Closed Salmancer's Spellbook

[Salmancer]

Hi there. I'm Salmancer, and this is my blog with a cutesy name. (I swear my username came first!) I kind of have a bad habit of starting big projects, planning them out, and then never getting around to actually doing them, and this came to a head when I tried to start a fansite only to struggle to get CSS to do what I wanted and getting super frustrated. So I figured I need to start even smaller than the fansite level, perhaps even smaller than the dedicated blogging platform level. Maybe if I can do this I can work my way back up to big things like actually completing every class I register for instead of dropping half of them.

What goes on in these pages? Well, whatever I feel like, as the Bulbablog rules allow. I suppose since my interests are mostly video games, you can expect game based posts more often than not. I'll also probably talk about those projects if they ever get off the ground since the self-promotion rules are apparently also suspended over in this corner of the forum.

Okay, I'm rambling now. I should just get on with it. Onto the first post!

 

[Salmancer]

So, what has the metaphorical slot machine chosen for a first topic… It’s Plants Vs Zombies Heroes!

I love the Plants Vs Zombies franchise. Well, I like the two games I’ve played, 2 and Heroes. (You might notice these are both free to play entries. Consider this a showcase of one of the upsides. I wouldn’t have touched either without them being free.) Their bizarreness is always incredibly charming. Everything is either a pun, a reference, or both at once, and it never fails to make me smile. There are times I just spend a day scrolling through the entire Almanac (the in-game database) of 2 and reminisce on all of the silliness that occurs.

Hang on, this is supposed to be a Heroes blog post. So I should actually start talking about Heroes. Heroes is a digital collectable card game based on the franchise, featuring a superhero and comic book theme. Naturally, the overall tone matches the IP: the main burn spell is being sat on by a zombie plumber, while many of the hero characters can be tied to parodies of famous superhero fiction. Every card also happens to have it’s own Almanac-style description, which adds to the charm. (My personal favorite is Molekale’s. “You think spinach is good for you? Please. I am spinach times infinity”)

(It’s funny how a Plants Vs Zombies has a CCG when the original game was partially inspired by games like Magic the Gathering. Also, I suppose I shouldn’t let this aside pass without posting a picture of the time Magic referenced PvZ.)

Now is perhaps a good time to talk about the game play. I don’t play all too many digital card games so forgive me if my terminology is completely unhelpful. Heroes runs on a five lane system, with the goal to play units to reduce the opponent’s life total from 20 to 0. There are two mechanics that I feel I should discuss. The first is that Heroes is actually asymmetrical. Each match occurs between a Plant player and a Zombie player, and neither side shares cards. This is a concept probably only workable in digital, since players don’t have to carry around multiple decks they might even get to play. I end up using it as an anti-frustration feature; if I keep losing on Plants, I can play Zombies for a different experience while still progressing. Each side has different mechanics on their cards to sell the narrative: Zombies have mechanics that interact with Plant death to make them feel like the aggressors, while Plants can have two units in the same lane via Team-Up to sell the idea of the Plants fortifying the lawn. The other mechanic is much more variable. Drawing from concepts like Duel Master’s shields and Pokemon’s prize cards, the Super Block helps losing players come back by randomly negating a single attack and giving that player a free card. However, the opponent can see how close the Super Block gauge is to filling and there are cards that serve to counter the mechanic, so Super Blocks add a fun swing without people feeling like it steals games.

If I had any issues, it’s probably the fact that the early game is very rough without investing money and the game feels less open than other card games. The game hands out all of the commons for free, but the commons are often under the curve and lack cards at high costs that win the game. Which means that when you head online, the starting decks will often peter out in the late game while cards you can’t even fathom owning run you over. (At the very least, the comedy takes some of the sting out of losing) Additionally, the game’s later sets added Environment cards, which modify a specific lane in favor of the user. There are no Environments at common, and the only way to shoo away troublesome Environments is to play your own into that lane, Stadium style. This means until you start opening Environments from packs, you are at the mercy of the opponent’s cards. (It’s notable that the opponent can never garner any benefit from a Enviroment, only avoid getting nerfed by certain ones. Maybe if they were more like Stadiums they wouldn’t be as unfair.) As expected from a card game using Hero characters, each character only plays two classes of cards. Which is fine, but especially coming from Pokemon, it can feel a little constricting. Sure, using Solar to ramp into Mega Grow finishers as Chompzilla is fun, but I can’t also throw in Guardian lane movement unless I go and use Wall-knight, which means I can’t use Mega Grow anymore. It’s always a conundrum, and it also makes deck building weird when you have an effect you want but are in the wrong class. (Oddly, there don’t seem to be cards that care about classes at all, only types that cards can have like Berry or Imp Zombies. Which just doesn’t feel right in a TCG.) At the very least, the classes keep the game on theme, so The Smash isn’t throwing smoke bombs around or anything like that.

I figure it would be fun to end this post with the Plant deck I’ve built. I spliced together some screenshots to present it.

This is “Team Up, Dream Up”, named after a catchphrase I always use. (I think I based it on the title of Mario & Luigi: Dream Team.) Naturally, it’s a deck focused on using the Team Up mechanic, with Chompzilla as the Hero and Mega Grow and Solar as the classes. In this deck, Solar provides Sunflowers to ramp into Mega Grow threats like Repeater, while Team Up is used to protect both types of plants. Mixed Nuts holds the whole thing together as an above the curve 4/4 for 3 Sun, as long as it goes in the same lane as a Team Up plant. Luckily there are 11 plants with Team Up in the deck so the combo usually works. The only issue is that I have no finishers. The two you see are just Plants with large stats, which doesn’t really win games when hard removal does exist. As such, it is critical to play aggressively and hope to squeak out an early win off synergy before the big hitters come down on the Zombie side. (Those same Mixed Nuts are very sad when you draw them off the top into an empty board swarming with expensive zombies as overcosted 2/2s.)

And that’s all. I hope this was at least somewhat enjoyable even if you aren’t interested in PvZ.


(I should note I’ve never actually played the original game in case anyone cares. (Lots of people love the original and disavow 2 for the free-to-play mechanics.) It’s not that I’m not interested, it’s more that I’ve heard the mobile version of it is best ignored and I never made looking at it a priority since a large draw of PvZ for me is the art and the original game has a very different and less adorable style. Maybe one day.)

