TxK is super awesome great

It's just over a week since TxK got released on PS Vita, and I've been playing it at every convenient moment since, finally finishing the game in "classic" mode this evening.

I beat the game and won a lovely cup of tea.

Oops, I missed the edges off my photo. But, I beat it! Yay me!

I really, really got into this game. It's beautiful, mathematics in colour.

It's the latest iteration of Jeff "Yak" Minter's take on Tempest, with nice shiny extras of powerups like the ability to jump, a nice AI Droid to help you out, and mind-bending levels and special effects featuring far more colours than the average rainbow.

The soundtrack adds 1990s rave onto the 1980s arcade visual style, and the Vita is a time-travel device.

I'm 15th best player in the world!

It's nice being so near to the top of the leaderboards for this game, but.... more people should be doing better than me! Is it that not enough people have this game? Are they just not getting so far in it? I suppose there is the possibility... I've been playing this guy's games for so long, rather than these games being perfect for me, it was me that was built to play these games.

Now, Jeff Minter posted some basic gameplay tips on the Playstation EU blog, but they are really basic, so I thought I'd post some tips of my own.

a) Basic Ship Controls

Don't think of moving your ship as going "left" and "right", because you will be running along the rim of objects that go upside-down. Think of it as "clockwise" and "anti-clockwise". And then later, when the game even manages to make that confusing, think of it as "the way I was going" and "the other way". Actually, maybe if you thought the last thing, it works for all cases. :)

b) Accellerometer controls

If you tilt the Vita during a level, you get to slightly tilt your viewpoint. If it comes to you naturally and you need a better viewpoint, use it. I didn't use it much. Noticed it more on the pause screen than during gameplay. But it's cool.

Between levels, as long as you aren't starting a bonus stage, your ship will fly through a series of rings; flying as close as you can to the centre will give you a points bonus. This bonus can become very sizable! I found that playing the game with the Vita near horizontal made the between-stage controls much better. Be gentle.

c) Shooting

I barely ever stopped shooting. On some levels (e.g. #30), I changed from holding down the fire button to a slower pulse with my thumb, as I spun through the level. Mostly I held down the fire button.

d) Smart Bomb (Supertapper)

I usually kept this in reserve for emergencies, but if you are feeling confident, all enemies you kill with the smart bomb give you double points.

The very basic enemies, if they get to the rim where you're standing, can start to drag you off the side. If that starts and you still can, touch the screen to set off the supertapper and rescue yourself. If you have the power-up, the AI Droid can also rescue you, but eh, sometimes it seems like it can't be bothered to. Lazy thing.

e) Power-ups

They come in roughly the same order each level - some yield points, there's a particle laser, but most importantly, there is the jump ability and then AI Droid. There is also a warp triangle, and eventually the dual wield ability - which I don't think is that useful (I only ever seem to get it so late in a level there's nothing left to shoot). Get every power up you can. The later point power-ups are 8000 points each - vital if you are working on your high score.

Jumping is the most important defensive power-up, because it lets you avoid things. But you will get more points the less you jump.

f) 1up power-ups

They look like normal power-ups, except they're pink. When they appear, a sound effect says "extra" then when you collect it, it says "life". Listen out for these! You can have up to 11 extra lives.

g) Strategy : playing to survive vs playing to score points

If you want to play to survive, start out sweeping a level with bullets to get as many enemies as possible, then stick to a small patch (hopefully that doesn't rotate too confusingly). Power-ups only appear from enemies you've killed, so sticking to one patch limits them to appearing only in your little spot, and hopefully you'll get the "jump" ability soon enough you won't be in trouble.

After that, try and get the AI Droid power-up if you can, then jump a lot and keep away from bullets, killing easy enemies and letting your AI Droid kill off the things that are more likely to put up more of a fight.

I think you get fewer points killing enemies when jumping than you do when you kill them on the rim, but I haven't actually checked to make sure.

h) Classic mode

In this mode, when you get Game Over, you can restart the level of your choice with whatever was your best score / number of lives you managed to achieve in the past. Most lives seems to be dominant over most score. As such, when you restart, rather than going to the last level I was on, I tended to go to the level where I last had most lives, and played to survive. Then return to them later and retry for more points.

i) Special enemies

Watch out for flowers. Shoot flower heads when they are either still, or spin slowly. If they are spinning quickly, they have broken free from the stem and are unstoppable, and will kill you if they touch you.

Watch out for the buzzy electric things that light up a whole column. Pay close attention to the light between their prongs; they light up in a certain way just before electrifying a column. If you see it, move or jump! (Electric attacks can't get you when you're in the air!)

The bulls that appear on level 33 are more deadly when they are killed than when they were alive, because their horns spin upwards to get you, and move quite slowly so you might accidentally jump into them. I found that letting bulls come to the top, and bounce down a little way before killing them made them easier.

The little whirlpools that spin the entire stage are more disorientating than they are dangerous. Don't be intimidated by them!

The missile rock things - sometimes it's better to avoid them than try to defeat them, because they can break into pieces. But, points! Score!

The round things that turn into rainbow tubes when you shoot them - I don't think they can be destroyed after they turn into tubes. If I'm wrong, let me know!

The static flowers that give a long "moooooo" sound, that come near the end of the game - the ones that are really tall and sweep across the rim - pay attention to the colour of the stalk. Before you have jump ability, you won't be able to destroy them. It's safe to pass below the flower head as long as the stalk isn't electrified, and they give a visible tell to let you know when they will light up.

