Utopia Must Fall

May 29, 2024 7:35 AM

Utopia Must Fall is a browser game (for mobile too) that evokes the days of 1970s and 80s vector scan arcade games. There are nods to Asteroids, Gravitar, Tac-Scan, Space Fury and other more modern titles like Geometry Wars, with gameplay reminiscent of Missile Command but with a research and upgrade upgrade system. The password is CEASEFIRE if it asks.
posted by GallonOfAlan (41 comments total)

Unrelated to Nufonia Must Fall.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 7:52 AM on May 29 [1 favorite]

Love that music. Mussorgsky "The Old Castle" from Pictures At An Exhibition, which I know through Isao Tomita's cover of it. And the ending music is definitely Bach but I couldn't tell you what exactly, and it reminds me of Wendy Carlos. So, more layers of nostalgia going on there for me than just vector graphics.
posted by Foosnark at 8:01 AM on May 29 [3 favorites]

Good post.
posted by Wolfdog at 8:29 AM on May 29

Gorgeous.
posted by Artful Codger at 8:32 AM on May 29

oh man, nostalgia overload. I love this.

p.s. I'm sorry New New York. I failed you.
posted by SonInLawOfSam at 8:33 AM on May 29

oH WELL, IT WAS ONLY cHICAGO.
posted by biffa at 8:38 AM on May 29 [1 favorite]

Steam has a demo version for Windows and Mac, also.
posted by Western Infidels at 8:48 AM on May 29 [2 favorites]

Thank you! As someone who has spent most of my adult life chasing the prefect Tempest machine, I continue to be astonished that stuff like this can run in a browser.
posted by The Bellman at 8:57 AM on May 29 [3 favorites]

This is fun, but I thought it was going to be a very different sort of game when one of the upgrade options was something along the lines of "Research better ways of communicating with the aliens"

I guess all of the upgrade options in white are a bit facetious and don't do anything?
posted by RonButNotStupid at 9:05 AM on May 29 [1 favorite]

how do you nuke??
posted by gottabefunky at 9:27 AM on May 29 [1 favorite]

how do you nuke??


Mouse click while the pointer is out of the 'safe zone'
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 9:32 AM on May 29 [1 favorite]

Incredibly well done and very much in my wheelhouse.
posted by gwint at 11:14 AM on May 29 [1 favorite]

Foosnark, it's Bach's Invention No. 2.
posted by mpark at 12:00 PM on May 29 [1 favorite]

oh yes
posted by lwxxyyzz at 12:04 PM on May 29

Yep, that's a great update on a venerable game genre, and an auto-block for me. Houston, we have a problem with concentrating at work.
posted by HeroZero at 1:10 PM on May 29 [2 favorites]

There's a demo of the full game on Steam if you check the wishlist link in the app.
posted by daHIFI at 3:34 PM on May 29

That is fantastic
posted by fimbulvetr at 3:45 PM on May 29

Well there goes the rest of my evening... (Thanks GallonOfAlan!)
posted by JonathanB at 6:59 PM on May 29

The white 'upgrade' options seem to be a re-roll of the choices of upgrade you get, and you still get to choose one so it's not a negative.
posted by coolname at 7:12 PM on May 29

Great game. Reminds me of Kenta Cho's shmups if anyone is looking for even more time wasting.
posted by joeyh at 7:26 PM on May 29

This game is great! My score seems to be hitting a wall at just shy of 200K. I think that is as far as my old man reflexes will take me. Still lots of fun!
posted by The Manwich Horror at 9:57 PM on May 29

Fun, but what's the big red button?
posted by Marky at 12:05 AM on May 30

If you're referring to the text of the 'Discipline' end-of-day reward that says "Manage a full day without pressing the big red button," that's just the reward you get for not using any nukes to beat that day.
posted by coolname at 1:40 AM on May 30

Anyone have any ideas on beating the cloaking squids that isn’t “nuke the hell out of them”?
posted by thecaddy at 3:09 AM on May 30

My solution has been getting as many damage, twin shot, and rate of fire upgrades as possible and hosing them doen as soon as they decloak.
posted by The Manwich Horror at 5:04 AM on May 30

I’m still sucking at this. Topping out at level 8 if I’m lucky. I have a hard time adapting my (poor) reflexes, particularly since the reflexes needed change with upgrades. Also I have a hard time rationing the nukes. I either hoard them when I should be using them, or run out too soon.
posted by notoriety public at 6:20 AM on May 30 [1 favorite]

