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Truxton Extreme
När Toaplan gick i konkurs 1994 försvann ett av shoot 'em up-genrens mest inflytelserika företag. Studion blev aldrig lika stor som Capcom eller Konami, trots att den under slutet av 80-talet och början av 90-talet satte avtryck med spel som Truxton, Fire Shark, Hellfire och Zero Wing. Arvet levde däremot vidare genom utvecklare som senare bildade bland annat Cave. Därför känns Truxton Extreme mindre som en uppföljare och mer som ett kärleksbrev till en tid då varje mynt i arkadhallen räknades.
Min egen relation till serien har varit sporadisk. Några omgångar på Mega Drive, ett par timmar med Truxton Classic till mobilen och en allmän uppskattning för Toaplans betydelse i spelhistorien. Därför var det extra roligt att se hur väl Truxton Extreme fångar originalets själ. Spelet känns omedelbart bekant, samtidigt som det har fått en modern kostym utan att tappa sina rötter.
Grafiken är snygg och detaljerad utan att för den skull försöka förändra seriens identitet. Explosionerna fyller skärmen med färg och ljus samtidigt som musiken bygger upp ett skönt tempo genom hela äventyret. Den tar aldrig över, fast finns hela tiden där och förstärker upplevelsen. Att originalets kompositör Masahiro Yuge har återvänt för att klä de klassiska arkadslingorna i modern skrud ger en enorm nostalgisk gåshud. Det dämpar också smällen av att spelet numera spelas i widescreen i stället för det klassiska, vertikala TATE-läget, ett skifte som fungerar förvånansvärt väl tack vare de snygga 3D-miljöerna.
Spelet bjuder dessutom på betydligt mer innehåll än jag först väntade mig. För den som vill lära sig grunderna finns ett pedagogiskt Tutorial och det mer förlåtande Heart Starter, där obegränsat antal liv gör att fokus hamnar på att lära sig spelets mekanik i stället för att ständigt börja om. Heart Starter är mer eller mindre första banan på easy mode och jag ser det mer som en förlängd tutorial istället för ett renodlat spelläge.
Sedan delas upplevelsen nästan upp i två personligheter.
Story Mode känns som den där omtänksamma farföräldern som alltid har ett vänligt ord över och gärna stoppar ner en liten present i fickan innan hemgång. De animerade mangasekvenserna och berättelsen ger spelet ett lugnare tempo och ett sammanhang. Här får du följa Ash, Bergamot eller Cyrilla genom deras respektive berättelser. Däremot hade jag gärna sett större variation mellan kampanjerna. Banorna och skeppen känns i stora drag identiska, vilket gör att det framför allt är handlingen som skiljer dem åt.
Sen har vi Arcade Mode.
Om Story Mode är den snälla farföräldern är Arcade den äldre släktingen som gått livets hårda skola. Den tar med dig upp på fjället, lär dig göra upp eld, bygga en generator av ett par kottar och förväntar sig att du klarar dig själv när mörkret faller. Här finns Truxtons verkliga själ. Det är här varje misstag straffas och varje seger känns förtjänad.
För den tävlingsinriktade spelaren finns dessutom Arena, där fokus ligger på poängjakt och höga resultat. Vill du dela upplevelsen med någon annan finns även ett lokalt Team Mode, vilket känns som en fin blinkning till den tid då arkadhallarna fortfarande var en social mötesplats.
Kontrollerna känns precisa och utmaningen träffar en fin balans. Truxton Extreme är inte enkelt, fast heller aldrig brutalt svårt. Det krävs skicklighet, goda reflexer och ett visst mått av tålamod. När jag föll upplevde jag nästan alltid att det låg på ett eget misstag snarare än att spelet kändes orättvist.
Jag såg ganska snabbt ett mönster i mitt eget spelande. Bomberna användes sällan ute på banorna. De sparades till bossarna. Där väntade ett hagel av laser, projektiler och attacker som satte både reaktionsförmågan och tålamodet på prov. När en boss till slut exploderade kändes det aldrig som en slump. Segern var förtjänad.
