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Of all of the Amiga's classic games, few are remembered more fondly than Gods. Steeped in the familiar themes of Greek mythology while boasting fresh, original ideas in a genre known for its lack of creativity, Gods is considered by many to be the finest platformer ever programmed.
I do not share this sentiment.
It's not that I don't think that it's a well-made game, because it undoubtedly is. But, as with many otherwise excellent games, it's full of silly mistakes that keep it from reaching its full potential.
To begin with, the intro is fantastic (at first). It's the first thing that the player sees, and the Bitmap Brothers wanted to make a good impression with it. The music isn't really my cup of tea, and the Chaos Engine-like percussion and "ahhh-ahhh"-ing background chorus completely clash with the established Greek theme, but it's well-recorded, catchy, and clear-sounding. The blocky, shimmering Greek-style titles flash onto the screen in sync with the tune's rhythm, and that alone shows more polish than most contemporary games had.
That is, until the background graphics appear. The Bitmap Brothers had a penchant for keeping the Amiga versions of their games from looking any better than the ST ports - a move no doubt intended to boost the sales of the ST versions - and it rears its ugly, dithered head about 15 seconds in. There's a picture of a helmet superimposed over a stone wall, and it's rendered in about five shades of verdigris, gray, and lavender. It looks like a grayscale image with the contrast deliberately reduced in Photoshop - were it not for the copious use of highlights and shadows, nothing would be discernible at all.
After a while, it shifts to a portrait of the game's nameless hero (which looks completely different from his actual sprite). And it's bad. Not only is he rendered using the same shades of pink and gray for everything - right down to his rippling muscles being the same color as the plume on his helmet and the handle of his sword - he also completely lacks anything approaching decent proportions. His axe-wielding right hand looks more like a declawed lion's paw, his pectorals look like an extra set of abs, and his left elbow appears to bend sideways. On top of that, his helmet looks like a rejected design for a Bionicle character.
Still, you may be thinking at this point, all of this heckling just for some intro graphics? I concur, and I think that I should move on to the game proper.
On paper, it sounds fantastic. It has huge levels broken into four connected parts each, brimming with lever and key puzzles, teleporters, secret areas, and almost everything else that platformers do best. It has adaptive difficulty, catering to both novice players and experienced veterans without the need of a single menu. It even has a weapons shop, peddling some of the most destructive (and screen-occupying) weaponry ever seen in a platformer. It's every player's dream come true, right?
Actually, no.
The Bitmap Brothers, in their infinite wisdom, decided that their game design was so good that people would buy nothing else, leading to their being declared an illegal monopoly and fined millions of pounds. Actually, they didn't, but it's as good an explanation as any for why they crippled it the way that they did. And how did they do that?
By giving it the worst control scheme since the original Barbarian's. The unnamed protagonist - who inexplicably wears a black leotard and sports even more grotesque musculature than his intro portrait (His back has boobs. Four of them!) - responds sluggishly to joystick input, walks incredibly slowly, is unable to jump more than a few feet, can only jump in a fixed diagonal arc, cannot fire while ducking, and is generally a few sizes too big for the space around him. Pitfall Harry wasn't nearly as limited, and he was a 2600 character from 1982!
So, what gives? What happened to all of those features that have been de facto for the platform genre since the days of the NES?
Why, they've been incorporated into the puzzle interface, of course! Sure, you might want the ability to jump vertically, but wouldn't you rather turn to face the wall instead? Isn't it better to give up attacking while crouched if it lets you pick up items?
No, of course not! Why should its playability as a platform game be ruined because it has adventure elements? Look at almost any action/adventure platformer for the old Spectrum and C64 (and there are quite a few) - you don't see them forsaking the central elements of their gameplay for the sake of enhancing the more tangential ones. Why not just pick up objects by crouching? Why not have "up" orient the player towards the wall only when there's something that can be used? However, suppose that it really was necessary to compromise some gameplay features to fit the controls onto a single joystick. Suppose that it was the only way to incorporate the added depth and complexity.
Suppose also that the single joystick was inches away from a massive panel of buttons, one which would be more than sufficient for Gods's expanded control scheme, and which was guaranteed to be available to anybody who owned a computer, Amiga or otherwise. Yes, I'm talking about a keyboard, and it leaves the Bitmap Brothers with no excuse for their wretched, gameplay-destroying controls. Back in the day, the great Amiga Power mourned the extent to which it was overlooked by developers, and their sentiments still ring true.
