Review: ZiGGURAT
Developed by Action Button Entertainment. Published by Freshùu. Available on iOS devices.
Imagine that you’re watching a bad player of Tetris. This guy really doesn’t kow wat he’s doing. He’s placing L-blocks where 4-bars should go, he’s leaving gaps all over the place, and all you want to do is somehow jump into his game and start cleaning up his stack as he plays, so he can lose with a modicum of dignity. ZiGGURAT is this clean-up game. It’s an endless, single-screen shooter that seethes with intelligent intensity, but it’s also so much more than that. It’s a fascinating sci-fi story told wordlessly. It’s twitch action and chain reaction. It’s an 8-bit punk anthem. It’s a middle finger to the bloated gasbags that video games have become, and it’s the best thing to happen to the iPhone since Canabalt.
ZiGGURAT was designed by Tim Rogers, the most despised columnist on Kotaku, the man Something Awful deemed “The Worst Games Journalist Alive,” and one of my favorite writers on the internet. He is the webmaster of Action Button Dot Net, a terminally hip games site where educated young men try to outsmart each other with iconoclastic viewpoints on games. Rogers often aggrandizes himself and fills his reviews with lengthy anecdotes that I don’t much care for, but when it comes to articulating the qualities of games that make us fall in love with them, there’s nobody better than he. Rogers simply gets it; he knows what makes a game fun, and the design ideals that he has preached on his site for years are now practiced in ZiGGURAT without the slightest speck of compromise.
ZiGGURAT arrives without explanation. You get no cutscenes, no text crawl, no exposition whatever, save for a dramatic silhouette of a lone figure on a mountaintop so high it pierces the clouds. Then the game begins. That lone figure is a man with some fabulous punk hair, a combat suit straight out of Gunstar Heroes, and a massive laser cannon that he hefts like an electric guitar. Within seconds, a crowd of skeletal, one-eyed creatures that the game only calls “alien freaks” begins to hop up the sides of the mountain, trying to get to the man, and it becomes clear that this poor soul has somehow found himself in a desperate last stand. It’s blaze of glory time.
This is an arcade experience, through and through. Your game ends when your man is hit just once, either by an alien or by one of the aliens’ slow-moving bullets. Your objective is simply to survive, fending off these hopping freaks with your laser cannon for as long as you can.
This laser cannon is not only the defiant defender of this last man on earth, it is the hook and the heart of the game. It has no variants or power-ups, but its utility is manifold. You charge and fire the cannon by touching the screen and letting go. The angle of each shot is determined by where you touch the screen. ZiGGURAT uses a unique aiming system: you have to imagine an invisible horizontal line running across the screen. The point on the line that you touch affects the angle of your shot. Touch near one of the edges of the screen, and your hero fires low in that direction. Touch in the center, and he fires straight up. It’s unorthodox, but the complexity doesn’t end there.
The cannon doesn’t simply fire laser blasts in straight lines, it launches them in quirky, graceful arcs. The speed and trajectory of those blasts is affected by how long you charge them. Tap and release the screen quickly, and you get a tiny shot that creeps down the mountainside. Charge to maximum power, and you get a tremendous blast that rockets across the screen.
A delightful note on charging: ZiGGURAT discourages constant, Mega Man-style charging by dropping off your gun’s power if you charge for too long. If you want to fire at full strength, you have to charge JUST ENOUGH before letting go. Brilliant.
The amazing thing is that the game gives you ample opportunity to use all of the myriad variations of angles, charge levels, and speeds that your versatile cannon provides. The alien freaks have a variety of behaviors, and you will have to rapidly prioritize your order and methods for keeping them under control. The good news is that these freaks have a weak point: their pulsing heads. As they hop toward you, their heads continuously swell and deflate. If you can shoot a freak in the head when it’s inflated, that freak will expire in a devastating explosion that will take out surrounding freaks and their bullets in a crackling, satisfying firestorm. The bigger the target’s head, and the greater your gun’s charge, the larger that explosion will be. Once you’ve mastered this technique, even a wall of encroaching freaks presents only a mild threat: just send out a fully charged shot into one big head in the crowd, and the baddies will burst like a brick of firecrackers. Saving yourself in this way feels at least as good as getting a Tetris, and it requires the same cool head in the face of intense danger.
ZiGGURAT has a clean, sharp look in the style of classic Capcom and Konami action games. Everything is presented simply and economically, but with a terrific dramatic flair. The musical theme is a driving rock chiptune that soaks the challenge in adrenaline. If you can survive long enough to hear the end of the song, which is no easy feat, you can expect some…strange occurrences in the sky around you. When you die, the action freezes in a shocking second of realization, and then the game screams out with a blood-red screen and a fiery guitar squeal that sounds like a table saw running through a nail. It’s a painful, but somehow fitting end to the tiny, tough tale that the game tells.