The annoying star things that shoot at you from the bottom rim of a stage - they get bigger when they are about to shoot stuff at you, at which point they are vulnerable. But, if you stick around to shoot at them, you are going to die. You really have to take advantage of the length of the stage, so your bullets reach it when you're safely out of the way, but overall, I'd recommend you keep out of the way if you can.

j) Bonus stages

You automatically go to these when you collect 4 warp triangles and end a level. The bonus stage where you fly through rings - the controls are really really sensitive, don't touch anything for the majority of the time. Be ultra gentle. If you're doing ok with these bonus stages, don't read what I'm about to say - but to me, it was like up and down were reversed.

The path bonus stage is far easier, in my opinion. You just go left and right as normal.

Accellerometer controls are disabled for the duration of bonus stages, and you get a 50000 point bonus for finishing each one.

k) Feel your way through the game

This is a game you feel. I've written up what I can, but I'm sure there's more that's just not conscious or I am able to express. Play this game with your eyes and ears and your hands. It's the most tactile geometric shooting game there is. Be glad you aren't playing it with your nose unless you like the scent of ungulates. Have fun. Discover things. :)

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That's about it, I think that's all I have. Good luck! This is a super awesome great game. But still not as great as Space Giraffe, which is an utter masterpiece. A mad, mad masterpiece. But super awesome great is still super awesome great! I think it's the best game on Vita so far!

Banshee's Last Cry / Kamaitachi no Yoru

An app came out on iOS a few weeks ago called "Banshee's Last Cry", it's published by Aksys and is described as "a thrilling visual novel that takes readers on a deadly thrill ride of murder and deception". It's a free download where you pay £2.49 as an in-app purchase to unlock the full game.

It's actually a localisation of an old game by Chunsoft for the Super Famicom, called "Kamaitachi no yoru", or "Night of the Sickle Weasel". I guess they primarily called it "Banshee's Last Cry" to make it look a little bit related to "Virtue's Last Reward" - well, enough to lure fans into spending their £2.49.

They've changed the location of the original story from a ski lodge in Japan to a ski lodge in Canada, made some technological changes to bring it into 2014, re-recorded the soundtrack (some music is the same, some different - some so it doesn't sound so traditionally Japanese, I suppose), gone to an actual Canadian ski lodge to take pictures to replace all the original background images, changed all the names of the characters, and changed the folk mythology from Japanese to Irish.

I've been reading it, and here's what I have to say:

The story is perhaps more "Choose Your Own Adventure" than you might expect from something described as a visual novel. It's what they used to call a "sound novel" - basically a light novel with atmospheric background images, music and sound effects. No character portraits or voices.

The main story really feels like a murder mystery from the 1990s. The murders and descriptions are really quite gruesome sometimes. The plot actually seems really familiar to me, perhaps similar methods were used in some Kindaichi manga I read, or some Detective Conan anime I watched. As such, it was fairly easy for me to pinpoint the correct suspect and details about the initial murder (though I certainly didn't get it on my first play-through). The main difficulty for me was finding the choices in the story where I could express my thoughts in order to trigger the ending.

Another comment on the 1990s feeling of the game - the attitude of the male protagonist and other characters is pretty much that females in the story only exist to be protected. They're rounded up together, and the way they don't seem to be suspects seems dismissive. Any attempt by them to be useful on their own ends up disastrous. I don't think they really even notice.

After my first play-through, certain new options appeared in the game, which is an interesting way of doing things. Your reasoning in previous play-throughs brings you closer to being able to solve the mystery. However, the player does not know - if I use this option it appears to be a short cut of a few pages, but is that relevant to any in-game path change?

Having said that reasoning brings you closer to the correct mystery ending... it's also the case that some endings completely diverge; one ending you can trigger very early in the story has you leaving before any murders take place - and so in that timeline the murder doesn't take place that night (why is that?). In the very worst ending (which is also the first one I saw), I still don't fully understand who committed all the murders at the end.

After I solved the main murder mystery and the credits rolled, a lot more options open up in the game. They lead to far more light-hearted stories, joke endings, and a lot of puns on the word "banshee". It is clear why they are not present when the game is first started. Two of the new endings also had end credits rolling, so they must be the "Occult" and "Spy" endings mentioned in the Wikipedia article on Kamaitachi no Yoru. One is just funny, the other a secret code message which I managed to decode straight away (but it was still fun to read the story). There's also a path with a reference to Chunsoft's "Mystery Dungeon" line of games. Oh it would have been nice if there really was a roguelike built into the app, hahaha.

Issues I have with the localisation - very few. One comment near the beginning about how silly it is to say "cheese" for photos because people end pulling an "ooh" face only really works if you consider the Japanese pronunciation of "cheese" ("chi-zu-"). There are some errors; in the "Snow Maze" path, there's a mistake where they give the incorrect name for one of the characters, accidentally marrying her to the wrong character ("Colleen Buchanan"). In the end of the path with the secret code, the font size messes up and you're left scrolling the page left and right to read.

It would have been nice to have something telling me which endings I've seen so I know if there's anything left to aim for. It would have been nice if like the original Super Famicon version, we could see silhouettes of each character in order to feed the imagination. It would have been nice to unlock some sort of diagram of branching paths for the after-story so I can see the last few things to do. It would be nice if there was a "clear data" option in the menu so I could compare the options available at the start to the ones available after many play-throughs.

Best of all, it would have been nice if it was on Android so I didn't have to borrow an iPad to read it! (I think that's "coming soon").

But overall, it's been a fun read, it was a good price, and it's been a pleasure to experience this little piece of sound novel history so long after the game originally came out. I hope they decide to bring more visual / sound novels out in English on mobile / tablet devices, because it's a very convenient platform for reading interactive fiction.