 

[Salmancer]

There are zombies on my lawn… I think they are moaning about how I only shared a Plant deck despite the Zombies in PvZ Heroes having equal billing. Therefore I have to make a follow up post with a Zombie deck.

But first, I should probably share some screenshots so that people can get a visual sense of the game. (I probably should have done this in the last post. First post jitters, I suppose…) I picked these two to show some of the different mechanics, so don’t get too intimidated by the card effects

It should be clearer how the system works, with each lane having space for a single Plant and Zombie, and Units in the same lane trading blows during the combat phase of the turn. (Team-Up being the exception, where both plants deal damage but only the front plant receives damage.) Any lanes without a Unit to take incoming damage leave the Hero character to take the damage instead. And of course, winning is achieved by draining the opposing Hero’s life from 20 to zero.

The glow around the Jelly Bean in the first screenshot indicates that it used Plant Evolution to enter play. One of the interesting elements of Heroes having a full board of Units can sometimes be a disadvantage, since it leaves all of your other Units dead in hand and can wind up wasting resources. The Evolution and Fusion mechanics are useful both to counteract this property and as a combat trick. Fusion allows for a Unit to be played onto the same lane as a Unit with Fusion, removing the Fusion Unit from play and generating an effect. “X” Evolution, where X is often just Plant or Zombie but can sometimes be more specific like Bean Evolution or Sports Evolution (Sports is a Zombie trait) allows for the Unit with “X” Evolution to be played into the same lane as a Unit that matches the X. As perfore, this discards the second unit and generates an effect.

The Pokemon influence is present in Fusion and Evolution, and the mechanic is certainly used evocatively. Fusion is typically flavored as the second Unit standing on top of the first, although a very fun Fusion card is a treasure chest which creates a Legendary rarity card for its Fusion effect. It’s like discovering treasure! Evolution is a little less clear. Thematically, upgraded forms of other Plants fits well, but there’s also a looser mutation throughline in the Zombies, and a select few cards instead go with a surprise attack theme. For some of the I guess generic Plant Evolution and Zombie Evolution was a little difficult for the card conceptors to work with. (As an aside, there’s an old Magic the Gathering mechanic called Champion that also drew a bit from Pokemon, and its flavor was also seen as confusing. I guess there’s something to having specific evolution lines in Pokemon.)

After reading all this, you might be thinking, “can Fusion and Evolution be used together?”. Well, there is the roadblock of correctly remembering how the mechanics work. I always mix up Fusion and Evolution in my head, leading to scenarios where I’m trying to play a Fusion Unit on top of an existing unit instead of in the correct order. Luckily, PvZ Heroes is digital so the game state can never break, but those names are just so similar. Once that issue is past, you’ll be happy to note that Fusion and Evolution do combo, and doing so grants both the Fusion and Evolution effects! This actually ends up being a bit back breaking when you are on the receiving end, although that has more to do with the power of the Evolution effects. Another technically of the mechanic is that Fusion and Evolution count as playing a card into a lane, which leads to an especially mean combo involving the aforementioned treasure chest card. There is an Environment, Medulla Nebula, that generates Brains (the Zombie resource) whenever a Zombie is played into its lane. Buried Treasure costs less than the Brains the Environment generates, and each Buried Treasure can be played on top of each other via its Fusion. Thus, by repeatedly playing Buried Treasure into Medulla Nebula, you can skip into high Brain values while the treasure’s effect ensures that you have something powerful to play afterward. It’s enough to give me a brainache… I mean headache!

Anyways, now onto contractual obligations! This is “Deadening Zoo”, a Beastly and Hearty Pet centric deck led by The Smash!

(Screenshot is still edited together, the interface is always half collection and half deck)

The heart of this deck is Zookeeper (that’s the one with the snake). As long as Zookeeper is in play, every time a Pet card is played, all Pet Zombies get +1 to their attack. As such, the game plan is simple: Stick a Zookeeper, play all of the Pet cards out of your hand, then smash the opponent before they get a chance to stabilize. Note while all of the Zombies with animals in the art are considered Pets (excluding the chicken one, that’s a costume), not all Pet cards are Zombies. That camel mural card, Camel Crossing, is also a Pet and critical to the deck. Normally, a Zookeeper induced stampede runs out of steam because Wrangler doesn’t increase health. Thanks to the Smash’s Hearty heritage, “Deadening Zoo” can use Camel Crossing to boost every Zombie’s health by 2 and get an attack boost from Zookeeper at the same time. This keeps the herd standing for longer so they can finish grazing on the Plants. (The lunchbox card is also a Pet, due to deep Plants Vs Zombies lore I don’t know how to explain.)

As an aside, not all of the cards here are Pets since I built the deck early on in playing, and many of the cards in this build are Commons! Even Zookeeper is a Common! The Smash is one of the starting Zombie heroes as well, so this kind of Pet aggro deck is easy to make and can see success.

(Oh, and PvZ Heroes is the only game I can think of that represents the word “Hearty” without using a heart. The symbol is a cone because of how Conehead Zombie, a zombie wearing a construction cone on their head as protection, is an iconic example of an armored zombie. I think it’s odd enough to share)

To conclude this Plants Vs Zombies Heroes double feature, I’ll share an anecdote about a crazy combo I accidentally discovered and an absurd game I played. So, the environment in the forth lane from the left in first screenshot is called Planet of the Grapes. If a Plant in the affected lane deals damage to the Zombie Hero, the Plant player draws a card. I opened three copies recently and figured that since it’s a meta card in control decks that I should try to build a control deck featuring the card. I chose Green Shadow as the Hero, hoping to use Mega-Grow’s Zombie movement and Smarty’s bounce effects in order to get hits in. The deck didn’t quite work out, which is part of the reason I’m not sharing it. (The other reason is that my pattern obsessed self would be forced to make a third PvZ post with a Zombie deck to balance it, and kicking off a variety blog with a three parter on the same topic seems like a bad idea.) However, there was one game where everything was firing on all cylinders. I was drawing the correct cards for a good Sun (Plant resource) curve and my plan of using Sweet Potato to pull Zombies into Lightning Reed’s Splash Damage was actually working. As such, the board was mostly empty. Then, I played Threepeater onto Planet of the Grapes. Threepeater is a classic variation on the iconic Peashooter plant, using three heads to shoot three peas. In Heroes, this is interpreted as Threepeater’s attack sending damage down the two adjacent lanes as well as the current lane. I figured that using Threepeater on Planet of the Grapes would just guarantee that I draw a card every turn, since keeping a Zombie in all three relevant lanes is difficult. Instead, I drew 3 cards off one clear attack.

