BAN (Original)

We're now finished with Kubus's rather unproductive first year, and we're onto 2003. Today's entry covers the original version of BAN. I vaguely recall playing one or the other of the BAN games at one point, but I can't really remember if it was the original or the remake, nor can I remember what it was like.

BAN starts off with an uncharacteristically cute startup screen. An unusual degree of thought seems to have gone into presentation here. The letters B, A, and N appear on the screen one at a time, with Kubus speaking each letter out loud.

Likewise, entering the game mode, you'll find that there are more options available to you than is typical for one of Kubus's games. Your character (a smiling stickman) can move to the left and right, and he can jump. Sometimes he can float upward and downward. He can also shoot blue circles at a green head that bounces around shooting smaller green heads at him.

This part of the gameplay is actually kind of clever. See, the head is huge, it moves to the left and right bouncing off the walls. You can't evade it, except that for you, the screen wraps around. So what you have to do is jump back and forth between the two ends of the screen as the head smashes into them.

There's no easy way to tell if you're actually hurting the head or not, but after a while, you start shooting larger circles, and then after that you find yourself in a new room with sort of a ninja star wobbling around in it. You have to run under it.

After this, a picture of a telephone teleports around the screen. When you click on it, it says, "RECEIVING CALL," and you hear a twenty-second clip of Kubus trying to talk over static. After listening to it, you are faced with a choice. Will you...

Send him to the radio company?

Redial?

Use the yellow page to track down his phone number?

Search for his number on the internet?

The game is surprisingly forgiving. Chosing the wrong answer doesn't send you back to the beginning or anything, you just get to try again. No big deal.

Moving on to fight more heads, the game is still pretty forgiving. your progress isn't erased or anything if you die. You just start over fighting the head again.

Meanwhile, most of the areas are accompanied by pretty passable sound and music. It's not mozart or anything, but it's not caustic. In one section, Kubus sort of beatboxes/makes flatulence noises, and it's actually sort of charming. The visuals are all fun and bright, and everything takes place against a sort of optimistic white void.

This game does have flaws though (I know... I know...). For one thing, you'll run into a lot of cheap deaths. The screen wraparound thing had some sort of bug in it where sometimes instead of teleporting to the other end of the room, you teleport to the middle of the room, right on top of the head. Plus it's never very clear if the head is lethal or not. Sometimes you can touch it for seconds at a time without suffering any harm. Sometimes you just bump into it and you're dead. No apparent pattern.

Also of note: there's no really obvious easy way to exit the game.

But worse than that is that this game set my expectations pretty high, and didn't live up to them. The game packed a lot of variety into its first three screens. A fight against a bouncing head, a "stealth" level where you have to sneak under a thing, and a click-the-object game followed by a logic-devoid multiple choice test. My hope was that the game would continue throwing surprises at me.

But it quit. After that, it was a slightly different head to fight, and then the game just sent me back to level one. So basically it just loops you through four events over and over. See, the phone call seemed witty and whimsical when I first encountered it, because it felt like just a little let's-throw-it-in kind of thing. But when it turned out to be a quarter of the entire game, it couldn't carry the weight.

I'd love to play a game like BAN, but with more. I mean, if Kubus could keep on throwing weird stuff at me for about fifty screens, I would genuinely be able to enjoy this game on its own terms. As it is, it picked me up and dropped me.

But that's not the kind of game it's meant to be, so I can't be too hard on it. I give it a 4/5. It's fun and whimsical, but over too quickly. Perhaps the remake will hold more appeal for me. Or perhaps the remake has nothing to do with the original, and Kubus just titled it like that to mess with me. The latter seems more likely.