Ah, I've had that problem too, in playing Katamari Damacy. There's a "charge" move that's all but essential to getting super-good scores/times, where you alternate the two analog sticks as fast as you can, up/down, down/up, up/down, down/up, to build up power for a sudden boose of speed. The faster you do it, the stronger the boost. Well it's very easy to accidently press *in* on both sticks while doing this, which activates the sudden-turn-around move, meaning your charge gets sent exactly 180 degrees AWAY from where you wanted to go. Arrrgh!
The price of controllers cannot skyrocket, so doodads like the touch screen are incredibly unlikely.
But consider: The DS is probably being sold at a profit, even at $130. The GBA was sold at a profit at $70. Guessing that the margins are about the same, and that many of the parts are the same, the DS-specific elements (wireless, extra screen, lights, touchscreen, ARM9, mic, battery) could be priced at $60. The touchscreen is probably the most expensive part of that, but still, we're not exactly talking about Wacom scale here. It's probably $30 or less. If Nintendo were willing to take a loss on the controller price, it could indeed probably be sold at $30.
We've gotten hints that the revolutionary aspect is simple and has been done before, but hasn't really been used in games.
I remember hearing that once, but it was months ago and hasn't been repeated from a difference source since then. And I think Nintendo was still thinking about the specifics at the time. It could still very well be something really new, especially it was a rumor even then.
There has been a LOT of talk about gyros. I've also read a few comments already suggesting that gyros/tilt sensors/etc are a gimmick. To that I say: Bullshit.
The best GBA game to come out in the last year was Warioware Twisted. The game is seriously cool. Not only does it have a gyro rotation sensor, but it has controller rumble as well. It feels absolutely amazing, like you're turning a gear or something when you twist it. I suspect that the controller has something like this in it. A tilt-resistant gyro sensor also has a level of coolness in it that sounds Nintendoish, although I'm unsure how it could be worked into gameplay.
I personally think a good possibility is an optical trackball.
It could give us the best console emulated versions of Centipede, Marble Madness and Rampart ever.
I did find that shooting on that game was a less than enjoyable experience. They had to rely on an automatic targetting system to actually pull off kills.
I just want to say that I really, really hate the PS2 analog sticks compared to the Gamecube ones. I recently had the chance to play Super Monkey Ball Deluxe on a PS2, and it worked okay until I got to a new level that required rolling across very narrow passages. I could do it easily with a GC stick, but on PS2 it was impossible. For Katamari Damacy they work well, but it doesn't require pinpoint control like Monkey Ball does.
Of course it is. Video games have always had that element of Da Gimmick. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat is gimmicky. EyeToy looks pretty gimmicky to me. Portable gaming would look gimmicky if we weren't used to it.
But the fact is, a good gimmick can make a game. Everything new looks like a gimmick. It is, in fact, but that doesn't mean it can't also be cool.
Not all gimmicky things are cool, of course. When "gimmick" is used as a deogratory term, the implication is that there's nothing else there. Which may have been true at first, but now... well, Kirby proved a lot of things. It may sell less than Advance Wars DS and Nintendogs, but it was the game that proved that, with solid design, the DS really does have new things to show the world of gaming. It's the most important DS release so far.
The coolest things have always looked gimmicky at first. If you're going to deride something solely because of its newness then you have a sad outlook on the world.
I know I'm gonna blow all my good karma on this thread. But you can't be serious when you say that Google is a company that's doing the best they can given limited resources? Google is now as near as you can come a company without resource limits at all. Just a couple of days ago they capitalized stock worth four billion dollars.
It still has limited resources, because it's the nature of reality that resources be limited. Governments have limited resources, and famously have problems doing everything they need/want within their budget. While Google doesn't have to pay for schools and police departments, they do have the world's largest pool of connected hard drive space. That can't be cheap to maintain.
Google is also doing a lot of things right now with little profit-making potential, really big things, and a lot more of those compared to your standard ultra-rich company. The storage requirements for Google Maps have got to be huge.
What puzzles me is that we Slashdotters seems to view Googles capitalism as idealism, something capitalism seldom is.
Remember all the fuss that happened with Google's IPO? The dutch auction system, the problems they had with brokers, the message they had on their site to prospective buyers? A stock sale is primarily about money, true, but Google did probably the best they could to let people know that this is not money at any cost. That's one of the reasons that Slashdot readers tend to get misty-eyed talking about Google.
And in retrospect, it didn't seem to hurt the stock price that much.
I disagree on Pikmin, which through successive replays shows that it's actually very well put together, and designed around the idea of playing time attacks. (The game can be won in nine days....)
Pikmin 2 seems more rushed than Pikmin 1, because of the somewhat-cheaty dungeon design. It's still cool, though.
It depends on which WarioWare you mean. The original and Twisted are pure joy, and last an amazingly long time (especially Twisted, which has a surreal number of unlockables). The DS-specific WarioWare, Touched, is the worst of the lot, although there are still cool things about it.
I'm not dissing Googles products here, I merely want to point out that Google are not as platform agnostic and idealistic that people here seem to think they are. And why should they? Idealism seldom makes anyone rich.
Um, idealism *is*, essentially, what's making Google rich.
As for their platforms, from what I've heard, they just released on Windows first. It's not always easy to port these things -- should they just not release at all until there's versions available for all common OSes?
Plus, Google Earth is primarily a special, EXE-based case of Google Maps, which runs on lots of browsers that run on lots of operating systems, because they support Firefox. Google Toolbar now runs on Firefox. Google Talk uses Jabber, so anyone with a Jabber-compatible client and a Gmail account can use their network.
What I see in Google is a company doing the best they can given limited resources. I won't say I always agree with them (that filtering search for China thing still sticks in my craw) but at least they *are* trying.
I'd love to see it, personally. But the gaming public at large just won't accept that sort of lack of forgiveness in a game anymore. For example, look at the uproar over the lack of an in-level save in Aliens vs. Predator 2 (an intentional design choice to heighten tension and force you to legitimately survive) -- I think they had a quicksave patch out within a month or two.
Ah, that's one of the things that prevents more people from trying out Roguelikes, which as a rule contain some form of permadeath.
And have we ever seen a fighting game where you could break limbs and they'd stay broken for the rest of the fight? The closest thing I can think of is Time Killers, where you could hack off one or both arms and the other player could keep going without them. The game stunk, though.
A fighting game is over in a few minutes no matter what happens. If you lost a limb to an early boss in your typical 50-hour action-adventure-hack-n-slash extravaganza, it'd be a lot more dire.
I do like the idea, from a design standpoint, that there's permanent bad things that can happen to you, but the way people expect games to progress these days, the moment something like that happened they'd reach for the reset button. (And I'll admit I've done it myself in the past -- like those rooms in the original Zelda's second quest with the mean old man demanding you give him 50 rupees or give up a heart container....)
Someone committing horrible acts in the service of something ostensibly good, even though they couldn't care less about doing the right thing. I think that's an interesting dynamic.
Typically in those cases, despite that the player (or other characters referring to that character) say, player-evil isn't presented as being nearly as bad as enemy-evil. You likely won't ever see a protagonist setting up a death camp or behaving in a racist manner. They may talk a good game, but usually you can't actually *do* it. (Not that I'm arguing with that policy....)
To me, some cute icon that's jarringly out of place completely shatters the illusion of the experience. Even the medical kits in Splinter Cell nearly break the experience, because the idea of instant health regeneration in that environment is patently absurd.