That was fun. Brought back some memories of playing in an arcade, wondering how this new tv show Battlestar Galactica would turn out.
posted by doctornemo at 7:44 AM on May 30 [2 favorites]

Is there anything you can do to speed up or skip the pre-game / end-game animations? Clicking the mouse seems to speed it up briefly, but holding it doesn't seem to continue the speed up.
posted by Reverend John at 9:03 AM on May 30 [1 favorite]

You can repeatedly click. You can also click the start game button before it has fully moved into place.
posted by reventlov at 9:20 AM on May 30

It would be nice if there were more screen real estate. Vertical orientation on a laptop browser doesn't make a lot of sense.
posted by emelenjr at 9:54 AM on May 30

Unsurprisingly it needs a balancing pass. The arc shield upgrade path seems to want to get to a place where it'll auto-kill a lot of the wave for you but the incremental upgrades to get there don't really help carry you through to get there. And even at the end, the HP scaling is so steep that it's doubtful it's viable.

Stacking fire rate to unlock multi-shot upgrades seems to unambiguously be the strongest move, with a sideline into nukes where the upgrade choices allow. But getting enough fire rate to begin with is heavily subject to RNG.
posted by coolname at 11:18 AM on May 30 [1 favorite]

There’s definitely a performance difference in Chrome compared to Firefox (something I’ve also seen in, say, Universal Paperclips). Shields seem to recharge faster in Chrome, and it feels like the squid spawnings are a little bit more fair (way less likely to decloak half-charged, though they still do it occasionally).

Anyway, good game. Off to hosts.txt localhost with it though.
posted by thecaddy at 2:59 PM on May 30

Agreed, when I get 2x fire rate at the beginning and then regen shield, arc flail, it becomes possible to avoid using any nukes, keep building defense, and go pretty deep (day 13). Also makes sense to slow roll the end of a level just to let the shield recharge some more.
posted by joeyh at 9:23 PM on May 30

@emelenr Vertical shooters need to be in portrait aspect ratio, because having them in landscape orientation makes as much sense as having a horizontal scroller in portrait.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 5:45 AM on June 1

Achieving level 8 is "sucking"?

-sigh-
posted by Artful Codger at 5:53 AM on June 1

Try not to compare yourself to others, we're all just having fun with a slick game :)

One tactic I've found really useful was to try to game the rewards system and fill the bar quickly to get the +1 upgrade and hence 2 upgrades at the end of the level. Do this by being 'clean' with your kills and prioritizing. For ex., finish up blowing up all the chunks of a meteoroid for the 'obsessive' bonus rather than shooting the formation that's already set up, try to immediately kill the small fragile triangle formations that all come in an easy line for the 'annihilation' bonus, definitely use a nuke on the elusive rare green one worth 150(!) upgrade XP. Conversely, some bonuses aren't really worth the effort required unless you have nothing else worth shooting at, like the 'completist' bonus for clearing an entire drone polygon squad.

Been trying to build into a blackout protocol (huge one-off firepower boost and bullet time on shield collapse) + the thing that lets you do it every other day, but that hasn't come up yet. One can dream...
posted by coolname at 11:07 PM on June 1 [2 favorites]

What a great game. Thanks for posting this.

This game would have been a monster smash hit back in the arcades around 1983 or so.
posted by Ampersand692 at 5:39 AM on June 2 [2 favorites]

i'm still playing it, just made it to day 30 with a new high score. Turns out there's a late game upgrade to Blackout Protocol which lets you use it every day instead of only every other day with Surge Protector. Didn't save me in the end, I wound up blowing it fairly early in the day. Even though I was able to clear the screen with the surge, I wasn't able to hold on until my shield came back. Even with max regen upgrades, you're still left with your ass hanging out for like 20 seconds, which is a long time on day 30. And with the shield down, your arc flail is also down, and when that's also maximally upgraded, it's a major part of your survivability.