If there’s anything to complain about with ZiGGURAT, it’s that it takes a little getting used to. It’s hard. In a strange coincidence, it shares a “feature” with Dark Souls in that it has no pause function. Its precision aiming system is unlike anything used in a video game before, and it will take some practice to master. The game provides a brief tutorial to get you oriented, but it doesn’t cover the swollen-head explosions that are so critical to success. I don’t suppose this is really a bad thing in itself; Tetris and Super Mario Bros. never gave away their secrets either, but ZiGGURAT is a tougher cookie than either of them, so patience is required.
Fortunately, the satisfaction of smashing freaks with smart shooting is so great that these flaws are forgivable. ZiGGURAT is an amazingly addictive arcade masterpiece, and anyone who enjoys the crunch of what Rogers himself describes as “electronic popcorn” will absolutely love it. Oh, and it’s also only a dollar. Load it up on your iDevice and prepare to enjoy the end of the world again and again and again.
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So everyday when I load up a gaming news site, another anticipated game is officially delayed. Today it was Capcom’s turn to announce Dark Void is now a 2010 game. So now we’re onto announcing games that no-one is anticipating. Word on the street is next week Ubisoft will announce a delay for “Imagine: Gold Diggers.” The eagerly anticipated Fall 09 game will be pushed back for “better exploitation purposes.”
So these games are going back for two reasons. 1- extra polish time and 2- Publishers have finally realised that if they throw everything at November- that they will end up with some high profile sales casualties. So Splinter Cell Conviction won’t compete with Assassin’s Creed 2 and Modern Warfare 2 and ODST.
I’m down to four games coming out in November that I want (because, like many, I was burned by the first AC game). Super Mario Wii, Modern Warfare 2, Left 4 Dead 2 (which i wasn’t planning on rushing out to get) and Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time (Uncharted 2 is September). It looks as though I will be banging away at MW2 multiplayer for a few months without a feeling of guilt at all of the other games I have sitting around (as happened in late 2005 when I was glued to CoD2 for four months solid). I’m sure you driving enthusiasts will least least be sated this year.
So 2010 is looking crowded with the games that were coming out then anyway now competing with the delayed titles. This will be interesting
Crackdown 2
APB
Splinter Cell Conviction
Mass Effect 2
Red Steel 2
Army of Two 2 (maybe not that interesting)
Alan Wake
Bayonetta
Bioshock 2
Dark Void
There’s more of course. I Am Alive and the next ghost Recon are so delayed they’re now going from march 2010 to march 2011.
Anyone else’s wallet breathing easier?
Have you ever asked someone about a game and their answer is something along the lines of “It was great but the last boss was a bitch of a last boss?” A similar question on a popular videogaming forums led me to consider games where the last bit coloured their overall enjoyment of the game. The more I thought about it, the more I realised there were multiple games where I liked it apart from the last encounter. Sometimes it made me hate the game an other times, it was juts one of those things where the worst bit happened to be the last bit. Here’s my list.
FAR CRY: INSTINCTS. This was the original Xbox version of Far Cry. Its not really a port, more of a re imagining of the PC version. I had both versions and found the Xbox game that much more fun to play, so much so that I tried to finish it. Then suddenly the last boss ramped up the difficulty on a game that wasn’t particularly easy to begin with. I tried for about an hour and a half to beat him and just when it looked as though I was finally going to beat him, he got stuck on some terrain and wasn’t responding to my shots. After wasting an hour or so trying to beat this prick I gave up. I mostly enjoyed the game, but I remembered that bastard with a hate-filled heart.
KILLZONE 2. I mostly liked this game. I won’t say loved but it was mostly very good, just not very innovative or varied. I enjoyed playing it even though it felt a little familiar. But then I got to the final encounter. I won’t describe it too much except its one of those instances where the game decides to pull the rug out from underneath you and be a puck-ass bitch. It ignores everything its taught you to date, then pads out the encounter with cheating AI and general bullshit. I find it hard to not have my overall experience coloured by this encounter and its the single biggest reason why I’d never play KZ2 again.
GEARS OF WAR: The encounter on the train was fairly brutal for me (and I played Gears 1 on Casual mode). It went on and on and the Krill kept killing me or the boss kept owning me faster than a Mexican jumping been who’s really gotta go. I managed to find the right weapon and beat the bastard but… blimey!
BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL: One of Ubisoft’s alltime great games, this short and rather sweet Zelda cum sneaking game decides to have a difficulty spike that looks like Mt Everest after an injection of growth hormones. It wasn’t just hard, it was bitchingly hard. On Mohs scale its just above Corundum.
UNCHARTED: Still one of the best PS3 games, its also got an insanely hard final encounter. You will cuss, you will throw your controller around like a petulant child and you will swear bloody revenge on Naughty Dog.
GRAND THEFT AUTO III: As its the only GTA game I’ve even gotten to the end of, I can’t say whether subsequent games were any better but, Jesus, this one was a doozie.
