Ravenlock
08-21-2009, 08:40 AM
A Note Before I Begin: It was my hope to take my own screenshots of Flipside, which as you'll read I was very impressed with the visuals of. Unfortunately, it did not play nicely with my screen capture software, and as such, screenshots here are taken from the game's website, www.playflipside.com.
Welcome to the third installment of More Than the Sum, our ongoing expedition through the ocean of user-created videogame content. If you're just joining us and want to read about what we're doing and why, that information can be found at the beginning of Issue #1 (http://www.colonyofgamers.com/cogforums/showthread.php?t=10585). For those already up to speed, we press on!
Using videogames to explore the unstable mind (which arguably, at some level, is any mind at all) is hardly a new idea. Several survival horror series have built their reputation and fanbase around the catharsis of confronting your inner demons with a contoller. The 1995 adventure game interpretation of Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream received widespread acclaim for its willingness to tackle issues of rage, paranoia, and outright insanity. And anyone who played American McGee's Alice can tell you how deep and dark that game's rabbit hole turns out to be. On the lighter side, Tim Schafer's beloved (if criminally undersold) 2005 title Psychonauts is probably the funniest depiction of a group of crazy people to yet grace a computer screen.
Today's feature presentation is another take on the mind gone astray, and while it's a game very short on content, it isn't necessarily short on value. My initial reaction to this 2008 IGF Student Showcase award winner was frustration and bewilderment - and subsequent playthroughs have not convinced me I was entirely wrong - but I still come away with a lot of respect for the work that was done here by a small team in a very brief period of time. I am affectionately labeling this piece, "Flipside: How a 15 Minute Game About a Crazy Person Nearly Drove Me Mad."
FLIPSIDE:
As was the case with Eclipse, the first mod I covered for MTTS, Flipside is a total conversion using the Source engine. Unlike Eclipse and almost every other Source mod I'm aware of, Flipside is not a 3D shooter or even a 3D adventure game but a sidescrolling platformer... though it isn't always scrolling the same way, which I'll get to in a bit.
Like Eclipse, Flipside (http://www.playflipside.com/) is a short game, but as you probably gathered from the previous section and my title for this piece, "short" takes on a whole new meaning here. The single level contained in Flipside can indeed be completed in under 15 minutes with ease after some practice, though as you'll shortly see, that doesn't mean you'll succeed at that the first time through. This extremely brief running time is understandable given the project's constraints; the game is the work of 12 students from seven different universities and art schools in Denmark who call themselves "Team 3 (http://www.playflipside.com/aboutteam3.php)" and who completed everything you'll see in Flipside in a single month. If you've ever worked on a software project before, you know that a month is a perilously short amount of time. Let's see how it turned out.
THE PLOT:
This section will be brief, as Team 3 has helpfully provided a combination plot and gameplay summary of Flipside on their website, and the game offers nothing more concrete than this (though the visuals are certainly - intentionally I'm sure - suggestive of more details, which I'll discuss):
"You have just escaped from a mental institution. You’re on the run. The sun is shining, the birds are singing. You are jumping happily from cloud to cloud. You know that the only way to freedom is by reaching the ship at the end of the level. A cute bunny is jumping towards you, blocking your path. By pushing a button the whole world flips around and shows its dark side. The bunny is now an evil nurse who is trying to stop you from getting away. You headbutt her, clearing your path. With a push of the button the world flips back and shows its light side again."
The game's protagonist, we are told by the opening screen, is named Hannibal Hildorf, and it's never entirely clear whether his journey is an actual escape in which he simply imagines fantastical details, or entirely a delusion, occupying his crazed mind while he lies captive in a padded room. Either way, the gist is simple and classic: on the other side of a string of obstacles lies freedom. Surmount them.
If only accomplishing that were so simple. Before I get to the gameplay, however, I need to heap some deserved praise on...