Well, the very idea of powerups is like that. It might actually be cool to play a game in which all powerups and damage were handled very realistically, where if you lost an arm, you'd have to go through the rest of the game without it. For various reasons, however, that's unlikely to happen, mostly because a mere torso can't expect to get very far on a quest to save even his lunch money.
But that desire for vengeance is misplaced, because Kratos was an enthusiastic participant in the very things he wound up holding against Ares.
Hmmm... what does the game seem to think of that attribute? Thing about a complete bastard doing things we don't approve of at our behest... I think a lot of games don't do that because they raise the question: "Why are we helping this guy slaughter innocent people?"
That's probably what they had at the arcade when I was a kid, then. It was basically 2-player Asteroids minus the asteroids, plus the option of having a variable-strength gravity well in the middle of the screen either with or without an accompanying planet that would destroy you on contact. The controls were all buttons -- rotation, thrust, firing, and I think a shield.
That sounds like the arcade version of Space War that got released early on in the original arcade boom. BTW, there is an Atari 2600 port with many options intact: http://www.atariguide.com/1/171.htm
The idea of using a heart icon for health restoration in a realistic-toned game like Splinter Cell. I felt that was basically impossible without ruining the tone of the game, and you disagreed, but hadn't really explained how it could be pulled off inoffensively.
I guess I disagree because I don't consider its use to be offensive. I don't think you've proven your point there sufficently.
I mean, if the game had frilly lace everywhere, and cupids shooting arrows, and shepherds shyly catching glances of dancing nymphs wandering around grassy hillsides, and young centaurs playing tag throughout the halls of the terrorist base, then I'd say you'd have a point. (Not that there's anything wrong with that imagery overall, in a Romanticist kind of way -- but there aren't an awful lot of Romanticist video games these days.) These days, hearts have been denuded of much of their Valentinesque import in the realm of video games.
I mean, it's not even as if they are an important part of a game's imagery. If it is, as in the aforementioned Kingdom Hearts, it invariably comes across as trite and forced, true. But beyond the eternal hunt for Pieces of Heart in Zelda games, I have a hard time naming another game in which they matter all that much that isn't pink, frilly, and have the words "Disney," "Barbie," or "Mary Kate & Ashley" somewhere on the cover.
And that's basically spot-on, though the linear paths are all seamlessly connected in a non-linear way, so you can backtrack or take shortcuts at will. The thing about God Of War, both in terms of gameplay and of story, is that it's not even remotely innovative -- it's just incredibly well-executed.
Yeah, that's what I mean -- if a game is obviously innovative, you can kind of feel it from a description of it. If it's just an extraordinarily well-developed example of the breed, however, it's difficult to get that through to someone who's never seen it. And what I hear of the story turns me off, just another random badass sent off against a procession of harder and harder bosses until he faces the Big Baddie at the end.
If he *wasn't* a random badass then maybe it'd be easier to get with. I mean, take a look at Link. He doesn't have much of a personality. There's not much to distinguish the character except a sword, elf ears, and a Peter Pan outfit. And yet since the NES days he's been one of the most popular characters in gaming, perhaps because of an understated acknowledgement that he's not Dirk Squarejaw, that he actually does look vulnerable when compared to one of those gigantic bosses, and so it feels a lot better when he takes one down without uttering so much as a catchphrase or even a condescending gesture to the defeated foe.
It's a pretty short game, actually. Probably 8-12 hours the first time through, though it can be completed in as little as 2.5 hours if you know exactly what you're doing. It's a very satisfying story with a great ending, and the game looks and plays like a dream. Well worth the investment.
I'll consider it. Odd that the *lack* of length in a game, for once, is a deciding factor in playing it....
This article, apparently published around April '91, lists 7 million copies of Super Mario Bros. 3 sold. This one (analysis) lists sales of 18M overall (and 8.5M for GTA:VC). SMB3 has, for a while now, been the canonical best selling game of all time.
NPD numbers are tricky in that they don't cover all stores, and the precise numbers themselves cannot be used publically without getting charged up the yang. And of course, they don't cover the Japanese market, where GTA games don't do nearly as well. (Media Create, however, produces free stats for hardware and software sales in Japan.)
As a novelty. But Pong doesn't have the lasting appeal of something like Space War, which I believe came out even earlier.
The original Space War was played in university tech labs only. Before releasing Pong, Nolan Bushnell & company produced Computer Space, the first arcade video game and somewhat similar (I think I heard) to Space War, but it was not popular, probably because it was too complex.
My gut tells me you're right about Space War being more interesting than Pong (which I picked as an extreme example to test against GTA:SA). But honestly, alas, by this point I've lost almost all track of the GTA:SA vs Pong argument.
> Well, it could still be done I think without wrecking the tone.
I really don't see how.
What were we talking about here, again? We started this discussion so long ago I'm getting fuzzy on it.
There are some interesting turns to the story, despite the fact that many of them are predictable -- and in that respect it's much like the rest of the game, which is a collection of extremely well-polished and well-executed clichés.
I dunno, it still hasn't broken through my apathy filter yet. Gameplay footage looks mostly like yet another "guy slays bunches of monsters in 3D using combos and special moves through a series of linear levels" game. But maybe that's just the lack of sleep talking....
Oh, I enjoyed the story in Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time, too. A fantastic game with characters that you actually cared about.
I've also heard PoP:SoT had a good story, but I probably won't get around to playing it. Not that I have anything against it... just that there's such a lot of games to play that I'll probably never be able to find time for. Sometimes I wonder if I'm not moving away from video games altogether these days. I played Katamari Damacy for weeks, but before that there was a good drought of gaming interest. Ah well.
These days, I find think about homebrew game creation is starting to pull ahead of actual game playing in my interests list. Which is a recipe for further gaming angst, I know....
Argh... I wrote that at around 8:30 in the morning after a night that might as well have been sleepless. No fun.
Since GTA:SA is the #1 selling video game of all time,
Hmm, this sounds suspecious to me, though it has been very popular. Do you have some numbers to back this up? Wikipedia's list, at least, identifies two games that sold more as of June 2005, Super Mario 64 and GTA: Vice City. And that list doesn't include NES games, which I imagine would blow both of those figures out of the water.
I don't think the raw numbers are on your side. Yes, Pong is still fun...for about 10 minutes. But after experiencing evolutionary games like Warlords or Arkanoid, Pong just doesn't cut it anymore for long-term enjoyment.
Watch the words, "doesn't cut it anymore." For its time, and for an arcade-only machine, Pong was quite a hit. I was speaking out of a general sense of the raw fun value of a game, which is of course only a theoretical concept.
But the fact remains that Pong is more accessable to people who've never played a video game before than GTA games, and there are still many more such people than gamers.
A rental just can't do that game justice. New gameplay elements are steadily introduced pretty much all the way through the main narrative, and the tone of the game changes considerably once you get beyond Los Santos.
Hmmm. I will give it another chance. I really wanted to like GTA:SA due to the free-roaming gameplay (and because I like the taxi missions from the prior games).
Can you imagine how absurd it would look if heart icons were used in Splinter Cell?
Well, it could still be done I think without wrecking the tone. Hearts have a certain iconic value now (partly because of all those NES games that used them). Sure, it'd make less sense than those omnipresent First Aid Kits... but those kits aren't exactly realistic either, though in a different way.
Nothing that's been pitch-perfect yet, but there have been some really strong ones. I'm no big Kojima fan (I thought MGS2 sucked after leaving the tanker), but I have to say that despite the sporadic goofiness, Metal Gear Solid 3 really worked as a story. You actually cared about the characters, and the game was able to elicit emotional responses from you.
