GDC 10: 4Fourths, by Mikengreg

4:40 PM on 03.16.2010   |   Anthony Burch

18 comments

_{Each year, Gamma entrants are asked to make games under certain constraints. This year, all Gamma4 entries must be controlled with a single button. I plan to write up my impressions of all six Gamma4 games.}

I'm going to try to do a back-of-the-game-box summary of what Mikengreg's 4Fourths entails. Wish me luck.

4Fourths is a four-player cooperative boss rush game where each player controls one half of a spaceship. One player might be charged with controlling the vertical thrust of the leftmost ship, while the second player might control that ship's weapon systems (ditto for the other player-controlled ship on the opposite end of the screen). The goal of every level is to defeat a boss before the time runs out. Also, friendly fire is always (A) on, and (B) entertaining.

You can read my full impressions of the game after the jump.

It's fun. Not quite fun enough that I wanted to play it for hours and slap down twenty bucks for the opportunity to do so, but fun enough that I'd really like to see the mechanic further explored and honed in a reasonably-priced XBLA game.

Much like New Super Mario Bros, 4Fourths claims to be a game about cooperation, while actually revealing how easily friends can turn on one another. Thanks to the clear graphics and simple control scheme, it's always clear when someone is fucking up, and whom is doing said up-fucking. Did your volley of bullets hit the area juuuust below the boss's radioactive core? Looks like whomever is controlling your ship's thrust isn't doing their job. Did the enemy's shield disappear and then reappear without a single bullet hitting the core in the meantime? Your gunner is probably screwing up.

When everyone is doing well, 4Fourths is a perfectly satisfying, fun cooperative experience. Boss rushes are fun, and cooperation can be fun, and everything's fine. When everyone isn't doing so well, 4Fourths is an exploration of that seething, passive-aggressive anger that boils just below the surface of most relationships. It's a game about attempting to find the most polite way of saying, hey, maybe you should boost the ship a little higher so my eight hundred perfectly-timed bullets don't uselessly crash into the ship's hull. It's about trying to mask the noise of your irritated sigh when, for the third time, the dude controlling the other ship's gun blasts your ship and kills you without even noticing, or apologizing. Granted, this makes it all the more satisfying when you finally destroy a boss with less than five seconds left on the timer. All the aggravation and subtle disappointment in your teammates gets swept away in the time it takes for the boss's death animation to complete.

If there's anything outright problematic about 4Fourths in its current state, it's the fact that too much of your team's success hinges on the thrusters, and too little on the gunners. The intentionally imprecise thrusting controls (pressing the button gives your ship a boost, which means you need to rhythmically tap the button to actually keep the ship hovering in one place for more than a few seconds) clash with the too-fast firing controls: where the thruster needs to dodge attacks and carefully align the ship's gun for maximum damage, the gunner experience generally consists of mashing the button a lot until something dies.

There's no delay between shots, so the gunner never really has to time his attacks or think about what he's doing; the gunner can attempt a charged shot that does a great deal of damage and can miss quite easily, but I didn't feel like I had much reason to use it when I could just spam the fire button to unleash a rapid torrent of death on the boss, pausing only when the other player-controlled ship entered my line of fire.

Mikengreg is currently looking for a "publisher-type person" to help them develop 4Fourths, and good luck to them: though the mechanic needs to be tweaked and explored a little further, 4Fourths could definitely be the beginning of a really fun cooperative experience.