THE TECH:
As much as Eclipse was a departure from the traditional Half-Life 2 engine look and setting, Flipside is a departure from almost everything we think of when we hear "Source." I already mentioned that the action here takes place entirely on a 2D plane, but don't assume that Team 3 simply locked a camera to the side of some ordinary 3D models. Have a peek at Hannibal in a happy moment:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2490/3840933463_eb9534f589.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/colonyofgamers/3840933463/sizes/o/in/set-72157621973806209/)
Every single piece of art in Flipside is a 2D cutout, a posterboard-style rendering pinned to a backdrop as if in a puppet theatre. Aside from Hannibal and his enemies, most of the art is not animated (with the notable exception of some lovely ocean waves that roll in the distance through half of the game), but an impressive number of depth levels are implemented in the foreground and background to create a parallax scrolling effect similar to what you would expect to see in an old Super Nintendo game. In motion, it simply looks great. The art style may or may not appeal to you, but there's no denying that the visual aesthetic of Flipside is both unique and striking. And, of course, the truly impressive feat here is that the whole thing is reversible.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3466/3840933441_769a4a90fd.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/colonyofgamers/3840933441/sizes/o/in/set-72157621973806209/)
Taking half a cue from the Paper Mario series, perhaps, the touch of a button flips the entire world around, showing the darker side of Hannibal's psyche. This has gameplay implications, of course, but the cleverness of this art design deserves some more attention first. To start with, this isn't a "hit a button to shift the world" mechanic, where the screen goes fuzzy and everything morphs into something else. Every time the player presses the 'Enter' key, the world is literally flipped; in a neat camera trick, you are swung around Hannibal to view him and the world from the opposite direction, demonstrating that yes, everything actually is a 3D model and the world is fully rendered on both sides. This lends the opportunity for Easter eggs; if you play the game, be sure to take a look at the "flipped" version of the asylum at the very beginning of the level.
More importantly, though, this mechanic and the way it's carried out lend considerable texture to a (forgive me) paper-thin story. Actually seeing 2 diametrically opposed sides to every object in the game - not two different versions of those things, but 2 perspectives of the same thing - connects you instantly with a character whose brain can't quite figure out how to parse the world presented to him. Looked at from the right, beautiful trees line a path shaded by fluffy white clouds. Change your view, though, and every piece of the landscape has eyes, always watching you. Lightning threatens you from the sky. The cute bunny obstructing your path doesn't become a violent nurse trying to drag you back to the asylum when you flip things; it always was a violent nurse, you just had to look at it from the right side. ...Or is it the wrong side? Maybe the wasp you thought was trying to sting you was actually a harmless honeybee, and you've killed it for no reason. The asylum is a serene haven adorned by stately columns. The asylum is a bloody torture chamber. The blooming rosebush is a briarpatch full of thorns.
They're either. They're both.
It's a great idea. It's simple, it's different, and it works well. It's my favorite thing about Flipside, and I'd love to see it implemented in a longer, better game. ...I guess I let the cat out of the bag a bit there. Very well, let's move on to...
THE GAMEPLAY:
This section will get long, so I'll start by being as succinct as I can: Flipside is not a very well-made platformer. It really isn't even a sort of well-made platformer. The controls, simple though they may be, are imprecise and feel unreliable. The physics of your character's movement are unpredictable and extremely difficult to get used to - appropriate for the subject matter, perhaps, but just aggravating during gameplay. And the combat, at its best, is unsatisfying. At its worst, it feels cheap.
There are a few bright spots and clever ideas, and they deserve some positive remarks. The basic division of the "light side" version of Hannibal and the "dark side" one (...I'm sorry to digress and talk again about the art style, but "dark" Hannibal's papery form is literally held together by haphazard strips of scotch tape while "light" Hannibal is fastened with shiny tacks, and that's just the sort of thing I'm talking about when I say the art design is great) is that goodie-two-shoes Hannibal can neither attack enemies, nor be harmed by them, because naturally in his vision of the world they aren't enemies at all. Hyde-Hannibal, however, can head-butt his foes into submission. Dark Hannibal is also able to climb walls, while the more lithe Light Hannibal can leap much higher into the air and bound off of the clouds floating over the landscape.