I got some serious recommendations about MGS3 from the guy who runs Curmudgeon Gamer, I'll probably have to play it before long.
I also enjoyed how Guardian Heroes took on religion and genre conventions in its multiple story branches, showing the dark side of the ostensible "good guys" and the sympathetic aspects of the supposed "bad guys". And it let you choose which side to back, or just go your own way.
But recently there have been a lot of games that have done exactly that, many of them Japanese RPGs, and the Japanese have far less of a vested interest in Western religion than we have so it's not as great a matter. In the years since Guardian Heroes' release, it's become its own full-fledged cliche. And most of these games don't tackle details of real-world religions, but idealized, abstracted representations of them. Nothing that could actually challenge someone's beliefs. And usually organized, specifically-Catholic-style religion is what gets knocked in those, when these days it's other groups that are causing far more harm in the world.
But my vote for the best stories I've seen in a game, after a cursory examination of the inventory of my brain, is that of the Grandia games, even though the second one is guilty of the problem I just described, even though they have their fair share of cliches, just because the dialogue is written with such energy and wit. Roger Ebert says of movies, that quality isn't decided by what the movie is about, but how it is about it. Maybe that could be said of game storytelling, too?
I have to admit, when I look at screenshots or movies of God of War, I am overcome with a profound weariness. Care to elaborate upon the storytelling in the game?
Ah, but GTA:SA has 2-player free-roaming co-op play, as well as 2-player rampages. And its open-ended design allows you to roll your own mayhem for theoretically endless enjoyment.
I suppose. I like the free-roamingness of GTA, but using it just to smash up whatever you can, because you can, doesn't greatly appeal to me. It's a case of a series that, maybe similar to your feelings about Nintendo, I can respect from a design standpoint but will probably never play much of.
And I also disagree that more people would enjoy Pong over GTA:SA. The gang-banger theme of SA really turned me and my friends off when we rented it. Meanwhile Pong got the game industry off the ground in earnest, so it's already proven it can be interesting to many non-gamers.
I completely disagree with this. The stripping of extraneous elements from movies makes most of them completely predictable.
Ah, that's false too. It only makes them completely predictable if they were already intellectually sterile. Annie Hall (movie, directed by Woody Allen) is an example of a movie that's not sterile, and even looks like it's filled with extraneous material, but is actually pretty sharp.
If a character makes a reference to something that doesn't seem to apply to the plot, you know it's going to be important later.
Unless that thing is not important to the plot, but instead speaks something about the story in a different way, or is used instead to modulate the viewer's expectations, or is included as a purposeful red herring (like how the opening of Psycho misleads the audience into thinking the movie'll be about someone it's not). None of these things are extraneous.
Extraneous elements that don't interfere with what you're conveying are perfectly fine, and perhaps even desirable.
I suspect we have slightly differing definitions of extraneous. Since part of GTA's appeal is that the game world must feel like a real city, then random pedestrian comments logically would have a place, to maintain that illusion. (Hopefully, by the time that illusion expires, the gameplay has engaged the player enough that it's not needed anymore.)
But you'd know that your opponent would know that, so he'd have to worry about you predicting that he'd try to counter the more powerful choice with the only option that would beat it. And that would raise the importance of the sign that beat the sign that beat the powerful choice, but that one would be beaten by the powerful choice, so when the dust settled you'd be right back to raw statistics again. It would still be in your interest to choose the more powerful sign more often than the others.
This is why I said Rock was left in the lurch. The game would come down to determining whether your opponent had played much of the variant before -- unless you observe that he also noticed there was an unbalanced throw, which would make him more likely to pick the new one. Unless you observe that he might observe that. Unless you observe that he might observe that you'd observe....
In terms of strict responsibility, yes. But Nintendo promoted a culture and house style that led to that sort of thing.
Well that's a matter of opinion, though there is obviously some truth to it. Nintendo was the hot kid on the block when it came to games at the time, after all, and game companies tend to follow what's successful at that time.
I still don't quite see what adding hearts does to ruin a game. You could see the use of hearts, for example, in Zelda was kind of grim; you've just killed an enemy, and although its corpse vanished in a splash of pixel dust, what's left on the ground is its heart. In the original game, it was still beating! And you collect it to get health back!!
But ultimately, hearts-as-pickups is just a game metaphor, serving to obscure the fact that there's really nothing inherent in killing a monster that makes you healthier. (If you really want to get sickened by a game that
Elegance and simplicity don't automatically translate into strength of design. It would be extremely "elegant" to have a game where no matter what you did, you always wound up losing. It just wouldn't be very much fun.
False! Many arcade games have followed this pattern.
To put it another way: Pong vs. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Which game has the purer design? Now which one is more engaging? Which is deeper? Which is the better experience?
You think this is a slam-dunk argument, but it is not! Both games have their own strengths. Pong is still playable today, and since it is a versus game, it's actually a way of testing the players against each other, rather than against a scripted set of missions, which means it's *possible* get tired of GTA:SA before Pong. And I know people who would never play a game like GTA:SA, but would love Pong.
> Less things to worry about [...] mean a purer play experience.
Purer, yes. Deeper, no. Better? Debatable.
**All other things being equal,** then fewer game elements do automatically make for a better game, for the same reason movies should not contain unnecessary characters, or novels unnecessary plot threads. While it is not always easy to tell what's essential and what is not (things on the outside of the core mechanic, like extra modes, are given more of a pass here), a designer should strive to keep a game free of spurious aspects.
Probably, though the more vibrant and hardcore gaming scenes tend to weed the subjectivity out of that.
I see that, eventually, this indeed becomes the case, although it could be difficult to say when the process is ever truly finished.
Baloney. KD is a great game, and a breath of fresh air in these days of genre rigidity -- but when it comes right down to it, it's just Marble Madness with tank controls and ever-increasing scale.
And that's what makes it great, and why it could only be designed by an outsider! Do not underestimate the importance of those words "with tank control and ever-increasing scale." Just because it's obvious in hindsight doesn't mean it was so while the game was in development.
Further, the game has a little more going on than just Marble Madness, though I think you summed up the core of it nicely. There's a certain something in KD that's difficult to put into words. In a way, if you don't already see it, I can't tell you.
Shoving the response proportions around could only mitigate it somewhat -- it'd still be in your interest to pick that choice most of the time.
No, because you'd also know that your opponent would be more likely to pick the more powerful throw as well. R,P,S has always been about trying to predict what your opponent would pick, the example I gave would move it out of the pure social dimension and put more actual game strategy into it, but eventually the social dimension still wins out. (My specific example is deficient, however, in that it does leave Rock in the lurch.)
Now look at games like Set or Quarto which play with variations in shape, color, and texture (and size, in Quarto's case). All of the elements are distinct, yet all are equally important to winning.
(After researching those games....)
Those are very cool and elegant games and now I'm just itching to try them (thanks btw), and it's obvious that, just like Rock, Scissors, Paper, they are devoid of extraneous elements. But my Rock, Scissors, Paper example was to point out that *extraneous* elements can wreck a game.
I guess the discussion is really about whether fighting games contain extraneous elements, and how many. I won't say that Smash doesn't; it's very difficult to make a game of the complexity of a fighting game (or Smash, I'm not sure it's even the same kind of game) and keep it pared down. Honestly, you're probably a better judge of fighting games in this regard than I am.
It wasn't just their visual language -- they imposed it on 3rd-party d
And yet, having multiple win conditions is always a case of having a weaker design than having a single win condition, because more arbitrary factors are added to the game.
