When I were
a young ‘un the Star Wars films were
re-released in the cinema. I went with the Beaver Scouts and found myself
watching A New Hope, despite actually
wanting to see Who Framed Roger Rabbit-aping
basketball extravaganza Space Jam. You
see: our lovely-yet-rapidly-aging leaders thought a film about a traffic jam in
space would be a bit boring for a bunch of eight year olds, which is fair
enough, however off-target their interpretations of the conspicuously
vehicle-free poster were. At the same time the lovely people at Walkers crisps
decided that all the children, regardless of their moviegoing preferences,
would benefit from sharing in the great warmth generated by the beloved
cinematic series. They started hiding little plastic
Pog-like disks in bags of their delicious snacking aids, all of which were
emblazoned with a precious image from the hallowed Star Wars history books. I never managed to get a full set of
fifty, but that wasn’t really the
point; I satiated my internal hunger to seek stability and security for a
bit and managed to help a
$10billion-plus corporation achieve its lofty profit goals for the year. That’s
a win-win all day long
in my mind.
The Star Wars franchise has, according
to the Internet, generated almost two and a half times more revenue from
everything but the films (that’s
merchandise, licensing deals and the like) than it has from everything that is the films (that’s theatrical and home
releases). It’s this titbit of information which leads us on to the WWE and
Doctor Who; two more ‘entertainment products’ squarely aimed at children but
which are nevertheless widely enjoyed by adults, whose continuing financial
viability is significantly aided by the waves of tat upon which they ride. Both
provide their avid fanbases with ample opportunity to declare their financial
allegiance to them. Their collective merchandising offering ranges from simple
action figures, DVDs and t-shirts, to the more worrying products for the watch,
jewellery and belt buckle demographic. Eventually we end up at the ludicrously
esoteric levels of tasteless
celebrations of fallen employees you never really liked, Christmas
danglies and fetching
thirty quid TARDIS jumpsuits, all of which I find distasteful for varying
reasons. Oh yeah, they both have card-based free-to-play games for your mobile phone as well.
Doctor Who: Legacy and WWE
SuperCard are both very different really. The former is a twist on match
three puzzlers, while the latter is basically Top Trumps
with wrestlers replacing the classic cars or notable roundabouts of yore. However,
and here’s the rub: both games’ mechanics - Legacy’s
being matching orbs in a novel way, and SuperCard’s
being, hmm, comparing numbers I
suppose - are heavily entwined with a collectible card game (CCG) framework.
Herein lies their more nuanced similarities and differences and, it could be
said (I am), where each of them will live or die in the long run (at least
inside my phone).
Legacy operates in a very similar way to Puzzle Quest (though it’s not as good
as, say, 10000000),
in that you match up coloured doodads in order to power attacks. FOR INSTANCE:
Rory “All The Non-Dorothy Characters Form The Wizard Of Oz” Pond is green, so
matching a load of green orbs allows him to attack. You build a team of six
characters, each of which is trapped inside a coloured collectible card, and take them into battle against all of your
favourite foes from the television series. Each success grants you experience
points with which to upgrade your team, allowing you to fine tune their Attack, Heal and Health stats, which when combined gives you your overall
battle-readiness-ness. It’s quite
simple really.
SuperCards is markedly
less involved. As with every other version of TopTrumps you’ve ever played, you make a hand of cards with a few
different stat categories, here they’re wrastlin’ stuff like Charisma and Power, and you compare them sight-unseen to another player’s hand. A
couple of booster cards can be taken into ‘battle’ as well, which can be used
once within a best-of-three match to top up your stats for a single bout of
card comparing. Win a match and you get two randomly-generated cards as a
reward, lose and you only get one. That’s about it for the base-game and it
doesn’t get any more complicated the longer you play: three bouts (regardless
of whether someone wins the first two, bizarrely), five cards and thirty
seconds of your life.
The hooks
really come out in these two games when it comes to upgrading your digital paper
men and women. As I said, Legacy
handles stat increases in the time-honoured RPG way of experience points gained
from battlin’. The stickler comes when you hit a card’s level cap, which is
initially at an easily attainable level ten. Instead of waiting eighteen months
for an expansion, however, you can punch through this gender-neutral glass
ceiling by collecting time shards wot
get dropped randomly while you battle. Each episode-themed chunk of the fun
drops specific shards, so you’re going to have to get used to playing the same
three of four battles in a loop if you want to prevent all that juicy experiential
goodness going to waste. This is despite it still
going to waste as you fruitlessly grind the episodes, such is the miserly rate
at which these precious trinkets give themselves unto you. For context: the
first cap lift requires, I think, five or six shards of differing types, which
left me replaying the Snowmen level
over forty times just to get the four
shards I was missing for two (TWO!)
of my cards.