Some of this works well, and some of it only works in theory. The fact that flipping the world literally rotates the camera around to view it from the other side means that Light Hannibal is moving from left to right on the player's screen, while Dark Hannibal moves from right to left. There are some places where this mildly disorienting shift feels like a clever puzzle, and you'll come across spots in the game where Light Hannibal needs to leap across a chasm, and then switch to Dark Hannibal in midair to catch and climb the wall on the other side. These moments are the closest Flipside comes to establishing a "flow", and they feel good.
Two fundamental flaws, however, serve to undermine the positive elements and make completing Flipside largely an exercise in frustration. Firstly, the actual jumping and landing on things - the raw essence of any game labeled a "platformer" - is awful. Hannibal's control both on the ground and in the air is woefully imprecise, and he will often keep moving after you've stopped him or landed from a jump (not every time, though) to slide right off a cliff or down a hill. Combined with his seemingly random movement patterns is the design flaw of making so many of the platforms look rounded - clouds and trees in particular - so the player has no idea where the edge is. There aren't many death pits in this game, but you'll fall down the ones that are there.
The combat is less frequent but just as problematic. Since Light Hannibal cannot be harmed by the friendly creatures he encounters, but is obstructed by them, the designers position these critters in such a way that you simply can't get past them without flipping over to the Dark side and defeating them. Personally, I would have preferred for Team 3 to give me the choice; if I want to play through the whole level once as Light Hannibal, waving cheerily at the nice bunnies, why stop me? Even accepting their edict that combat must occur, though, the combat here just isn't fun. As mentioned, Hannibal has one attack, a very short-range headbutt. Against the evil nurses, this is effective but boring; they walk forward, you headbutt, they die. Against the game's only other enemy type, the wasp, it's almost completely ineffective. The wasps will dart at you either (1) too quickly to hit without perfect timing, or (2) from above, making it impossible to hit them no matter how good your timing. You can hang back and hope to dodge their attack and then close in for a strike, or you can do what I ended up doing; wait in "Light mode" until they're floating right next to you as cute honeybees, then flip the world and hit 'em as quick as you can. It works, but it feels like cheating the system and, again, it isn't fun.
One final issue - Hannibal begins the game with a single unit of health. He can pick up bunches of flowers to increase this up to three times, each one allowing for an extra hit before death. The moment he picks up the third flower, though, he immediately enters a brief period of invincibility, which drains his extra health back down to one-hit mortality. The power-up lasts for such a short time, and the flowers are placed so randomly (often away from any enemies) that it actually makes more sense to collect 2 flowers as backup health and then avoid picking up any more. It simply doesn't feel well thought-out.
Several of these issues are bad enough that Team 3 makes mention of them on their website in the FAQ section, though they spin them as "challenging". I suppose that's accurate, but there's challenge due to good game design, and challenge due to bad game design. As I see it, this is the latter.
THE BOTTOM LINE:
That was quite a little rant there; my apologies. Honestly, for as harsh as I am towards some of Team 3's design choices and their execution, I don't find Flipside to be without merit as an experimental title. Moreover, I remain tremendously impressed by what they managed to accomplish in just one month. The art in Flipside really is standout work, and the way that art supports the storytelling simply begs to be expanded on in a deeper title. As frustrated as I got with this miniature game, I still found myself interested in Hannibal, and I wonder where he goes after he gets on the boat to freedom at the end. If he ever went anywhere at all.
It feels a little strange to write, but I recommend that you go to their site (http://www.playflipside.com/download.php) and start downloading. It's free, it's short, you'll know very quickly if you don't want to keep playing it, and it's original enough to be worth the experience. All in all, Flipside isn't such a bad ride. I wish you weren't so likely to go a little mad yourself, taking it... but hell, maybe that's the point.