I don't see any rational basis for that statement at all.
It's true because the design is more elegant. To some degree, game design is an exercise of communication to and from the player. Make the game more complex, and the game will need that much stronger a play experience for the player to accept it. That's not just learning a game, but also has to do with which the player processes it. All games are essentially arbitrary processes, but they also seek to convince the player that they are not. Multiple win conditions are one way that a game becomes less "pure."
No, because in the second case the only actual threat is being knocked out of the ring. If your offensive attempt fails, but you weren't in danger of being knocked out yourself, then it's not a dilemma.
But the issue here is the *potential existance* of a class of threat. By making damage less important, Smash shifts that type of peril into another area. Less things to worry about (even if the total worry is quantitively the same) mean a purer play experience.
If the game is balanced, then each character should have a roughly equal chance of achieving one of the win conditions when used properly.
I find myself wondering about this more and more these days, that part of what is percieved a "balance" exists in the social sphere that surrounds the games. Like when a reputation builds up around Character X because he's "cheap," when really he's just easier to learn, or he looks cooler so people naturally put more effort into learning him, or the antidotes to that character are part of the more esoteric aspects of the fighting system. But that's an issue for a different discussion I think.
Well, I don't think I'm full of crap, and you still haven't explained that "restricting options" comment...
Oh for the....
I think to some extent we're both full of crap because some of the most interesting games that I see are the ones that are obviously *not* the result of debating about them. Katamari Damacy could only have been designed by someone *not* steeped in the history and lore of gaming. The insulariry of FPSes and fighting games is just a specific case of the insularity that infests video games as a whole. Does that explain things?
Restricting options making a game more interesting, hmmm... well, to take an example, take Rock, Scissors, Paper. There are exactly as many choices as you need. Add more choices and something is lost. If you put in, say, a throw that wins over two choices, then it gets picked more often, so it wrecks the game. (Or more accurately, it DOESN'T wreck the game, it means it gets picked more often, which means Paper is picked more often as a counter to it, which means Scissors is picked more often as a counter to *that*, and it all evens out eventually. But only eventually, and it loses the entire focus of the game.)
But even in well-designed variants like Rock, Scissors, Paper, Spock, Lizard, in which all the choices still have equal power, it's essentially more complex than it needs to be. The soul of the game is in the equality of the choices, everything else is superfluous and should be edited out. Take that concept and generalize it to the case of video games, and that's a fair bit of what I'm talking about.
This is true. Though it's pretty much impossible to make a competitive game that's satisfying to both button-mashers and tactical players, because the button-mashers want to be 100% effective without a learning curve, while the tactical players won't settle for a system that allows button-mashing to win the day.
I don't buy this, someone just hasn't come up with the right approach yet, but that could just be my optimism about the potential of video gaming talking. (And there are some people who claim Smash is such a game. A
No, because being near a boundary automatically creates a Ring Out risk for both players, though not necessarily an equal one. I'm pointing out the extra dimension that having to worry about two different win conditions creates.
And yet, having multiple win conditions is always a case of having a weaker design than having a single win condition, because more arbitrary factors are added to the game.
Sure, there *can* be situations where you can go after a health or positioning win, but there also can be situations where you get a similar (though likely not identical) effect in a Ring Out only system.
> This is not always true. People tend to go for the easiest condition.
And those people are novices who will be destroyed by anyone who sees the larger picture.
Not necessarily. But we're moving into wholly theoretical realms here, where it's difficult to see how one could convince the other without demonstrations.
Restricting options based on the individual selections made can add depth, because the individual parts aren't interchangable.
I really don't see what you're trying to say here.
It's not really a Smash-oriented comment. And it could be seen to go against my prior comment about increased arbitrariness in a game producing weaker designs. But there's a lot of things about game design that are like this, the best ones tend to come way out of left field. To some extent, I suspect both of us are full of crap.
When a game is about offense, defense, counters, and meta-counters, the number of unique gameplay situations does in fact make the game deeper. Exponentially so.
But I tend to not be fond of games that are essentially about just these things. A game that isn't *just* about these things, thus, has the potential to be greater than a game that is just about them. Which is why I think Smash is better, in some respects, because there are other factors there that come from its platformer nature.
Fighting games benefit from the fact that there's been so many of them, because there's an established language for discussing and creating them, and a wide library of ideas that have been tried before. But they also suffer for that, fighting games are almost as insular a genre as FPSes. Smash also suffers from that, but to a lesser degree.
But if you polled the Nintendo fanboys, I'd venture a guess that the overwhelming majority of them just happened to have an NES or SNES as their first video game system, and that's why they're such die-hard Nintendo fans.
Yeah, I can see that. I kind of think it's cool to have a romantic notion of a game system, but yeah, it's also important not to be blinded by that.
I was simply citing an early reference for swapping out a character with a completely different one -- I wasn't making any comment beyond that.
Well there are other instances of this concept in gaming from far before Altered Beast. It's just another version of Super Mario's mushrooms and flowers, and even that's not the origin of the idea.
Though not an exclusive innovation, since the first SSB and Power Stone came out around the same time.
Well that gets us to the question of what is innovation. It's one of those "All things are X/No things are X" situations. PS and SSB are sufficently different from each other than dying from falling out the stage doesn't mean quite the same thing in each game. I'd say that Nintendo probably came up with their idea independently, since they have a bit of a "not invented here" policy (which sometimes works to their detriment).
(Also, I seem to remember Smash being out a little before Power Stone, but my memory could be faulty here. It's not a big point.)
Me, I'm an old coot from the Atari / Intellivision days, so I don't have anyone to be blindly loyal to anymore. I personally don't care for Nintendo's approach to things most of the time -- it's too cutesy and childish for my taste. But that does
Perhaps it's the story line more than anything. I can't relate to some young little boy dancing around in some medievel fantasy world with Deku trees and all that. I don't care if he can't find his magical flute.
Spoken like a man who's never fought Ganon in Ocarina of Time or Wind Waker....
You obviously never played with Gen since his entire normal move, special move set, super move set, movement and even his stance changes when he switches styles.
Well, I may have to bow to superior knowledge on that one. But Zelda/Sheik's different forms also have different physics. Can the same be said of Gen? If so, then you're right, and this one character concept in this one game may have been done before.
You're defending Smash Brothers on all the wrong premises.
But that would only be true if you had countered *all* the points I had made. You have not, sir.
I'm not denying it is a great game, but to deny that it has pulled a lot from fighting games (or other games in general) is a disservice to all of the games that came before it.
Of course Smash pulled from other games. All games do, unavoidably.
Of course Smash pulls from fighting games. The whole style of the game is based around that.
But in other areas, I'm less certain if Smash takes elements of other games, or just devises them from the ground up anew, and ironically, this may be because of one of Nintendo's greatest flaws: they have a severe case of "Not Invented Here" syndrome. They don't look outside the company much, and historically, those times when the company does innovate in outside genres, the game's from one of their subsiderary companies, like HAL Labs, Intelligent Designs or Retro Studios.
But your argument was that it made the game deeper. How does being more limited create depth? Isn't it a tougher problem if you have the opportunity to make a move that will K.O. your opponent if you succeed, but leave yourself open to a Ring Out if you fail?
Replace the words "K.O. your opponent" with "Ring out your opponent" in the sentence. Your scenario is possible under both systems. Ring Outs require that players worry more about positioning, and less about just tearing down (or up) a number. But it's difficult to explain, like more things concerning game design than people will admit, exactly *why* a Ring Out only system is deeper.