Apparently, Threepeater’s attack consists of three separate damaging events. It’s really hard to tell because of PvZ Heroes’s snappy animations, but that’s the way it works! I was completely caught off guard, but realized that this style of combat resolution means that Threepeater + Planet of the Grapes = immense value. (I don’t think decking out is a lose condition in Heroes, so recklessly drawing every single card in my deck is 100% upside) Therefore, I should shift my gameplan to protecting Threepeater at all costs. The result was one of the most lopsided board states I have ever seen playing Heroes. The final field before the last combat phase looked like this.

Just look at my hand! Having seven cards this late is just unreasonable!

It doesn’t take a mad scientist to figure out who wound up winning. This is why I love trading card games. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, except the pieces don’t have set locations. You can arrange the parts in so many different ways, and sometimes a combination comes out that leaves you in awe. Other times, the end result ends up falling flat, but taking the puzzle back apart and trying again is not only possible but encouraged. Either way, the medium is all about exploring and marveling at all the ways there are to win games.

(I suddenly get the feeling that I’ll make a revision of this post that actually makes sense instead of spending half of it on explaining mechanics and the second half making a point.)

 

[Salmancer]

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. “After a video game franchise evolves over time, a certain sect of fans forms demanding that said franchise return to its roots and release a game that’s just like the ones from the good old days.” It’s a tale as old as gaming, and repeats itself over and over again across every single genre, console, and character. More recently, however, has been the advent of companies acting on this very impulse. Titles like Old School Runescape, World of Warcraft Classic, Angry Birds Reloaded, Crash Bandicoot 4, and Super Mario Party all aim to pull lapsed fans back into the brand by ignoring later and more controversial entries and making a game just like the ones those fans adored way back when. Naturally, with the 16 bit Sonic trilogy practically worshiped online, Sega was going to put its hat into the ring.

I have a bit of an odd perspective when it comes to Sonic Mania. I did play Sonic 1 and 3 back when I was a child, but I also played Sonic Heroes and watched Sonic X. (This sounds impossible, but young Salmancer used online emulators.) So I never really divided up Sonic into eras. Sonic was Sonic, regardless of if this game had longer limbs or that game had pixel art and a less janky physics engine. As such, I don’t have reverence for that trilogy. I genuinely do not understand why people were mad that Sonic 4 allows for walking up walls. So, what do I think of Mania?

Well, it’s high on my list of best Sonic games. Not at the top, for reasons I’ll get to, but I love it all the same.

Maybe the “Mania” is that the whole game is a hallucination. Islands don’t come in Sonic head shapes!

Sonic Mania is styled after the classic Sonic trilogy to a tee, sticking closely to the momentum based platforming that put Sonic on the map all those years ago. Additionally, as the 25th anniversary game, the game is split about half and half with new zones and returning favorites. It’s all wrapped up in a pixel art style with a light dash of polygons, as though to represent what a 2D Sonic game on the Sega Saturn would have looked like. (That’s not a joke, that was the design intent.) It succeeds on this front, with winding levels that just beg to be optimized and straightaways for the game to flaunt its speed and visual qualities with. All three characters have new animation sets and some of the zones are stunning. I want to live in Press Garden, which is a chilly natural space inspired by Asia with a prominent printing press. And I didn’t need to consult a wiki or reference material to write that last sentence; Mania is very good at getting across a sense of place without spending a word outside of the title cards.

On second thought, I could do without the threat of being frozen into a block of ice. I don’t think that’s a valid excuse for being late.

The gameplay innovations are no slouch either. Many people found the Drop Dash – the new ability to charge a Spin Dash from the air – an invaluable addition for keeping the action snappy. I didn’t really get much use out of it, but I found more joy in Mania’s treatment of elemental shields. Many of the game’s zones showcase a unique interaction between a shield and the zone’s obstacles, be that walking on magnetic ceilings with the Thunder Shield on Flying Battery or passively melting icy objects with the Fire Shield in Press Garden. Perhaps it’s my inner Kirby fan showing, but I loved messing with how shields react to the environment and made it a point to hold on to shields for as long as possible. Playing to keep the shield safe from harm is perhaps a little backward, but I had fun doing it. Even auxiliary modes have new features that really improve them. Sonic Mania’s time attack mode might just be the best in the genre. You can simply hold a button to reset the level, with no tedious pausing or loading to come between a player and the fastest time on the leaderboard. As a Sonic game, there are so many places where just jumping a slight bit later or triggering a roll just a moment earlier can make or break a run, and quick restarts mean there’s more time left for making those minute adjustments.

You would not believe how many videos I have of my better runs.

The place where the “faux Saturn” premise influences Mania the most is in the all new Special Stage design. Accessed through 3D Giant Rings, which are tacky in the best way, these task the player to race laps across a flat three dimensional course to catch a UFO. The sense of speed these provide is incredible, with the music and visuals working in perfect sync to provide so much energy. Sonic and pals have three speed levels, and minding how each level handles is key to avoiding obstacles while staying on optimal racing lines. But it’s actually not required to go all the way to max speed. Perfect play allows for collecting the Chaos Emerald while only at the second level, mandating careful turns to avoid losing too much speed. It has a high skill ceiling, but a low enough skill floor to allow for most people to succeed in collecting the full set of Emeralds with more restrained play.
(While I was messing around, I learned that if you run backward through the course, the UFO will retreat backward in turn. It’s still possible to complete the first special stage in this manner, meaning the game is open-ended enough to allow for shenanigans. I love shenanigans, so the next time I play Mania, I’m probably doing a “all backward Special Stage” attempt.)

