Nerd Mentality

The Thrill of the Chase

Posted November 23rd 2011 by J Edison Thomas.

The local multiplayer videogame is a wheezing, dying beast.  The global online gamesphere has freed players from the cramped, fractured splitscreen of yesteryear, and for entire genres, there is no going back.  There have been resurgences, of course, centered around the Fresh New Thing of the day.  The advent of the Wii had families flailing and laughing together for the first time with a videogame console, and the rhythm game craze reinvented the college party for a few years of the late twenty-aughts.  But rhythm- and motion-based party games have consistently released to diminishing returns after their respective peaks.  Eventually, the Fresh New Thing isn't so fresh, or new, and these spikes settle down.  Try as they might, with each new Mario Party release it becomes less and less likely that Nintendo will be able to recapture the magic that they bottled nearly two generations ago.  So games return to their shelves, and gamers return to single-player or online games until the next big thing brings them back together.

After industry giants beat the motion and rhythm genres into the ground like so many dead horses, it may be apropos that the latest Fresh New Thing was born from the indie gaming scene.  This is, after all, where creativity is still the dominant currency, as opposed to, well, the actual currency that fuels the corporate videogame machine.  A clever idea with straightforward controls and presentation is the best that indie developers can hope for, and that perfectly describes DoubleDutch Games' Speedrunner HD.

As its name implies, Speedrunner HD is a distillation of classic 2D sidescroller parkour: players jump over gaps, hop up walls, and swing on grappling hooks to maintain momentum in a course littered with obstacles.  Played alone, the object is to reach the end of the level before time runs out.  It can be challenging, but the experience is that of a platformer without enemies, a time-trial that amounts to a non-starter. It is the competitive component that provides the spark that spurs this engine into action, and the multiplayer mode hums with magnificent precision.

Up to four players race in a looped course, trying to disrupt each others' momentum with items such as tethers that pull back leaders or blocks that can be dropped in the way of pursuers.  The race is, for all intents and purposes, never-ending; there is no finish line, no number of laps to complete, no checkered flag.  The twist is that when a player falls too far behind the leader and hits the "back" of the screen, they lose a point, and the race is complete once all players but one have run out of points.  In other words, it's Mario Kart racing with Super Smash Bros.-style elimination.  The frenzied fun that occurs in these matches lives up to that staggering comparison. 

There is no option to play online, but it is difficult to imagine the magic would translate anyway.  This is a game meant to fill up a room, to be played with six people passing along four controllers, all berating and congratulating each other, wincing in defeat and hooting in victory.  It has the ability to raise a room's volume to ridiculous levels, as excited shouting gives way to bursts of laughter.  The interesting thing is, the laughter almost always erupts first from the player who has just lost a point.  This may seem innocuous, but it speaks volumes about the gameplay that DoubleDutch has created. 

The truth is, it's easy to make a person happy when they succeed; the true difficulty comes in making them happy when they fail.  And when developers are able to pull that off, they don't have to pull punches with a game's challenge, because players are riding a wave of fully-focused engagement and loving every second of it.  Failure, and learning from it, is such an integral component to the enjoyment of a game that it should be no surprise that developers who shy away from it are forced to stuff their games full of silly gimmicks to maintain attention.  The aforementioned Mario Party, Mario Kart, and Super Smash Bros. have become ridiculously bloated affairs in their attempts to cloud their weakened gameplay.  The diminishing returns of each series stem from Nintendo's clumsiness in addressing the issue of failure—usually by simply granting bonuses to losing players.

By contrast, beginners in Speedrunner HD will find a rocky path before them, with no clear lifeline other than learning through trial and error.  It's unlikely that a new player will be able to figure their way around the controls or the obstacles well enough to last even a full lap against players with more experience.  However, the structure is not overly cruel, and players are encouraged to keep trying through subtle agents of balance. 

Each time a player loses a point, the entire group is reset to where they fell, and the race resumes from there.  That player is down one point, but his foul-up doesn't mean he is removed from the group the way he would in a traditional race, following from a distance and grumbling to himself until his inevitable failure is finally tallied.  He is placed back in the thick of the other players, capable of interacting with them to try to edge his way ahead again.  Because the punishment for mistakes is light, there are no sore feelings to foster.  This also means that in order to win a race, players need to consistently break away from the rest rather than break away once and then maintain their lead.

DoubleDutch figured out a natural way to facilitate comebacks without resorting to cheap tactics like preferential bonuses for lagging players. Getting ahead of the group is itself more difficult than catching up; because the screen centers on the middle of the pack, the leader gets closer and closer to the "front" of the screen the further ahead he is.  Even for players who have memorized a course, it can be extremely difficult to navigate with the precise reflexes the game requires with so little warning about what is ahead.  The added difficulty of maintaining a lead makes it all the more tense, and adds a natural handicap on whoever finds their way to the front of the pack.  Players who manage to get a "kill" (i.e. being the player who pushes ahead enough that someone else hits the back and loses a life) are rewarded for their efforts with a point, as long as they had previously lost one by falling behind.  Simple, straightforward ideas like these make the game brilliantly designed to keep players competing and never feeling like defeat is ultimate or crushing.

Playing the game with friends and family, I was amazed to see how well these structures worked.  Brandon initially introduced me to the game, when he invited me, along with Yshua, to help him test the multiplayer for a review he was writing (you can read it here).  He had played through the single player levels and understood the game better than us, and for the first few races, it showed.  However, within an hour—maybe half a dozen races in—we were consistently trading wins between the three of us.  I was hooked.

I immediately bought the game upon returning home, and this pattern has repeated itself with everyone else I bring into it: a few races of one-sided victories, and then hour after hour of manic muscling for rank between capable opponents.  Nightly gamers, casual players, and even children seem equally able and eager to follow the game's short, steady learning curve and enjoy the competition.  We play, perfecting our jumps and slides between exchanges of missile fire, and occasionally discovering a new maneuver that shaves a second off of a challenging turn.  Veterans are more likely to win—it's a game of skill and the random element of items isn't overwhelming, nor is it tapered to losing players—but the design is so simple that this advantage is not absolute.

In finding that balance, DoubleDutch has done with a $3 game what the mightiest studios in the industry struggle to achieve continually in their blockbuster titles.  With fairly straightforward gameplay based around a handful of levels and items, this may not be the next Super Smash Bros. Melee, a game I still play regularly 10 years after its release.  It's entirely possible that this game returns to its (virtual) shelf in the wake of the next Fresh New Thing.  But I have a feeling it will stick around. Outside of Melee, I can't think of a game that has made me laugh so hard, or shout in excitement so often, as when Speedrunner HD occupies my living room with me and my friends.

SpeedrunnerHD is available on Xbox 360 through Xbox Live Indie Games.  A PC version is also available.

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Tags: Xbox 360, doubledutch games, multiplayer, xblig, xbox live indie games, Indie, speedrunner hd, Microsoft

Posted in: Gaming, Features

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