Welcome to the third installment of More Than the Sum, our ongoing expedition through the ocean of user-created videogame content. If you're just joining us and want to read about what we're doing and why, that information can be found at the beginning of Issue #1 (http://www.colonyofgamers.com/cogforums/showthread.php?t=10585). For those already up to speed, we press on!
Using videogames to explore the unstable mind (which arguably, at some level, is any mind at all) is hardly a new idea. Several survival horror series have built their reputation and fanbase around the catharsis of confronting your inner demons with a contoller. The 1995 adventure game interpretation of Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream received widespread acclaim for its willingness to tackle issues of rage, paranoia, and outright insanity. And anyone who played American McGee's Alice can tell you how deep and dark that game's rabbit hole turns out to be. On the lighter side, Tim Schafer's beloved (if criminally undersold) 2005 title Psychonauts is probably the funniest depiction of a group of crazy people to yet grace a computer screen.
Today's feature presentation is another take on the mind gone astray, and while it's a game very short on content, it isn't necessarily short on value. My initial reaction to this 2008 IGF Student Showcase award winner was frustration and bewilderment - and subsequent playthroughs have not convinced me I was entirely wrong - but I still come away with a lot of respect for the work that was done here by a small team in a very brief period of time. I am affectionately labeling this piece, "Flipside: How a 15 Minute Game About a Crazy Person Nearly Drove Me Mad."
FLIPSIDE:
As was the case with Eclipse, the first mod I covered for MTTS, Flipside is a total conversion using the Source engine. Unlike Eclipse and almost every other Source mod I'm aware of, Flipside is not a 3D shooter or even a 3D adventure game but a sidescrolling platformer... though it isn't always scrolling the same way, which I'll get to in a bit.
Like Eclipse, Flipside (http://www.playflipside.com/) is a short game, but as you probably gathered from the previous section and my title for this piece, "short" takes on a whole new meaning here. The single level contained in Flipside can indeed be completed in under 15 minutes with ease after some practice, though as you'll shortly see, that doesn't mean you'll succeed at that the first time through. This extremely brief running time is understandable given the project's constraints; the game is the work of 12 students from seven different universities and art schools in Denmark who call themselves "Team 3 (http://www.playflipside.com/aboutteam3.php)" and who completed everything you'll see in Flipside in a single month. If you've ever worked on a software project before, you know that a month is a perilously short amount of time. Let's see how it turned out.
THE PLOT:
This section will be brief, as Team 3 has helpfully provided a combination plot and gameplay summary of Flipside on their website, and the game offers nothing more concrete than this (though the visuals are certainly - intentionally I'm sure - suggestive of more details, which I'll discuss):
"You have just escaped from a mental institution. You’re on the run. The sun is shining, the birds are singing. You are jumping happily from cloud to cloud. You know that the only way to freedom is by reaching the ship at the end of the level. A cute bunny is jumping towards you, blocking your path. By pushing a button the whole world flips around and shows its dark side. The bunny is now an evil nurse who is trying to stop you from getting away. You headbutt her, clearing your path. With a push of the button the world flips back and shows its light side again."
The game's protagonist, we are told by the opening screen, is named Hannibal Hildorf, and it's never entirely clear whether his journey is an actual escape in which he simply imagines fantastical details, or entirely a delusion, occupying his crazed mind while he lies captive in a padded room. Either way, the gist is simple and classic: on the other side of a string of obstacles lies freedom. Surmount them.
If only accomplishing that were so simple. Before I get to the gameplay, however, I need to heap some deserved praise on...