Power-up-systemet fungerar också bra. Min favorit blev snabbt det målsökande vapnet, som gav ett skönt flyt under de mest intensiva partierna. Detta val av favorit rubbar spelbalansen då den vita laserns övermäktiga potential gör att den i princip raderar ut behovet av att ens experimentera med spelets andra vapen. Ett annat störigt moment är att uppgraderingarna smälter ibland in i bakgrunden. Vid flera tillfällen råkade jag plocka upp ett annat vapen än det jag hade byggt upp min spelstil kring. Det skapade mer frustration än utmaning.
Den enda invändning jag egentligen har mot speltempot är banornas längd. De flesta ligger någonstans mellan fem och åtta minuter. Det är ingen katastrof, snarare en vanesak. Jag är mer van vid kortare och intensivare banor i denna typ av spel där nästa boss väntar runt hörnet. Samtidigt finns det en fördel med upplägget. Sex längre banor ger utrymme för större miljöer och mer genomarbetade bossfighter än om spelet hade bestått av ett dussin kortare uppdrag. Checkpointsystemet känns däremot stundtals märkligt placerat och gör vägen tillbaka lite onödigt frustrerande, särskilt när viktiga uppgraderingar har försvunnit.
Truxton Extreme försöker aldrig uppfinna shoot 'em up-genren på nytt. Det behövs inte heller. Spelet bygger vidare på det som en gång gjorde Toaplan till ett namn att räkna med och lyckas samtidigt kännas relevant för en modern publik. För egen del är det här ett spel jag vet att jag kommer återvända till.
För varje fiendeskepp som exploderar känns det nästan som att den antika arkadhallen vaknar till liv igen. Doften av varma kretskort, svettiga sommardagar och Coca-Cola i glasflaskor med riktigt socker ligger kvar någonstans i bakhuvudet. Ibland räcker den känslan för att vilja stoppa i ett mynt till.
Big Walk's voice chat volume issue has been resolved with its latest patch, but House House are sticking to their guns on its overall design
We've all been there. You're out on a hike with some friends, solving some abstract puzzles for a purpose that's not immediately clear, when you get two feet away from your pals and they're as quiet as a dormouse. Or at least, that's been the case for a bunch of folks playing Big Walk, Untitled Goose Game studio House House's latest, as the secret Predator game's approach to proximity chat has made it a little difficult to hear your friends. But an update seemingly fixing the issue is here! Just don't expect to be able to hear anyone from any distance.
Fantasyförfattaren Joe Abercrombie berättar hur TV-spel utformat hans berättelser
När författare precis kommit igång med karriären får många rådet att helt enkelt läsa mer för att bli bättre på sitt hantverk. Att fördjupa sig i berättelser för att sedan kunna hitta på mer intressanta historier på egen hand. När författaren bakom bland annat The First Law och The Devils, Joe Abercrombie, växte upp blev även TV-spel en stor inspirationskälla för hans fantasi vid sidan av böckerna.
När vi nyligen träffade Abercrombie under Celsius 232 berättade han hur gaming under barndomem krävde att spelaren själv fyllde i många av berättelsens luckor. Abercrombie sade bland annat att hans första spelenhet var datorn Acorn Atom, 2K, men tillade att familjen uppgraderade sina datorer och spelmaskiner i takt med att han blev äldre och närmade sig tonåren:
"When, I suppose, when young people would be reacting to books. I was reacting to books, but also to video games. And in that era, I guess you had to fill in a lot of the blanks for yourself and in a way to kind of have your own backstories to characters. And so they were very, I think, powerful for stimulating the imagination. And so those are my first kind of writing experiences, in a sense, fleshing out the background to the games that I was playing when it was just a few pixels on the screen."
