[ EPU Foyer ] [ Lab and Grill ] [ Bonus Theater!! ] [ Rhetorical Questions ] [ CSRANTronix ] [ GNDN ] [ Subterranean Vault ] [ Discussion Forum ] [ Gun of the Week ]

Eyrie Productions, Unlimited

Subject: "Play Pizza Tower. Do It."     Previous Topic | Next Topic
Printer-friendly copy    
Conferences Games Topic #198
Reading Topic #198
The Traitor
Member since Feb-24-09
1204 posts
Feb-27-23, 08:42 PM (EDT)
Click to EMail The%20Traitor Click to send private message to The%20Traitor Click to view user profileClick to add this user to your buddy list  
"Play Pizza Tower. Do It."
 
   A schlubby, balding, perpetually anxious Italian man named Peppino Spaghetti runs a small failing pizzeria. One day, a giant floating pizza in the sky tells Peppino that it has taken over a giant tower and intends to blow up his pizzeria with a giant laser cannon. Peppino is understandably miffed at this news, and so charges towards the Pizza Tower to save his restaurant and possibly also the day!

All of this is in the opening cutscene btw.

Pizza Tower's design brief was "What if you could play a cartoon from the 1990s?" and holy moly does it nail that brief. The game has fantastic animation for Peppino in particular, with his moves super snappy and responsive whilst they still have the wonderfully evocative squash-and-stretch of something like Ren And Stimpy or Earthworm Jim. Peppino needs to be responsive too - this is a precision platformer. Just not one based off of the usual sources of inspiration.

The key design inspiration, as has been talked about to death by other people writing about the game, is the later Wario Land games. For those who never played them, Wario Land 3 and 4 used their titular protagonist like a wrecking ball, sending him through large, sprawling, open levels that rewarded keeping your momentum up and exploring the place. You needed to explore them as well, because once you completed the level's goal, a timer descended from the heavens and you had to get the hell outta Dodge before the clock ran out, which I don't doubt was responsible for a lot of anxiety disorder diagnoses in kids who played it.

Pizza Tower retains this mechanic and expands on it a lot. The main ways it does so are threefold. The first way is through level design. Every level is built around the ability to keep up your momentum, power-ups you need to progress are easy to understand and snappy to use, and Peppino's friend Gustavo (and Gustavo's pal Brick, a giant rat he rides around on by dangling cheese in front of his face) is there to provide helpful directions, showing you where to go when you're dashing through the level in reverse. The second is in Peppino's massively expanded movement options compared to Wario. He can sprint up walls, spin-dash through tiny gaps, belly flop through vertical obstacles, taunt to parry projectiles, crouch into a super-jump, and more besides. Power-ups do add to this, but most of the game is about your basic ability to send a neurotic pizza chef on a screaming rampage through a small army of enemies made from sentient toppings. The third and most important way, however, is in its score attack gameplay.

This might not sound like much of an expansion on the OG Wario Lands, but it does make a hell of a difference. When you're exploring the levels, you can't actually die. This lets you get a feel for a given level's various weird gimmicks, find the secret rooms, suplex sentient cheese blobs wearing suits of armour, and so on. Getting hurt doesn't kill you. What it does do is knock points off your score; not so many that it's frustrating, but not so few that you don't notice. Your points also slowly drop during the escape sequence, encouraging you to haul ass back through the level as fast as possible. Sprinting through the level with a bunch of points and leaving will get you a B rank, which is neat. Sprinting through it while beating the hell out of your enemies to keep your combo meter going will get you a high A or a low S rank, which is cool. But you want the best rank. You want the P rank (the P is for Pizza!). And to do that, you'll need to scrounge up as many points as you can, keep your combo meter going throughout the entire level, and once you've finished the escape, go to a secret door not too far from the level exit you fought so hard to get to. Going through that secret door takes you somewhere very, very special:

Back to the start of the escape sequence.

