Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

On Single-Player Competition

Posted by Zonk on from the not-just-online dept.

Via Ars Technica, a post on the Major League Gaming site about the return of single-player competition (ala arcade games) with the likes of Xbox Live Arcade. From the article: "Once it stops being really enjoyable and just becomes work, you move on to another game and rarely come back. But imagining myself playing Resident Evil 4 with online leaderboards showing high scores in the missionary mode or a timed 'kill as many bad guys as you can' mini-game brings a smile to my face. I know for a fact I would be playing Super Mario Sunshine every now and then to try to get the fastest time for beating a certain level if there were leaderboards that everyone could plainly see after they beat a level."

3 of 59 comments (clear)

  1. Not only the worldwide leaderboards... by wedgewu · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Your friends list leaderboard is even more compelling. It's easy to say "I can't compete with those guys, they spend all their time playing games." However, when you're faced with your friend whom you KNOW is around the same level as you... well, you're even more compelled to beat the snot out of their score so that you can rub it in their faces later.

    Being able to filter the leaderboard by your friends is pure genius...

  2. Cheating problems by mightypenguin · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The main issue here is that cheating is so much easier with single player. Traditionally, single player games haven't had near the cheating protections of multi-player online games. It's also easier to catch people cheating when all the action is happening live on a server, then when it's all happening on someone's personal computer and they'd just upload score info :) This idea will only work for server hosted games. Otherwise you'll have people hacking the data upload or the game itself and have scores like "13371337" all over the place.

  3. Re:Gamer tastes have not changed, games have by Zangief · · Score: 2, Insightful

    FPSs are what "jump and run" games were in the NES, SNES era. Something that everybody understands and knows how to do well, and there were a lot of games in the genre that did well in the past, so, why don't we do another one?