Where exactly did ‘Epic Mickey’ get it so wrong and Castle of Illusion get it so right’.

In part 2 of my assessment of Epic Mickey, I delve right into the heart of platform game design and compare and contrast Castle of Illusion (referred to as COi from now on) and Epic Mickey (henceforth referred to as EM).

I'm not convinced that there's one rule to rule them all but I do know that there is one major rule to developing a great platform game – and it's one that IMO, Junction Point got so wrong.

Rule 1: Platforms in a platform game need to be comfortably traversable.

Obvious? Yes. But you’d be surprised how many games get this wrong. It’s possibly one of the biggest issues that sets apart a great platform game and an average to poor one. But what does the statement actually mean?

Well. It means that the 'real estate' of any platform that a controllable character can jump onto and walk on top of must be of a size that the character – being controlled by the player - can comfortably move around on.

This is basically a calculation that takes into account the character size and the walk animation cycle which is then used to work out the size of the traversable top of the platform. The further the distance the character moves in taking a single step, the larger the traversable area needs to be. My own personal preference is that this space equates to something in the region of about two to three steps of the walk cycle.

In practice, setting up this rule isn't that difficult: Create a flat square platform, place the playable character on it and walk around. The character should comfortably be able to take somewhere between two and three steps when walking from one side of the platform to the other before reaching the edge. As mentioned above, this is heavily dependent on the animation and character size. In some circumstances, you might get away with less and other times you might need a little more. There are exceptions to this rule with a perfectly acceptable way of dealing with the exception discussed below.

Now that we’ve expressed the rule, let’s bring the discussion back to EM and COi.

COi does this to perfection. Every platform Mickey jumps onto is comfortable to be on top of. It’s one of the reasons you feel so 'in control' of the little mouse as he’s walking and jumping around. Mickey is a dream to control; walking, jumping and running around is never stressful, is always reliant on your skills to make the correct jump at the right time and if you die – it’s always your own fault (something that I don’t need to tell you is a #1 rule of any game right?).

So what about EM? How did Junction Point deal with this rule? Well. They didn’t. Every single level in EM is littered with areas and platforms that Mickey can traverse that are simply too small for him to be easily controlled on. Thin balconies, rooftops, lamp posts, ledges, windows – they’re everywhere! And this, in my opinion, is one of the biggest failings of EM. Many people point to the camera, but actually, I believe that although not perfect, the camera system would have been workable if the design had put in place the rules they needed in order to not make it a hindrance to players.

For instance, When Mickey jumps on top of a small platform in EM, you often slide off. When you fall, the camera goes nuts trying to readjust to the world geometry in conjunction to Mickey’s location. Fall off a ledge that has a wall a few feet behind where you were walking and the camera tries to adjust, then readjust as he falls, and continues to readjust all the way down and finally coming to a stop when Mickey stops. Where it stops is reliant on luck. If you happen to be standing on the wrong side of a wall - your fucked: the camera throws a wobbly.

They didn’t even have rules to state that basic geometry should not be built in such a way that causes the camera to adjust. So don’t place buildings, or walls, or in fact anything that sits higher than the camera within a certain distance of each other. I.E. Don’t put a high wall opposite and close to another high wall (where 'high' is higher than where the camera sits).

Interestingly, there are certain sections in the game where Junction Point did adhere to this rule and the camera and control of Mickey work much better, so I do wonder if they worked it out too late in development but didn’t have enough time and resource to fix earlier built geometry? I have a suspicion that this might be the case.