One of my favorite aspects of Mania is the boss battles, which showcase Sonic at its most humorous. The returning boss fights throw in new wrinkles that change the fight’s flow completely, such as changing the Death Egg Robot’s climatic standoff with zero room for error into a chaotic autoscrolling brawl. But the standouts are the new ones, packing in silly nods to the past while being interesting in their own right. The Heavy Shinobi throws Asterons, an infamous star shaped enemy that shoots spikes, as ninja stars that themselves still shoot spikes if left unattended. The Studiopolis boss is built around a weather program displayed on a background television. It may take place indoors, but each forecast affects the field in a very literal manner. I can’t end this paragraph without mentioning Chemical Plant’s boss, but it warrants a spoiler warning despite being the fourth boss in the game. It’s that good. You get sucked through a tube and land in the player slot of a Puyo Puyo board. This leads to a game of Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine against Eggman, with the loser being dumped down a bottomless pit. The fight isn’t hard, as per standard practice for sudden gameplay shifts (doubly so when going from platforming to falling block puzzle), but the animation of the chosen character awkwardly taking the controls just sells it.

Oh no, not again. I had enough back in 1994!

With all that gushing, you might be wondering why I said Mania is not my favorite Sonic game. It comes down to three issues: steadfastly recreating the problems of older Sonic games, Blue Sphere, and a bad story. Let’s cover them from least to most problematic.

Sonic Mania brings back Blue Sphere, Sonic 3 & Knuckles’ Special Stage, as a Bonus Game. Accessible from every checkpoint if the player is past a ring threshold, Blue Sphere tasks the player with running around a spherical map while collecting the namesake blue spheres. Red spheres serve as instant death obstacles, and every collected blue sphere becomes a red sphere so retracing your steps is not allowed. Completing Blue Sphere requires lots of concentration to remember where you have been, where you need to go, and how to safely collect the blue spheres, all while the game speed is constantly increasing. I didn’t like it as a Special Stage because of the difficulty, and it makes for an even worse Bonus Game. It requires so much concentration that it breaks the flow of the game to play Blue Sphere at every checkpoint, and the game puts a lot of pressure on the player to do exactly that because the extremely fun unlockables are tied to completing Blue Sphere stages. (Special Stages requiring focus is less of an issue because there are only seven of them and locating a Giant Ring feels like a goal on its own. There are thirty-two Blue Sphere spheres to complete.) Also, it kind of breaks the game’s concept of being a lost Sonic game. Outside of very deliberate throwbacks, Special Stages don’t get reused by later games. A theoretical Saturn Sonic game wouldn’t have done this, and a later Sonic game would have tweaked the mechanics so it didn’t control exactly like Blue Sphere. By the end of Mania, I went from having a low opinion of Blue Sphere to hating it enough to refuse to engage with the unlockable bonus levels, which is a shame.

As Sonic Mania is a “lost Sonic game”, it naturally adheres to most of the conventions of the original trilogy. While this is usually to Mania’s benefit, there are times where the best parts of the past are accompanied by the worst parts of the past. The best example comes from Chemical Plant Act 1, which takes an infamous segment directly from Sonic 2’s Chemical Plant Act 2. In it, Sonic is chased up a vertical shaft by rising water. Impeding said climb is an array of crushing blocks, and Sonic moves more sluggishly once the water catches up. It's very difficult to manage with the time pressure and there’s a very real risk of getting caught off guard by the physics change and smushed between the blocks and a wall. Of all things, this was in the fourth level of Sonic the Hedgehog 2, and it is one of gaming’s most infamous difficulty spikes. For some reason, Sonic Mania ignores this and makes this sequence part of the third level. Regardless of how iconic the bit is, it doesn’t belong in anything other than a port of the original. (Fun fact: if you run at full pelt after spawning from the nearest checkpoint, you are guaranteed to get caught between the entrance and a block. There’s a place where this is also true in the penultimate level, but it’s more acceptable with the increased hazard density.) Generally, many of Mania’s foibles can be traced directly to pain points from older games that were enshrined as moments that make Sonic, well, Sonic. Another example includes that the Stardust Speedway boss was given a swinging hitbox that’s difficult to judge, echoing the Death Egg Robot from Sonic 2. A third would be the spike bars from Mirage Saloon. They were imported from Sonic 1’s Spring Yard and still rotate too quickly to evade if you are already in their line of fire. I humbly disagree with this line of thinking. Mania should have eased up on some of these, no matter their significance to the Sonic fandom.

If there’s a Phantom Ruby, does that mean there’s a Zombie Sapphire hiding around somewhere?

Sonic Mania has a bad story. Note that I don’t mean it has an excuse plot; I am perfectly okay with plots that mostly exist to justify a set of gameplay. No, Mania has a poorly made excuse plot. This is going to require some explanation, so bear with me. The Sonic franchise revolves around Dr. Eggman’s attempts to conquer the world, while Sonic stops him at every turn. A recurring element of this conflict is control over the Chaos Emeralds: seven jewels containing infinite power that have a habit of getting involved with tyrants who use them for evil. Harnessing a single Emerald allows its controller to freeze time and teleport at will. Two emeralds allow for time travel, while the full set gives its wielder temporary access to a super powered state or power terrifying war machines that would surely destroy the world if it wasn’t for the Blue Blur. Mania eschews the Emeralds and instead focuses on the Phantom Ruby, an equally mysterious yet far more powerful hunk of rock. The single Ruby can: warp space, warp time, travel across dimensions, conjure painful illusions (which do not care if you think that’s an oxymoron), grant temporary powers, grant permanent powers, and can still serve as a power source. That list is too long. The Phantom Ruby basically has whatever powers it needs to push the story along, and invalidates the Chaos Emeralds by being several orders of magnitude stronger while being easier to obtain. New elements are supposed to complement the existing ones, not overshadow them completely. (With the exception of defining plot twists.) This goes doubly so when the older concept is as foundational to the franchise as the Chaos Emeralds. It’s also notable that the Phantom Ruby is part of the story of the later released Sonic Forces. Recently, the head developer Christian Whitehead posted an earlier concept for the Mania narrative, which lacked the Ruby and made more sense. I can only conclude that Phantom Ruby was added to connect the stories of Mania and Forces, to the detriment of the first game. On a more minor note, the game’s story is presented in an odd way. The Heavy King is a key character in the game’s true ending, but he is only fought in the Knuckles campaign. However, the Knuckles campaign has a joke that needs the context of the Sonic campaign to shine. So the optimal order to play the game is to reach Sonic’s bad ending, complete Knuckles storyline, then loop back for Sonic’s true ending. Mania doesn’t communicate this to the player, so it was a little confusing when I powered through to the true ending before playing as Knuckles.