Now, this wouldn't be so bad if the designers had actually bothered to design the game around its control scheme, making allowances that would render the control scheme "unique" rather than "teeth-grindingly awful". Flashback had some of the most idiosyncratic controls ever, but they were perfectly suited to the idiosyncratic gameplay - they'd be intolerable in any other platformer, but they added to Flashback's character. Gods, on the other hand, is structured like a typical arcade adventure, seemingly expecting the player to do things that just can't be done. When surrounded by fire-spitting goblins, there's really no good option for someone who can't fire while ducking - they can shoot and be burned by the flames, or duck and be mauled when the goblins walk right into them. That situation crops up frequently in Gods, and there are many more that are just as infuriating.
Still, even if a game fails at being fun, it can still be worth playing just for the atmospheric experience, right? Well, I prefer games that have both good atmosphere and good gameplay, but I'll take what I can get. As a game, I'd have to say that Shadow of the Beast II is one of the worst that I've played in my life, but the beautiful, otherworldly atmosphere that permeates it keeps drawing me back, even if I never last more than two minutes.
Gods, however, doesn't have that. The graphics, while appealingly blocky and suitably stone-like, are murdered by the 16-color palette size that the Bitmap Brothers inflicted on all of their games. They reuse the same shades of brown and gray for everything, and have more dithering than the average chessboard. Some may argue that this adds "texture"; I say that it makes everything look as if it's been wrapped in chicken wire. As far as atmosphere goes, Gods has it in spades - it just isn't actually Greek at all. If anything, the chunky stone blocks and heavy wooden doors look positively medieval. And, for all of the reverence that he gets, Mark Coleman really doesn't have a good sense of proportion. While this makes him good at pixelling grotesque beasts, it makes the hero himself look rather silly. I already covered his ridiculous back, but he's even more ludicrous when walking. Swinging his arms stiffly at his sides like a toy robot, he shuffles across the screen with a gait all his own - I certainly haven't seen actual people walk like that. The ST-quality scrolling only adds to the effect, and the screen doesn't move until he's near the edge, prompting quite a few unnecessarily close encounters with enemies.
And Gods doesn't even have the consolation of an in-game soundtrack. While the title theme is a high-quality piece of Amiga music, the only sounds that the player actually hears in the game are those of clinky-sounding items falling, clinky-sounding weapons hitting the walls, or the grunts of the hero and monsters. Occasionally, there's a screaming harpy or short tune to shake things up, but the sounds as a whole are sparse and echoey, and only increase the slight feeling of emptiness in the absence of music.
I don't want to be too hard on Gods, though. Even if the graphics look about as classical as a Renaissance Faire, and even though they're horribly grainy, they definitely have class. Coleman didn't get his reputation as a good graphician for nothing. And, although actually playing through them is a nightmare, the expansive, varied levels beg to be explored, and there's genuine satisfaction when the player finds a secret area - the game teases the player with items that are just out of reach, and the act of discovering how to get to them is rewarding in its own right. The weapons are also beautifully destructive, and the weapons shop adds a nice element of strategy to the gameplay. The game didn't exactly beat me over the head with its much-flaunted adaptive difficulty, but there were times when I noticed subtle adjustments to the enemy behavior. They may not save the game entirely, but the moments when Gods's potential shines through the layers of grime covering it are simply wonderful, even if they're few and far between.
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The player sprite is badly-proportioned, the scrolling is jerky, and the scenery is full of dithering, but the graphics somehow manage to look good in spite of themselves. The exploding faces when the warrior dies are cool, and the chunky stone blocks, while not looking remotely Greek, have a real sense of mass. The sheer number of sprites on the screen is also noteworthy.
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There's a rather high-quality title theme and rather high-quality sound effects, but there's very little in the way of substance or richness. Without an in-game soundtrack, Gods has a somewhat empty feeling.
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Gods would be one of my favorite games of all time if it had anything approaching playability. The lack thereof ruins what could have been a truly spectacular game - the controls are just too stiff and limited for it to be enjoyable. And what were the Bitmap Brothers thinking with that three-slot inventory? Still, it had some great ideas, and its potential shows through in many places.
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| Gods could have been great, but its good ideas were ruined by terrible implementation. |
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