VVVVVV and Tape to Tape

I know I told all you wonderful patrons supporting me on patreon.com/PungryFTW that I was working on a Tim Rogers-esque podcast essay on Spyro: Reignited Trilogy, but that’s hard work to actually write! Tim Rogers spends full 8 hour (at a minimum) workdays just on editing a 2 minute segment of a video of his. I can’t even spend 8 hours over a week playing video games!

Alright, I confess. I was halfway through Spyro 2 on the Reignited Trilogy when my friends gifted me two games on Steam, VVVVVV and Tape to Tape. I had wishlisted Tape to Tape after trying its demo last year and feeling it was the courteous thing to do for a game in Early Early Access that I enjoyed–kind of like holding the door open after exiting a restaurant’s grand opening after only trying their free samples. VVVVVV was a game 100% off my radar, much like the game’s plot. Nothing other than coincidental timing links these two games together in any way… or is that true????

Well, here’s one link between VVVVVV and Tape to Tape: they can both be played on PC. And here’s another: they both represent the “indie trend” of their time.

VVVVVV is a game released in 2010, developed by Terry Cavanagh with a soundtrack composed by Magnus Palsson and additional support given by Bennett Foddy, of QWOP fame. Put simply, it is a fake retro 2D sidescroller indie game which was all the rage during the time of development. Games such as Braid (2008) and I Wanna Be the Guy (2007) were megahits that revitalized interest in 2D sidescrolling platformers. VVVVVV released during that indie zeitgeist, and was its own moderate success itself due to it.

I want to be clear that VVVVVV is likely to have been made by Terry Cavanagh regardless of the popularity of such new age retro games, but that it is unlikely it would have been as well received. Right now, the game has a 10/10 Steam user review score across 5,769 reviews. It has an 83 on Metacritic from critic reviews. People enjoy this game! And now that I’ve actually played it, it’s pretty clear why: the music is really good.

That’s a bit of a joke. Palsson’s tracks add a lot to the game, but VVVVVV has immense charm and easy-to-recognize gameplay charisma. You control the pixelated version of the stickman I draw as a “human” whenever I am forced to hand-draw something. You can move left or right. When you press the action button (shoutout Tim Rogers), instead of jumping like in a normal platformer, you invert gravity. You can only invert gravity with your feet firmly on the ground. You are required to invert, and subvert, and revert gravity all through a vast dimension to search for your crew of spacemen in order to escape this void your spaceship accidentally teleported into. You will have great difficulty as you quickly learn that the game is a puzzle game with timing elements rather than an action game. The game’s beauty shines through on repeated playthroughs as you learn how to more efficiently clear rooms that gave you extreme trouble your first few times playing them. I personally died on the screen below around 15 times the first time I played the game:

I really lived up to the room’s name, huh? What keeps VVVVVV from being extremely frustrating is the numerous amount of checkpoints that respawn your character should you meet an untimely demise. The game is split into 20 second chunks via these frequent save spots that fall into the simple pattern of observe, plan, execute, repeat. As the game progresses, you are required to do more inventive things with your simple abilities of moving left/right and flipping gravity, such as escorting another character, surviving in a tunnel with an endless amount of trash thrown at you, and planes that flip your gravity when you touch them, but the core loop of observe, plan, execute, repeat remains the same. It’s genius stuff, truly.

That said, I personally did not grow up playing Mega Man 2 or Super Mario Bros: Lost Levels, and thus have zero nostalgia for VVVVVV’s rose colored glasses gameplay. This game had to win me over on its own merits. And I will say, that music went a very long ways towards winning me over. In the same way that someone who has only seen Boss Baby will be reminded of the film whenever they watch another movie, VVVVVV reminded me of the only difficult 2D sidescrolling game I’ve ever played, Metroid Dread. That game too has frequent checkpoints and turns navigation into a major puzzle. Of course, that game came out 10+ years after VVVVVV and has a whole lot more interaction than simply moving left/right and flipping gravity. But it does explain to me why I really enjoyed VVVVVV but had no desire going back to master it. I still haven’t replayed Metroid Dread even though that game also begs you to redo the script faster and better. I think I don’t enjoy full mastery of games. Unless it’s Super Mario Strikers.