Multiple win conditions automatically make the game more complex.
This is not always true. People tend to go for the easiest condition. Further, more complex is not the same thing as deeper. Sometimes, added complexity makes a game more shallow!
Quite true. Though the Power Stone games are very much in the same vein as SSBM.
I believe I mentioned PowerStone, if memory serves....
Remove the similar characters from MvC2 and you still have well over 40 very distinct fighters -- everything from screen-filling monstrosities to tiny football-sized robots -- and they can be lumped together in arbitrary teams of 3, giving you a pretty insane arsenal of swap-in combos and simultaneous multi-character attacks.
Well that's more of a judgement call. More options doesn't always make a game deeper. Restricting options based on the individual selections made can add depth, because the individual parts aren't interchangable.
Guardian Heroes on the Saturn had the magician Randy with his little rabbit Nando who would attack semi-independently, even though they were controlled by the same player.
Guardian Heroes isn't the same kind of game, however, it's a side-scrolling Beat-em-up in the vein of Double Dragon and Final Fight. Of course, neither is Smash the same kind of game. But its closer, to the sake of this argument, than Guardian Heroes is.
Or go back to Virtua Fighter 4, where most characters have multiple fighting stances (at least one character has 4 of them) that completely change the way they approach combat. Start working fighting stance changes into your combos and the number of possibilities becomes ridiculous.
Once again, sheer number of possibilities doesn't necessarily make a game deeper. Number of *useable* possibilites is closer, but even then not always.
I mentioned so many (though not all) of Smash's elements because of the way they all work together during a game. Look at it this way: in almost all fighting games, sure you can move around in a 3D area, you can move around a bit, but the most important directions, almost exclusively, are "towards the opponent" and "anywhere except towards the opponent." Many fighting games (although not all) implicitly acknowledge this by keeping the camera oriented so it looks like a Street Fighter-style fighting game. Smash has a lot of coolness in it, but maybe its best innovation is that other directions mean a lot more, like "away from the gaping pit" -- even though, ultimately, the game isn't really 3D.
There's prior art going at least as far back as Altered Beast for that one.
Well if you're going to go to Altered Beast, then the gloves are off: Rampart is twice the game that Smash Bros. Melee could ever hope to be. So is Katamari Damacy. So is Ocarina of Time. So is A.P.B. (Atari Games).
My original point was that Smash compares favorably to fighting games, not all-other-games. (And for the record, I hated Altered Beast. Lame Genesis pack-in, grrrr!)
Well, random item drops automatically debalance a game. That's their entire purpose, after all.
I'm not sure. Nethack is composed of almost entirely random items, and yet it's exquisitely balanced....
But leaving that aside, balance is really a matter of making sure that the risk/reward ra
Real triple-A titles are those which achieve critical and commercial success. So, things like Deus Ex, Half-Life, Mario 64, Zelda (not that I like it personally), Goldeneye, GTA3, etc.
This is off the topic, but I'm curious. You mention liking Mario 64, but not (I assume Ocarina of Time) Zelda.
I've wondered, in a way, how anyone can not like Zelda. I mean I'm sure it's possible, but when I get to the specifics of it, it doesn't fit into my brain, I guess.
Would you mind explaining what it is about it that doesn't agree with you? I'm not intending to ask this in an argumentative way, just out of curosity, my own theories of game design might benefit from an answer.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, I've had that problem too, in playing Katamari Damacy. There's a "charge" move that's all but essential to getting super-good scores/times, where you alternate the two analog sticks as fast as you can, up/down, down/up, up/down, down/up, to build up power for a sudden boose of speed. The faster you do it, the stronger the boost. Well it's very easy to accidently press *in* on both sticks while doing this, which activates the sudden-turn-around move, meaning your charge gets sent exactly 180 degrees AWAY from where you wanted to go. Arrrgh!
The price of controllers cannot skyrocket, so doodads like the touch screen are incredibly unlikely.
But consider:
The DS is probably being sold at a profit, even at $130. The GBA was sold at a profit at $70. Guessing that the margins are about the same, and that many of the parts are the same, the DS-specific elements (wireless, extra screen, lights, touchscreen, ARM9, mic, battery) could be priced at $60. The touchscreen is probably the most expensive part of that, but still, we're not exactly talking about Wacom scale here. It's probably $30 or less. If Nintendo were willing to take a loss on the controller price, it could indeed probably be sold at $30.
We've gotten hints that the revolutionary aspect is simple and has been done before, but hasn't really been used in games.
I remember hearing that once, but it was months ago and hasn't been repeated from a difference source since then. And I think Nintendo was still thinking about the specifics at the time. It could still very well be something really new, especially it was a rumor even then.
There has been a LOT of talk about gyros. I've also read a few comments already suggesting that gyros/tilt sensors/etc are a gimmick. To that I say: Bullshit.
The best GBA game to come out in the last year was Warioware Twisted. The game is seriously cool. Not only does it have a gyro rotation sensor, but it has controller rumble as well. It feels absolutely amazing, like you're turning a gear or something when you twist it. I suspect that the controller has something like this in it. A tilt-resistant gyro sensor also has a level of coolness in it that sounds Nintendoish, although I'm unsure how it could be worked into gameplay.
I personally think a good possibility is an optical trackball.
It could give us the best console emulated versions of Centipede, Marble Madness and Rampart ever.
I did find that shooting on that game was a less than enjoyable experience. They had to rely on an automatic targetting system to actually pull off kills.
I just want to say that I really, really hate the PS2 analog sticks compared to the Gamecube ones. I recently had the chance to play Super Monkey Ball Deluxe on a PS2, and it worked okay until I got to a new level that required rolling across very narrow passages. I could do it easily with a GC stick, but on PS2 it was impossible. For Katamari Damacy they work well, but it doesn't require pinpoint control like Monkey Ball does.
Miss. Pac. Man.
Of course it is. Video games have always had that element of Da Gimmick. Donkey Kong Jungle Beat is gimmicky. EyeToy looks pretty gimmicky to me. Portable gaming would look gimmicky if we weren't used to it.
But the fact is, a good gimmick can make a game. Everything new looks like a gimmick. It is, in fact, but that doesn't mean it can't also be cool.
Not all gimmicky things are cool, of course. When "gimmick" is used as a deogratory term, the implication is that there's nothing else there. Which may have been true at first, but now... well, Kirby proved a lot of things. It may sell less than Advance Wars DS and Nintendogs, but it was the game that proved that, with solid design, the DS really does have new things to show the world of gaming. It's the most important DS release so far.
The coolest things have always looked gimmicky at first. If you're going to deride something solely because of its newness then you have a sad outlook on the world.
I'm as big a Nintendo fan as anyone, I suppose, and even I agree.
Besides, Nintendogs needs a strategy guide?! If you need a guide for that game, then I humbly suggest you're missing the entire point.
I know I'm gonna blow all my good karma on this thread. But you can't be serious when you say that Google is a company that's doing the best they can given limited resources? Google is now as near as you can come a company without resource limits at all. Just a couple of days ago they capitalized stock worth four billion dollars.
It still has limited resources, because it's the nature of reality that resources be limited. Governments have limited resources, and famously have problems doing everything they need/want within their budget. While Google doesn't have to pay for schools and police departments, they do have the world's largest pool of connected hard drive space. That can't be cheap to maintain.
Google is also doing a lot of things right now with little profit-making potential, really big things, and a lot more of those compared to your standard ultra-rich company. The storage requirements for Google Maps have got to be huge.
What puzzles me is that we Slashdotters seems to view Googles capitalism as idealism, something capitalism seldom is.