Ok, so what’s the exception to this rule and how can you have small traversable platforms such as bannisters, ledges etc? Easy. It’s all to do with Mickey’s animations. In COi, If Mickey jumped on top of a small platform – or indeed, whenever he reached the edge of any platform, he started to falter. You could see him, arms outstretched, trying to stop himself from tipping over. This is an incredibly powerful visual feedback to the player; 'I know I can’t run on here, I know I’m on precarious ground. I can see it! So what do I naturally do? I go slower. I take much more care.' COi was very clever in the way they used this and coupled it with a proper ‘sliding down a vertical platform’ animation that meant if Mickey was ever on a bit of dodgy geometry and started falling, he would enter this sliding animation which again, gave the player a powerful visual that told them exactly what was going on – you’re no longer in control of Mickey as he’s falling down. When Mickey landed, you got control back. Very easy, very clever, years ahead of its time!

Contrast this with EM. Mickey gives no feedback that he’s on a small platform and therefore the player doesn’t instantly realise he needs to take care. But even when you learn yourself to go slower, the walk slowly animation is not a good one – it’s too cumbersome and the camera not being a great one means that you often can’t control Mickey comfortably whilst he’s on top. You end up going so slow and having to readjust every micro step to try and stay on there. It’s not nice - it’s frustrating and painful. Had they forced a ‘faltering’ animation and coupled it with an auto ‘careful walking animation’ controlling Mickey on all of those ledges would have been a much nicer experience and the game play would have gone through the roof. Even if this problem was kept to a minimum, it would be ok – no game is perfect right? But the fact that EM is littered with small platforms means it’s a game killer. This, more than anything else, made Epic Mickey a frustrating game to play. What could so easily have been a great game, was turned into a painful experience because of these few, basic schoolboy errors. Well. In my opinion anyway.

COi got these things so right. They are level design perfection. Right up there with the Mario games for me. Epic Mickey on the other hand, got these so wrong and fell the other way. A case of so close, yet so far. Sorry Warren and the designers at Junction Point - it’s easy for me to criticise, but had you got that right, you would have had a great game and a great legacy on your hands. Have you fixed these problems in EM2? I really hope so!

There are several other things that marred the game for me, such as how they used the 2D side scrolling sections as 'hallways' between the full 3D levels or the basic control of Mickey (his jumps and using brushes for instance). But these are secondary to the 'traversable platforms' problem for me. If there's any further interest in discussing those, I'll write another post on the subject, otherwise, that's it for Epic Mickey and Warren Spector for now - until Epick Mikcey 2 is released of course!!  :)

Thanks for taking the time to read my bollocks post.

Love and kisses,

GigiFusc.

Where Warren’s going wrong with Epic Mickey.

So I recently read an interview with Warren Spector in which he discusses a few things about Epic Mickey 2. Amongst all the usual stuff, I found it very interesting that he claimed not to have played any of the old Mickey Mouse games. I think his reasoning was that he didn’t want those games to taint his design in any way.

Now, first of all, I have no beef with Mr Spector – he seems a great guy who has made some great games in the past and I’d even guess that he’s a pretty cool boss to work for due to his enthusiasm and love for what he’s doing. But I find this comment surprising. My initial thoughts are that he’s lying – he doesn’t want to get into any possible legal problems with any of the publishers or developers of those older games who could cry ‘thief’ (ironically) at him.

If however, it is true and Mr Spector really hasn’t played any other Mickey Mouse games, then that could possibly be one of the reasons why Epic Mickey was not the game it should have been.

Now, don’t get me wrong – there haven’t exactly been a wealth of great Mickey Mouse games. If anything, it’s been a mixed bag - ‘The Timeless Adventures of’, ‘Magical Quest’ and ‘World of Illusion’ on the old SNES and Megadrive platforms were pretty decent - but not great. So the vast majority have been quite poor – everything from ‘Fantasia’ right up to ‘Magical Mirror’ on the Gamecube. In my opinion, ‘Epic Mickey’ falls about half way between that list – it was neither truly great, nor terribly poor. For me, the term ‘flawed classic’ which has been used to refer to it by others, is as apt a term as any.