Vi frågade även Abercrombie om han någon gång skulle kunna tänka sig att skriva ett TV-spel, kanske ett moraliskt tvetydigt rollspel som vår intervjuare David Caballero föreslog. Abercrombie förklarade:
"It's a fascinating area. Obviously, that business is becoming so huge, so much bigger than film and TV, bigger than books. Over time, I'm sure it will become bigger yet. And so it is undoubtedly a fertile field for writing. But I think there's still a degree to which writers are somewhat at the mercy of the design and the programming and the kind of commercial elements.
It's a tough space to kind of slot into as a book writer. As an author, you have this total authority over what you do, which can be a pressure, but at the same time is a great deal of freedom. And so I'm not sure how I would now, as someone who's used to getting his way, respond to having to do as I'm told."
Det finns fortfarande möjlighet till fler filmatiseringar baserade på Abercrombies verk, och du kan höra allt om dem i vår intervju nedan.
WoW developers reflect on Midnight's first season—a world without AddOns, task overload, and Prey
This is Terminally Online: PC Gamer's very own MMO column. Every other week, I'll be sharing my thoughts on the genre, interviewing fellow MMO-heads like me, taking a deep-dive into mechanics we've all taken for granted, and, occasionally, bringing in guest writers to talk about their MMO of choice.
World of Warcraft: Midnight's first season has been… well, a bit of a mixed bag. While the launch-day offerings impressed me, patch content—the major thing that gets remembered in the expansion pack history books—has ranged from rather quite good to downright confusing (I still do not like the Folio).
And, to be fair, Midnight had a ton riding on it. It's the middle child of WoW's ambitious Worldsoul Saga and the first expansion where combat AddOns have been heavily hamstrung. As a consequence, every spec in the game was redesigned in some way. After 20 years of waiting, we even got player housing.
I have not envied Blizzard's position as much as I've raised my eyebrows at its choices, on occasion, and I think it's a marvel that things have pretty much gone fine. I like Prey, I've missed AddOns less than I expected, the remade Silvermoon is downright beautiful, and player housing has knocked it out of the park, bar some microtransaction nonsense.
I recently sat down with several developers from WoW, including lead encounter designers Taylor Sanders and Andrew De Sousa, as well as associate game director Paul Kubit and lead quest designer Rachel Vought, to ask them how they thought Midnight's first season had gone.
Broadly positive, is the answer—with the devs citing Mythic+, solo content such as delves, and Prey as bright spots. Kubit says: "I'm having a great time with season one. I am still this last week rounding out some of my own personal Mythic+ goals, trying to get my numbers as high as possible. But things that have been just a joy for me this first season have been—playing through Delves again, having another season of Delves to explore with a new follower Valeera … and also the addition of Prey alongside it.
"I think that the new feature of Prey, while not technically part of the traditional season, does have some seasonal elements to it, and it sort of played nicely hand-in-hand with how progress went through through delve."
That's something Vought echoes, too: "Having the Prey overlay, just doing outdoor activities, has been like such a delight—because we talk about optimizing the fun out of it, but it's like no, actually, I kind of do want the extra challenge while I'm doing my world quests, and it's a lot of fun."
Though she has been naturally psyched to revisit Silvermoon for the first time since the Burning Crusade, as well: "Going back to Silvermoon and getting to see [it updated], and getting to play through the story and all of that has just been incredible for me as a player. I've also surprisingly been enjoying delves and getting to play local stories, and obviously we're going to get more of those in Curse of Ula'tek as well. Continuing the story, the campaign, and also getting to explore the island."
While, to me, these all track as reasons to be satisfied with the current state of things—after all, I've written positively about them on this site—there's also the other side of the coin, the idea that Blizzard's breakneck pace has given players too much to do without a stern direction: Too many currencies, too many dailies, too many reputations and void assaults and delves. Kubit says:
"We always try to listen to as many players as we can in our game, and we find that—you all as players are not a monolith. You have vastly different play styles and vastly different preferences, and that means that—for as many people as who do feel that strange feeling, like 'there's too much for me, there's too much going on', there's just as many folks who are like 'I wish there was something new happening this week'.
