Review
A better beta
by J Nash (October 25th, 2010 at 5:20 pm)
Game: Alpha Runner. Publisher: Boiled Goose. Author: P Swinnea. Free. Play the game.
I like credits. It always irritated me when magazines, a thing that once existed, would trumpet the publisher of a game instead of the authors. Of course today, a thing that exists for approximately 24 hours, the practice is arranged carefully by powerful game corporations rather than accidentally from ignorance, with the purpose of maintaining a belittling grip over the creators and reinforcing the idea they exist solely and anonymously and replaceably by the largesse of the distributor. So well done games, you’ve struggled to “be” movies and have made it all the way to 1908. (Smash the state! — F Lawrence’s intertitle.)
The space-y track.
Anyway, when I trip over something I enjoy during a wearying hike through the hideous iTunes Shop, I make sure to examine everything by that same author or studio. And that’s pretty much wrecked the suspense of my next few posts, because today I’m clumping around the library of P Swinnea’s B Goose.
Alpha Runner is a tunnel racer against the clock that feels like an unfinished demo. The game itself is solid — you zoom through three (long) courses, shooting obstacles and replenishing petrol, trying to make the next checkpoint with time to spare and points in the bank. The movement is fast (not fancily breakneck, but enough to have you rolling where you stand like a presumably less disfigured Popeye) and the levels reasonably pretty and inventive with a couple of minor junctions. In a nice touch(tm), the game auto-calibrates the tilt controls to however you’re holding the iThing during the chequered flag countdown.
The outdoorsy track.
(Incidentally, why don’t all tilt games do this?) (Also, hang on. No, Alpha Runner isn’t magically more clever than every other game and still gets hopelessly confused if you’re lying down looking up at the iThing, even if you fiddle with the control inversion options. Ach weel. Full points still for the auto-calib.)
The demo “feel” comes from the bits round the edges. Obstacles range from those that bash your ship damagingly to those that stop you dead so you have to wastefully shuffle around them, but it doesn’t matter because you can shoot just about all of them. Firing your tap gun doesn’t affect your speed or fuel, so you just blast your way through everything with the occasional swerve past a looming wall or town-unplanned farmhouse. (The only time I had any trouble was when I inexpertly jammed my ship under a jutty eave.) Of course, this contributes to your final score — those minor junctions usually funnel you past a few extra obstacles or a bonus petrol lozenge — but you’d think there’d be a penalty associated with clearing your own path, or at least more trickily sneering blocks.
The other-y track.
The other major flaw is that for a high score game there are no leaderboards. (You might think that bizarrely the current course record isn’t shown until the end and, say, write a paragraph about that with some brilliant jokes in, but in fact it is — until you net your first point on a track, the readout displays the high score. Cough.)
Peasy fixes then. (And playing again for screenshots, it’s particularly noticeable in the first, space-y course that the timing patterns of the traditional sweeping laser bars, etc, suggest your gun was thrown in halfway through the design but the maps left unadjusted. I like this sort of authorial glimpse.) As it stands, Alpha Runner is a neat but hiccupy genre entry I can see myself returning to in a spare moment (if Podgamer’s mag madcappery left me any!! Eh?? Cuh!!) and bodes well for my next rummage in B Goose’s catalogue, except for all the gameless novelties like the hologram generator.
Or does it?
Or DOES it?
OR DOES IT?
I think you’ll find that’s suspense resewn.
The icon for this game looked strangely familiar — ah yes, I grabbed this in mid-2009 while waiting for Star Wars: Trench Run. If you do a search for “trench run” you will find both games and nothing else. Is that how you found this?
It’s much better now, and the funky soundtrack adds a lot of fun to the game. I can’t decide whether the textures, which look like something from the mid-1990s, are a help or a hindrance. On the one hand, they’re butt-ugly. On the other, I really liked Dark Forces, Doom, and Descent!
In keeping with the “runner” title, this game could be improved by adding a parkour-like running-man challenge to the options, instead of a smooth-flying hovercraft, or roller-skater, whichever you’re supposed to be in the current version. Something like Mirror’s Edge (the 3D version), with lots of Duke Nukem-style, nausea-inducing head-bob animation, please.
Thanks for the game!
>Is that how you found this?
Of course not, that would be sensible and logical. My agonising back-breaking laborious trawls of the hideous iTunes Shop usually centre on a random word (say, “collapse”) and then hours and hours of misery-filled wasted effort trying to fight the grotesquely inept search and turn up a playable game. It’s surely a deliberate attempt to make the universally hated computer iTunes look better, because trying to casually find a game on the iThing version is a murderous catastrophe.
(In fact, I was planning a throwaway series of items by someone purporting to be the hideous iTunes Shop designer each proudly describing an element of the dismaying monstrosity, but got stuck trying to think of a host worse than Hitler, who’s already in a forthcoming article about something else.)
I cannot slightly conceive why even one person in the entire world would consider the hideous iTunes Shop acceptable in any context, except that everything else is even more terrible, which is a possibility that puts the willies right up me.