New on Desk #33 — Mysteries of the Gradient

The summer hassles have kept my schedule busy this week as well. I’ve been picking apples, framed some acrylic glass windows for a cooking shed, organized a flea market table, wrote up some Covid alleviation grant reports, and whatnot. The one constant has been playing Gradius for half an hour every night, so at least I’ve made some little progress on that.

Short Intro to Gradius

Shoot’em up is this old ’80s genre of video game: you control a flying sprite on a 2D screen, dodging enemies and bullets and shooting them down, progressing down an automatically scrolling (vertical or horizontal) screen until the end of the stage, where there’s often a boss fight of some sort before you move to the next stage. The genre has its roots in the earliest days of video gaming, with Space Invaders and such, had its glory days in the late ’80s and then went into obscurity as new genres surfaced in the ’90s. Shooters have remained a staple in the arcade scene specifically, such as it is, and have continued evolving; the “bullet hell” shooter is a 21st century development that’s gotten some recognition, and most gamers obviously know what a “shooter” is so I have no idea why I’m writing this paragraph.

So anyway, Gradius could be the best shooter in history, which is amazing considering how it’s from 1985 and therefore rather early in the development of the genre. Despite its age the game is entirely current insofar as playability goes: the graphics are clean, the music is pretty (rather peppy considering the grim extermination space war theme), the difficulty gradient is perfect, the level design is brilliant and it’s simple and straightforward, yet nevertheless has its own gimmicks that make it very distinct from other games. Various weaknesses of the genre from later on aren’t present, such as cheap coin milking, elaborate artificial score chase elements or overly cluttered graphics.

Power-ups are a staple of the genre, and here Gradius plays in a very distinctive way, being much more interactive and provocative than usual. Each power-up token you collect gives you a point on the power-up track on the bottom of the screen, and you have an upgrade button you can press to pick whatever upgrade is available on the tracker position you’ve reached, expending your power-up for the upgrade. You gain power-up tokens by efficiently defeating key enemies and formations on the screen.

Or, to express that in a different way: upgrading your ship is performed by a point-buy process where you gain more points as the game progresses, but are pressured to make choices that help you continue gaining the points, and there’s no particular hand-holding involved in what you choose. The first part of playing Gradius (after getting over the basic shooter hurdle of being able to see the bullets and dodge them) is to familiarize yourself with the upgrade tracker and form an upgrade strategy, figuring out what specific upgrades you want, and in what order. There is a “right answer” to the question for most purposes, too, which I sort of like: it’s something you figure out and can then move forward from, focusing on the deeper levels of the game.

One of those deeper levels is the matter of “recovery”, which is a key question of shooter gameplay in general, and has been boldly framed in Gradius as core of the gameplay experience. Your Gradius game at mid-skill levels basically goes like so:

1. The first couple of levels are easy, so you stack up max upgrades efficiently, making the game generally easy in the sense that you have plenty of suppression fire and direct blasting power to make short work of most challenges.
2. However, the game gets more difficult, and it gets more difficult faster if you have those fat stacks of upgrades, and sooner or later you’re going down despite all that firepower — one hit and you’re out, that’s generally speaking the shooter gameplay.
3. Instead of just continuing immediately from where you die, in Gradius you go back to a checkpoint a bit farther back. So now you’re playing through this same level you just died in fully equipped, except now you have nothing. This is recovery: the question is, is it even possible to make a comeback on your second life, or is Gradius actually a one-life game masquerading as having multiple lives?
4. After struggling to recover, nine times out of ten you end up dying like five times in quick succession to the lack of weapons, so evidently the answer is no — no, it’s not possible to recover in Gradius.

Except, sometimes it is possible! And it feels possible, I should be able to do it. It’s even easy if you happen to die on an easy checkpoint. It’s all very interesting, and while I only recover rarely, the gameplay never feels entirely unfair, like I would absolutely need to have that extra firepower. If I was better, and had better concentration on recovery (as opposed to raging at myself for having died in the first place), there are plenty of places where I totally could recover. The upgrade process isn’t that deep anyway, you just need to get through like half a level to get back up to a respectable degree of firepower.

The upgrade strategy conundrum and the recovery question wouldn’t of course be appealing if the overall execution of the basic gameplay wasn’t pitch-perfect; all the shooter staples like dodging, suppression (shooting down enemies to reduce dodging needs), avoidance (not running into a wall while flying dodging patterns), punch-through (putting stronger enemies down quickly) and loiter time (minimizing time spent in dangerous situations) are present and obviously very well thought-out. Gradius was a gem at the time of its release, and it’s amazing how well it’s aged.

