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[PC] Seiklus

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Unread postby ChairTax » 18 Jan 2011 08:21

“Seiklus” is the Estonian word for “adventure” because, presumably, in Estonia, “adventure” is a verb that means “to engage in activity that is devoid of all risk, excitement, and peril”. Seiklus, the video game, is a collect-a-thon platformer whose very title manages to mislead its players by calling “unadventure” adventure. In Seiklus, there are 600 multi-colored orbs that are placed throughout the game’s open world at haphazard intervals. The only goal is to collect all 600 orbs. The occasional enemy threatens your path, but, alas, you cannot be killed, only returned to the beginning of the stage. (A threat that, at its worst, entails losing ten seconds of progress.) Adventure indeed.

But let’s back up. Seiklus is a platformer and, as such, it includes most of the mechanics of the genre. You can jump, run, scale ladders, swim, and, well, that’s about all you can do in Seiklus. You cannot kill the enemies. You cannot double jump. You cannot crouch. Seiklus is devoid of all the better mechanics that have been introduced to the genre to make platformers more complex. The game’s greatest failure, then, is that the mechanics you’re left with don’t function with any complexity. The jumping in Seiklus, while more or less responsive, has not been programmed to differentiate between a long jump and a short jump. The swimming, on the other hand, lacks physics; you simply move in the direction you wish to or remain stationary in the water. So to is the act of “falling” broken, as falling gifts the player the opportunity to move very quickly left or right in an overly-forgiving manner.

But even if Seiklus is a bare-bones platformer (which it is), it should still be capable of a little depth and complexity (it’s not).

You see, one could forgive the awful MS Paint backgrounds and sprites of Seiklus if the game were to utilize the fact that it’s a platformer to its advantage; a precariously placed orb—requiring a deftly carried-out jump, for example—would impart a challenge that, if coupled with the ability for your player to die, would then justify the minimum requirements for “adventure”. Or so one would think. Rather, the mechanics in Seiklus are so poorly developed that there is literally nothing that could become challenging and, therefore, rewarding. A precariously placed orb would either be easily reachable or impossible to reach. Seiklus removes all possibility for challenge.

Thus, the only way one could write about “skill” or “challenge” with regard to Seiklus would be if they were to mistake “luck” or “idiocy” for either of those things: secret and hidden areas are everywhere, of which only a handful make their presence known cleverly. The rest of the secret and hidden areas are placed arbitrarily and without any logical reasons for their being there. Capturing all 600 orbs is rendered an even greater fools errand by this fact.

So what does this leave? Well, the soundtrack to Seiklus is tolerable, but is so thematically different from the game’s environments that it always seems out of place. (And this is because the tracks themselves are nothing but unskilled imitations of the Zelda no Densetsu: Kamigami no Triforce soundtrack, whereas the game imitates other platformers by genre only.)

If there’s one thing to be praised about Seiklus, it’s that there’s hardly any pretension behind it. (At least, none that has come from the game's creator, cly5m.) A quick perusal of cly5m’s website yields nothing but comments that pan the game. But let us not mistake this self-deprecation as an excuse or, further, as something that allows Seiklus to escape criticism. Seiklus is a horrible game; a horrible game that also served as the antecedent to another horrible game, Knytt. Most importantly, though, is that Seiklus is a game and therefore deserves to be treated like one. On the contrary, cly5m’s website clearly demonstrates that the only adventure to be found in Seiklus is not in playing it, but in lambasting it.

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ChairTax
 
Joined: 24 Mar 2010 21:50

Unread postby zinger » 18 Jan 2011 11:16

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-qVq4ElvTk

How is that music even similar to Kamigami no Triforce at all? It sounds like stupid cracktro tunes.

The argument for why Zelda's music wouldn't work in Seiklus is bad. They do belong to different action sub-genres, but the music in Kamigami no Triforce is perfect for just exploring vast fields, dark caverns and even underground lakes, which is all you do in Seiklus. The games' tempi seem close enough too. Some of the Zelda themes actually work quite well in Seiklus, though the qualitative contrast between the music and the graphics is problematic of course.
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zinger
 
Joined: 22 Oct 2007 16:32
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Unread postby icycalm » 18 Jan 2011 16:11

ChairTax wrote:Seiklus is devoid of all the better mechanics that have been introduced to the genre to make platformers more complex. The game’s greatest failure, then, is that the mechanics you’re left with don’t function with any complexity.


That's just an awkward attempt to ape my reviewing style. So awkward it comes close to parody. I can't use this shit.
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