User:人间百态/Ziggurat

Ziggurat
File:Ziggurat cover art.jpg
类型	射击游戏
平台	iOS
开发商	Action Button Entertainment
发行商	Action Button Entertainment
模式	单人
发行日	2012年2月17日 (2012-02-17)

《Ziggurat》，是由Action Button Entertainment开发，上架于iOS平台的一款复古风格的街机射击游戏。该作为Action Button游戏工作室开发的第一款游戏，玩家在该作中将扮演世界上最后一个人类，站在通灵塔的顶端与来袭的外星怪兽作战。玩家可通过触摸控制操纵角色射杀敌人，但角色若被敌人击中也会死亡。该作采用16bit绘图和8bit音乐风格的背景音乐。Action Button游戏工作室的设计师蒂姆·罗杰斯（Tim Rogers）从《愤怒的小鸟》中想到了该作的创作灵感，并在成立Action Button游戏工作室后于2012年2月17日发布该作。

该作在评论聚合网站Metacritic上获得了“普遍好评”的评价。评论者们称赞了该作顺滑的操作和简洁的界面风格。《時代雜誌》将该作评为在第三代iPad上最适合游玩的游戏之一。

玩法

File:Ziggurat screenshot.jpg

玩家正准备攻击从屏幕两侧出现的敌人

玩家操纵的角色作为“地球上最后一个人类”，站在位于世界之巅和时间尽头的山峰上，消灭不断来袭的单眼外星人。玩家可以用激光步枪攻击敌人，但角色若被敌人击中也会死亡。外星人的体型和外形各不相同，有像《塞尔达》中的玻石蟲一样跳来跳去的蓝色外星人，可以隐身的黄色外星人，会突然扑向角色的红色外星人，以及可以反弹角色攻击的巨型外星人。

玩家可以切换精准射击模式或是弹弓射击模式：前者需要玩家用手指在屏幕底部滑动来控制射击， 从而决定角色的射击方向；后者则和《愤怒的小鸟》的射击方式类似，玩家需要用类似使用弹弓的方式拉弓射击。玩家按屏幕的时间越长，角色射击的力度就会越大，当玩家松手时角色就会攻击。该作没有增强道具，也没有内置收费和暂停游戏功能，但有成就系统。该作还添加了亲社会功能，玩家可以在GameCenter或Twitter等平台游玩该作。

该作采用16bit风格的绘图和8bit音乐风格的背景音乐。玩家操纵的角色被设计成一名身着红色连体服的金发女郎。背景里飘动的云朵使用了运动视差，而太阳的位置则会随着游戏时间的累计而变化。背景音乐的音调会随着游戏难度的增加而逐渐升高。玩家死亡后游戏会出现“令人不寒而栗的电子尖叫声”和“一片血红的屏幕”。

背景及发行

Action Button Entertainment was founded by Tim Rogers. The studio consists of Rogers, Brent Porter, Michael Kerwin, and Nicholas Wasilewski, who have built all of the studio's four games from Ziggurat through Videoball. Their games are consistently simple in their aesthetics and controls. Rogers cited Angry Birds as the inspiration for Ziggurat. He found the former "an incredible collision of game design concepts" that worked, though he wanted the game to be more of a "driving range" where he could throw birds at falling stuff, an idea which he refined into a Raiders of the Lost Ark-themed game of slowly hurling projectiles that push back bats in a corridor with no limit of projectiles. When riding the Bay Area Rapid Transit from Oakland to San Francisco a year later, Rogers watched a man play Angry Birds as he perfected a level, whereupon Rogers decided to make his game idea. He asked his friend and indie developer Adam Saltsman for advice, who confirmed and encouraged Rogers's interest in trying Flixel, the Adobe Flash tools used to make Saltsman's Canabalt. Upon deciding that he lacked the expertise, he tweeted to recruit others on the project and received some responses that later fell through. Action Button Entertainment是由蒂姆·罗杰斯（Tim Rogers）创立的游戏工作室，由蒂姆·罗杰斯、布伦特·波特（Brent Porter）、迈克尔·克尔温（Michael Kerwin）和尼古拉斯·瓦西莱夫斯基（Nicholas Wasilewski）四人组成。罗杰斯称该作的创作灵感来自于《愤怒的小鸟》。他认为《愤怒的小鸟》是一次不可思议的游戏设计观念碰撞后的产物，不过他更希望《愤怒的小鸟》能像高尔夫球练习场那样可以向不断来袭的生物发射小鸟。他以这个想法为基础创作了一个为主题的游戏，即在一条没有弹丸限制的走廊中缓慢投掷弹丸，将蝙蝠击退。[10] 一年后，当罗杰斯乘坐湾区捷运从奥克兰前往旧金山时，他看到一个人在玩 "愤怒的小鸟"，并完善了一个关卡。他向自己的朋友、独立开发者亚当-萨尔茨曼（Adam Saltsman）寻求建议，萨尔茨曼肯定并鼓励罗杰斯有兴趣尝试Flixel快速编辑，即用于制作萨尔茨曼的Canabalt快速编辑的Adobe Flash工具。在确定自己缺乏专业知识后，他在推特上招募其他人参与该项目，并收到了一些回应，但后来都不了了之。 Rogers continued to work as a video game design consultant and met Bob Pelloni (of Bob's Game) at the 2010 Game Developers Conference. The two worked on games (including Ziggurat) together. Rogers put out a call for artists on Twitter with a submissions request of "fan art of the Japanese box art of Phantasy Star II", and Action Button artist Brent Porter replied in under an hour with an entry Rogers called "incredible". In mid 2011, Rogers decided to work on an iPhone game for a few weeks as a break from a larger project. While Pelloni was against the buttonless iPhone as a platform, Rogers said the team was convinced by his design document. He contacted an Internet acquaintance who had previously mocked up a design idea from Rogers's Kotaku column, programmer Michael Kerwin, who came through in a week with a version without graphics or sound, which was later added. Rogers recorded "some insane and rough music" with his band, Large Prime Numbers, that Andrew Toups converted into an 8-bit soundtrack in the "original Nintendo sound format" that Rogers found "breathtaking". His friend, QWOP creator Bennett Foddy, deemed the game "sort of interesting".

