#revolution60

I’ve been meaning to write this post for almost a year and a half. Every time I’ve tried to write down all my problems with this game’s story it ended up quickly escalating into a college dissertation-length affair. This is my last-ditch effort to just get this all out of my system.

Before I start I will say that all of my exposure to the game comes from watching streams. I don’t own any Apple devices and the PC port has been “a week away from launch” since October of 2015. To some that might disqualify me from writing anything critical of the game since I haven’t experienced it myself. Fair enough.

This is not a review of the game, since again, I haven’t played it. Whether anyone else wants to buy the game or not is of no consequence to me. Buy it if you want, don’t if you don’t. Simple, yeah? There will be spoilers for Revolution 60  after the jump so if you want to avoid spoilers, do not read further.

And now for some fun.

Revolution 60 is a new iOS game from Giant Spacekat, which I understand to be a small game development company located in my favorite city, Boston.

In Revolution 60, you play a squad of "Chessboard" agents (think CIA) on a mission to do something in space. I could describe it more specifically, but I really don't want to give away any spoilers. Primarily you play as Holiday, the woman shown in the picture above. She is the assassin of the group, and theoretically the one best at combat. On rare occasions you will control Minuet, the commander of the squad or Amelia, the engineering whiz. You guide them through a thriller of a plot toward a conclusion that is tailored to the actions you have taken.

When I first played the demo, I thought of two comparisons: "Dragon's Lair" and "Choose Your Own Adventure".

Dragon's Lair was a coin-op video game released in 1983. By way of comparison, this is the same year that Spy Hunter was released, Arcade games at the time might have worked off a 256 color palette, and might have had video resolution of about 500 pixels by 500 pixels. Dragon's Lair was unlike any video game that came before it, and unlike most that followed. Rather than display sprites that were controlled by the player or a CPU, the game showed sequences of traditional cel animation from Don Bluth (most famous for "The Land Before Time" and its sequels). At various points during the animation, the player was expected to move the joystick in a particular direction or hit the sword button. Depending on whether the player did the successful action, the next sequence was either the continuation of the story, or (more likely in my case) a horrifying death for the hero, Dirk the Daring.

Dragon's Lair was a radical change in imagery and gameplay. I remember it being very popular, despite it often costing three to four times to play and resulting in far less playtime for people who hadn't memorized the sequences of joystick/button operations to succeed at the game. In some senses it was frustrating: failure to produce the exact sequence had terminal consequences, but on the other hand it was a lot of fun to be directing the actions of someone as well rendered as Dirk the Daring. (IMO, only within the last few years have we approached this level of graphic detail that was expressed in a game from 1983).

Revolution 60 is like Dragon's Lair, in that a lot of the game consists of pre-rendered action scenes separated by controller tasks such as drawing a circle, tapping a target, or drawing a line. Unlike Dragon's Lair, Revolution 60 makes it rather explicit as to what you are expected to do, making it a much more palatable game. (If you didn't know what you were doing, a typical Dragon's Lair game could last 40 seconds.) The effect is the same, however: by being pre-rendered, the action sequences can be much better looking and much better visualized than if the game were forced to keep the same perspective and dynamically allow control of the avatar.

Choose Your Own Adventure was a series of books, first published in 1976, which had the unique conceit of being written in the second person perspective. At the end of a page or two you were asked to make a decision, and directed based on your decision to a different page, where the story would continue, affected by the choice you made.  These books were fantastically successful in my childhood.

Revolution 60 harkens to that style by using dialog choices. Each choice alters a score representing an attribute of a character (e.g., the extent to which Holiday is allied with either Minuet or Amelia), and later in the game the prior choices restrict the options and direct the story.

If you remember Choose Your Own Adventure fondly, you should check out the "interactive novels" released by Choice of Games. They are text games operating under the same premise, and I've found them to be much better written in general than the original Choose Your Own Adventure books.

The combination of these two elements gives the game a very nostalgic feel, which is undoubtedly helped by its art direction. Each of the agents in dressed in fashion from the 1960's. The look feels like it could have been straight from an episode of the original Star Trek series.

A few days ago, I had the thought that beauty is intention, which is to say that the way to appear beautiful is to appear that you intended to look exactly the way you look. In this light, the characters in the game are gorgeous. The artistic style is very deliberate; Holiday's ridiculous hairstyle and exaggerated height are but two examples of the fantastic art direction in the game.

There is a third game that I thought of when playing Revolution 60: Street Fighter II. In Street Fighter II (and many games that were derivations of that same type of game), you controlled fighters that had particular moves that could be activated by a seemingly arbitrary sequence of buttons. The ones I remember were Chun Li's helicopter kick (up-down-up, powerful kick?) and Ryu's fireball (rotate the joystick from left-down-right, and then powerful punch?), but when I actually played the game I had memorized a fair bit more. Revolution 60 takes the memorization aspect out of it, but performing "special moves" in combat requires similar arbitrary drawing of circles and lines on the screen to represent those moves.