Epic Mickey is very pretty in the looks dept. It has some excellent ideas, an interesting world and great characters. But ultimately, it failed in the single most important area that any video game must not fail in – it wasn’t very playable. A combination of a poor control system and a god awful camera (Sorry Warren - you must be so sick and tired of people telling you that) turned the game from a great one, to a ‘What a shame, it came so close but chuck it in the bargain bin’ one.

We’ll discuss Epic Mickey in further detail later on, but in the meantime, I would like to bring to both your and Mr Spector’s attention to one other Mickey Mouse game that can hold its head above any precipice and stake a claim to be not only a genuine classic, but also, one of the best 2D platform games on any platform.

You know what game I’m about to name check – ‘Mickey Mouse and Castle of Illusion’ - specifically the Megadrive version.

If Mr Spector genuinely hasn’t played Castle of Illusion, then I strongly recommend he does so. Now. If none of his team of designers have played it, then again, they need to – right now. Right this very instant!

Castle of illusion, despite being a ‘Mickey Mouse’ game, is sublime on almost every front. Graphics were beautiful (and still hold their own today relatively speaking), but where it really excels is exactly that one place where Epic Mickey failed – game play. It played like a dream! And more than that; playing it today – it still plays like a dream.

So why on earth would anyone developing a Mickey Mouse game not look at the single best Mickey Mouse game ever made that also happens to be one of the best platform games ever made? Doesn’t make sense does it? I reckon Warren’s telling porkies myself.

So this leads me to a few questions:

-          Just what is so bloody good about Castle of Illusion?
-          Where exactly did Epic Mickey go wrong? (and it was more than just that dodgy camera)
-          Is Warren going to continue to get it wrong with Epic Mickey 2?

I don’t want this to turn into an epic (pun intended) blog post, so I thought I’d separate it out into two or three posts – the next one will be answering the first question above and showing my man love for that game.

Cheers for now,

GigiFusc

I remember the first time I saw his eyes. I was mesmerized by them. “You can see the eyelashes!” my friend exclaimed in astonishment. He did indeed have great eyes. Very detailed and yes, he even had eyelashes. This was 1987. We were 17 years old and the only escape from the dull monotony of working class life in London's east end was the wonder of the multitude of worlds that video games created.

There I was in the sweaty, spunk smelling bedroom of my out of work teenage friend as we loaded up the latest game on his Commodore 64 computer; The Last Ninja. A game that achieved what we now term 'best in class' for pretty much everything. The graphics were jaw droppingly beautiful. Not many games could claim a ‘beauty’ attribute in those days; 8 bit machines just weren’t powerful enough, but Last Ninja achieved it.

And it didn’t stop at the great graphics - the game play was top notch too. You controlled a ninja walking through lush environments, fighting against baddies, exploring, finding weapons and items and solving fairly simple puzzles (for the most part at least). The Last Ninja was a showcase for video games. It played like a dream and it sold by the shed load. I was young, completely hooked on video games and this instantly became one of my all-time favourites.

It’s now 2012. I’m sitting at home. My wife and two kids are asleep upstairs. I’ve had somewhere in the region of thirty years of a wasted life playing games. I've wasted the last fifteen years working in the games industry in the vain hope of actually working on a game that I actually cared about. Old. Jaded and bored by the glut of identikit AAA games, I thought a nice change of pace was in order so I broke out the Amiga emulator.

I scroll down the long list of games, trying to find one the peaks my interest and there it is - The Last Ninja Remix! It takes seconds to load in comparison to the several minutes of the C64 original and when it's finished, breaking through time and space. Bridging 25 years of game play. There they are again. Those stunning eyes of his still hypnotise me. And he still has eyelashes!

My memory kicks in and within minutes I’m playing it like I’m still 17 with more time on my hands than Scot Bakula in Quantum Leap. It's incredibly impressive how much they managed to fit into this game. If you push aside the amazing graphics and animations, you’ve got full combat, world interaction, exploration, puzzles, multiple item usage, multiple weapons and they’ve even got time for niceties such as praying to Buddha who gives you hints! Truly impressive; for the time – this was up there.

