The barbaric growth of the terrier in the game industry.
You’ve probably seen adjectives like “a love letter to video games” countless times in recent years. Most of the time they describe a movie, animation or book, not a game anyway.
Since Spielberg laid various game eggs in “Ready Player One” in 2018, the “love letter” statement has been requisitioned by various products with “romanticism” as a selling point, even if it is not easy for gamers to buy it. .
But in my memory, the concept of “love letter” has long belonged, that is “Evolution Land” that I played in 2013. It was the first time I saw the game “growing up” in front of me, and I can still recall the novelty of that time.
Years ago, players commented on it more simply, calling it “a game that tells the history of video games”, but in today’s context, calling it “a love letter to video games” seems to be Also worthy of the name.
It coincides with the launch of the mobile version of “Evolution Land 2” in China. If you haven’t played it yet, now may be a good time to open this love letter.
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If you’re not familiar with this series before, I’d better start with the most classic opening performance of “Evolved Land”.
You wake up in a forest, and the picture is a smeared green unique to ancient video games (this is actually caused by the lack of hair color in the early games), your surroundings, no, there are only two directions for walking, your There is a treasure chest on each side.
Open the treasure chest, and what you will get is: 2D movement ability.
You can move up, down, left and right, and the screen space also expands
Going further is more treasure chests, and each treasure chest will give you a new “ability”, not a character skill, but a step forward to update the game. They may be the color of the game, sound effects, background music, or even different gameplay, which makes the game “evolve” step by step.
Among them, the most impressive thing for old players is not whether the acquired “ability” is strong, but realizing once again: those game functions that are commonplace in modern times all have neglected milestones behind them.
For example, “scroll scrolling” is a somewhat unfamiliar term for modern players, referring to the fact that the scene (the background scroll) in a 2D game can move (scroll) synchronously with the player’s movement. It seems so normal today, as if 2D games were supposed to be this way when they were born. But in fact, in the early 2D games, the reels were fixed, and the player had to go to the end of the current scene, and the scene would switch to the “next scene” like a stage curtain, accompanied by an unnatural pause. For example, 2D
The first generation of “The Legend of Zelda”, the ancestor of ARPG, is the representative of fixed scrolls:
But those fun games in childhood mostly support dynamic scrolls, such as “Contra” and “Red Fortress”. When we played these games back then, we couldn’t really realize the advanced nature of the dynamic scroll, but vaguely felt that “playing is smoother and more refreshing”. Now, by looking back, we can intuitively feel the game improvement brought by technological development – even on the same 8-bit host, the technological progress is very obvious.
This evolutionary process is embodied as a treasure chest called “Screen Scroll” in “Evolutionary Land”, and the same is true for evolutionary nodes in other game history. When you open a treasure chest called “16 Colors Display” and unlock “Colors”, the scrolls begin to color your world from left to right. At this point, your adventure has just begun.
This is the beginning of the first “Evolutionary Land,” and there’s another — you’ve probably heard of it — a classic success story behind it.
Land of Evolution was born out of the Ludum Dare 48-hour game-making competition. Ludum Dare is a well-known online game making competition. Participants complete the game quickly and well under given events and themes. So far, many well-known independent games are inspired by Ludum
Dare, for example, players are familiar with “Mini Subway”, the domestic game “Candleman”, and last year’s little popular “LOOP HERO”.
Under the theme of “Evolution”, producer Nicolas Cannasse defeated 1,400 contestants and won the championship with his golden idea of ”evolving” game history in the game.
Producer Nicolas is that kind of genius producer. He started making video games at the age of 10 and developed the Haxe programming language by himself. After the establishment of Shiro Games studio, “Evolution Land” became their first work – a only in Ludum
The game was downloaded 300,000 times in Dare’s demo.
Nicolas Cannasse (1st from right)
There is also an episode in the middle. Shiro Games studio, known for “Dune: Spice Wars” and “Northgard”, initially thought that its first work would be “Until”
“Dark”, a multiplayer online game with the theme of adventurers exploring the world, but due to limited development, there was no follow-up. The birth of “Evolutionary Land” happened to save Shiro, and the game sold a full 600,000 copies— -It was more than ten times higher than their own estimate of 50,000 copies, earning them the first pot of gold.
Although born by accident, Land of Evolution did not succeed by accident.
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The game mode of “Evolved Land” is to “evolve through its structure rather than content”, but its own content also has many tribute elements. For example, the game itself refers to classic games such as “The Legend of Zelda” and “Final Fantasy”. Clink, the protagonist of the game “Evolution Land”, is a combination of Link and Claude in terms of body shape and name.
For example, some lines that suddenly make people smile: Until I get an arrow in the knee…
But if you want to develop a sequel to the game, the producer must face another problem: the previous game came from a game production competition, and its core lies in the golden idea of ”evolution”, but
How should players of the previous game who have already consumed this idea accept the “do it again”?
As a result, “Evolutionary Land 2” is very cleverly done, because it makes the theme of “evolution” into a story. The protagonist group can travel through time and space in the plot, and the games with different screens represent the timeline of the past, present and future.