"What we try to do on the reward side and incentive side is make sure that folks who are hungry for lots of new things to do," be it grinding or stacking cute furniture, transmogs and mounts in collections.
And, listen—while I empathise with Kubit here, with MMO audiences being particularly hard to please, I'm not all that sure this works as a simple case of taste. I've played other MMOs that simply give you a wide breadth of things to do, but WoW places a lot of these activities in a package of seasonal pressure. Daily and weekly checklists that will, at some point, become undesirable or even unattainable. The wider systems might be evergreen, but Midnight's also been laden with its fair share of FOMO.
An AddOn-less world
On the encounter design side of things, Sanders and Sousa are both enjoying getting to play in a space where a WeakAuras tech won't be able to code out a solution to everything—allowing them to rely more on memorisation, positioning, and communication-based mechanics.
Sanders tells me: "I think the encounter design team has been learning a lot as we try to design mechanics, in this new paradigm where players have, in many ways, less computational help in terms of the information they're getting in real time, and trying to understand what types of new mechanics players might enjoy in that world.
"You saw us experiment with this a little bit in the L'ura encounter, the final boss of Midnight, with the runes and the symbol mechanic," Sanders is referring to Death's Dirge, here, where L'ura marks players with an order of symbols that have to be struck by a laser in the correct configuration.
"It was fun for me as a designer (and as a player) to see different social groups that I played with, whether it was a pug or my standard raid group, develop different strategies to that. Each group had their own personalized way of handling it … I did hear about a group that had five different people remember the different symbols and repeat them in order. That blows my mind. I can't believe that that worked for a group. A friend of mine told me about that. I'm not sure I believe him."
That same design technique's going to be used for patch 12.1, as well: "We have a couple new places where we're experimenting with this in the Curse of Ula'tek update in the new raid, the Venomous Abyss, and as well in the new delves nemesis boss … You're going to continue to see us explore that a little bit as we try to find new ways to engage players in an AddOn-less world."
Sousa, meanwhile, says that the amount of players trying Mythic+, which has reached new records during Midnight, is also down to the lowered barrier to entry: "That's really affected even our core design for something like dungeons and Mythic+.
"You know, as you're aware, Mythic+ was very, very accessible in Midnight season one. Players are jumping in and really enjoying it. And in a world where we've pulled these things back, our design has allowed for us to emphasize some core skills, and not worry about the delta between folks that have complex add-ons and people that are playing with the base game, so we're seeing people engage a lot deeper as those (perceived or not) requirements have been lifted."
Sanders agrees, saying: "We've seen the package that players felt like they used to need to be able to, baseline, raid or do competitive PvE content shrink or or disappear entirely. So the base UI for the game is better than it's ever been, and we're very excited about continuing to develop that in the future."
Ultimately, the new state of affairs that WoW has laboriously constructed seems to be working for its development team—and while I'm not entirely convinced it's been all sunshine and roses, speaking as someone who has felt the exact opposite in my other MMO of choice, I can't say I prefer it when a developer plays it safe. On balance, I'm still glad WoW's been shaking things up, and I'm keen to see if Blizzard can keep refining its flagship MMO going into Curse of Ula'tek next week.
Best MMOs: Most massive
Best strategy games: Number crunching
Best open world games: Unlimited exploration
Best survival games: Live craft love
Best horror games: Fight or flight
Tour de France Femmes: Vollering’s late escape for yellow leaves Niewiadoma fuming
Victory on penultimate stage secures eight-second lead
Previous leader claims she was blocked by rival’s team
Demi Vollering took the overall lead from Kasia Niewiadoma in the Tour de France Femmes with a vicious attack in the hills behind Nice to lead the race by eight seconds from the 2024 winner, with just one stage remaining.
“It’s very special to be back in yellow,” Vollering, leader of French team FDJ United-Suez said. “Tomorrow I start in yellow and I will do everything in my power to keep it. So much can happen – it’s still a big fight.”
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