February 6th, 2012 | By Chris Priestman
Tagged in: Platformer | sosowski | super pig | tactile memory
Unfair platformers are a staple of the hardcore gaming diet. Another one is the mass consumption of bacon. Put the two together and you get Super Pig! No not Homer’s loveable Spider Pig. SUPER PIG!
Now, as far as my relationship with platformers and gaming in general goes, it started off at a very early age. Oh I remember the days of playing Alex Kidd, Sonic 2 and Shadow of the Beast and having red-faced tantrums because “I can’t do it”. Of course, back then death often meant having to restart the whole game and those buttons were hard to press with such feeble thumbs.
Enter my loving parents – yes, this is all their fault. Their reaction to my frustrations was with a range of phrases which have been burned into my skull forever. “There’s no such word as can’t” was a favorite of theirs, along with “It’s no good crying when you could be trying”. But the ‘creme de la creme’ was “Practice makes perfect”. Shudder.
The effect of such near infanticide was the gift-curse of the inability to rage quit. This is why, when I started playing Super Pig, I was not going to be beaten by its cruel yet genius design. Not on my watch!
Mastering platformers is a real skill but anyone can do it with time and dedication – two things that Super Pig urges from its players. You also have to be a master at keeping your cool and be willing to obsessively replay a level so that you can maneuver the avatar around it with your eyes closed. You will literally have to do this to complete Super Pig. Well almost.
Allow me to elaborate. What you are doing when replaying a level again and again in an “unfair platformer” is learning the necessary steps to pass through the level safely. It’s more than that though, you begin to establish a ‘tactile memory’. That means, quite simply, that you begin to feel the level. My fingers know how long to press the directional button on the initial jump on the level ‘The Hole II’ in Super Pig – it’s not something I have to consciously think about, I just do it. That is the result of about an hour’s worth of doing that jump over and over again. Thankfully my effort was rewarded, I am now one of only 6 people to have completed that tortuous level…so far.
This is a common trait of what I term the “unfair platformer”. These are games which adhere to a masochist form of gaming, titles such as I Wanna Be The Guy, Aban Hawkins & The 1000 Spikes and, of course, The Unfair Platformer. These games all have their roots in those pesky invisible blocks and other unfair designs in Super Mario Bros., as the guy in the video below finds out.
The significance of Super Pig is that it is designed from its very core to push the player to the very desperate depths of their tactile memory. When you start up the game and get past the amusing difficulty selection (they’re all Hard) you encounter the very first level…and it is pitch black. Super Pig stands there in a fuzzy darkness and that’s it, that’s all you can see. Move or jump however and you will soon come across some spikes clinging to the walls, floor and ceiling. DA FUQ?!
When you do die, and you will, a load of blood sprays over the environment and remains there so you can start to piece together the level and its dangers. This introduces the player to the idea of dying to make it easier for themselves, or as I like to term it, “tactical dying”. Essentially, you use those blood splats to reveal parts of the level.
The more you replay a level though, the less of the level you need to expose – you only have a certain amount of lives to play around with. So to make it easier on yourself and to ensure you have more lives for when you need them, you rely on your tactile memory to navigate past spikes and through the level without being able to actually see any of the environment.
I am not entirely sure how original this idea is but I can tell you that I have never seen this form of game design before. Although I would imagine the idea has been toyed with and touched upon in other games at some point.
This kind of blindness enforced on to the player is actually cropping up in other game types as well and it’s really quite an interesting and unique way to offer a new and challenging experience. BlindGiRl and its sequel and SONAR are two games that limit the player with blindness; the former sees it transform into a puzzle game and the latter a terrifying survival horror. I really hope to see more developers continue to experiment with this simple design idea, it has some great potential.
Sosowski‘s Super Pig is a very clever platformer though and one you should at least acknowledge, even if you cannot last the enduring pain.
You will be able to find out more information and play Super Pig on its official website shortly.
Chris Priestman (1271 posts)
Valuing gameplay and innovation over everything, Chris has a keen eye for the most obscure titles unknown to man and gets a buzz from finding fantastic games that are not getting enough love. Chris Priestman, Editor-in-Chief of IGM Email: chrispriestman@indiegamemag.com Twitter: @CPriestmanThere is currently no description for this author...