Six months passed as Rogers worked on a social game before he chose to make a few more changes: more enemy types and progression, graphics in the background, and so emailed people to continue development. Rogers described his own critical list of video games as having minimalist aesthetics with no overt story to tell other than through its game mechanics, and wanted the game to live up to those expectations. He fine-tuned the game with gut-driven decisions. For example, he applied a concept he called "sticky friction" from Super Mario Bros. 3 to the game's controls. One of the final features was the "scream sound effect" Rogers made with his guitar and "crushed" for a distorted and quasi-digital sound that he compared to those made by eccentric Japanese musicians whose records he owned.

Rogers explained that they did not add a pause option because he did not want non-game icons in the screen and because (like in Contra) players would die too soon after resuming. He saw the game as simultaneously a "snow globe of an electric toy" and a "gosh darn airtight hardcore video game" homage to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and Sega Genesis, and called Ziggurat a descendant of his hobbies: Ibara: Black Label and the Rubik's Cube. Rogers added that the game contained nine hours of scripted events and that the Archenemy alien "is only the beginning". Rogers produced a trailer for the game. It was released for iOS platforms on February 17, 2012. Two months later, Freshuu, then the game's publisher, signed Ziggurat as the first client for Gimme, an in-game achievement to "real-life rewards" incentive program. The game received two spikes in sales following positive reviews from journalists, and from a mock infomercial's release on YouTube, all postrelease and not at the time of launch. Brandon Sheffield, writing for Game Developer, thought that Rogers handled the postrelease well since leaking details to the press before the game was available may have impacted sales. Action Button later became the game's publisher.

Reception

评价
汇总得分 汇总媒体 得分 Metacritic 83/100 评论得分 媒体 得分 Edge 9/10 Eurogamer 8/10 TouchArcade Paste 9.0/10

The game received "generally favorable" reviews, according to video game review score aggregator Metacritic. It won a Destructoid Editors' Choice Award, and Time magazine picked the game as one of the best for the then new high-resolution third generation iPad.

Edge compared the game to a more pleasurable version of Halo: Reach's final scene. The magazine also compared the feeling of prioritization as a swarm of enemies appear to the feeling of clutter when stacking Tetris blocks haphazardly. Edge also called the red screen and sound effect that flashes upon the player's death "brash and lo-fi and unexpectedly poignant", for which they noted Rogers's interest in noise rock and credited the effect as "a beguiling personal signature". Alternatively, Paste's Joe Bernardi thought the sound did not accomplish what it intended. Joseph Leray of TouchArcade noticed how the guitar sound in Gears of War was reaffirming but the opposite in Ziggurat. Edge noted that nuances such as gravity's influence on the arc of uncharged shots make Ziggurat more of a basketball or golf-like sport skill than a "2D Halo". Edge awarded the game a 9 of 10, adding that it "prized immediacy" in a manner that matched the iOS platform.

Eurogamer's Martin Robinson said the game made him nostalgic for a score attack game from the early 90s that does not exist, and as such called Ziggurat "one of the finer simple score-attack shooters ... on the App Store" and an expression of the golden age of the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis. He called the game's mechanics "fine-tuned" and the gun's abilities collated from the best elements of other video games. Danny Cowan of IndieGames.com likewise found the controls "very well suited" for touchscreens. He also praised the chained explosions and shot charging as "satisfying", and compared the game to Missile Command in its allure. Robinson of Eurogamer said the game's deserving peers were Geometry Wars and Robotron for their refined play styles that make players predict what enemies are about to act. TouchArcade's Leray praised the game design and never reached a place where his skills plateaued. He advised against using the Slingshot mode controls.

Joe Bernardi of Paste put Ziggurat in a lineage of iOS games where the player tries to do a fun thing as much as possible before dying, including Canabalt, Bit Pilot, and Super Crate Box. He connected Ziggurat's mechanics to Rogers's longstanding interest in "infinite mode" without external rewards, and praised the charge time mechanics as "excellent" and the perfect awkward length to confuse muscle memory. Leray of TouchArcade praised its attention to detail, especially in the character sprites. Paste's Bernardi called Action Button's design restraint "admirable" and lauded the game's balance. He noted its "extremely focused shallowness" as defining, like a Dorito, and called it "one of the best iOS games [he had] ever played". Reviewing for ActionButton.net, indie developer Adam Saltsman called Ziggurat "French New Wave action videogame fan art".

Notes and references

Notes

References

External links

• 官方网站
• Official soundtrack