Rock of Ages rocks

I've just beaten Rock of Ages, a bizarre bowling, platforming, tower defense, marble madness Monthy Pythonesque race game. Its genre is hard to define, which makes it somewhat hard to talk about the game, but it's a very neat game so it's definitely worth talking about.

Clearly a regular Tower Defense game

Rock of Ages starts off with Sisyphus, the character from Greek mythology, as he performs his eternal task of rolling a boulder up a hill in Tartarus only for it to fall downhill right before he makes it to the top, forcing him to roll it up again.

Poor Sisyphus.

Of course that rather sucks, so Sisyphus and his boulder at one point decide they've had enough and could use the force from rolling downhill at great speed into the literal gates of hell would be a far better idea. After making their way out of Hell, the two travel the lands whilst for some reason getting caught up in boulderfights with all sorts of characters from history, mythology or the arts, where each side tries to destroy the gates to the other's castle to flatten their enemy whilst also placing defenses such as towers, ballistae and dynamite to stop the enemy's boulder and hopefully crush it before it ever makes it to their gate.

This was almost as bad as the time he tried to conquer Russia.

The journey is essentially a travel through time, where the game is divided into five sections which are each defined by a certain time period and an art stream which is connected to that period, so the game begins in Ancient Greece, but in the next world you'll be in Medieval times and further on you'll enter the Renaissance as Plato and Aristotle literally rise from their graves.

Quite the variety

The story is told through short cinematics which use a style similar to that of Terry Gilliam of Monthy Python where famous artistic renditions and paintings are animated into historical in-jokes, spoofs of popular media and plenty of slapstick humour, which results in cutscenes which are so bizarre and ridiculous that it's hard for it not to appeal to someone in some way. The cutscenes alone are worth checking out, they're that bizarre. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zay_e8zvyd4

A view of a day in the life of Ares

Once in battle you'll be able to place various defenses in your side of the field while the enemy places defenses on their field, the fields are mirrored versions of the other, and once their boulder is prepared they can roll their boulder and if they saved enough money buy an upgrade to their boulder. Once in control of your boulder you try to make your way to the enemy gates while avoiding being destroyed by their defenses and crushing enemy structures and art objects in order to make money to create more defenses next round. Once the enemy gate is hit or your boulder is crushed you go back to placing more defenses while a new boulder is prepared until one played managed to break the other's gate and crush the opposing player, the number of boulders it takes to crush the gate depending on the level of crackedness and velocity of the boulder as it hits the gate.

Rarrr

The concept sounds easy enough, but actually playing turns out to be a lot harder than it seems since you need to place your defenses cleverly to prevent the enemy from rolling right past them or using shortcuts you left exposes, while rolling the boulder requires apt mastery of the physics engine and knowing the best way to roll and jump past enemy defenses, it's quite fun to see which player makes it to the other's gate first or to see your opponent's boulder get crushed in the upper right of the screen because of your well-placed defenses.

Man's greatest achievements laid bare

The game starts of quite easy and lenient, the maps are simple and don't have many alternate paths while the opponents take longer to create their boulders and roll them to the gate, but as the game goes on more and better types of defenses are introduces, levels become more complex with more possible paths, devious map layouts and difficult but rewarding shortcuts while the AI also becomes more competent with their boulders. By the end my boulder cracked more and more often and matches became a lot more tense.

Rockoco

Accompanying the game are a wonderful blend of 2D visuals taken from famous artwork and animated as sprites with era-appropriate 3D graphics for the map, structures and background, it really does feel like you're experiencing and going through a certain art period, and the music which takes heavy cues from music styles suiting those eras really adds to the game, Medieval times comes with appropriate instruments while you can feel the opulence while going through the Rococo levels.My favourite track has to be the amazingly titled "Let us win and be famous in history" track from the Renaissance area. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGC-l8Rns9w

