But the upside is absolutely filled with upness - it’s front-loaded with upness.
You place the paints on the canvas and you are absolutely not committing yourself to anything.
Akka Arrh review
Anyway: I think Jeff Minter works with code in a similar way.
Oh,Space Giraffeis Tempest again?
Then he started moving stuff around.
And then he started movingthatstuff around.
And then he was reshaping, reworking, seeing what pleased him and rebuilding everything around that.
Minter has said before that he doesn’t see his job as rendering a set design document in code.
This is true with Akka Arrh, I think.
In fact, maybe it’s never been more true than with Akka Arrh.
Also this: it started its life as an Atari design that never quite made it to full production.
True to form, when I started playing Akka Arrh, I started by mis-thinking.
Oh, I said, this is Tempest again, but inverted.
You’re at the bottom of the well and at the top of the well.
I had forgotten the process, of course.
The reshaping, the reworking, the serious work of seeing what pleases from one moment to the next.
The rewards of such a way of working cannot really be overstated.
Akka Arrh takes a long time to click - it did for me at least.
(That said, I do recommend switching out the default one-button control to a two-button option.)
But when it does click, it clicks on an entirely new level.
It clicks deep - subcutaneous deep?
Deeper still - a thrill I feel in my bones, my marrow.
This game puts you in the zone.
Oh god, how to explain this?
Any of these ground enemies caught in the shockwave will obligingly die and trigger their own shockwaves.
A combo starts to build and the point is to keep it climbing.
This is how you score big points!
Akka Arrh wants you to be elegant.
And then - did you see this coming?
- there are enemies who are unaffected by bombs.
These enemies require bullets, which you’re free to shoot in all directions from your rotating tower.
Bullets - did you seethiscoming?
- are earned by enemies you take out during bombs.
From this design, an awful lot of magic happens.
It’s chaos, but underneath it’s actually choreography.
Or at least the unseen audience lets out an empathetic groan.
Finish a level but only by spamming too many bullets?
You’ll be penalised for not holding onto enough of them.
Suffer an intrusion in your base and your bonus disappears.
Succeed, the game is telling you, by shutting off these basic avenues of not succeeding.
Play more and you’ll discover gimmicks and twists and one-shot moments of brilliance emerging from the central idea.
But still at the heart of it, the rigour that makes it so replayable: everything matters here.
It’s awful and brilliant - the panic of needing to be in two places at once.
How to find words for what Minter does?
All of which is to say: cor.
But that’s part of the way these games are made, right?
Part of the benefits of moving paint around.
Here, fully revealed, is a digital Romantic, and what he can show us is almost overwhelming.