In some ways, I feel that this is a bit of sly commentary on gamer elitism. Skill at many games, including Street Fighter II and its ilk, requires memorization and the ability to move a joystick to draw a circle or a line, similar tasks made explicit in Revolution 60. A person who brags about how good they are at Revolution 60 is essentially bragging about how well he or she can draw circles and lines, which sounds downright silly. To me it helps pop the notion that skill in games is worth celebrating, but I honestly could be reading too much into it.

(It did not surprise me to learn that Amanda Stenquist, the Lead Animator, was a big fan of Mortal Kombat, one of the more successful Street Fighter II derived games.)

To sum up, it's a game that combines the best of Dragon's Lair with the best of Choose Your Own Adventure and combines it with a gorgeous artistic style, with gameplay that is easy to learn but seemingly difficult to master. (Having only completed the game on "Easy" mode, I feel like I am in for some serious struggles on the most difficult mode.)

I've played a number of different games on my iOS devices over the years. I think the only game that comes close to Revolution 60 in terms of making me smile, laugh, and have sheer fun, is Tiny Wings. Tiny Wings is and was a game coated in a sort of whimsy I adore, and it was tremendously successful (and tremendously simple). I have a sense that Revolution 60 has much better replay value, so it would not surprise me to decide, perhaps a few months from now, that it's the best game I've ever played on the platform. 

Overall, it's hard for me to think of a game that's been more fun to play over the last few years. SimCity, if it didn't have all the game-breaking bugs, might have been close. ESO was fantastic, but it was a $60 + $15 per month game, and even then it had its frustrations. My impulse is to call it the best game I've played in years, and almost certainly it's one of them.

If you'd like, you can stop reading now, because I think that's more or less a complete review of the game as intended. I think there is some social commentary inherent in the game (which, to be honest, makes the game even better), but I understand that some people don't care about that. Feel free to stop reading.

There is obviously some commentary inherent in a game in which every significant character is female. There is also obviously some commentary inherent in a game made by an indie developer with an all-woman staff. The commentary is inherent in its very existence.

I must admit that Revolution 60 first caught my eye when a friend of mine retweeted this tweet from Brianna Wu, Giant Spacekat's lead developer:

"In Revolution 60, the male gaze is unusually absent." pic.twitter.com/QZKEJRA8p0

— Brianna Wu (@Spacekatgal) August 31, 2014

She was citing this review by mookychick. At the time I read it, I knew absolutely nothing about Brianna Wu, Giant Spacekat, Revolution 60, or anything. I knew I had to give it a shot.

It is strange how the absence of something can be interpreted as social commentary. In the case of Revolution 60, the thing that is absent is sex. The agents are undoubtedly representations of gorgeous women, but there is absolutely nothing in the game that suggests they are sexual objects at all. The closest reference to anything of the sort is a reference by "Unknown" to a fiancé, but that would be stretching things beyond the breaking point. At no point does any of the characters move or act in such a way as to appear to be satisfying a sexual desire of a presumed male gamer.

Again, this is the absence of something. This is not a game that goes out of its way to say such a thing is bad, or to shame anyone for wanting that sort of thing. It just isn't there. As far as social commentary this is the quietest of whispers.

Yet this whisper, to me, has quite a bit of power, because it reveals a flaw that many other games have. I spoke in my last post about The Witcher 2's use of prostitutes as background art. By not including such schlock, Revolution 60 exposes such things as flaws in other games, flaws that are designed to distract a gamer from the actual game, which may not be as good as the gaming company would like.

Perhaps a typical male-dominating gaming company could have told the same story. But perhaps the reason Revolution 60 was able to do this is because they made a game with an all-female cast, with an all-female company. It certainly didn't hurt.

This game is brilliant, not only for what it is, but for what it isn't. To the extent that the gender makeup of the cast or the gender makeup of the company behind the game is relevant as to social commentary, I say we need more of that. But not because of some high-minded devotion to equality or representation.

I thought I'd put in a quick word for Revolution60. By now, if you're not coming back from a trip to Mars and are interested in tech, you should have heard of Brianna Wu 1. She has made headlines several times this past year in her quality of leader of an all-female developer team. I do not agree with everything she says, but unfortunately most of the facts she has exposed about our industry are true, and most of the sexist behaviors are still out there. The fact that a minority, including myself, are engaged into changing this does not seem to matter much, particularly in the valley, where the heart of the problem stands.

Anyway, Brianna and her team, after what seems like an eternity, have completed their first game and launched on the App Store. Having played the betas, I can only encourage you to download and play the game (hey, it's free with IAP). Even though I'm disappointed by he business model here, as it is the norm nowadays, I can only recommend the game. It is fresh, playable even by non-gamers like me, and should delight comic book readers. My take on it, from several months ago: that's Danger Girls in space. I did enjoy it, did complete it, and did enjoy the storyline(s). And the score is good. Go get it.