Remember all the fuss that happened with Google's IPO? The dutch auction system, the problems they had with brokers, the message they had on their site to prospective buyers? A stock sale is primarily about money, true, but Google did probably the best they could to let people know that this is not money at any cost. That's one of the reasons that Slashdot readers tend to get misty-eyed talking about Google.
And in retrospect, it didn't seem to hurt the stock price that much.
I disagree on Pikmin, which through successive replays shows that it's actually very well put together, and designed around the idea of playing time attacks. (The game can be won in nine days....)
Pikmin 2 seems more rushed than Pikmin 1, because of the somewhat-cheaty dungeon design. It's still cool, though.
It depends on which WarioWare you mean. The original and Twisted are pure joy, and last an amazingly long time (especially Twisted, which has a surreal number of unlockables). The DS-specific WarioWare, Touched, is the worst of the lot, although there are still cool things about it.
That's certainly evil if you are an investor, they're behind the great outsourcing spree of Y2K. It's not evil to John Q. Public.
John Q. Public not-evil trumps investor not-evil. Sounds obvious, but a lot of corporate malfesance is justified based on the reverse.
I'm not dissing Googles products here, I merely want to point out that Google are not as platform agnostic and idealistic that people here seem to think they are. And why should they? Idealism seldom makes anyone rich.
Um, idealism *is*, essentially, what's making Google rich.
As for their platforms, from what I've heard, they just released on Windows first. It's not always easy to port these things -- should they just not release at all until there's versions available for all common OSes?
Plus, Google Earth is primarily a special, EXE-based case of Google Maps, which runs on lots of browsers that run on lots of operating systems, because they support Firefox. Google Toolbar now runs on Firefox. Google Talk uses Jabber, so anyone with a Jabber-compatible client and a Gmail account can use their network.
What I see in Google is a company doing the best they can given limited resources. I won't say I always agree with them (that filtering search for China thing still sticks in my craw) but at least they *are* trying.
I'd love to see it, personally. But the gaming public at large just won't accept that sort of lack of forgiveness in a game anymore. For example, look at the uproar over the lack of an in-level save in Aliens vs. Predator 2 (an intentional design choice to heighten tension and force you to legitimately survive) -- I think they had a quicksave patch out within a month or two.
Ah, that's one of the things that prevents more people from trying out Roguelikes, which as a rule contain some form of permadeath.
And have we ever seen a fighting game where you could break limbs and they'd stay broken for the rest of the fight? The closest thing I can think of is Time Killers, where you could hack off one or both arms and the other player could keep going without them. The game stunk, though.
A fighting game is over in a few minutes no matter what happens. If you lost a limb to an early boss in your typical 50-hour action-adventure-hack-n-slash extravaganza, it'd be a lot more dire.
I do like the idea, from a design standpoint, that there's permanent bad things that can happen to you, but the way people expect games to progress these days, the moment something like that happened they'd reach for the reset button. (And I'll admit I've done it myself in the past -- like those rooms in the original Zelda's second quest with the mean old man demanding you give him 50 rupees or give up a heart container....)
Someone committing horrible acts in the service of something ostensibly good, even though they couldn't care less about doing the right thing. I think that's an interesting dynamic.
Typically in those cases, despite that the player (or other characters referring to that character) say, player-evil isn't presented as being nearly as bad as enemy-evil. You likely won't ever see a protagonist setting up a death camp or behaving in a racist manner. They may talk a good game, but usually you can't actually *do* it. (Not that I'm arguing with that policy....)
To me, some cute icon that's jarringly out of place completely shatters the illusion of the experience. Even the medical kits in Splinter Cell nearly break the experience, because the idea of instant health regeneration in that environment is patently absurd.
Well, the very idea of powerups is like that. It might actually be cool to play a game in which all powerups and damage were handled very realistically, where if you lost an arm, you'd have to go through the rest of the game without it. For various reasons, however, that's unlikely to happen, mostly because a mere torso can't expect to get very far on a quest to save even his lunch money.
But that desire for vengeance is misplaced, because Kratos was an enthusiastic participant in the very things he wound up holding against Ares.
Hmmm... what does the game seem to think of that attribute? Thing about a complete bastard doing things we don't approve of at our behest... I think a lot of games don't do that because they raise the question: "Why are we helping this guy slaughter innocent people?"
...that even show up under Firefox. Thanks, "Science Blog!"
That's probably what they had at the arcade when I was a kid, then. It was basically 2-player Asteroids minus the asteroids, plus the option of having a variable-strength gravity well in the middle of the screen either with or without an accompanying planet that would destroy you on contact. The controls were all buttons -- rotation, thrust, firing, and I think a shield.
That sounds like the arcade version of Space War that got released early on in the original arcade boom. BTW, there is an Atari 2600 port with many options intact: http://www.atariguide.com/1/171.htm
The idea of using a heart icon for health restoration in a realistic-toned game like Splinter Cell. I felt that was basically impossible without ruining the tone of the game, and you disagreed, but hadn't really explained how it could be pulled off inoffensively.
I guess I disagree because I don't consider its use to be offensive. I don't think you've proven your point there sufficently.
I mean, if the game had frilly lace everywhere, and cupids shooting arrows, and shepherds shyly catching glances of dancing nymphs wandering around grassy hillsides, and young centaurs playing tag throughout the halls of the terrorist base, then I'd say you'd have a point. (Not that there's anything wrong with that imagery overall, in a Romanticist kind of way -- but there aren't an awful lot of Romanticist video games these days.) These days, hearts have been denuded of much of their Valentinesque import in the realm of video games.
I mean, it's not even as if they are an important part of a game's imagery. If it is, as in the aforementioned Kingdom Hearts, it invariably comes across as trite and forced, true. But beyond the eternal hunt for Pieces of Heart in Zelda games, I have a hard time naming another game in which they matter all that much that isn't pink, frilly, and have the words "Disney," "Barbie," or "Mary Kate & Ashley" somewhere on the cover.
And that's basically spot-on, though the linear paths are all seamlessly connected in a non-linear way, so you can backtrack or take shortcuts at will. The thing about God Of War, both in terms of gameplay and of story, is that it's not even remotely innovative -- it's just incredibly well-executed.
Yeah, that's what I mean -- if a game is obviously innovative, you can kind of feel it from a description of it. If it's just an extraordinarily well-developed example of the breed, however, it's difficult to get that through to someone who's never seen it. And what I hear of the story turns me off, just another random badass sent off against a procession of harder and harder bosses until he faces the Big Baddie at the end.
If he *wasn't* a random badass then maybe it'd be easier to get with. I mean, take a look at Link. He doesn't have much of a personality. There's not much to distinguish the character except a sword, elf ears, and a Peter Pan outfit. And yet since the NES days he's been one of the most popular characters in gaming, perhaps because of an understated acknowledgement that he's not Dirk Squarejaw, that he actually does look vulnerable when compared to one of those gigantic bosses, and so it feels a lot better when he takes one down without uttering so much as a catchphrase or even a condescending gesture to the defeated foe.
It's a pretty short game, actually. Probably 8-12 hours the first time through, though it can be completed in as little as 2.5 hours if you know exactly what you're doing. It's a very satisfying story with a great ending, and the game looks and plays like a dream. Well worth the investment.
I'll consider it. Odd that the *lack* of length in a game, for once, is a deciding factor in playing it....
This article, apparently published around April '91, lists 7 million copies of Super Mario Bros. 3 sold. This one (analysis) lists sales of 18M overall (and 8.5M for GTA:VC). SMB3 has, for a while now, been the canonical best selling game of all time.
