AfterPad Game of the Month: January 2016
Welcome to the first AfterPad Game of the Month!
The Game of the Month Award is given to my favorite game from the past month, as governed by the following criteria:
- It has to be a great game (of course)
- It has to have well-implemented controller support
- It has to have a fair business model that is appropriate to the game
- It doesn’t need iCloud, Game Center, or universal device support, but it helps
- It has to either be released this month, or updated for controller support this month
That last point needs clarification. One thing I’ve consistently heard from gamers with MFi controllers: they almost exclusively purchase games that feature controller support. This means that many MFi gamers might have ignored a potentially great game on its release, due to lack of controller support. For this reason, when a game gets updated with controller support, it might as well be a new game. Because of this, the Game of the Month award might be given to a game that was originally released in an entirely different year.
Lastly, separate Game of the Month awards may be given for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV. A great universal game might sweep the awards, but sometimes different versions of a game might not meet every qualification for an award (I.E. the Apple TV version of a game might have controller support while an iOS version does not, or an Apple TV port of a game might arrive at a completely different time than the iOS version, or a universal game might run far better on iOS than it does on Apple TV).
With that out of the way, the first ever AfterPad Game of the Month award goes to…
Game of the Month: Momoka – An Interplanetary Journey
Momoka is an easy choice for Game of the Month: it’s an outstanding game. It hits all the right notes – classic gameplay, presentation oozing with personality, the perfect degree of challenge, great graphics, smooth performance, and a feeling that it was tailor-made – with love – for iOS.
Momoka is an adventure game, equal parts platforming and exploration. There’s a healthy dose of combat thrown in, but the emphasis is more on navigating the environment’s puzzles and platforms than it is on shooting. Like the best platformers, enemies are placed in such a way that they’re just another part of the platforming puzzle for you to navigate.
Momoka employs a relatively unique, visually stunning trick for its world design, and one that fits nicely with the game’s narrative: the planets you’re hopping to and from each have their own centers of gravity. A side effect of this is that the themselves are circular, wrapping around the center of the planet. This allows for a different take on level design – you’ll often find yourself wrapping back around the planet, zig-zagging downwards towards an objective at the planet’s core. You’ll even find yourself jumping from one planet from another, trying to avoid dizziness as you rapidly shift from one gravitational center to another.
This sort of “2D Super Mario Galaxy” style of gameplay had previously been explored in Soosiz, another iOS classic. Its hard not to draw comparisons between the two, but Momoka is very much it’s own game – the similarities are superficial. You’ll find similarities to other games, too, though I won’t spoil specifics. That’s okay – Momoka never feels like it’s ripping off other games. It takes ideas you’ve seen before, but spins these ideas in unique ways.
There’s a loose story here, and it fits nicely with its gameplay: you’re a girl named Momoka on a quest to save the world. Your galaxy’s sun is dying; nobody knows how to fix it, but you need to take your rocket ship out on a journey from planet to planet, looking for a way to (literally) save the day. This storyline almost feels like something you’d expect to find in a Final Fantasy game; I doubt that’s an accident. Much like the classic Final Fantasy games, Momoka has a way of opening up the world map as you play, making an area that you previously thought was the limit of the game instead feel like a tiny part of the universe.
Momoka’s few boss fights evoke the classic action-platformers of the ’80s and ’90s: bosses have a pattern you need to figure out, and you’ll need to time your attacks perfectly to dodge bullets and hit the boss in its weak spot. You will die on some of them, repeatedly, but these boss fights never feel unfair, and your checkpoints are never too far away.
Momoka takes advantage of another time-honored platformer tradition: much like the classic Metroid / Castlevania style games, Momoka likes to tease you by showing you collectables in areas you just can’t quite reach yet. You’ll find yourself revisiting earlier stages after you collect new items and abilities to 100% the game, easily blowing through enemies and traps that previously posed a challenge – always a nice feeling! More than that, it helps give you a bit more to do in an otherwise short game.
About 1/3 of the way through, Momoka presents you with a goal to collect 3 specific items on three planets; the order in which you tackle that job is up to you. I wish more games approached stage selection in this way – it helps an otherwise linear game feel more open.
Momoka supports all MFi controllers on both iOS and Apple TV – obvious since its on this list. Still, support isn’t perfect. You can only use the d-pad to move, which is less than ideal for those with certain MFi controllers. You can use either the X button or the right shoulder button to fire your gun, but for whatever reason, there is a bug with using the X button: after you unlock the grenade launcher, pressing X while jumping will also accidentally fire a grenade. The good news is, using the shoulder button or B instead of X doesn’t exhibit this bug. The fact that, even after this bug, I still picked Momoka as my Game of the Month, should tell you how great this game is.
There is only one criticism I can level at Momoka: I wish there was more of it. I managed to get 100% in about 6 hours, and I was still hungry. Don’t let that dissuade you – I enjoyed every minute of this game, and I’ll enjoy it again on my next play-through. If you like platforming games, this is the best $6.99 you can spend this month.
Runner Up: Venture Kid
Venture Kid provides a fascinating contrast with Momoka. Both games are love-letters to classic ’80s and ’80s platformers. Both games have superficially-similar gameplay mechanics. Both have Mega-Man-style guns. They even have similar level designs. But whereas Momoka brings innovative new remixes to the classic platforming fundamentals, Venture Kid instead looks backwards, sticking close to the formula of the games it references.
Lets get this out of the way right now: when I say Venture Kid sticks close to the Mega Man blueprint, what I mean is, if you swapped Mega Man’s graphics over the titular main character, this could be an NES Mega Man game. There is absolutely nothing original here. That’s okay – this isn’t trying to break new ground. Venture Kid is 100% focused on feeling like a classic platformer that could have existed on the NES.
Some people really seem to hate how close this feels to an NES Mega Man. They aren’t the target audience for this game. The target audience for Venture Kid is Mega Man fans with a strong sense of nostalgia for the NES. This audience has been poorly served by the official iOS Mega Man games, which are not the best ports. Venture Kid is the best Mega Man experience you can get on iOS. It runs vastly better than any of the official Mega Man games, which suffer from emulation issues. The price is low, with optional in-app purchases for coin doubling. Controller support is solid – I’d go so far as to say essential, actually, as the game is vastly more frustrating with touch controls.
A certain subset of gamer will find Venture Kid extremely cool, specifically because of how closely it sticks to the ’80s Mega Man formula. Myself, I’m conflicted – I think the best NES games hold up in spite of their technological limitations, not because of them. Game design has advanced in so many meaningful ways since Mega Man was released, and Venture Kid prides itself on ignoring most of those advances. This stands in stark contrast from Momoka, which takes some of the best elements of classic platformers and evolves them in meaningful ways, contributing its own identity to the history of the genre. For this reason, Momoka gets the nod for Game of the Month. But a more traditionalist platforming fan might prefer the way Venture Kid sticks to the Mega Man script.
Ultimately, both of these are outstanding games. If you want to play a brand new NES Mega Man – with all the strengths and limitations that entails – tailor-made to run well with an MFi controller on iOS, you should buy Venture Kid immediately.