One more observation to those readers who might have gotten into shooters much later: if you’re into Touhou style bullet hells, I highly recommend Gradius as an entry into “traditional” shooters, which have grace all their own. I feel that the fundamental cornerstone feature of the golden age shooter is the combination of dodging and avoidance flight, which in the masterpiece designs of the era can take on a breath-taking pace and intensity that bullet hells simply can’t match. Gradius is precisely that kind of game, as with the rising difficulty rank (the longer you don’t die, the more the rank rises) the screen absolutely fills with ever-faster enemies, shooting ever more often, with the bullets flying ever faster. And unlike a bullet hell, it’s all dynamic: the enemies are shooting towards you! It’s the same number of bullets, but how truly delightful — the patterns aren’t fixed here.

The Easter Island Bottleneck

The first two levels of Gradius are easy, by which I mean that somebody with basic shooter routines in their fingertips will figure them out in a few tries unless they get stuck on some tactical dead-end with the few trickier spots. I won’t pretend that this is an entirely trivial skill level, because I’ve met some people who haven’t trained their fingers for action games since childhood, and apparently it does matter, but for even a casual hobbyist this is ultimately more of a pleasant stroll. A few tries and you’ll be breezing through these.

In fact, let’s take a closer look. I just found a fun website called The Video Game Atlas that has exactly what we need here: full screen captures of entire scrolling shooter levels. Here’s levels 1 and 2 of Gradius:

The maps are from the NES version of the game, which is ultimately an imperfect home console adaptation, but the layouts are basically the same as arcade or PC Engine (the version I’m actually playing). The maps only show the permanent landscape without the enemy sprites, which makes everything seem deceptively empty, but at least it makes the terrain clear. I hope it’s clear how these maps relate to the gameplay experience: during play the game starts by showing you the left end of that long strip of graphics, and then scrolls slowly over it, ending up at the other end.

There’s not a lot to say about these first two levels, but they do set the baseline of expectations for what we’re dealing with in the game. The first third of each stage is an empty space area where enemy flying squadrons come from the right to face the player’s ship; it’s generally easy, and the actual challenge is picking up the power-ups you need later on by effectively slaying the key enemies in the waves.

After the space section the actual level begins, which in the first stage means a tunnel with generally similar waves of small enemies as in the space section; efficient suppression fire (lots of bullets in the air) makes this easy. The second stage is different in that its middle section is actually a scrolling-over field, meaning that you can continue flying up or down freely, which scrolls the field view for you, allowing for a lot of freedom in choosing your flight path. (The NES version doesn’t have this feature, for those of you wondering about what I’m on about here.)

Each stage ends with an unique penultimate challenge and a standard boss fight. (One of those neat aesthetic peculiarities of Gradius that make it distinctive as opposed to merely supremely well-crafted: the actual end boss is the same one in all the stages, which has the effect of making the boss fight act more as a routine cool-down period for the player than a challenge.) In the first stage the penultimate challenge is a pair of volcanoes, while in the second it’s a bunch of flying space amoebas that teleport in as a swarm and try to ram the player’s ship. All in a day’s work once you figure out how to approach these.

The third stage, though, is where the going gets tough. I’ve yet to get my performance here to a consistent level; rather, I crash more often than not, and the recovery in this stage is awfully hard, so often my Gradius run ends right here.

The middle part of the stage is again vertically scrolling, so you can fly through this labyrinth of imposing Moai heads, picking and choosing from a variety of lanes to drive through. Each Moai is a dangerous enemy, for as soon as you arrive in its line of sight (literally, it depends on what direction the Moai is looking) its mouth opens and a stream of plasma rings bursts forth. The plasma is relatively suppression-resistant (that is, you need to shoot it pretty heavily to disperse it) due to how much the Moai vomits at once, and they keep doing it as long as you remain in their line of sight. The Moais can be destroyed, but only by shooting them in the mouth when it’s open, which is difficult because the plasma comes from the mouth and the Moai is often in a direction that can’t be reached by the weapons array.

