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Is The Best Game One You Were Never Intended To Play?
Wired has an interesting look at the sport of pushing proscribed boundaries in video games. Easter eggs in games have been around for years, but now finding surprises, intended or otherwise, is becoming a driving force behind the enjoyment of games. "In games as diverse as Fallout 3 and Mirror's Edge, players are pushing to find or create unexpected ways to break past the game horizon, and turn the designers' intentions on their heads. It's only a matter of time before someone releases a game where the best version is the one you were never intended to play. That's only to be expected, says David Michicich, CEO and creative director of Robomodo, the developers of Activision's new Tony Hawk: Ride, and a 14-year veteran game designer. 'Today's news gets old quick — we Twitter, blog, pass viral video. We thrive off the sudden excitement of the latest and most buzzworthy,' Michicich says. 'It's exciting to still feel like you can discover something new. It's stimulation, plain and simple.'"
I remember playing Goldeneye and Turok 64 with group-enforced rules to spice things up. We'd play "Hunt the Raptor" or assign the best player the worst controller. We called it the Torgo control, if that means anything to you. :)
coffee | nose > keyboard
A lot of vaudeville acts got into the movie business (The Three Stooges and The Marx Brothers among them), and they very quickly learned that a shtick that could last for years on the various circuits on the road got national exposure on film -and then they had to come up with new shticks. Games have something of the same dynamic going on with hedonistic adaptation. First the intensity goes up, but eventually the form itself changes.
So is Counter-Strike. But I don't think the gameplay of WC3 or HL includes playing with map editors or sdks.
Exception: the ridiculous ones like shoot the gnome into space in Half-Life 2 Episode 2
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I was playing this at a friends and we were having more fun trying to get the quirky accomplishments than the actual game.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
If you make easter eggs an intentional part of the game, something that players are supposed to find... well, guess what, it's not an easter egg anymore.
These kinds of things are only interesting because they weren't part of the normal gameplay. Most easter eggs are actually pretty dull if taken on their own merit (a "developer room" with NPCs standing around doing nothing? Wow, so glad I spent 500 hours trying to find this place).
Truth is that if you can really do something in a game that completely borks the intended design, that is a failure of QA and/or QC, depending on whether it wasn't found or wasn't fixed. Any number of game exploits-turned-features got their start this way, from Warcraft 2's lumber bug to the Quake rocket jump (which was a physics bug).
While these tricks have been treated as features, they basically add a non-intuitive learning requirement to play the game effectively against other people. It's this sort of thing that risks turning off a lot of players. The fighting game genre, for example, since Street Fighter 2 has bled off everyone except the devoted hardcore fighting audience, because to be good at these games really means learning not how to play according to design but how to exploit combo engines and hit detection to trap the other player. Basically a matter of who is able to get their exploit first.
Ha! People tend to forget that counter-strike is a mod for Half Life ! A game that notoriously sucked, in multiplayer mode...
Half Life DM sucked? Are you nuts? Half Life DM rocked man.
I admit I don't use Twitter, but I recognize that broadcasting brief, one-way messages is useful to some people.
However, I'm sick of seeing Twitter referenced as a major milestone in communication. What influence did Twitter have on the latest Tony Hawk game? It's impact on the way people play video games is negligible at best. If Twitter went away tomorrow Facebook and MySpace would fill the void without a single enhancement: "Playing Tony Hawk 49, found a door I can open on the Tokyo level." What would be lost without Twitter, other than the verb "twit"?
The original NWN on AOL was intended to be a multi-player cooperative RPG. Players were not allowed to attack each other. However, players discovered that they could still cast spells at one another, including damage spells. This allowed pvp to exist in the form of spell warfare. NWN pvp was one of the best social gaming experiences ever. It was turn-based combat, so its slow pace allowed chat, taunts and tactics, stuff more substantive than the "gay" of xbox live, to flow while fighting.
I welcome our new 99% overlords.
That is one of the reasons i stick with PC gaming, the mods give you so much more replay than you ever get with a console. Take Freelancer for instance. While the original game was fun, with the Freelancer Mod manager loaded full of cool mods it is like I have a dozen new games to go with the original. Hell of a good deal for the $35 I paid for it at Gamestop awhile back. This game was released in 2003 and there are STILL new mods coming out for it. To me that is value for my gaming dollar.
And while console gamers scream "PC Gaming is expensive!" it really isn't unless you get into that whole epeen "must be able to get 60 FPS on high everything on Crysis!" BS. I just built myself a new AMD dual core, and since I already had XP X64 I picked up awhile back with shipping and all the box cost a whole $281. I will play on the built in 3100 for a week until I can pick up a $100 card, which will probably last me a couple of years before needing replacing. The P4 3.6GHz box it replaced has had maybe $500 spent on it over the last 6 years counting building it and my oldest is playing Left 4 Dead on it right now, thanks to a $50 X1650 Pro GPU upgrade. So for me PC gaming is the way to go. The mods give me so much more for my gaming dollar than anything I have seen with the consoles.
I mean where else can you still get new gaming experiences for a game you paid a whole $35 for that came out in 2003?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.