What's Stuck in Jack's Craw?

Jack Claw is a top-down action scroller built around an interesting mechanic: Jack's Claw.  The Claw is a Doc Ock-like tentacle protruding from the protagonist's right arm that can be used to grip, lift, smash, crush, and throw just about anything.  Unfortunately, the core mechanic falls down in execution.  The mouse controls for The Claw simply aren't sensitive enough to forcefully smash or throw anything.  The result is a very calm and considered Claw, too slow to have any fun with: the fun of wrecking things, slamming cars from wall to wall, throwing guys at high velocity into faraway dumpsters.  With all the physics and destructable environments firmly in place, it really is a missed opportunity.  Frozenbyte can attest to this, as they were forced to abandon the project to save the company's future.

Presentationally, the game is quite strong, if not a little cliché.  Jack has broken out of jail, on the run from the authorities in a rundown town.  The setup draws heavily on the comic book stylings of Sin City, from the [captioned] opening monologues to the 40s-era décor.  There's a hint of Tarantino in there as well, with Bombora-esque surf rock undercutting it.

At this point Jack Claw consists of only one level, and can be finished in under five minutes, so it's better that you go in thinking of it more as a prototype than a full game.  Having said that, the game does come with a level editor, so perhaps the story doesn't end here.


Jack Claw is a computer game developed by Frozenbyte.  You can download it as part of the Humble Frozenbyte Bundle.   You can also take part in the game's future on the Frozenbyte forums.

Capcommunity

I haven't felt this daft in a long time.  I've been gorging myself on press releases from Capcom for more than a decade and only now has it dawned on me: 'Capcom Unity' is short for 'Capcom Community'.  I only realised this as I was listening to Destructoid's Podtoid and they were discussing how community managers copped a lot of flak for corporate decisions that even they are bummed about.  When the discussion moved onto Seth Killian, Community Manager at Capcom, and the healthy relationship the company has fostered with its fans, I finally saw the title of their fan site the way I was always meant to: Capcommunity.

Of course, once I realised why it never dawned on me, that cloud of daftness lifted immediately: it's not my fault I didn't get it, it's Capcom's!

See, it all comes back to the basic rules of grammar.  If you want the end of the first word to form the beginning of the next word, they need to flow together.  Putting spaces or hyphens in between two words breaks that all-important flow.  In poetry, a hyphen indicates a four-second pause - that's the longest pause in poetry.  Officially, Capcom-Unity is hyphenated, however, many gaming news articles have named 'Capcom Unity' as the source over the years.  And that's why I've never read the word the way Capcom intended all this time.  So there.

And so it comes to pass that my humiliation has been replaced with indignation. 

Dear Capcom,

If you want people to understand your clever pun, you're going to have to put those words together.  And you're going to need another 'm'.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you:

Capcommunity.

Glitch

Glitch is the logical lovechild of Tiny Speck (the makers of Flickr) and Keita Takahashi (the maker of Katamari Damacy), but I must confess, I'm not entirely certain how to take it.  It definitely feels like a new breed of game; a strange hybrid between Blueberry Garden and a social network.

As someone who has been brought up on games, I felt that Glitch coddled me too much in its opening moments.  I wanted to explore this strange new world for myself, and work out how it ticks.  Nonetheless, I appreciate that I am probably not Glitch's target audience.  Once all the tutorialising is out of the way, the game does evoke a living, breathing world, ever changed by its inhabitants.  In fact, Glitch offers precisely eleven worlds to explore, each of which resides within the particularly imaginative mind of a giant.  Players interact with most objects and creatures in the game, and some actions have a tangible and lasting effect on the game's environments.  Players can interact with each other as well, and while the feeling of community really contributes to that sense of a living, breathing world, some of the social networking elements honestly feel like a distraction to the game itself.  I take my hat off to whoever can manage to multi-task these seemingly disparate elements.

There are energy and mood levels to attend to as well, which again feel like a distraction - an unnecessary game-y element - to the game's explorative core.  It didn't take me long to fill my inventory with food items (designed to increase my energy and mood levels) but I never seemed to need them.  Your avatar has experience levels as well, which at least gives you something to shoot for.

In a way, Glitch lacks confidence in the attractiveness of its core gameplay, and I don't think it should.  I would love to see the game shed its unnecessary game conventions and social networking elements to put the spotlight back on the fresh and the new.  The prospect of building and shaping an imaginary future with other players is something too compelling to pass up.


Glitch is a web-based massively multiplayer online game designed by Tiny Speck and Keita Takahashi.  Sign up here to play the game (there is a waiting list).