Videogames may be becoming more sophisticated, but we still crave a compelling, fun quick-fix now and again. Which is where the superb Cut The Rope comes in…
Back in the late 70s and 80s, when the arcade game was in the middle of its golden age, the short, sharp gaming experience was king. The kind of games whose controls and objectives could be grasped within a minute, but at the same time, required quick thinking and lightning-fast reflexes – games like Galaga, Pac-Man or Donkey Kong.
They were easy to pick up, but actually mastering them was a very different proposition – Donkey Kong, in particular, is infamous for its astonishing level of difficulty.
What’s notable about this particular brand of quick-fix, arcade-style gaming is that, as the medium has constantly chased evolving technology, introducing players to ever more complex systems, more diverse objectives and sometimes beautiful virtual worlds, those earlier game forms have endured.
Now more than 20 years old, Tetris is still among the most played games on the planet, and still influences programmers even today, as the numerous homages and twists on its classic gameplay prove.
Casual gaming?
As the videogame industry has grown to become one of the biggest and most lucrative on the planet, two divergent strands of gaming culture have emerged, which are often summed up as hard-core and casual gaming. The fact is, though, that there’s not necessarily a divergence between the people that play such games – many gamers who love MMORPGs or Modern Warfare 3 also enjoy quick-fix games.
So while many of us, when we’re in front of our gaming PCs or sat in the living room playing on our consoles, will often seek out titles that will keep us absorbed for several hours, we’ll also look for games that can be played for five minutes at a time – on our mobile phones while waiting for an appointment, perhaps, or during an idle tea break.
Quick-fix, casual games, having spent several years apparently in the wilderness during the 90s, enjoyed a renaissance of sorts, thanks to the rise of independent programmers sharing their games on the Internet. Suddenly, smaller titles that wouldn’t have made much of an impression on major publishing houses were finding audiences. One of the big success stories, of course, is PopCap, whose puzzle game Bejeweled became the acme of simple-to-play casual games.
Mobile gaming
The appearance of Snake on Nokia mobile phones back in the late 90s was a seminal moment in quick-fix gaming on the go. It wasn’t the first game to appear on a phone (a version of Tetris appeared on a mobile in 1994), but here was a simple yet incredibly addictive game – one that had been around in one form or another since the 1970s – that could be enjoyed in an idle tea break.
Since then, the mobile gaming market has ballooned into a multi-billion dollar market. And with that growth, the games that have emerged have become increasingly well-designed and original.
Where early mobile games were often thinly-disguised clones of old arcade games, perhaps with a twist to their graphics or controls, the past few years has seen the rise of quick-fix games that stand alone as great games in their own right.
The most obvious example is Angry Birds, a simple puzzle game developed by the Finnish studio, Rovio Mobile, and released in 2009. Taking advantage of the touch-screens on modern smartphones, the game was simple to control and easy to pick up – multi-coloured birds, each with their own characteristics, were pinged at structures in order to make them collapse. Those collapsing structures in turn destroyed little green pigs – flatten all the pigs, and it’s on to the next, more challenging level.
Angry Birds’ fresh, distinctive graphics and addictive, intuitive gameplay came to exemplify all that’s great about modern mobile games, and rapidly grew into a phenomenon. The question is, with all those structures demolished and the pigs beneath them destroyed, what do we all play next?
Cut The Rope
Chillingo may have the answer in the shape of Cut The Rope. Like Angry Birds, its graphic design is clean and engaging, while its gameplay is simple to grasp and extraordinarily compulsive. The aim is to feed a ravenously hungry little monster called Om Nom a series of tasty sweets. The only problem is, those sweets are suspended from the monster’s hungry maw by a tangle of black ropes. With a swipe across the screen, the player must slice through the ropes, sending the sweets swinging down, pendulum-like, and perhaps picking up one of the three bonus stars as it journeys towards the monster’s open mouth.
As you may have gathered, a series of increasingly cunning level designs add numerous complications to this simple premise. Pinball machine-like bumper send sweets pinging off in different directions, for example, while bubbles make sweets float away on unexpected tangents. Only through carefully choosing which ropes to cut, and knowing how various objects and obstacles can be used to strategic advantage, can all 250 levels be conquered.
Cut The Rope is an addictive, cleverly designed game that is a natural progression for mobile gaming – its cleverly-programmed use of physics, and its colourful presentation, make it one of the brightest arrivals in quick-fix gaming for some time, and it’s little surprise that it’s won so many awards and accolades so far, including the 2011 BAFTA award for Best Handheld Game.
Like all the best quick-fix games, from Pac-Man and Tetris to Angry Birds, Cut The Rope hooks players in with a simple concept, and then keeps them enthralled with colourful, intelligent and downright devious level design.
You can find out more about Cut The Rope by visiting its website. www.cuttherope.ie.
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