In terms of design logic, the previous generation of “Evolutionary Land” provided players with a sexy game skeleton, and the second generation did better is to make it more like a real game, not only Sticking to the framework of the first generation, from characters to interactions are more vivid.
The previous work “evolves through its structure rather than its content”, this one makes “evolution” also part of the game content and can serve the narrative performance.
The beginning of “Evolved Land 2” will make players feel like returning to the first generation, but then the plot will take a huge reversal.
In terms of element fusion, “Evolution Land 2” is also significantly better than the first generation. The previous game is somewhat fragmented, and the scene switching is often a bit unnatural. This fragmented game mode has also been optimized, which has been improved in terms of viewing and playability.
But the unique temperament of the game has not changed. On the surface, it looks like an orthodox JPRG, but in the process, it may suddenly transform into a puzzle game, card game, music game, and even fighting game.
Relying on the unique game system, the most interesting part of “Evolution Land 2” is the unique gameplay derived from it. In a maze in the middle of the game, the protagonist needs to solve the puzzle according to the information difference in different dimensions through the continuous conversion of 3D pictures and 2D planes. This puzzle is not difficult, but it is indeed one of the most interesting parts of the game.
The upcoming national server has also been adjusted in terms of playability, optimized the operation of some levels that were slightly distorted due to too many gameplays in the previous mobile version, and added the gameplay of “Tower of Lords”. Players can start bosses here
Rush challenge and relive your friendship with monsters. And players don’t need to worry that the game will become “krypton gold”. The mobile version of “Evolution Land 2” is still a one-time paid game. The price of the game is 18 yuan (original price 25 yuan).
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According to the producer Nicolas, he will mix various game forms into a game, which depends entirely on his gaming experience as a child: playing “Super Mario” and “Civilization” at the same time is completely different After growing up, the desire to make different types of games was born.
From this point of view, “Evolution Land 2” should be more in line with Nicolas’s idea of the ideal game back then. After learning from the experience of the previous work, this later work has a more complete game structure, richer game details, a larger hodgepodge of game forms, and, more memes.
Most meme players can easily crack, such as Super Mario’s gold coin bricks:
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles played by squirrels in the arena:
The “Metal Gear” stalk who escaped from prison in a box:
Mewtwo in the lab:
There are also some parts that are not so easy to understand and contain a lot of tribute content. For example, when the protagonist was asked to choose a name in the arena, the names provided were a tribute to “Super Mario”, the previous work “Evolution Land”, “Metal Gear”, “Wonder Woman” and “Terminator”.
In order to make it easier for players to accept the meaning of stalks, the national server launched this time has also worked hard on localization, optimized the Chineseization of the original PC version, and the game copy is easier to read. For example, the picture below is the Chinese version of the name of the PC version of the arena. Some of the names are difficult for players to respond to, and they may miss the opportunity to smile.
Chinese version of the original PC version
There are dozens of large and small memes in the game “Evolutionary Land 2”, but since explaining memes is like explaining jokes, I won’t go into details here, leaving some suspense for players who haven’t played it yet.
For producer Nicolas, it’s not so much a meme, it’s better to say that these are the “game elements” he wants to pay tribute to. Each element is part of the era they belong to, and some of them, which are more niche, have become It’s getting harder and harder to see, almost lost.
With a large number of “elements” placed, “Evolution Land 2” is like an awakening of the ancient video game culture, but in a more intimate and gentle way. Even if some players don’t understand or understand, it doesn’t matter, it can also become a “slight self-mockery” of old players’ memories of the past.
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It seems that we can once again understand the original definition of “Evolutionary Land”: a game that tells the history of video games. In the past, most games are screened in the players’ minds layer by layer, and the things that are retained in the end become fragmented and difficult to splicing. In the end, people compile the last remaining memories in the game into “stalks”.
The stalk almost grows with the game, and it even grows faster than the game. It can be passed on from ten to ten, and it can even appear suddenly in places that have nothing to do with the game, making people thousands of miles away recall the few words in the game.
For example, some of the most popular audio material on domestic short video platforms is actually the sound effect of infiltrating and being discovered by the enemy in “Metal Gear”.
Today, the short and fast Internet culture has given birth to the same short and fast meme culture. In the daily rapid circulation, the meme culture born out of the game has become its own school, and even has the potential to feed back the game.
The “hot stalks” known to some netizens have also become the best topics for developers to get started with. Last year, there was a game called “Bamboo Rat: Survive”, which was created by borrowing the current hot topics. Although most of these games are still immature, players can somewhat appreciate the ingenuity of some of the producers.
But now, the games spawned by the stalk culture can already carry a heavier value. Not long ago, a player made a “Home Isolation Simulator” by himself. The game mode is similar to “Life Reopening Simulator”. Hundreds of events are put into the game. Because the content and events The resonance generated is easily accepted by the players.
Maybe in the future, we can not only miss the game through the stalks, but also miss the stalks in the game and recall the era behind the stalks. Whether it is “Evolutionary Land 2” or “Home Isolation Simulator”, they provide us with a lot of slices of reality – when someone revisits many years later, they will focus on the ACG cultural elements that were popular once, see What’s happening right now.
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