Review
The Mixed-Up Far-Out Upside-Down Back-to-Front Jive Jump Caper
by J Nash (October 16th, 2010 at 9:30 am)
Game: Hoggy. Publisher: Raptisoft. Free (includes buy-in 59p/€0,79/99¢ Lost Levels expansion). Play the game.
One of the exasperating things about drifting back into games following a few years of complicated international revenge after being left for dead during an impossible burglary is that I’ve completely lost track of who’s ripping off whom (grammar).
I just like the yeti’s expression here.
For example, there was a cunning platform game a short while back on the electric computer called VVVVVV, by T Cavanagh, where instead of jumping you flipped upside-down and stuck to the ceiling (or floor, depending where you started from). Now here’s iThing freebie Hoggy, a lavish variant with console stylings. Who was first? This looks like a case for PODGAMER AND MORRISSEY IN — THE MYSTERY BODS!
CUE TITLES. A rapid montage of inexpensive animation with flat colouring, inexpressive lines and characters going off-model between poses. Lots of reaction shots and group running and a general air of contrived adequacy. A session musician guitar band plays a jaunty pop theme.
SONG: When there’s a mystery around
And a villain to be found
You call Morrissey — and the Mystery Bods
Hunting ghosts is just the most
From case to case and coast to coast
For Morrissey — and the Mystery Bods
Stuart runs the band with eagle eyes and gripping hand
Funky Grayson is the hep-cat of disguise
Craig is debonair and caped and never lets the ghouls escape
And they give those wacky crims a cool surprise
But where’s Morrissey? Oh no! He’s tripped up the bunch
While hiding in the spooky kitchen baking his lunch
But now he’s somehow rolled a butter churn into the Giant Yeti
And accidentally wound him up in miles of wet spaghetti
Now the case is solved and Morrissey has saved the day
Let’s get to the concert so the whole band can play
When there’s a ghostie around
And you want the grooviest sound
You call Morrissey — and the — Mystery! Bods!
(Also J Nash, who missed the bus)
TITLE CARD. The gang in a cobwebbed vault reacting in alarm to a giant bat-like shadow, except Morrissey who is blithely eating a pasty.
CAPTION. Morrissey and the Mystery Bods in — THE MIXED-UP FAR-OUT UPSIDE-DOWN BACK-TO-FRONT JIVE JUMP CAPER!
SCENE. Everyone at the beach. Stuart and Grayson are in the sea batting around a huge inflatable beachball. Craig is frugging to stock music from a transistor radio. Morrissey is in outlandishly inappropriate clothes and giant sunglasses, sitting under a beach umbrella and eating a pasty.
J NASH: Oh right, looking at the publisher’s site, it’s VVVVVV that was first.
(Morrissey drops his pasty in the sand. Everyone laughs. Morrissey picks up the pasty and continues scoffing. Freeze frame. Seven hundred thousand blurred credits run up the screen in 3.3 seconds.)
But anyway.
Hoggy is personable and playable with tons to do, but more than a bit lazy — the levels are often bigger than the screen and more than once you’ll drop off the ceiling and get killed by landing on something you couldn’t possibly know was there beforehand, or discover your carefully manipulated bomb blast didn’t knock out the full height of the plug, because these things were concealed by the push scrolling.
(I’ve also reached the point, about halfway through the 40-odd levels, where the increasing reliance on multi-stage levels and precision movement is really testing my patience — phew, that’s the screen finished with some needlessly fussy jinking past the monsters; oh, triff, the scrolling reveals ANOTHER floor of the same puzzle again in a slightly different arrangement.)
Possibly I went into Hoggy with the wrong expectations — it starts as a puzzle game but then morphs into an action puzzle game. Suddenly, as well as toggling switches and knocking movable blocks around to outwit the designer, you have to do that with fast accuracy to escape a monster, or funnel a monster into a certain place at the right moment, and so on. There’s nothing wrong with that — the tilt controls (with tap to flip planes) are crisply up to the task, and some of the puzzles are attractively diabolical to the point of having at least one screen where I have no idea at all how to start — but it seemed a bit of a bait and switch, like recent J Nash favourite Stickbloke Maze unexpectedly introducing a pursuing mutant or something.
Hoggy is an otherwise friendly game, with a clever progression system where you win keys by beating levels and the labyrinth you’re trapped in has numerous doors each requiring X keys to unlock. You always have a few doors open and a few jars to play in before you hit a dead end. (Levels take place within stone jars, a lovely conceit that originally had me wondering if the Flipping From Floor to Ceiling idea was in fact some longstanding Nintendo-y genre or something.)
Arrange the vertically movable blocks to clear a path so when you nab the power-up acorn (which lets you smash a single block) you can reach the plug at top right. Well, that’s a picture described that you’re already looking at.
One masterful touch by the designers is that the door to the Lost Levels (ie, the 59p add-on) only appears a few areas in. Of course, there’s a prominent button on the title screen, but making it appear as a disclosed secret within the game after you’ve got the hang of playing ingeniously nudges you into stumping up the cash.
(I in fact didn’t, which is why this isn’t a real review.)
Hoggy kept me coming back, until it seemed to me the see-saw had tipped from genially sedate puzzling to reflexes. The problem there is that you veer into Lemmings territory, where you rapidly deduce the answer but then have to flip, flick and rapidly beswitch everyone through the elaborate motions with no margin for error, and that’s something I’ve never enjoyed. This leads to the only possible ending, which I disguise by push scrolling:
Soggy, more like.
Ooh, I picked up this one a few months ago, and I loved it. I never thought that the scrolling was cheap though…
I thought one of the levels was evil for the perfect timing it demands, where there’s a really deep column of blocks across the screen, and you have to repeatedly lure an owl monster into bombing it away. It’s really hard to consistently bait the monster into dropping it’s bombs without getting hit yourself, because you move SO VERY SLOWLY.
And then they go and make a harder version for the Lost Levels pack. Bastards.
Yep, the owl bomb seq is one that flashed my whooping head-bulb. You immediately see what you have to do (ie, play Action Dodge) but it goes on for ever, one slip-up kills you instantly and it feels like you’ve swapped game carts by mistake. I could sort of understand if that’d first appeared in the expansion, because getting things slightly backwards is what data disks are for, but one minute you’re interestedly squinting at a complicated puzzle with no explanation or clue, experimentally pushing bits of screen around until the answer clicks in your lobes — which I liked — and the next you’re playing inverted Arkanoid. Blah.
The scrolling thing is indefensibly terrible though. Whether or not you like the action bent, you don’t expect a Plunge of Faith.
Wasn’t Ancipital first?
Pfft — whoever remembers anything on the C64?
(But I suspect Ancipital was a shoot-’em-up, while the VVVVVV style is to “jump” through a double-sided plat puzzler. PODGAMER INFALLIBILITY RETAINED.)