Sonic Mania is a hard game for me to evaluate. I love the game on its merits, but I dislike the trend of disregarding modern entries because “the old games were perfect”. Sonic Mania’s problems can be largely tied to how it courts lapsed fans by bringing back everything from older titles regardless of the reasons they were left behind in the first place. I genuinely laughed at all of the comedic set ups, but found myself confused in a genre that doesn’t usually have complex storytelling. It’s not a game of extremes, but with the game’s existence tied to a vocal minority as it is, I find myself questioning more of Mania than I would otherwise. So that’s why I just can’t put it at the top of the Sonic mountain. Maybe Superstars will figure things out, or maybe my preferences hew closer to Modern Sonic gameplay than I think they do.

To end on a positive note, apparently I’m in the top 700 of Sonic Oil Ocean Act 2 runs. While I’d like to say I’m a Mania master, it’s more likely that people didn’t like playing Oil Ocean that much. I'm tempted to go for top 500...

 

[Salmancer]

(Unfortunately, there’s no combined logo… Thus ruining my format only 4 posts in.)

(Were you expecting Encore DLC coverage? Nah, I haven’t bought it yet. I totally will, but I don’t think I have anything more to say about Mania. Instead, we’re covering something more obscure.)

I love physical games, but I generally dislike when companies only put them out as limited releases. They’re losing out on advertising via the store shelves! Isn’t that valuable? (Related article: “Let’s not rush the death of physical video games”). When it comes to AAA and AA releases, I buy them physical where possible, just to have a shelf saying where I’ve been in my gaming life. I’m okay with buying digital only releases and I’d never turn my nose away at a good eShop deal, but I do like my cases. (There’s also the neat fact that digital sales put a hard cap on price gouging of out of print titles. Sure, having to spend an extra $10 or so is okay, but things start getting silly when games start going for triple their MSRP.)

That opinion probably raised a few eyebrows. Sonic Mania is a six year old game at this point, and the above review was posted last week. If I like physical releases so much, how did I get a hold of a physical copy of Sonic Mania? That’s a trick question. I didn’t. I got a copy of the Sonic Mania + Team Sonic Racing Double Pack. It has data for both games on the same cartridge.

As far as I’m aware, bundling games together like this doesn’t happen all that often. It’s even rarer if compilations of retro games are excluded. The last non Sega one that comes to mind is 2015’s Puzzle & Dragons Z + Puzzle and Dragons: Super Mario Bros Edition. (Sega apparently does this a ton, but I only know about those because I frequent Sonic Retro too much.) I kind of wish it would happen more often, as a way to justify a second printing of certain games and as a way to give digital only games a method of being physically released.

Oh wait, the logos for Sonic Mania and Team Sonic Racing are up there! I’m supposed to be typing about those! Well, you can scroll up for Mania, and Team Sonic Racing is a good kart racer with an overly difficult story mode. Getting both games at the same time was neat, since I would have skipped out on Team Sonic Racing if it wasn’t included with Mania. (Also, the dialogue is a riot.) For the purposes of this post, I’m more concerned about how the two games don’t really complement each other. Sonic Mania is considered a Classic Sonic title, while Team Sonic Racing exists as part of the Modern Sonic brand. These aren’t cross compatible, in that Classic Sonic is now a separate branch of the overall Sonic franchise. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to pair Sonic Mania with Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz, which even features Classic Sonic as a playable character? Then Sonic Forces could have been paired with Team Sonic Racing, since both games put the spotlight on the wide range of Modern Sonic characters. (Forces has a double pack with Banana Blitz.) Oh well.

One thing I was worried about when I picked the Sonic Mania + Team Sonic Racing Double Pack up was that it wouldn’t be compatible with DLC for Mania. Older double packs were a single piece of software, with a menu used to select which game of the two to play. At some point this was changed, and the Sonic Mania + Team Sonic Racing Double Pack is just two separate games that happen to exist on the same cartridge. Meaning that downloadable add-ons should still work. Huzzah! (Also, thank goodness for copy/paste features. Typing “Sonic Mania + Team Sonic Racing Double Pack” this many times would take forever.)

There's one other thing I want to mention about Team Sonic Racing! The music is really good, with Sonic remixes backed up by the occasional original track. It's fitting to cap this post off with a track from it, so here’s Roulette Road, remixing Casino Park from Sonic Heroes.

Spoiler: Roulette Road (Soundtrack Release)

 

[Salmancer]

Just this Monday, ZeptoLab and Paladin Studios put out a new game in the prestigious Cut the Rope series, Cut the Rope 3! It’s an Apple Arcade exclusive, so I can’t play it even though I want to. (Cut the Rope Daily is a Netflix exclusive by the way, so it actually costs two subscriptions to play every Cut the Rope game. If you crave ad-free rope cutting, there’s a third subscription for all the older games too.) In honor of this new title, today is about Cut the Rope!

Cut the Rope is Zeptolab’s marquee physics puzzle series, and a subset of the greater Om Nom brand. Each game revolves around feeding that ravenous green creature Om Nom with his signature peppermint treat. Doing so requires strategically slicing through the ropes that the candy is attached to and taking advantage of all manner of interesting objects strewn throughout each level. As for why the candy has been strung up in the first place? Well,,, it’s a video game and the puzzles are fun; just go with it. (Story elements will be part of the follow up post and I don’t want to be redundant.)

Seriously though, Cut the Rope has been around since practically the dawn of Apple’s App Store. It’s a contemporary of Angry Birds, and I personally rank Cut the Rope as being only slightly less iconic. (There was even going to be a Om Nom movie, though I'm certain it's vaporware by now.) The game design is always top notch, as each world introduces new tools of increasing complexity. Yet the difficulty curve is gentle so that players aren’t usually stumped. Even if that happens, Cut the Rope runs on a three-Star collectable system. The stars are optional save for Star gates for unlocking each world, so it’s okay to skip over a few in the tricky puzzles.

However, we’re not here to talk about all of the fun things in Cut the Rope. Today’s topic is a much more maligned one: The evolution of energy systems in Cut the Rope. We’ll be looking at, in chronological order, Cut the Rope: Experiments, Cut the Rope 2, and Cut the Rope Magic. (The original Cut the Rope created the energy system that is used in Experiments, but it was fully excised in an update at some point. I don’t want to look for old Cut the Rope APKs on shady sites for reasons explained later on and Experiments contains the exact same mechanics, so Experiments can stand in for Cut the Rope here.)

