Email: Cave Story and Terraria

Hi Malstrom

 

I wanted to point out that Terraria has already been released on consoles. It is selling quite well but not outpacing Minecraft. Also, the PC version has already been out for two years. I think if it was ever going to be as much of a phenomenon as Minecraft, the time for that to happen has passed. The only things down the pipeline are a big update and the vita version. 

 

I’m going to interrupt the emailer here.Yes, I knew about the console ports already being out. I said Terraria was POISED to become a phenomenon, not that it is actually there yet. Terraria also receiving a major update on PC is a huge reason why I said it is poised.

Remember that Terraria was abandoned with the designer saying he wanted to spend time with his infant kid. Now he is back. What gives?

This comment isn’t against you, emailer, it is against people who are emailing me who do not know have reading comprehension (common among gamers). So let’s try this again.

Gaming phenomenons tend to occur with cult hit games overcoming certain barriers or finding their way onto the correct platform that explode the game. Before Super Mario Brothers, there was Mario Brothers which had a cultish fanbase back in its day. Before Grand Theft Auto 3, there was the cult fanbases around GTA 1 and GTA 2. Before Ultima Online, there were the cult fanbases of the Ultima games. Animal Crossing had a cult fanbase, but it didn’t become a phenomenon until it went to a portable console. Warcraft was a RTS game that was popular but had a cult fanbase around it. It wasn’t until World of Warcraft that it became a true social phenomenon.

Minecraft was a cult fanbase of a game when Minecraft was in alpha and on the PC. When Minecraft developed more and moved to another platform (the Xbox 360), children began having access to it as children don’t normally play PC games. The game soon became a phenomenon.

Terraria is poised to become a phenomenon. Do people not know what the word ‘poised’ means? It’s not there yet. There are some obstacles in the way.

I bought and played Terraria back when it came out. It was terrible. People emailed me saying it was the greatest thing ever. It wasn’t.

Playing it today after all the updates so far, I can see how it can pop out to become a phenomenon. But it isn’t there yet. There are too many problems with the game. One of them is the terrible sprite work. Another is the terrible music. Also, large chunks of the game are extremely monotonous. There is also terrible marketing going around (everyone says it is Minecraft in 2d which is not the case. Where are the marketers?).

When the developer abandoned the game, I thought that was that. But now the developer is back planning a major update and a company thinks, financially, the game is worth porting to consoles. What is going to happen next is that the next update will come (which will have some new music thank God), and it and the console versions will continue to evolve. Will that eventually erode the last obstacles holding the game back? Maybe. Maybe not.

Notch did some savvy marketing with Minecraft. The guy behind Terraria doesn’t seem as savvy. But who knows what will come.

Resuming the email:

Also you keep mentioning Cave Story as a bad game which i find funny because I think it has all the stuff you usually like in games. It has a lot of unique and good content. The weapons have interesting gameplay mechanics like a machine gun that the recoil lets you fly around by shooting it at the ground and a gun that shoots bubbles that hang in the air like that scene in the matrix, then you fire them off all at once in any direction.  And all of the weapons are actually 3 weapons, because of the weapon leveling system, where you collect triangles from fallen enemies to level them up. Some weapons are small variations on leveling up but some are completely different on each of the three levels. There is even a weapon that becomes worse as you level it up! It fires a large beam that covers half the screen and destroys everything, until you level it up and it fires a toy duck. With its huge power it becomes hard to avoid the many triangles that come from the fallen enemies.

 

The game world has inventive level themes like a factory of dragon-eggs and scaling the cliff-face of a floating island. Not to mention the strong world-building and fiction of the game, which is really its own thing. There is a lot of meeting unique races and cultures. And it has great music – you could easily make one of your music posts with Cave Story’s soundtrack. The only issue i can see you taking with it is that it is way too wordy. And it is, but at least 90% of the game is spent with the core action gameplay. And a lot of people only talk to you if you talk to them first. It even has choices that you make not with a choice menu, but through failure of objectives and gameplay mechanics, like deciding on what weapon to bring. And the impacts on the story and what levels you end up getting to play are pretty significant.

 

When you talked about it before you mentioned that Nicalis should have never gave it away for free. They never did, they just licensed the game from the original developer, a humble Japanese man. They are only responsible for porting the game to Wii, DS, 3DS, and back to PC. No one bought their ports because it had no new content besides higher-res sprites of dubious quality, a “remixed” soundtrack that was much worse, the option to play the original soundtrack had broken stereo audio, and other modes directly lifted from freely available mods of the original game, like a boss rush mode or another character. There is no value in Nicalis’ port. A new player would never buy the paid version, so they are only selling to the niche of hardcore fans, who don’t see the point of paying for a version that’s worse than the original. In any case, Nicalis’s arrogance has nothing to do with the original game.I have played Cave Story and do not like it. I think it is the one of the most overhyped games out there. I don’t see the game gaining traction in any market. I do see Nintendo pushing it relentlessly (why is that? Is it because Nicalis is Japanese?).

I think you’re confusing ‘what I like in games’ to be nothing more than 8-bit or 16-bit caricatures. What I like most in games is ambition. This is why I strongly dislike games such as Mega Man 9. Where was the ambition in that? Mega Man, when it originally came out, was ambitious. Mega Man X was ambitious. This is also why I don’t like NSMB U or NSMB 2. There is no ambition in those games. You distinctly get the impression Nintendo was not interested in making those games. You see much more ambition in, say, Mario in 3D World.

This is also why I HATE, HATE, HATE it when someone emails me a ‘rom hack’ of a ‘new’ 8-bit or 16-bit Mario, Zelda, or Metroid game. I don’t point to classic games and say, “copy these mechanics.” I point to classic games and say, “copy its ambition.”

Compare the Nintendo games of the 8-bit and 16-bit eras to any other games of their time on consoles and on PCs to get an idea of the ambition. Legend of Zelda was the first console game to have a battery to save, it was in a gold cartridge, it had TWO QUESTS in it, it was just chock full and very ambitious. Metroid was extremely ambitious. Super Mario Brothers was incredibly ambitious as was Doki Doki Panic, Super Mario Brothers 3, and Super Mario World. Super Mario Kart and Starfox were ambitious.

Wii Sports was ambitious. Wii Fit was ambitious. NSMB Wii was ambitious. Do you see a pattern?

Today’s Nintendo games seem passionless and seem designed around ‘game mechanics’ or ‘level design’ instead of actual ambition.

No, I don’t see Cave Story as an ambitious game. It was an ambitious free game given away on the Internet. Once you put a price tag on it, Cave Story then has to be compared to other games that are sold. I don’t see the value.

If Nintendo games have ambition today, they are the WRONG type of ambition. Sakamoto was very ambitious with Metroid: Other M. But is ambition toward manga and story what gamers wanted? Aonuma is ambitious with Zelda. But is ambition toward puzzles and NPC stories what gamers wanted? Miyamoto is very ambitious with Mario. But is playing Mario in 3d really what gamers wanted?