobs, the more and bigger enemies will be on screen and the harder it is to survive. On the other hand, the bigger a chain you pull off, the more points and the more you clear out the screen.

At some point, equilibrium tips and you either frantically inflate a blob at popping speed, setting off a chain reaction or (if you are me) you run into something and die.

This tension between the immediate goal (Survive NOW), the medium goal (farm blobs to set up a chain reaction) is fantastic. Not bad for a game put together in 48 hours.

In which I talk about how great the weapon reloading mechanic was for Marathon 2: Durandal.

Marathon 2: Durandal (recently re-released on XBLA) is one of my favourite games of all time. The fact that the whole series is now available for free on Mac and PC is nothing but good news for the human race.

One of the innovations of the game was Ammo Clips for your guns. At the time, most FPSs (like Quake) treated you as if you had a hose attached to your ammo pack and you’d just keep firing and firing until you ran out. Ammo clips matter because they add a tactical dimension to gameplay by giving you moments of total vulnerability to your enemies when you can’t shoot, leaving you to dodge and run and seek cover. It gives weapons a new dial to fiddle with when you seek to make them feel different.

Plus, loading a gun is viscerally cool. Shotguns are awesome because “Shck-Click .. BOOM” is about 200% cooler than “BOOM”.

In modern games, the visceral thing tends to be more important than the vulnerability thing because most fire fights last less than a clip. There are few opportunities for the player to run out of ammo on a moment to moment basis and reloading tends to sync up with natural pauses in action and players are pavlovianly trained to hit ‘r’ after each mini encounter to refill the gun.

Running around with with the pistol in, say, Half Life 2 goes like this:
“Bang Bang Bang … Reload … Bang Bang Bang Bang … Reload … Bang Bang”

Most games pull the difference in bullets between FULL and CURRENT from your reserve pile of ammo when you reload. In Marathon, one key difference exists in the ammo clip scheme: When you reload your gun you LOSE the bullets that were in your discarded clip.

First off, this more realistic. If I’m ripping the clip out of my gun, while an alien-zombie-demon thing bounds towards me, I don’t have time to collect the three rounds that were in the old clip.

More importantly, this changes the flow of fire and reload dramatically. In an environment where ammunition is a scarce resource (and what post-apocalyptic biohazardous space hulk under siege isn’t?) throwing away perfectly good bullets is stupid and dangerous. But so is running into a room of grenade-hucking shock troopers with only 1/2 a clip left in your SMG.

And so in Marathon you find yourself constantly faced with an interesting choice between immediate efficiency (reload now!) and long term effectiveness (save ‘dem bullets!). A dynamic that I haven’t seen in any game since (not even the System Shock or Deus Ex series both of which would have benefited a great deal, I think).

I really don’t understand why not.