“Energy” is the common name for a mechanic in video games where currency must be spent to begin playing and the game cannot be played if the user is out of energy. The energy currency typically regenerates freely after certain intervals of time, so that the player can resume playing after waiting. More importantly, it is typically possible to buy additional energy by using real money, allowing the studio to turn a profit from impatient players. More benign uses of energy include the build up of anticipation as the currency finally returns, setting a strict cap on session length so that players don’t get bored, and making every attempt at a level have higher stakes. Note that energy is not to be confused with “lives”, a similar concept where the gating currency is only lost when the player fails the level. Some would say that lives are more generous than energy, as a better player is rewarded by having additional playtime. I actually think lives are worse, because you lose the codified session length that energy creates. Also, the difficulty of games with energy and lives tends to lean high, meaning that in practice lives only really give away extra playtime early in the game. (These systems are not to be confused with “lives”, the mechanic in which a player loses some amount of progress in the game after running out of attempts at a challenge. Gaming really needs to standardize some terms here.)

If you played Cut the Rope on IOS devices, you might be a little confused. On Apple devices, short of an App of the Week promotions, all Cut the Rope games are priced at a full 99 cents. (No, that’s not a joke, that’s the “race to bottom” aspect of game pricing at its final form) On Android devices, all of the games are instead free with a couple dozen asterisks attached. Those asterisks include advertising, saga maps, currency that has to be grinded for, and energy. This happened because it is much easier to pirate games on Android compared to IOS, leaving game companies in a losing proposition when it comes to selling games on Android. The solution is to have the game be “free” and instead charge users for in-app purchases, which are harder to circumvent by just grabbing the game files off a repository. If people try to say that piracy has no effect on companies, show them this paragraph. On the bright side, I saved 3 dollars and have a blog post topic, so maybe I’m the winner here.

Experiments is the first Cut the Rope game to use energy, so it should be no surprise that the mechanic is in its roughest form here. That goes for both creative execution and for gameplay function. In order to start a level, you must spend 1 Candy. The spent Candy represents the candy Om Nom is eating to complete the level. I think it’s trying to represent the cost of pet ownership, but that comes across extremely clunkily when the store consists of a single menu with 5 buttons. Resetting a level also costs 1 Candy. This is really painful in a puzzle game where trial and error are necessary to learn how objects function and how they can be best used. (It’s also great that a game subtitled “Experiments” actually discourages experimenting) But not to worry, old ZeptoLab has thrown the player a bone. For completing a new level, the player is rewarded with 2 Candies! That’s enough to cover the cost of entry and play another level! It’s all the benefits of lives with none of the drawbacks! Well…

Not quite. See, most energy systems have a cap to the currency. Once the player’s reserve reaches that cap, energy will not generate naturally until the player is below that cap. The cap in Cut the Rope Experiments is 10, a paltry number. After getting that high, the energy system winds up acting like a lives system anyway. There’s another trick to note. Some of the game’s “boxes” (early Cut the Rope name for worlds) can only be unlocked by spending a certain amount of Candy. The costs start as low as 15 but leap to as high as 80! (It would be higher, if not for an email I sent complaining about this to support eight years ago. I indirectly improved the user experience.) This means that a player must beat a minimum of 70 of the game's levels in just a single attempt to unlock the final world, while avoiding taking 2 or more attempts on any level to avoid losing Candies. Fail to turn a profit on enough levels, and the only options left are spending $2 to buy Candies or watching 18 advertisements for 4 Candies a pop. This is going to add an immense amount of stress to playing a Cut the Rope game, which I feel is contrary to the series’ principles. (The numbers are a little better than this bleak output suggests, since it appears that there is a random chance of getting extra candies by clearing a new level. As far as I can tell, this doesn’t happen for repeated levels, so the lockout can still occur.) All in all, Experiments’s Candy is too brutal for me to recommend using it again.



(Oddly, there was a daily reward system in the game that had a chance of giving the player 3 Candies, 5 Candies, or a level skip power up once a day. That was the one I was complaining about in the email. Getting all the way from 10 Candies to 80 Candies this way took forever, and it required loading the game without playing it for weeks, but at least players couldn’t get softlocked. I wonder why it was removed. Daily gifts are still in Cut The Rope: Time Travel, so I assume it’s not a matter of it not performing as well as other mechanisms.)

Next up is Cut the Rope 2, with the Sun currency. Sun works in most of the same ways as Candy, being that it costs 1 Sun to enter or restart any given level. (It’s hard to travel the world by moonlight.) However, Candy gates are fully removed. The only barriers to progression are gates requiring a certain number of Medals, earned by beating each level’s objectives, to pass. Even then, ones located on the primary level path will open after 24 hours. New to the sequel are light customization features, which has a tie to the Sun system. Wearing a hat adds more Sun to the player’s maximum capacity. So while the starting max is 90, it can be bumped all the way up to 115! (So maybe it’s actually based on “warmth”?) I personally really like when energy systems get more lenient with progression, because it feels like it rewards investment. It also eases up on the pinch of running dry on energy as the game gets more difficult. (Nothing breaks flow more than reaching a tough bit that can surely be done with a couple more attempts, only to be out of energy) It can go even higher than that though. The game’s most expensive purchase is a crown, which enables an infinite supply of Sun. (I suppose it glows in the dark.) Fully buying out energy systems is generally a rarity, so this is a “nice to have” for those who really want to grind at Cut the Rope 2’s most difficult puzzles. (I assume the Medal gates don’t go away, so blitzing through the entire game shouldn’t be possible.) (The cost of said crown is very high, perhaps too high compared to the game’s overall length. I recall grinding all the way up to the 10000 Candy Coin cost way back when, but it’s probably better to just pony up for the $15 Supreme Pack instead if you need to be rid of energy.)

One issue with how 2 displays Sun is that Sun is not displayed while in a level. Only on the results screen or on the world map can the player note the amount of Sun left. This means that on the more finicky levels, it is easy to lose track of the number of restarts and run out of Sun without realizing it. In Experiments, the Candy counter is visible upon starting and restarting every level, so it is always clear how many attempts are left. Perhaps by design, Cut the Rope 2 for Android is full of finicky levels. They range from time attacks to hoping that Blue’s block creation ability stacks in the correct manner. I skipped some of the Blue puzzles just because of this unfortunate interaction, which I view as a negative against the energy system. It’s better than Experiments, but there’s still some friction here.