P Ranking a level like this lets you fucking style on it in a way that's really uncommon for platformers of this kind and is also unbelievably satisfying to pull off. This is at least in part due to the insane music in the hurry-up section going even harder in Lap 2. And the music was fucking awesome to begin with. I will demonstrate the two hurry-up tracks below:

It's Pizza Time! (Lap 1)

The Death That I Deservioli (Lap 2)

The Lap 1 music is frenetic, fast-paced, and panicked. However, the Lap 2 music is a lot more assured. If you're going for Lap 2, you have chosen to beat the absolute shit out of this game. In Lap 2, Peppino has had e-fucking-nough of this shit and has fully chosen violence. It feels incredible to just listen to both of them on their own, and the rest of the soundtrack is amazing too. In game? Masterpiece.

I said before that the game takes inspiration from Wario Land. The other key influence, at least in my opinion, is the 2D Sonic games, albeit in a different way. See, with its incredible speed, tight controls, and emphasis on going as fast as possible whilst bulldozing through anything and everything in your way, it plays the way 90s adverts said (which was frankly a lie) 2D Sonic did. This is a game that feels like it has blast processing. This is a game that lives up to the legacy of super-fast platforming and blows past it in a shower of pizza toppings and letters from the local health inspector. This is a game that makes you truly feel like a short, sweaty Italian man who is About To Wholly McFucking Lose It at any given moment. And it's glorious. So I leave you with a question, that will help you answer if you're ready to play this game:

Y'ALL READY TO GET FUNKY?

---
"She's old, she's lame, she's barren too, // "She's not worth feed or hay, // "But I'll give her this," - he blew smoke at me - // "She was something in her day." -- Garnet Rogers, Small Victory

FiMFiction.net: we might accept blatant porn involving the cast of My Little Pony but as God is my witness we have standards.

And yes, The Noise is a parody of exactly who you think he is. =]


  Alert | IP Printer-friendly page | Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

  Subject     Author     Message Date     ID  
  RE: Play Pizza Tower. Do It. dbrandon Feb-28-23 1
     RE: Play Pizza Tower. Do It. Gryphonadmin Mar-01-23 2
         RE: Play Pizza Tower. Do It. StClair Mar-03-23 3
  RE: Play Pizza Tower. Do It. Gryphonadmin Jun-29-24 4

Conferences | Topics | Previous Topic | Next Topic
dbrandon
Charter Member
221 posts
Feb-28-23, 08:49 AM (EDT)
Click to EMail dbrandon Click to send private message to dbrandon Click to view user profileClick to add this user to your buddy list  
1. "RE: Play Pizza Tower. Do It."
In response to message #0
 
   I will never play this game, but I just want to say that I appreciate the shit out of your description of it.

--dbrandon


  Alert | IP Printer-friendly page | Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
Gryphonadmin
Charter Member
22554 posts
Mar-01-23, 04:51 PM (EDT)
Click to EMail Gryphon Click to send private message to Gryphon Click to view user profileClick to add this user to your buddy list  
2. "RE: Play Pizza Tower. Do It."
In response to message #1
 
   >I will never play this game, but I just want to say that I appreciate
>the shit out of your description of it.

Seconded! Except that one of these days I may actually try it, learn how bad I am at it, and leave it in my library until I need the disk space, as I have done with countless platformy games. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


  Alert | IP Printer-friendly page | Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
StClair
Charter Member
836 posts
Mar-03-23, 04:22 AM (EDT)
Click to EMail StClair Click to send private message to StClair Click to view user profileClick to add this user to your buddy list  
3. "RE: Play Pizza Tower. Do It."
In response to message #2
 
   Thirded.


  Alert | IP Printer-friendly page | Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top
Gryphonadmin
Charter Member
22554 posts
Jun-29-24, 03:17 PM (EDT)
Click to EMail Gryphon Click to send private message to Gryphon Click to view user profileClick to add this user to your buddy list  
4. "RE: Play Pizza Tower. Do It."
In response to message #0
 
   And now it has been played by an actual Italian.

(I haven't actually watched the VOD yet, but I mean, how can that be anything other than epic?)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


  Alert | IP Printer-friendly page | Edit | Reply | Reply With Quote | Top

Conferences | Topics | Previous Topic | Next Topic

[ YUM ] [ BIG ] [ ??!? ] [ RANT ] [ GNDN ] [ STORE ] [ FORUM ] GOTW ] [ VAULT ]

version 3.3 © 2001
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited
Benjamin D. Hutchins
E P U (Colour)