Just a regular Goya painting...
With boulders

All-in-all it's a pretty rock-solid game, the single-player is enough to satisfy someone for a few evenings and the game has local and online multiplayer functionality as well with several game-modes such as Castle War, which is like the regular gameplay, Obstacle Course which is trying to race though the course filled with obstacles, Skeeboulder where you race though the map and try to hit targets along the way and position the boulder into the right slot to score points and a single-player only Time Trial which lets you test how quickly you can make it through a stage without any obstacles. I imagine I'd play the multiplayer mode if I had someone I could play with, seems like the sort of thing you might come back to every once in a while since it's such a novel game, though I don't know anyone who might read this blog who has the game. *wink wink*

Skeeboulder in action

The game's definitely worth checking out if it sounds like fun, it's normally 10 euros, but during discount periods it goes as low as 80% so it only costs 2, which is a really good deal given the amount of fun you can have with the game. It's actually currently 80% off, so, you know. *nudge nudge*

Howdy! I'm Happy Boulder! Happy Boulder the Boulder!

In this world, it's crush or be crushed!

Oh, and have a happy 2016.

FRACT OSC - A musical experience

It's been a while since my last blog, again. Haven't got around to making many of these, but since I'll be playing some new games during the Winter Break perhaps those will be some things I can write about. I beat one such game just yesterday, in fact, called FRACT OSC.

OSC as in synthetic oscillator.

FRACT OSC is quite the odd game, I've never played any like it, really. The main gameplay consists of basic exploration an open world through walking around and interesting with some elements of the world which mostly consist of puzzles to solve. The interesting aspect of the game is its heavy emphasis on music, which works its way into the rest of the world and the puzzles.

Don't think the puzzles will be easy

As the game starts off you have a little tutorial level which, without words, explains how the mechanics work and how you can interact with the world, but once you do some basic operations like wriggling the mouse in circles or from left to right, you open up the main world and... Well, the rest is up to you. The game doesn't tell you where to go or what to do, it has no dialogue at all in fact, but leaves you to find it out by exploring it for yourself and picking up on environmental clues as to what's going on.

Oh no, someone forgot to turn on the... Thing. Yes.

The world starts off mostly devoid of colour or music, but as you explore the three worlds, each themed around a different part of a synthesizer with appropriately differentiated colour schemes and environmental patterns you find all sorts of abstract objects that emit sounds and music which guide you towards large structures where you have to solve musically-themed puzzles. The interesting part in these puzzles is how the puzzle pieces correspond to the music and their placement and configuration change the music. You're effectively making the music along with solving the puzzle rather than solving a puzzle towards an already solved piece of music.

Can't turn the platform without tuning the music as well

These puzzles take various forms and each of the three worlds have their own puzzles, half of which require you to interact with the puzzle space itself, placing blocks, turning valves or rotating platforms while the other half have you create the appropriate sequence that finally solves the puzzle. The brilliant part of these sequences are that there's not just one correct sequence, there can be a multitude of correct sequences which means that your solutions change how the music in the game sounds and you've got a certain control over the gameworld.

This is not how I remember my solution.

In the end it all comes together in a very satisfying way, as you solve more puzzles and move from world to world and unlock more quick travel/save points the world slowly starts to become and feel more lively as more and more areas start playing music. It comes together especially nicely in later puzzles which combine parts of old puzzles and use the sequences you made yourself. The game does suffer a bit from the lack of direction at some point where it can be a pain to find the next destination or it requires you to properly sequence your sequences together which requires you to have noticed some objects light up when you inspect them closely to give hints as to how to tune your sequence, but these hobbles do make your eventual successes feel more satisfying.

Nothing screams satisfying quite like beams of light.

Another notable part of the game is the in-depth synthesizer features you unlock by progressing through the game. There's tons of functions and by the end of the game you can easily make a 3-minute long song if you have the patience to fiddle around with the settings and sequences you can add. I know I had my fair share of fun making a track of my own with bizarre results. If you want the files just bug me about it and I'll see if I can send them to you, the game has a function to upload the files to youtube or expert them as .wav files but I only got the latter to work, somehow it just didn't link to my YT profile.

It gets pretty complex.

Anyway, it's definitely a game worth checking out if it sounds interesting! Perhaps during the upcoming winter sales you could see if it's discounted.