NPD numbers are tricky in that they don't cover all stores, and the precise numbers themselves cannot be used publically without getting charged up the yang. And of course, they don't cover the Japanese market, where GTA games don't do nearly as well. (Media Create, however, produces free stats for hardware and software sales in Japan.)
As a novelty. But Pong doesn't have the lasting appeal of something like Space War, which I believe came out even earlier.
The original Space War was played in university tech labs only. Before releasing Pong, Nolan Bushnell & company produced Computer Space, the first arcade video game and somewhat similar (I think I heard) to Space War, but it was not popular, probably because it was too complex.
My gut tells me you're right about Space War being more interesting than Pong (which I picked as an extreme example to test against GTA:SA). But honestly, alas, by this point I've lost almost all track of the GTA:SA vs Pong argument.
> Well, it could still be done I think without wrecking the tone.
I really don't see how.
What were we talking about here, again? We started this discussion so long ago I'm getting fuzzy on it.
There are some interesting turns to the story, despite the fact that many of them are predictable -- and in that respect it's much like the rest of the game, which is a collection of extremely well-polished and well-executed clichés.
I dunno, it still hasn't broken through my apathy filter yet. Gameplay footage looks mostly like yet another "guy slays bunches of monsters in 3D using combos and special moves through a series of linear levels" game. But maybe that's just the lack of sleep talking....
Oh, I enjoyed the story in Prince Of Persia: The Sands Of Time, too. A fantastic game with characters that you actually cared about.
I've also heard PoP:SoT had a good story, but I probably won't get around to playing it. Not that I have anything against it... just that there's such a lot of games to play that I'll probably never be able to find time for. Sometimes I wonder if I'm not moving away from video games altogether these days. I played Katamari Damacy for weeks, but before that there was a good drought of gaming interest. Ah well.
These days, I find think about homebrew game creation is starting to pull ahead of actual game playing in my interests list. Which is a recipe for further gaming angst, I know....
I assume you meant "GTA:SA over Pong".
Argh... I wrote that at around 8:30 in the morning after a night that might as well have been sleepless. No fun.
Since GTA:SA is the #1 selling video game of all time,
Hmm, this sounds suspecious to me, though it has been very popular. Do you have some numbers to back this up? Wikipedia's list, at least, identifies two games that sold more as of June 2005, Super Mario 64 and GTA: Vice City. And that list doesn't include NES games, which I imagine would blow both of those figures out of the water.
I don't think the raw numbers are on your side. Yes, Pong is still fun...for about 10 minutes. But after experiencing evolutionary games like Warlords or Arkanoid, Pong just doesn't cut it anymore for long-term enjoyment.
Watch the words, "doesn't cut it anymore." For its time, and for an arcade-only machine, Pong was quite a hit. I was speaking out of a general sense of the raw fun value of a game, which is of course only a theoretical concept.
But the fact remains that Pong is more accessable to people who've never played a video game before than GTA games, and there are still many more such people than gamers.
A rental just can't do that game justice. New gameplay elements are steadily introduced pretty much all the way through the main narrative, and the tone of the game changes considerably once you get beyond Los Santos.
Hmmm. I will give it another chance. I really wanted to like GTA:SA due to the free-roaming gameplay (and because I like the taxi missions from the prior games).
Can you imagine how absurd it would look if heart icons were used in Splinter Cell?
Well, it could still be done I think without wrecking the tone. Hearts have a certain iconic value now (partly because of all those NES games that used them). Sure, it'd make less sense than those omnipresent First Aid Kits... but those kits aren't exactly realistic either, though in a different way.
Nothing that's been pitch-perfect yet, but there have been some really strong ones. I'm no big Kojima fan (I thought MGS2 sucked after leaving the tanker), but I have to say that despite the sporadic goofiness, Metal Gear Solid 3 really worked as a story. You actually cared about the characters, and the game was able to elicit emotional responses from you.
I got some serious recommendations about MGS3 from the guy who runs Curmudgeon Gamer, I'll probably have to play it before long.
I also enjoyed how Guardian Heroes took on religion and genre conventions in its multiple story branches, showing the dark side of the ostensible "good guys" and the sympathetic aspects of the supposed "bad guys". And it let you choose which side to back, or just go your own way.
But recently there have been a lot of games that have done exactly that, many of them Japanese RPGs, and the Japanese have far less of a vested interest in Western religion than we have so it's not as great a matter. In the years since Guardian Heroes' release, it's become its own full-fledged cliche. And most of these games don't tackle details of real-world religions, but idealized, abstracted representations of them. Nothing that could actually challenge someone's beliefs. And usually organized, specifically-Catholic-style religion is what gets knocked in those, when these days it's other groups that are causing far more harm in the world.
But my vote for the best stories I've seen in a game, after a cursory examination of the inventory of my brain, is that of the Grandia games, even though the second one is guilty of the problem I just described, even though they have their fair share of cliches, just because the dialogue is written with such energy and wit. Roger Ebert says of movies, that quality isn't decided by what the movie is about, but how it is about it. Maybe that could be said of game storytelling, too?
I have to admit, when I look at screenshots or movies of God of War, I am overcome with a profound weariness. Care to elaborate upon the storytelling in the game?
Ah, but GTA:SA has 2-player free-roaming co-op play, as well as 2-player rampages. And its open-ended design allows you to roll your own mayhem for theoretically endless enjoyment.
I suppose. I like the free-roamingness of GTA, but using it just to smash up whatever you can, because you can, doesn't greatly appeal to me. It's a case of a series that, maybe similar to your feelings about Nintendo, I can respect from a design standpoint but will probably never play much of.
And I also disagree that more people would enjoy Pong over GTA:SA. The gang-banger theme of SA really turned me and my friends off when we rented it. Meanwhile Pong got the game industry off the ground in earnest, so it's already proven it can be interesting to many non-gamers.
I completely disagree with this. The stripping of extraneous elements from movies makes most of them completely predictable.
Ah, that's false too. It only makes them completely predictable if they were already intellectually sterile. Annie Hall (movie, directed by Woody Allen) is an example of a movie that's not sterile, and even looks like it's filled with extraneous material, but is actually pretty sharp.
If a character makes a reference to something that doesn't seem to apply to the plot, you know it's going to be important later.
Unless that thing is not important to the plot, but instead speaks something about the story in a different way, or is used instead to modulate the viewer's expectations, or is included as a purposeful red herring (like how the opening of Psycho misleads the audience into thinking the movie'll be about someone it's not). None of these things are extraneous.
Extraneous elements that don't interfere with what you're conveying are perfectly fine, and perhaps even desirable.
I suspect we have slightly differing definitions of extraneous. Since part of GTA's appeal is that the game world must feel like a real city, then random pedestrian comments logically would have a place, to maintain that illusion. (Hopefully, by the time that illusion expires, the gameplay has engaged the player enough that it's not needed anymore.)
But you'd know that your opponent would know that, so he'd have to worry about you predicting that he'd try to counter the more powerful choice with the only option that would beat it. And that would raise the importance of the sign that beat the sign that beat the powerful choice, but that one would be beaten by the powerful choice, so when the dust settled you'd be right back to raw statistics again. It would still be in your interest to choose the more powerful sign more often than the others.
This is why I said Rock was left in the lurch. The game would come down to determining whether your opponent had played much of the variant before -- unless you observe that he also noticed there was an unbalanced throw, which would make him more likely to pick the new one. Unless you observe that he might observe that. Unless you observe that he might observe that you'd observe....