See, VVVVVV did get me mad. The Final Challenge killed me 41 times because there’s zero time to observe what to do. It’s one of the two times in the game you are put on a deliberate clock and have to observe while dying in order to not die the next time. These two segments are incongruous with the rest of the game. And I say that as someone who tried to clear most rooms off of instinct alone rather than thought. There is a certain level of genius behind Cavanagh’s design here, though. Playing a platformer is similar to running in real life, you feel best when in a flow state. VVVVVV generally encourages the flow state by setting up rooms in a way that allow a player “in the groove” to clear without thought and with constant action. Now, the whole game isn’t designed for this flow state–lord knows I died to a number of obstacles when transitioning between screens that I couldn’t have possibly prepared for without seeing them first–but enough of the game is made in a way to keep the player moving and grooving to the beat of Palsson’s tunes to make a nice little rhythm game.

VVVVVV shows its Braid influences with a deceptively abstract minimalist story. Your character finds missives on TVs in the abandoned dimension that seem like nonsense individually but tell a tragic tale of how some people before your crew found themselves in the same dimension due to a number of scientific anomalies and presumably passed away. Your character in the present moment is only concerned with getting his crewmates rescued, and never acknowledges these missives, nor does he acknowledge his ability to flip gravity. It just is for the character. Us players with our understanding of dramatic irony start to worry that maybe saving the crew won’t get the team out of the abandoned dimension, and that they’re just a thinly veiled metaphor for the loss of minimalist, pixelated 2D sidescrollers in the first place. No crew of game developers can fully revive the abandoned dimension of the 2D sidescroller–they can only teleport in with their own twist, and teleport out to something else once complete. Which is why Terry Cavanagh went on to make Dicey Dungeons.

All of these words are for me to say that I recognize how VVVVVV came out of the retro 2D sidescrolling zeitgeist and that I can appreciate how well Terry Cavanagh executed his take on the genre, but I simply do not have the same love affair with those games. I enjoyed VVVVVV but was not inspired to replay it for any of its low death achievements. I played both Mega Man 9 AND 10 on the Wii out of a weird feeling of obligation that I had to play them for modern historical purposes, and stopped playing both before I even cleared a stage in either game. Heck, the only truly old pixel game I’ve played was the GBA remake of Super Mario Bros 3, not even the original. I haven’t even played a real NES! So VVVVVV fell on deaf hands. Still liked it.

Time passed, and indie games started getting made by more and more people. Soon enough, the hardcore gamers that learned how to code their own Kaizo Mario romhacks were replaced by people who wanted to feel things other than anger while playing games. Undertale (2015) ushered in the next indie game zeitgeist by making all indie devs decide to make their own spin on Earthbound, which led to some beautiful gems like Omori and, well, Undertale (Poser alert: never played Undertale or Deltarune, no plans to do so).

Following Undertale, indie gaming continued to flourish. More and more people got into developing games as game making tools became easier to access and use. The game Celeste (2018) proved that indie 2D platformers still had room to grow. Pizza Tower (2023) was the most recent 2D platforming indie hit and it has inspired its own suite of imitators to come over the next few years to keep sidescrolling platformers relevant. But the roguelike card game Slay the Spire (2019) became the defining indie game once it was released, and the path it paved for roguelikes is the mold the other game I titled this blog post for (Tape to Tape) is within.

Slay the Spire wasn’t the first indie roguelike to be popular. Heck, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup (2006) even pre-dates Braid. A roguelike used to mean a game like Rogue, hence the name. And not like Rouge the Bat. Spelunky (2008), Binding of Isaac (2011) and FTL (2012) were some of the first popular indie games that took elements from roguelikes and placed them in more comprehensible game styles. In general, a roguelike has permadeath (you have to restart the entire game should you reach a losing state once), randomized level design, randomized access to items or abilities (or their equivalents), emphasis on player learning and memorization of skills or tricks, and no actual relation to the game Rogue. What makes a roguelike interesting is that you have to make tough decisions on what the best course of action is based on incomplete information. Compared to a game like VVVVVV where you can memorize the entire game and execute a script like a robot, a roguelike that is well designed forces players to constantly make sub-optimal decisions to adapt to the situation in front of them.