The other enemies are really just flavour, the Moais are the real threat in this stage. The early half is somewhat manageable, but near the end of the stage in the arcade version you’re faced with punching through one of two tunnels with Moais in both top top and the bottom parts, and some nice extra enemies harassing you from the front. Destroying the heads is a nice daydream, but getting a shot is unreliable, so you’re better off dodging — but it’s easy to dodge into a crash, and you have to keep dodging as the Moais vomit their plasma rings towards you. For a horrible five seconds or so the stage asks for total situational awareness and a complex horisontal dodging pattern as the stage scrolls forward and finally lets you out of the Moai tunnel to face the boss.

A fine cherry on top here is that when I manage to get through the Moais, it’s not uncommon for me to fumble the vice-boss encounter, which involves a bunch of drone orbs spitting lesser drone orbs in a bullet hell swarm of sorts. It’s not really even difficult compared to the Moai, but after the concentration in Moai run it’s easy to make stupid mistakes in dodging some space orbs.

If the goal was just doing it once so I could say that I’ve done it, that’d have been achieved a long time ago. The real goal is to get some consistency into it, if for no other reason then so as to get to tackle stage 5 for real. The PC Engine version of the game has an exclusive bone-themed 5th stage that wasn’t in the original arcade version, so I’m eager to find out how it matches the so-far admirable design standards, but to do that I’ll need to get consistent enough with the Moais that my run doesn’t die four times out of five in stage 3.

(Stage 4, in case you were wondering, is “Inverted Volcano” — it’s the first stage flipped over with some new tricks, and a welcome respite in the difficulty spike. I’m not truly consistent on that one either yet, but it’s very much easier than stage 3, so I don’t expect to get stuck on it nearly as much.)

How to play shooters

In case you haven’t gotten into shooter games yourself, but would like to try, I have a few words of advice on how the approach the genre. I guess I’m a shooter kid myself, having played these from my childhood, but I can see how it’s not a very easy genre of game to have fun with: the games are short, hard, quick and monotonous compared to some other activities you could engage in.

As you can probably see from the above story of my Gradius exploits, shooters aren’t intended to be played progressively the way most modern video games are: you don’t start the game from the beginning and then continue playing, saving at points to continue from there, until the game is finished. Shooters, like most of these old arcade genres, aren’t intended as experiences at all, in fact: the game isn’t an entertainment tool that you plug yourself into for a while, following instructions to progress.

Rather, shooters represent the other big branch of video game interactivity by presenting a challenge: the game itself is of moderate size, and if you actually had the skill, you could finish it in 20 minutes. The difficulty is such, however, that you’ll make mistakes and wipe out long before reaching the end. The game experience is recursive in that it consists of trying again and again, observing your own play and making corrections, trying to figure out the right strategy and tactics to solve the challenges the game presents.

My own little project with playing Gradius here is a good example of how one might go about playing a shooter, I feel: I’ve been making a point of playing a single run every night for the last week. If I feel like it, I might play a second run after the first, but the point isn’t to extend the sitting too much, so often I just get up and do something else after getting the night’s training in. Last night I made a save point and grinded that Moai stage, practicing the movements and exploring options for how to make it safer and easier to get through it, but even then I didn’t play for more than an hour at one sitting. Shorter regular sittings, that’s the ticket.

The above insight on how to play shooters may seem obvious to some, but at least to me it hasn’t been that, and I’ve been playing these games since I was like 6 years old. At first, for a child, the game doesn’t feel so short and repetitive because the attention span isn’t so great to begin with. Later on you lose your ability to be entertained by the quick action, as the shooter (and some other arcade genres) combines repetitiveness with difficulty, so you spend most of your time just failing and getting nowhere. Thus I lost interest in the genre as I matured, starting to prefer games where you can generally progress by simply sitting there and putting in the hours.

(A potentially interesting cultural history tidbit: the Gradius game that we really wasted our childhood with around here was Life Force, the first sequel to Gradius. The NES Gradius didn’t really make it to Finland, I think, but Life Force did in a big way. I can remember how bemused I was at some point later when I tried out this legendary shooter classic, Gradius, and it was basically just Life Force.)

However, now that I’m old and wise and bitter, I’ve rediscovered my love for the shooter genre, and the reason is specifically in my general efforts to take my gaming more seriously and in a more goal-based way: shooters are much more fun when you take practice seriously and set goalposts for yourself! Proactive Gamist creative agenda, as we would say in roleplaying. This is true for most arcade games whether driving games or beat’em ups or whatever, too. So that’s my lesson: shooters are boring because your experiental stance on how to interact with the game is making them boring. Try instead being proactive about figuring out how to beat your best result, and you’ll find that the game starts making much more sense!