METAL GEAR SOLID 2/ 4 (tie) For some odd reason, when I played through MGS2 originally, I don’t remember the last boss being particularly hard, but when I replayed it, I was sweating bullets trying to beat this. MGS4 is different. It makes you fighth a boss with a completely new combat system. And its hard. But that’s not thie bad bit. Then you have to watch OVER AN HOUR of cutscenes.
What about you?
I got this email today. Why would I want to pay $12 a year to update my PSN trophy card?
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Cam ollies, George Nollies and Clint grinds
Have you ever bought the same piece of hardware twice? Ok, if you owned a Gamecube and then bought a Wii, then yes, you technically have 2.5 Wii’s. We all know about PSX’s needing to be stood on its side to work, PS2 drives dying and of course RROD’ing 360′s. But under what circumstances would you rebuy a console you already have?
If you’re giant Xbox 360 fan, and you don’t want to buy a PS3, what do you do when your launch 360 breaks and there’s no warranty to cover repairs? Do you shell out for a new Arcade unit? Do you pay for repairs? I have yet to have a completely dead console that wasn’t covered by warranty. My PSP 1000 is completely dead though.
I have one game on it I wouldn’t mind playing at some point- God of War: Chains of Olympus. My PSP is now dead dead. I can’t see why I’d drop AU$300 to replace it when I would only be doing so for one game. If my Wii were die, I’d have just as much of a choice. IE, I wouldn’t bother. If my PS3 died, I would have to replace it IMMEDIATELY. Last weekend I enjoyed the following movies on Blu Ray: Pirates of the Caribbean at World’s End, LA Confidential, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Awesome times. Apparently I can play games on it at some point.
My 360 has RRODed twice, but the last fix seems to have taken as the machine has nearly gone 18 months since its 2nd failure. Its working now. There’s currently no reason to replace my launch 360 apart from the fact I’d like HDMI, a quieter DVD drive and a much bigger HDD drive. Reason enough, but I’ve decided to wait until I can be guaranteed to get a ‘Jasper’- the latest hardware revision with supposedly quieter and more reliable hardware.
I have a DS Phat. I haven’t really played it for ages but I entertained the thought of getting a Lite, but by the time the DSi turned up, the DS was dead to me. Considering Nintendo haven’t released a game for me on the DS in years, I think I’ll pass.
How about you? Have you ever bought a console twice and WHAT THE HELL WHERE YOU THINKING? 
Children write letters to Santa, The Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and, in the case of kids whose folks work at EA, John Riccitello. Sometimes they get a response and sometimes their parents get laid off. This week, the Post Office breaks all privacy laws and ignores any sense of common human decency to show us kids’ letters to their favorite videogame characters.
Metal Gear’s Solid Snake is one such recipient of children’s adulation, exemplified by nine-year old Mary-Marie Ryan
“Dear Snake,
I have played all of the Metal Gear games ever since the debut of the series on the MSX computers. I recently got Metal Gear 4 and noticed you look quite old. Maybe you should stop smoking before you die? Also, I like cats. Do you like cats?
Mary-Marie”
Solid Snake’s curt response really says it all
“Metal Gear?”
Six- year old Simon Greenblatt wrote to Toad from the Mario games
“Sup Toad?
Dude, what up with you and Peach man? She be some fine honey, why ain’t you hit that yet? You scared of Mario? That fat pipe jockey? Sheeeeeet son, you got gallons of suave on that spaghetti slurper. I’ve seen the way she looks at you man, you’re in. Don’t trip, you and her should rock it with Daisy and I sometime.
Peace!
-Simon B”
Mabel, aged 11 emailed her favourite Street Fight character
“Dear Miss Li
My mum has thighs just like yours. They are very big and muscular. My mom says the doctors says its a thyroid problem and she’s receiving treatment for this condition. I thought you might like to see a doctor in case your Thyroid has a problem like my mom’s big thighs. My dad, who has mysteriously broken his pelvis several times, says its like being with Xenia Onatopp, but I don’t get what he means by that.”
Eight year old Jerry send a letter to his favourite character Vault Boy
“Dear VB,
I very much enjoyed your appearance in Fallout 3. Can I also get Fallout 1 and 2 on my playstation 3? Your adventures have inspired me and every night, I say a prayer hoping a nuclear holocaust will devastate the globe so that I might one day live in a bomb shelter. Either that or join an Emo band and sing songs about death.”
12 year old Tina H writes to Faith from Mirror’s Edge
‘Heya Faith,
I really like that tatoo you’ve got on your face. Its just so stylish and fasionable and I know after having seen my big brother play your game that I want just that look when I go back to school. My mom’s being a real cunt about me getting a tattoo like you’ve got so I put a hot iron on my face, giving myself first degree burns. Do you like Fallout Boy? When I get out of these pressure bandages, I’d like to go see them in concert.
XOXO Tina’
Faith writes back
“Hey, Tina. Its actually just black makeup and I don’t listen to much Fallout Boy. Hope you’re face heals soon
F.”