Again, Slay the Spire was not the first roguelike that did this well, but it certainly became the Earthbound of Roguelikes in how it influenced the genre. Tape to Tape especially took notes. Tape to Tape is a roguelike arcade hockey game. You play as Angus McShaggy, a golfer-turned-hockey-player that seeks the cup at the center of The Promised Land in order to reverse the defrosting of the world. It’s a silly story with silly dialogue that you only have to see once should you win. You have to win 9 games in order to win a run of Tape to Tape. At the start of a run, you choose another “superstar” with their own special ability to join your team and get three benchwarmers to fill out your squad. Between required games, the player can choose between taking their team to a practice game for the chance to earn a random new ability to equip to a player, to training in order to boost every player’s stats directly, or to an event where a bunch of random things can happen, some good, some bad.

Slay the Spire has 3 distinct acts, Tape to Tape has 3 distinct acts. Slay the Spire has artifacts that boost your character’s abilities, Tape to Tape has artefacts that boost your team’s abilities. Slay the Spire has random events, Tape to Tape has random events. Slay the Spire has a map screen that gives players some amount of choice over what they wish to do on a given floor, Tape to Tape has a map screen. Slay the Spire has an Ascension system where the player can gradually increase the difficulty of the game as they win runs, Tape to Tape is almost certainly developing an Ascension-esque system to do the same thing. Or at the very least, the devs are working on an equivalent act 4 like in Slay the Spire.

That isn’t to say everything is the same. For one, Slay the Spire is a player-vs-enemy card game, Tape to Tape is an arcade hockey game. In Slay the Spire, you will lose a fight if you fail to build a good deck. In Tape to Tape, you can win any game even if you fail to meaningfully improve your team just because it’s an arcade hockey game; you have much more control over winning and losing since there’s never a time you’ll be dogged by a bad draw like in Slay the Spire. Another key difference between the games is in meta-progression. In Slay the Spire, you unlock 15 character-specific cards and artifacts after a few runs with each character and these don’t actually increase or decrease your chance to win necessarily. In Tape to Tape, as the player wins games, they earn Rubber which can be used to buy unlocked superstars, skills, or increase Angus’ stats; the player will be able to brute force their way to winning a run after playing long enough by simply having a super-powerful Angus and a super-powerful superstar unlike Slay the Spire which always requires real thought.

I think that’s enough of a compare/contrast essay. Let’s get to my actual thoughts about Tape to Tape. I think the game’s fun! I never played NHL 94 which is what the game is most inspired by, but I did play a ton of Mario Sports Mix’s hockey which is basically the same thing. I think adding the roguelike elements into NHL 94 and ripping off Slay the Spire’s structure gives a great excuse to play a bunch of arcade hockey. Season modes just aren’t as compelling as the Slay the Spire random 3 act structure. I also feel the game nails the speed, fun, and chaotic energy of an arcade sports game like NBA Jam. There’s something primally satisfying about speeding down the wing and setting up a slapshot one-timer for a goal. The game is also quite funny and flavorful. The first boss team you play against is a team of referees that will once-per-game negate one of your goals and once-per-game grant themselves a goal arbitrarily. That’s hilariously infuriating! All the other enemy teams are equally well-flavored and make it as entertaining as possible to lose to them.

Now the cons I have with the game. First and foremost, I do not find the map screen compelling. The events are so random that it feels like it’s never worth going for them except to save time. Compared to giving your team straight stat boosts, they’re too much a headache. Also, the individual talents you get from winning practice games are all pretty uncompelling. I’m not sure what playstyle a talent like Berserk (+30 checking, play without a stick) is for, but it ain’t for me. Those I think are pretty universal complaints. My complaint as an individual is that enemy goalies get too good too fast in act 2 at the moment. I lost to the Princess team the first 9 times I played them and only scored 2 goals in those 9 games despite outshooting them by 10+ shots every game. I still don’t fully understand how I ended up beating them eventually in that 9th game. I also have this bizarre issue with the game’s performance during the final boss where there’s input lag while the framerate somehow increases to 60 FPS after being at 30 FPS the rest of the game. Very strange.

As I finish writing this, I’m halfway through Spyro 3 on the Reignited Trilogy and the proud player and completer of VVVVVV and Tape to Tape. I’ve really grown throughout this month of January as you might be able to tell. I’ll probably play Tape to Tape down the road as the game gets closer to full release and then is fully released, but I find it unlikely I’ll play VVVVVV again. They should’ve made it a roguelike.