Monday: Coup de Main #10

Our on-going efforts at becoming like unto gods in the fictional interactive realms of D&D took great steps forward now that the party finally conquered the Yragerne (yes, a contributor actually told me that I’ve been writing it wrong) basement from the giant rats, enabling them to explore the place. The biggest find was probably something like 500 square feet of thick velvet drapes that had mysteriously been left ungnawed by the rats, but all kinds of other cool stuff is on the docket now as well — it’s like the module author doesn’t care how much 500 kg of malachite is worth on the open market.

All was, however, nearly lost when the party entered the outer caves and very nearly fell prey to an ambush by a carrion crawler — such a fearsome beast that the giant spiders who were totally gonna mess up these intruders chose to hang back! It was a rather grim situation, as my boy Crawler is one of those low-level dungeon features that are totally capable of putting down an entire adventuring party on its lonesome. With the party vanguard Sven the 2nd level Barbarian dueling the thing, the rest of the party could retreat, but then Sven got paralyzed and it seemed like all was lost.

The party kept their heads cool, though, and Astur the mediocre Fighter went into total hero mode, distracting the Crawler for two whole minutes before succumbing as well. This, however, was enough time for the party to have dragged Sven out of the immediate danger, allowing him to recover from the paralysis. (I run carrion crawler paralysis as allowing a new save every round unless the crawler gets a chance to really slather you with the venom.) Anybody else would have escaped, but Sven was gripped by the Black Rage (a gift he brought with him from Hell during his planar adventures), so he simply ran back into the fray and cleaved the carrion crawler in twain with one fell stroke! (Critical hit for near maximum damage there.) For a moment it looked like Sven would continue the killing spree by putting down his friends, too, but ultimately he ended up exhausting himself against the party’s impromptu barricade this time. Only a matter of pressing your luck before Sven kills somebody, though, what with the Black Rage and all.

We’ll see next time whether the party wants to keep exploring the basement or if it’s time to seize what they can and run away. There are certainly interesting doors still to be opened here, but the OG Crawler, Esquire, was something of a wake-up call, I think; this place is generally pretty casual, but now and then the danger spikes, and the basement may well include even worse things yet…

Coup development: the Divine Handbook

One of the wise things I wasted my time on this week was the start of a reasonably organized class write-up for the Cleric class, to be used in the Coup campaign. It’s still unfinished, but the Cleric part is pretty complete, so I might as well link it here. I’m planning to do writeups on the Paladin and a few other classes as well, and lay out some of my generic divine magic theory in there as well at some point.

The motivation for doing this now, when the campaign actually involves a huge amount of similarly complex rules material that hasn’t been laid out in writing yet, is that the player of our Main Man and XP record-holder, Phun Eral the 2nd Level Cleric, straight up asked me to elucidate on how I’m planning for divine magic to work in the campaign. A fair thing to ask for, I think — it’s unnecessarily difficult for him to actually maneuver the character as a Cleric if there aren’t any rules for what Clerics do. So yeah, if you want rules, I suppose all you need to do is ask for them nicely.

The writeup might be a bit difficult to follow as it is, as it relies heavily on this greater framework of aspirational high-level rules that I’ve developed by mixing various sources, most prominently the Mentzer Immortals rules. I believe that a grognard of the game will figure out what it says, though.

Gentlemen on the Agora

Because this is my most popular segment, apparently, I’ll just say here that I haven’t had the time to follow the discussions properly lately, so I’m probably missing some quality content. If you’d like to help, be sure to tag me when interesting topics are being chewed in the saloons!

What I do remember, though, is that one of the gentlemen started reading Foucault’s history of medieval madness in the spring, and is still going at it like a particularly insistent mole digging into a root cellar. By all reports it’s some pretty solid stuff if you’re looking for fresh ideas on social arrangements to throw into a medievalish fantasy game. The historical study is apparently thoroughly anecdotal, with Foucault waxing poetically about every attractive story he hears about his area of interest, but that’s not a problem if you’re looking for ideas more than historical truth.

State of the Productive Facilities

I’m sure I once had some productive facilities. I can remember how I almost wrote an essay for the blog earlier this week, but then I had to mow the lawn and it was sort of dropped. Maybe one day.