Cut the Rope: Magic improves the energy system seen in 2, by making one change that seems minor but is extremely significant. Om Nom’s Appetite decreases only when a level is completed, and restarts are free! This is the best implementation of energy in the series, because it allows players to take time figuring out how things work. After 10 levels’ worth of candy munching, Om Nom becomes too full to continue, at least for a little while. There’s even an extra cute stuffed Om Nom asset, so as to make the energy feel like a full part of the game rather than something tacked on to the Android version. (Technically, the way Appetite drains means that you can play an infinite number of completed levels if you quit out before Om Nom eats the candy, but the experience for normal players is improved so drastically that I feel it is worth the occasional exploiter.) If newer Cut the Rope games ever make their way to Android, I hope they just reuse Appetite because it’s a perfect combination of mechanics and art. (Okay, Cut the Rope 3 doesn’t feature Om Nom eating candy so that one would have to have a new concept for energy.)

Energy isn’t the boogeyman that some consider it to be. There are ways to make it palatable, and I hope going through three games worth of implementations made that more apparent. Sure, by definition no one is ever going to say that energy is the greatest mechanic of all time, but even a workhorse can be tuned for a better experience.

 

[Salmancer]

This post contains spoilers for Cut the Rope 2

Stories in games are tricky to make, but stories in continuously updating games are perhaps more fraught. There's always the specter of the sales running dry and the game getting canceled. Then the plot is stuck hanging off a cliff, awaiting a rescue that will never come. (People harp on Plants vs Zombies 2 having a lackluster ending. I'm thankful that there even is an ending.) My personal least favorite case of tales getting cut short is Cut the Rope 2.

Cut the Rope 2 is a sequel, so we're going to need some context. I’m going to go through the stories of all Cut the Rope games prior to 2 in release date order. (Yes, games. Spin offs make series retrospectives way more complex.) Please keep in mind that the Om Nom franchise has gone through a large amount of drift, so the canonicity of what I am about to say may be suspect. Additionally, I have not played Cut the Rope Remastered, an Apple Arcade exclusive featuring the first five games. It is entirely possible that the remaster changed certain story elements. I can only work off of the games I can actually play.

The original Cut the Rope offered a very simple story with a large mystery element that never gets resolved. A mysterious box arrives at the player's door. The box is labeled "Feed with Candy", and Om Nom is inside of it. And… that's all. It's all communicated in a single cutscene. The Youtube reuploads clock it in at 8 seconds. The implication is that the player took Om Nom in and the puzzles represent the act of feeding him. But this was also all Cut the Rope needed to get started. Oh quaint beginnings...

Of particular note are the spiders. While Cut the Rope generally leans away from violent elements, the first game leaned more on traditional gaming concepts. This leads to spiders being the only “enemy” characters in the entire franchise. First introduced in the Fabric Box, spiders lurk on top of certain rope hooks. If the Candy is attached by a rope to one such hook, the spider will begin climbing down the rope. If a spider reaches the Candy, it steals the snack away and hops off the screen. This is a fail state, and results in a level reset. While the mechanic only reappears in Cut the Rope: Experiments, spiders have had a long legacy in Cut the Rope. Om Nom generally gets along with all animals except for spiders.

Oh right, Om Nom Stories. Starting in 2011, Zeptolab worked with Toonbox to create a companion animated series (of shorts) to Cut the Rope, named Om Nom Stories after the central character. While the pilot episode was a story about Om Nom coming out of the game, the show proper instead builds on the story presented in the game. A nondescript boy, named Evan in paratext, finds the box containing Om Nom at his doorstep. The first episode ends with the two becoming friends, and later entries in the first season focus on their daily life together. No adventure elements here, just a boy and his monster. It’s aimed at children but the antics are still enjoyable. Personally, I regard the first season as the most noteworthy of them all because it is a live action show with Om Nom done in 2D animation, which somehow works perfectly well. (There's a behind the scenes video that showed some of the practical effects used to have Om Nom “interact” with real objects and it enthralled me as a child. Here's another that's more about why there is an animated series.) The show was put up on Youtube just a year later, and you can watch it and all other seasons on the dedicated Youtube channel if you’d like. Said channel sprawls out so wide Season 1 might be hard to find, so have a playlist link too.

Cut the Rope: Experiments is a bit of an oddball, as it appears to take place in an alternate timeline. Instead of winding up on Evan’s doorstep, Om Nom is dropped off at the lab of an eccentric professor. Naturally, he starts running experiments on the creature, though of the candy feeding kind rather than dissection or something like that. One thing from this timeline that may be applicable to the rest of the canon is that Om Nom’s box falls out of a truck in the opening cutscene.

Experiments also introduced Superpowers, a level skip/alternate gameplay mode comparable to Angry Birds’ Mighty Eagle. The details aren’t really important, since Superpowers aren’t in Cut the Rope 2, but the mechanic is also included in the original Cut the Rope and later TIme Travel. It likely paved the way for the consumable power-ups of 2. The trailer for Superpowers is kind of fun though: Zeptolab consistently makes neat looking trailers and I suppose this one also ties into the “Spiders as enemies” narrative.

(This cutscene makes me laugh nowadays because of this time machine says 2013. That was the year of release. )

Cut the Rope: TIme Travel continues off Cut the Rope and Om Nom Stories Season 1. A mysterious time machine appears in Evan’s house, and drags Om Nom and his candy to various periods of history. Along the way, Om Nom meets many of his ancestors, who all look like him but with extra accessories based on the era. (Why Om Nom is a constant across time and space is never addressed, but fun to theorize about.) This game had a unique approach to presenting the story. Each episode of Om Nom Stories Season 2 is based on a world in the game, while a cut down version of the first episode is used as the opening cutscene. A fun trivia point is that the cartoon and the game have different endings. If I recall correctly, older versions of Time Travel had their own discrete video player. Newer versions link to the Youtube uploads of each episode.