THE TECH:
As much as Eclipse was a departure from the traditional Half-Life 2 engine look and setting, Flipside is a departure from almost everything we think of when we hear "Source." I already mentioned that the action here takes place entirely on a 2D plane, but don't assume that Team 3 simply locked a camera to the side of some ordinary 3D models. Have a peek at Hannibal in a happy moment:
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2490/3840933463_eb9534f589.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/colonyofgamers/3840933463/sizes/o/in/set-72157621973806209/)
Every single piece of art in Flipside is a 2D cutout, a posterboard-style rendering pinned to a backdrop as if in a puppet theatre. Aside from Hannibal and his enemies, most of the art is not animated (with the notable exception of some lovely ocean waves that roll in the distance through half of the game), but an impressive number of depth levels are implemented in the foreground and background to create a parallax scrolling effect similar to what you would expect to see in an old Super Nintendo game. In motion, it simply looks great. The art style may or may not appeal to you, but there's no denying that the visual aesthetic of Flipside is both unique and striking. And, of course, the truly impressive feat here is that the whole thing is reversible.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3466/3840933441_769a4a90fd.jpg (http://www.flickr.com/photos/colonyofgamers/3840933441/sizes/o/in/set-72157621973806209/)
Taking half a cue from the Paper Mario series, perhaps, the touch of a button flips the entire world around, showing the darker side of Hannibal's psyche. This has gameplay implications, of course, but the cleverness of this art design deserves some more attention first. To start with, this isn't a "hit a button to shift the world" mechanic, where the screen goes fuzzy and everything morphs into something else. Every time the player presses the 'Enter' key, the world is literally flipped; in a neat camera trick, you are swung around Hannibal to view him and the world from the opposite direction, demonstrating that yes, everything actually is a 3D model and the world is fully rendered on both sides. This lends the opportunity for Easter eggs; if you play the game, be sure to take a look at the "flipped" version of the asylum at the very beginning of the level.
More importantly, though, this mechanic and the way it's carried out lend considerable texture to a (forgive me) paper-thin story. Actually seeing 2 diametrically opposed sides to every object in the game - not two different versions of those things, but 2 perspectives of the same thing - connects you instantly with a character whose brain can't quite figure out how to parse the world presented to him. Looked at from the right, beautiful trees line a path shaded by fluffy white clouds. Change your view, though, and every piece of the landscape has eyes, always watching you. Lightning threatens you from the sky. The cute bunny obstructing your path doesn't become a violent nurse trying to drag you back to the asylum when you flip things; it always was a violent nurse, you just had to look at it from the right side. ...Or is it the wrong side? Maybe the wasp you thought was trying to sting you was actually a harmless honeybee, and you've killed it for no reason. The asylum is a serene haven adorned by stately columns. The asylum is a bloody torture chamber. The blooming rosebush is a briarpatch full of thorns.
They're either. They're both.
It's a great idea. It's simple, it's different, and it works well. It's my favorite thing about Flipside, and I'd love to see it implemented in a longer, better game. ...I guess I let the cat out of the bag a bit there. Very well, let's move on to...
THE GAMEPLAY:
This section will get long, so I'll start by being as succinct as I can: Flipside is not a very well-made platformer. It really isn't even a sort of well-made platformer. The controls, simple though they may be, are imprecise and feel unreliable. The physics of your character's movement are unpredictable and extremely difficult to get used to - appropriate for the subject matter, perhaps, but just aggravating during gameplay. And the combat, at its best, is unsatisfying. At its worst, it feels cheap.
There are a few bright spots and clever ideas, and they deserve some positive remarks. The basic division of the "light side" version of Hannibal and the "dark side" one (...I'm sorry to digress and talk again about the art style, but "dark" Hannibal's papery form is literally held together by haphazard strips of scotch tape while "light" Hannibal is fastened with shiny tacks, and that's just the sort of thing I'm talking about when I say the art design is great) is that goodie-two-shoes Hannibal can neither attack enemies, nor be harmed by them, because naturally in his vision of the world they aren't enemies at all. Hyde-Hannibal, however, can head-butt his foes into submission. Dark Hannibal is also able to climb walls, while the more lithe Light Hannibal can leap much higher into the air and bound off of the clouds floating over the landscape.
