Nekogames: Parameter

Parameter by Nekogames is essentially an interactive design document. It could be for an RPG, or for a fighting game, or for some kind of simulation. Whatever the missing skin, it matters not. After this game, I want to play all the design documents.

I am presented with an off-kilter spreadsheet with wonky swaths of yellow in the drunken black and grey grid. I can click on boxes. Only a few at first. Only the few which aren’t marked with the grey padlock. The boxes fill up like the status bar in a loading window. Percentages tick up. Other numbers fly out! Pink ones! Green ones! With a swipe of the cursor they are collected, even though I haven’t figured out what I’m collecting them for. How is this sea of numbers and garish yellow over abyssal black so compelling?

The top of the screen is a maze of different statistics, all described by abbreviations not always clear. An ACT. meter governs how many times you can click in a row before the message “Run>Attempted:Lack of ACT.” is displayed. A stat I can put points into called RCV. puzzled me for about twenty minutes of play until I figured out it corresponded to life recovery rate. I diagnose this not as an intentional attempt at obscurity, but rather as the inevitable result of a Japanese flash game translated without a translation budget.

I fight yellow enemies by clicking frenetically until “You win!” is displayed across the top and the enemy box is converted into a lifeless grey, spewing out its numberly innards. There is no blood, there is no death rattle, there is no acknowledgement at all of what the entity I have defeated is, but it is gone. With my new money and EXP. I make my parameters grow stronger. The help menu lets me know that “Effects of RCV. is LIFE, ACT,ATK, DEF speed of recovery will be faster.” Thank you Nekogames. Mysterious telephone boxes explained only by a question mark are taunting me with additional unexplained mechanics. Maybe if I find the secrets of the telephones I will grow stronger... (the answer is yes. Telephones are good)

The funny thing about this playable design document is that it’s totally broken. There are serious balance issues no matter how you go about optimizing your character, resulting in a long and tedious grind (click) towards the end so as to be powerful enough to beat the final boss (represented solely as the fraction “752/752”). This is followed by a series of “greater challenges”--which are really just more excuses to make a clickclickclickclickclick noise with your mouse--ending with the kind of gleeful goodbye message of a company which is incredibly proud to have offered an experience for a player to have enjoyed. I like their attitude. That made it fun. The simplicity made it fun. And that there is no skin to this spreadsheet allowed me to assign details entirely according to my imagination. I saw it as a hacking simulator, because my imagination is dull--but it could have easily been seen as a sports management simulator, a knight simulator, even a reductionist recreation of a Counter-Strike match.

I think Parameter is more than just a broken spreadsheet rpg; it is raw enthusiasm minus the flavour text. It can be found here, and is worth experiencing--if not to the bitter end--just to get to know the numbers behind a video game a little bit better.

My rating:

I could...

A. Can not combat with the enemy to recover LIFE and becomes zero

B. Take it.

C. Leave it.

PS. (why didn’t I write about the sound in this game?)

They forgot to put sound in this game. I would really like to know what kind of music Nekogames would assign to this game. That being said, it’s probably so versatile as a reductionist piece of design because there are no textures. A score might imply an atmosphere, and an atmosphere would destroy its whole aesthetic as skeleton. I listened to the Blade Runner soundtrack when I was playing. I would imagine I would have had a very different experience listening to renaissance lute music while playing. Perhaps that’s worth another try.

There, now I’ve written about the sound in this game. Mission complete.

Pedro Pavia: Anestesia

This morning, I woke up to find myself in a cold sweat, realizing I’d been thoroughly outdone by Kay and her Vidiot Game review. While she had managed to describe a nonsense-sober-drug- trip-in-a-game for her first post on this site, the best I’d managed was to blather on about ASCII and shmups, two moderately obscure acronyms. If it was acronymsdaily.com we were working on, perhaps that would have been appropriate, but as it is, we’re trying to run a dueling video game blog, and as such, I had fallen behind. No matter! What follows is a cure to all of my anxieties:

Anestesia by Pedro Paiva is a bit like someone who’d only ever played the original Zelda for the NES decided to ruminate on the impact of alcohol on the working class. The result is a carnival of transactions (charmingly illustrated by all manner of pictorial equations) involving the exchanges of life for money, money for booze, booze for “happiness”, booze for broken hearts, broken hearts for booze, and so on and so forth.

ANESTHETIZED YOU DON’T FEEL.

ANESTHETIZED YOU ACCEPT.

I think this work is a fantastic example of a personal reflection in the medium, as well as a political statement. It is almost an animated film in its simplicity of interactions, except that as a metaphor for the all-consumingness of alcohol abuse, I think it’s entirely appropriate to make the progression inescapable. The frenetic pace with which the game responds to the small inputs it demands of the player amplifies the sense of being lost down a path. Furthermore, like a magician, the game presents flickering lights and abstract movements, redirecting the player’s eye from the actions they are committing to. All this is effective dispute the actual narrative being so simple it can be completely recognized on the first playthrough.

The sound design deserves a special note for being that particular combination of off-kilter and funky that I am so dearly in love with. This music is the James Chance of chiptune. (more on potential applications below.

If not obvious from the few paragraphs above, I love this game, and recommend it highly. Go down this two minute rabbithole for a charming bit of working class Anestesia.

My rating:

I could...

A. You don’t have money enough.

B. Take it.

C. Leave it.

ps. on blending musics

One of my favourite pasttimes is listening to different pieces of music at the same time and seeing if they play nice together. Today the combination was of the Fez soundtrack’s gorgeous adventurescapes (found here) and of course the whinging, exhausted pleasuredome of Anestesia.