The way I see it, this is the best of both worlds: the game has an accompanying story, and watching the cutscenes on Youtube is a complete experience because the show can be watched standalone. There are two caveats to this. The first is that if the story content is hosted on a service, then changes to that service may affect the presentation of the story in unforeseen ways. In this case, I watched all of the relevant Om Nom Stories episodes before making this post, and found that the Ancient Greece episode is currently age-restricted on Youtube. I’m not sure what Youtube saw, but this is a problem since the target audience surely can’t watch that episode even with an account. The second is that Time Travel got four level packs released after the conclusion of the show which obviously don’t have associated episodes. This isn’t a big deal to me since Time Travel’s story is more like an anthology, though some people might be sad that there’s a “The Future” world but no episode about it. The show’s conclusion and game’s conclusion work without those missing narratives, so whatever.

Now for some extras we can skip. Cut the Rope: Holiday Gift was a free level pack sold as a separate game. It doesn’t have a story. Om Nom: Candy Flick was an AR game where players could launch candies at an Om Nom rendered through augmented reality. As far as I’m aware, it doesn’t have a story.

Om Nom Comics was a short lived digital comic app. I’d love to describe it here, but I never read it and it was delisted shortly after publication. (I recall that it had something to do with quality issues, but I could not find a source saying that.) There were three issues, but only one was ever given a physical release. Considering it was delisted, I think it's fair to discount Om Nom Comics from a plot summary.

And now the stage is set…. for the prerelease period of Cut the Rope 2! (When you hesitate on releasing a numbered sequel for years, that sequel coming out is huge news.) There was an award winning marketing campaign about Om Nom disappearing from the Cut the Rope game before the events of the sequel! 2 was set to introduce five brand new characters, to a franchise that only had 13 characters up to that point! (And 8 of those were just time displaced versions of Om Nom!) Yet again, a season of Om Nom Stories would back up the presentation of the game! Obviously, this would be the biggest adventure Cut the Rope would depict!

(You can still download the press kit for this game from Zeptolab's website, which has a file going over the game like it's a detective case. Also has some behind the scenes information, like concept art and storyboards.)

And it is… to a point. Cut the Rope 2 really is an evolution of the games worthy of a number coming after the title. Instead of being confined to a box or a time vortex, the story takes Om Nom to new locations. Older games only treated Om Nom as a level goal, but 2 allows Om Nom to swing and roll across a stage just as well as the candy does. (Okay, Om Nom is technically a little worse at rolling, but he’s not a cylinder so it tracks.) Each of the new characters, which are grouped together as the “Nommies”, are the stand out mechanic of each world. (Excluding Roto, but the first world of a puzzle game generally lowballs things.) Om Nom becomes more of a character too, with extra animations and a light customization feature involving different hats. Gone is the “level skip” game mode of Superpowers, being replaced with a number of more creative power ups like the ability to freely attach balloons to any object. (And there were also regular level skips) But when I think about Cut the Rope 2, it’s always the lackluster ending to a great setup.

Here’s the pitch: The spiders have made off with all of Om Nom’s candy and escape via hot air balloon. Om Nom attempts to stop them but is caught in a rope dangling from said balloon and gets dragged off into the sky. Incidentally, the extra weight unbalances the balloon and scatters many of the candies across the land. When Om Nom finally gets free, he falls into a forest, oh so far from his home But all those candies leave a convenient trail, and so by following the candies Om Nom has a chance to make his way back.

As before, each of the game’s five worlds has a Om Nom Stories episode, plus two of the worlds added in updates received episodes too. Throw in an extra episode for the opening cutscene and we have an eight episode run. Naturally, these lean somewhat formulaically to match the game’s structure: Each one has Om Nom meet a Nommie and interact with them in some way to collect a candy at the end. The two always wind up becoming friends, and cue the rest of the game. (I guess this shows a weakness of tying the show to a game so closely, since Om Nom Stories has to respect Cut the Rope 2’s status quo.) There are some twists to be had, with the adversarial relationships that Boo and Ginger initially have with Om Nom being more memorable. I’m biased though, Ginger’s episode, Bakery, does land as the best one of the bunch, with a very pretty final sequence. (It helps that Ginger is a wild gameplay mechanic. She is a fireball that deletes any one wooden object on contact while being deleted on contact with water.) I suppose it has a narrative that one could find a million better versions of, but it is near and dear to my heart.

And part of that is that Bakery is the last episode, and therefore the last world of Cut the Rope 2. There’s nothing to see past that point. There’s no ending, no catharsis to this story. The in game version is no better, having an ending where Om Nom and the Nommies look out for adventures that will never come. That’s that. No final confrontation against the spiders, no reunion with Evan, no clever return to the original hybrid media style, nothing. Om Nom just got lost, bumbled about around the world, and wandered off I guess. Doubly so, because this was about when the aforementioned “drift” started to happen. Evan never appears again, and Om Nom begins to be depicted as an adult who has their own house at their scale. (This escalates further by the way. Season 5 introduces Om Nelle, who is Om Nom but female, and they start living together in Season 6.) The status quo of 2 would never be referenced again. (The Nommies on the other hand make a surprise reappearance in Season 9 episode Friends to the Rescue, and have added multiple new members to their ranks as the Om Nom franchise grew.)

Spoiler: Aside for Om Nom Stories Season 4

I guess for completeness I might as well mention the last game based season of Om Nom Stories, Season 4, which was based on Cut the Rope: Magic. Magic is similarly scoped to Cut the Rope 2, with Om Nom traveling through the magical lands of a book to stop a magic spider who stole his candies. But notably, the show ditched tying into every world, instead just using the general premise of the game. It got to be noticeably more inventive and one could say it’s the highest quality of all the seasons covered in this retrospective. Not to say the show didn’t do any direct shilling. By the end it made sure to feature every one of Om Nom’s transformations from the game. But it was more clever about it. Also it has an ending, something the Android version of Magic lacks. I pretend the show's ending applies to the game. Oh, and I didn't find a better place to put it but this is about when Toonbox leaves the franchise, as their site doesn't mention Magic and their logo stops being in the videos.

I suppose it could be worse. It could be an episodic game without its final episode, like Sonic the Hedgehog 4. It’s not like there was a deep arc running through Om Nom Stories (though some of the further seasons start bringing in sequel episodes and arcs.) or in the game proper. But its so deflating. All this buildup, all this rising action, and no climax ever came to capitalize on it. Tales ending long before “The End” appears are a stark reminder that for as much as we enjoy exploring fictional worlds, and people enjoy making them, this is still a business. The truest value a story holds to those who own it is its return on investment.