Some of this works well, and some of it only works in theory. The fact that flipping the world literally rotates the camera around to view it from the other side means that Light Hannibal is moving from left to right on the player's screen, while Dark Hannibal moves from right to left. There are some places where this mildly disorienting shift feels like a clever puzzle, and you'll come across spots in the game where Light Hannibal needs to leap across a chasm, and then switch to Dark Hannibal in midair to catch and climb the wall on the other side. These moments are the closest Flipside comes to establishing a "flow", and they feel good.
Two fundamental flaws, however, serve to undermine the positive elements and make completing Flipside largely an exercise in frustration. Firstly, the actual jumping and landing on things - the raw essence of any game labeled a "platformer" - is awful. Hannibal's control both on the ground and in the air is woefully imprecise, and he will often keep moving after you've stopped him or landed from a jump (not every time, though) to slide right off a cliff or down a hill. Combined with his seemingly random movement patterns is the design flaw of making so many of the platforms look rounded - clouds and trees in particular - so the player has no idea where the edge is. There aren't many death pits in this game, but you'll fall down the ones that are there.
The combat is less frequent but just as problematic. Since Light Hannibal cannot be harmed by the friendly creatures he encounters, but is obstructed by them, the designers position these critters in such a way that you simply can't get past them without flipping over to the Dark side and defeating them. Personally, I would have preferred for Team 3 to give me the choice; if I want to play through the whole level once as Light Hannibal, waving cheerily at the nice bunnies, why stop me? Even accepting their edict that combat must occur, though, the combat here just isn't fun. As mentioned, Hannibal has one attack, a very short-range headbutt. Against the evil nurses, this is effective but boring; they walk forward, you headbutt, they die. Against the game's only other enemy type, the wasp, it's almost completely ineffective. The wasps will dart at you either (1) too quickly to hit without perfect timing, or (2) from above, making it impossible to hit them no matter how good your timing. You can hang back and hope to dodge their attack and then close in for a strike, or you can do what I ended up doing; wait in "Light mode" until they're floating right next to you as cute honeybees, then flip the world and hit 'em as quick as you can. It works, but it feels like cheating the system and, again, it isn't fun.
One final issue - Hannibal begins the game with a single unit of health. He can pick up bunches of flowers to increase this up to three times, each one allowing for an extra hit before death. The moment he picks up the third flower, though, he immediately enters a brief period of invincibility, which drains his extra health back down to one-hit mortality. The power-up lasts for such a short time, and the flowers are placed so randomly (often away from any enemies) that it actually makes more sense to collect 2 flowers as backup health and then avoid picking up any more. It simply doesn't feel well thought-out.
Several of these issues are bad enough that Team 3 makes mention of them on their website in the FAQ section, though they spin them as "challenging". I suppose that's accurate, but there's challenge due to good game design, and challenge due to bad game design. As I see it, this is the latter.
THE BOTTOM LINE:
That was quite a little rant there; my apologies. Honestly, for as harsh as I am towards some of Team 3's design choices and their execution, I don't find Flipside to be without merit as an experimental title. Moreover, I remain tremendously impressed by what they managed to accomplish in just one month. The art in Flipside really is standout work, and the way that art supports the storytelling simply begs to be expanded on in a deeper title. As frustrated as I got with this miniature game, I still found myself interested in Hannibal, and I wonder where he goes after he gets on the boat to freedom at the end. If he ever went anywhere at all.
It feels a little strange to write, but I recommend that you go to their site (http://www.playflipside.com/download.php) and start downloading. It's free, it's short, you'll know very quickly if you don't want to keep playing it, and it's original enough to be worth the experience. All in all, Flipside isn't such a bad ride. I wish you weren't so likely to go a little mad yourself, taking it... but hell, maybe that's the point.