So I’m playing loving it all over again. And then, it comes. The first river crossing!

Something that has been hidden in the dark recesses of my mind kicks suddenly back into life. ‘These river crossings were pretty hard to do weren’t they?’

Yes they were Gigi. Yes they were. My body shivers. Last Ninja, for all its greatness included one of the most frustrating mechanics ever in that each level had one or two river crossings where you had reach the other side by landing on several stepping stones. This wouldn’t be a big problem other than the fact that using these stones required pixel perfect jumping – and I mean ‘pixel perfect’.

That would still be ok (if a little hard) if it wasn’t for the fact that the jumping mechanic on Ninja was fucking shit. It wasn’t awful as much as broken. Performing a jump was a simple affair – you held down a direction, pressed the button and Ninja jumps. There’s no control of him once you initiate it – he just jumps and lands according to whether you performed a long or short jump.

The problem is that you rarely land where you expect to land. Ninja seems to do some kind of diagonal jump that takes him from bottom right to top left and vice versa. The horrible jump combined with pixel perfect jumping sections was a recipe for hardness 25 years ago. Today? It’s a game killer. Seriously. I’m sitting here wondering how on earth I played this game back then. With only 3 lives on level 1, I would have died again and again and again just trying to get across these river sections. How I didn’t give up I just don’t know.

Today? Well, thanks to emulators being incredibly sophisticated and frankly outstanding pieces of software, I have two things that turn this game from pure frustration to keeping its place of greatness.

1. Save states

2. Cheats

Infinite lives mean I can now die as many times as I need to try and get over the jumping sections, but also, save states mean I don't have to go back to the start if I make a major mistake.

To give you an example of how hard those jumping sections are; level 2 has a fire breathing dragon that cannot be beaten by combat. If you walk past it fries your ninja arse instantly. So the puzzle is to find a magical orb that gives you a shield of some sort that will let you walk past it unharmed.

The orb has a time limit – something like 5 minutes. It is located on the other side of the world from where the dragon lives. Not that big a deal when you consider the levels are quite small. But when you realise that you have to fight several baddies on the way, this make it a bit tougher. But then factor that you have to overcome two, yes, that’s right TWO, jumping river crossing sections that lie between the orb and the dragon… Well. How the fuck anyone finished this level without cheats is beyond me. I know they did and I know I did. But today. Bloody hell. It’s IMPOSSIBLE!

So even though it’s still quite a tough thing to achieve and very frustrating, the cheats and save states get me through it. I have to look at myself in the mirror and realise I'm not the hard core gamer I once was. I still love all the same hard corey things. But I no longer have the patience or the time to play through excessively difficult sections in games anymore.

The tolerance levels in video games have changed vastly in those 25 years for me. I assume that younger gamers have that time. But do they have the patience? I'm not so sure. Is this change in tolerance added to the lack of patience of today’s youth what has made the entire games industry move towards linear corridor games with high ratio of WOW:pace? I think so. And that's a shame. Not because the shit jumping mechanic in Last Ninja is something I'd ever propose, but the knock on effect of change but I do miss the ability to explore worlds. Some games still have it I guess. But the high number of AAA's that use Call of Duty as their blueprint has led to games becoming samey and boring in my opinion. I'm sure the youth will disagree.

In the meantime, if you’ve never played a Last Ninja game, well, I strongly suggest you try it out. I recommend the C64 version as that’s the best one, but the Amiga ‘Remix’ is still good if second best. I’d also say jump in at #1 – don’t play 2 or 3 first. It’s a continuous story that spans all three games and you do need to play them in order to appreciate it.

Hey! How cool is that? I went through an entire blog post without using the word ‘bollocks’! Oh. L

Video games are bollocks. Fact.

They're a complete and utter waste of time.

What better way to waste my life then, than to talk about them?

Feel free to add your comments to any crap posts I write.

Thanks.

GigiFusc.