I think it still needs some tuning. The fire rate upgrades are always 100% Take First if available, it isn't even a choice. And the nuke upgrades are lacking. By the time you can get reliable nuke production going (given that all other upgrades take a back seat compared to maximizing the railgun), an enemy starts spawning that generates an anti-nuke field, which really crimps using nukes actively. Even if you aren't using any nukes, that enemy is still extremely deadly because a big part of the later game strategy is leveraging the enemy's nuke effects against them. The risk of having a precious active nuke squashed without effect just devalues developing nuke tech even further.
posted by notoriety public at 9:02 PM on June 15 [1 favorite]

The fire rate upgrades are always 100% Take First if available, it isn't even a choice.

Yeah, I'm still playing too (only survived around 16 or so days, though), and I'd concur with that, with one caveat: the two absolute must early-game upgrades for me are a first-level fire-rate upgrade, and the arc flail. The flail handles so much stuff for you: stray asteroids, slow-moving projectiles, usually one of the two bombs those hovering guys fire on the regular. Once I have the arc flail, those second and future fire-rate upgrades are best, but I'd take the arc flail in preference to a second fire-rate upgrade.

I have a pretty good sense of upgrade priority in my head. As mentioned above, the first fire-rate improvement and arc-flail are top priority, so much so that I'd take citizen proposals in hopes of getting them over an important but not critical upgrade like shield regeneration or first-level gimbal speed. After getting those, my priority would probably be:

1. future fire rate upgrades
2. regenerative shield
3. the first gimbal-speed upgrade
4. blackout protocol
5. any arc-flail upgrades (depend on plasma physics/superconductivity)
6. shield capacitors (depend on superconductivity)
7. any shield-regen upgrades (depend on plasma physics)
8. the second gimbal-speed upgrade
9. the plasma physics basic-research package
10. ricochet and advanced ricochet
11. blackout protocol
12. citizen proposals (this is the line between "worth it" and "not" to me, where I'd rather reroll the dice)
13. the superconductivity basic-research package
14. third and subsequent gimbal-speed upgrades
15. twin shot
16. muzzle velocity upgrades
17. nuke stuff

As you can see, I agree with you that the whole nuke-improvement/stockpiling path is not really implemented in a way which makes it a good choice. Superconductivity is a weird package for me: it's got really good upgrades, but plasma physics provides more fundamental ones that are critical to survival.
posted by jackbishop at 5:50 AM on June 22 [1 favorite]

I’m not sure why twin shot is so low for you? It’s essentially the next step up in fire power—the rate drops a bit, but you are firing two shots at once (and you can separate them to cover a broader range of targets) so your overall DPS has gone up. Afterwards you get a few more fire rate boosts until you get the triple shot option, which likewise can be upgraded a few times.

If there’s one tweak I’d make, I’d remove or sharply lower the scaling on the extra upgrade rewards. Getting a bonus upgrade every three or four days (instead of a couple early and then maybe two more by day 20) would help players keep up with the increasing enemies and encourage more experimentation with the less-awesome tech paths.
posted by thecaddy at 1:11 PM on June 22 [1 favorite]

yeah, twin and triple shot are pretty useful since they allow you to be less precise in your aim when trying to take out incoming missiles; same thing with the sawed-off muzzle and blunderbuss upgrades. basically the idea is that at some point you're not shooting down specific things, but you're trying to keep an umbrella over your city with the rail gun.

the game seems to have 3 or 4 stages. first, your trying to get achievements to get the +1 upgrades - firepower upgrades are really the only thing you want here. the faster you can destroy formations before they set, the faster you get upgrades, the faster you destroy formations.

This lasts until day 5/6 ish when you shift to trying to keep things off ya. there's too much stuff at once to really finish off a flight before you have to deal with the next, so you just want to make enough dead that you don't have to worry about it while you work on the next thing. plus the bonuses for the achievements are weaker, so there's not much incentive to go beyond the bare minimum. here you want the arc upgrades.

This lasts until day 12/13, when keeping stuff off is no longer completely tenable... then you focus on the regeneration upgrades - most of the time i can last this long until I *have* to get the first regeneration upgrade, but then you really want to get all of them as quickly as possible. you're going to take hits, but your shield should bounce back pretty quick.

The final stage is luck/attrition. the blackout protocol stuff will keep you alive for a bit but once you're at that point, it's a matter of time before some combination of jelly fish/asteroids/whatever will get you.

the nukes are occasionally useful, but only in the same way the blackout is - if you need a nuke you're on the downslope.
posted by logicpunk at 12:04 PM on June 23 [2 favorites]