SuperCards is a bit more generous with its upgrade system
(can you see which way I’m beginning to lean here?). In a title where the
gameplay is entirely based around
fiddling with its cards, it’s quite fitting that the powering-up of those cards
is wholly based around the other cards in the game about cards. In that
wonderful Ouroborean loop of RPG item mechanics, cards are upgraded by
sacrificing other - not necessarily lesser - cards at the altar of
Individualism. Say you’ve got an uncommon Summer Rae, you can pump a load of
common Daniel Bryans, Big Es and AJ Lees into her card and have her stats soar
into the stratosphere of skeuomorphic pretend greatness. Do it again with a
duplicate Summer Rae card and then you can combine the two bad-boy paper ladies
into one, Pro Version Summer Rae,
ripe for a bit more upgradin’. This can be done right up through the expected
colour coded totem of RPG rising rarity, until she’s the envy of all the
anonymous people you aren’t actually playing against on the Internet because
the game makes all your opponents’ choices for them. MAGIC.
The
fundamental difference between each upgrade system, I feel, stems from what the games want to be. Legacy wants to be a proper, respectable
match three puzzle game first and foremost, just without the leper-like stigma
of gating progress with an energy system (see above). SuperCards, I’d say, is pretty happy just being a quick-fire source
of constant, bite sized stimulations. Without power-ups or the kneejerk “buy
more goes” revenue streams, the characters and the upgrading of them is the
only real way Legacy can generate
some money. Character cards drop randomly and about as infrequently as the
shards do, meaning that while there is indeed no energy gating, what we end up
with is an ability to play for long stretches which quickly becomes an obligation; as there is no way to
comfortably progress without grinding heavily or, of course, spending some
cash. This problem, I feel, is further exacerbated by the locking of particular
shards and characters to specific scenarios, doubling up the fatigue by making
a repetitive activity formulaic, as you always battle through the same enemies
in the same configurations in the same order. Every time.
While SuperCards is also heavily reliant on
grinding - fully upgrading even a common card takes tens of its contemporaries
- much of the strain is placated by the randomised nature of most aspects of
its design. The rewards you receive from your matches are always an unknown, so
too are any cards you purchase from the shop as you buy them blind, just like
real life CCG booster packs. Furthermore, the matches you fight are all against
AI-controlled versions of players just like you, so the wrestler cards, boosts
and stats you’ll compete against are always in flux. That the pace of these
matches is so brisk - thirty seconds or so, as I say - further assists the game
in holding your attention. With SuperCards
it’s not that you aren’t spending
almost all of your time grinding for better cards, solely to enable you to
attain even better cards, it’s just that
the piecemeal rewards and breathless pace roll together effectively enough that
you’re swept up in the buoyantly jubilant atmosphere.
I think
both games as they stand now play to their respective audiences quite well.
Looking at message boards and marketplace reviews it’s clear that Legacy has Whovians rapt. It has successfully grabbed them with the promise of
a bit of a story (I didn’t like it); the ability to purchase and hone a very
specific team of one’s favourite characters; as well as generally being filled
with inordinate amounts of Doctor-related stuff.
Which is great, but the game part of it is so protracted that - even with my
deepish fondness for the source material - I just can’t envisage myself going
anywhere near its final levels. SuperCards,
on the other hand, in being distinctly average and entirely unambitious in its exploitation
of loot-lust,
has been created in a way that it almost entirely precludes failure. It is
compulsive, constantly rewarding and imminently consumable: it’s the perfect
recipe for a successful mobile game.
A couple of
weeks ago Tami Sigmund wrote of her
frustration at the lambasting free-to-play games receive quite regularly. I
myself have written around the topic a couple
of times
recently, and feel that between Doctor
Who: Legacy and WWE SuperCard we
have two examples of free-to-play games which, as Tami was keen to stress, are “beautiful
creations that delight players”. It is a fallacy to call all games of their ilk
exploitative and shallow, especially when we have examples happily refuting
such assertions. At their heart they are both making money from their audience’s
love of and investment in characters: it’s just more merchandising, nothing
more. I might not enjoy the way they gently (or not) push me towards their
online stores, but I can’t fault them for trying. At the end of the day I’d
rather you bought a four quid digital Hulk Hogan trading-card-that-you-can’t-trade,
than a four quid Hulk Hogan keyring - or any keyring for that matter. But what
do I know; I wanted to go see Space Jam
over Star Wars, a film not about a massive sci-fi traffic jam. Which,
Beaver Boss - just for the record - wouldn’t have been that bad in the form you
imagined: Doctor Who did just that ten
years later in two faasand and seven.
(Still haven’t seen Space Jam, either.)
(Still haven’t seen Space Jam, either.)
Because
I have no personal creativity whatsoever, I’ve set up one of them Patreon pages
wot a lot of other writers have got themselves these days. If you like my
thought process and fancy helping me legitimise my type of video game criticism
to a terribly unsupportive girlfriend and the wider world, then please consider
not donating to my peerlessly altruistic cause. It resides here: patreon.com/ashouses. Chrz.