In terms of strict responsibility, yes. But Nintendo promoted a culture and house style that led to that sort of thing.
Well that's a matter of opinion, though there is obviously some truth to it. Nintendo was the hot kid on the block when it came to games at the time, after all, and game companies tend to follow what's successful at that time.
I still don't quite see what adding hearts does to ruin a game. You could see the use of hearts, for example, in Zelda was kind of grim; you've just killed an enemy, and although its corpse vanished in a splash of pixel dust, what's left on the ground is its heart. In the original game, it was still beating! And you collect it to get health back!!
But ultimately, hearts-as-pickups is just a game metaphor, serving to obscure the fact that there's really nothing inherent in killing a monster that makes you healthier. (If you really want to get sickened by a game that
Elegance and simplicity don't automatically translate into strength of design. It would be extremely "elegant" to have a game where no matter what you did, you always wound up losing. It just wouldn't be very much fun.
False! Many arcade games have followed this pattern.
To put it another way: Pong vs. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Which game has the purer design? Now which one is more engaging? Which is deeper? Which is the better experience?
You think this is a slam-dunk argument, but it is not! Both games have their own strengths. Pong is still playable today, and since it is a versus game, it's actually a way of testing the players against each other, rather than against a scripted set of missions, which means it's *possible* get tired of GTA:SA before Pong. And I know people who would never play a game like GTA:SA, but would love Pong.
> Less things to worry about [...] mean a purer play experience.
Purer, yes. Deeper, no. Better? Debatable.
**All other things being equal,** then fewer game elements do automatically make for a better game, for the same reason movies should not contain unnecessary characters, or novels unnecessary plot threads. While it is not always easy to tell what's essential and what is not (things on the outside of the core mechanic, like extra modes, are given more of a pass here), a designer should strive to keep a game free of spurious aspects.
Probably, though the more vibrant and hardcore gaming scenes tend to weed the subjectivity out of that.
I see that, eventually, this indeed becomes the case, although it could be difficult to say when the process is ever truly finished.
Baloney. KD is a great game, and a breath of fresh air in these days of genre rigidity -- but when it comes right down to it, it's just Marble Madness with tank controls and ever-increasing scale.
And that's what makes it great, and why it could only be designed by an outsider! Do not underestimate the importance of those words "with tank control and ever-increasing scale." Just because it's obvious in hindsight doesn't mean it was so while the game was in development.
Further, the game has a little more going on than just Marble Madness, though I think you summed up the core of it nicely. There's a certain something in KD that's difficult to put into words. In a way, if you don't already see it, I can't tell you.
Shoving the response proportions around could only mitigate it somewhat -- it'd still be in your interest to pick that choice most of the time.
No, because you'd also know that your opponent would be more likely to pick the more powerful throw as well. R,P,S has always been about trying to predict what your opponent would pick, the example I gave would move it out of the pure social dimension and put more actual game strategy into it, but eventually the social dimension still wins out. (My specific example is deficient, however, in that it does leave Rock in the lurch.)
Now look at games like Set or Quarto which play with variations in shape, color, and texture (and size, in Quarto's case). All of the elements are distinct, yet all are equally important to winning.
(After researching those games....)
Those are very cool and elegant games and now I'm just itching to try them (thanks btw), and it's obvious that, just like Rock, Scissors, Paper, they are devoid of extraneous elements. But my Rock, Scissors, Paper example was to point out that *extraneous* elements can wreck a game.
I guess the discussion is really about whether fighting games contain extraneous elements, and how many. I won't say that Smash doesn't; it's very difficult to make a game of the complexity of a fighting game (or Smash, I'm not sure it's even the same kind of game) and keep it pared down. Honestly, you're probably a better judge of fighting games in this regard than I am.
It wasn't just their visual language -- they imposed it on 3rd-party d
And yet, having multiple win conditions is always a case of having a weaker design than having a single win condition, because more arbitrary factors are added to the game.
I don't see any rational basis for that statement at all.
It's true because the design is more elegant. To some degree, game design is an exercise of communication to and from the player. Make the game more complex, and the game will need that much stronger a play experience for the player to accept it. That's not just learning a game, but also has to do with which the player processes it. All games are essentially arbitrary processes, but they also seek to convince the player that they are not. Multiple win conditions are one way that a game becomes less "pure."
No, because in the second case the only actual threat is being knocked out of the ring. If your offensive attempt fails, but you weren't in danger of being knocked out yourself, then it's not a dilemma.
But the issue here is the *potential existance* of a class of threat. By making damage less important, Smash shifts that type of peril into another area. Less things to worry about (even if the total worry is quantitively the same) mean a purer play experience.
If the game is balanced, then each character should have a roughly equal chance of achieving one of the win conditions when used properly.
I find myself wondering about this more and more these days, that part of what is percieved a "balance" exists in the social sphere that surrounds the games. Like when a reputation builds up around Character X because he's "cheap," when really he's just easier to learn, or he looks cooler so people naturally put more effort into learning him, or the antidotes to that character are part of the more esoteric aspects of the fighting system. But that's an issue for a different discussion I think.
Well, I don't think I'm full of crap, and you still haven't explained that "restricting options" comment...
Oh for the....
I think to some extent we're both full of crap because some of the most interesting games that I see are the ones that are obviously *not* the result of debating about them. Katamari Damacy could only have been designed by someone *not* steeped in the history and lore of gaming. The insulariry of FPSes and fighting games is just a specific case of the insularity that infests video games as a whole. Does that explain things?
Restricting options making a game more interesting, hmmm... well, to take an example, take Rock, Scissors, Paper. There are exactly as many choices as you need. Add more choices and something is lost. If you put in, say, a throw that wins over two choices, then it gets picked more often, so it wrecks the game. (Or more accurately, it DOESN'T wreck the game, it means it gets picked more often, which means Paper is picked more often as a counter to it, which means Scissors is picked more often as a counter to *that*, and it all evens out eventually. But only eventually, and it loses the entire focus of the game.)
But even in well-designed variants like Rock, Scissors, Paper, Spock, Lizard, in which all the choices still have equal power, it's essentially more complex than it needs to be. The soul of the game is in the equality of the choices, everything else is superfluous and should be edited out. Take that concept and generalize it to the case of video games, and that's a fair bit of what I'm talking about.
This is true. Though it's pretty much impossible to make a competitive game that's satisfying to both button-mashers and tactical players, because the button-mashers want to be 100% effective without a learning curve, while the tactical players won't settle for a system that allows button-mashing to win the day.
I don't buy this, someone just hasn't come up with the right approach yet, but that could just be my optimism about the potential of video gaming talking. (And there are some people who claim Smash is such a game. A
No, because being near a boundary automatically creates a Ring Out risk for both players, though not necessarily an equal one. I'm pointing out the extra dimension that having to worry about two different win conditions creates.
And yet, having multiple win conditions is always a case of having a weaker design than having a single win condition, because more arbitrary factors are added to the game.
Sure, there *can* be situations where you can go after a health or positioning win, but there also can be situations where you get a similar (though likely not identical) effect in a Ring Out only system.
> This is not always true. People tend to go for the easiest condition.
And those people are novices who will be destroyed by anyone who sees the larger picture.
Not necessarily. But we're moving into wholly theoretical realms here, where it's difficult to see how one could convince the other without demonstrations.
Restricting options based on the individual selections made can add depth, because the individual parts aren't interchangable.
I really don't see what you're trying to say here.
It's not really a Smash-oriented comment. And it could be seen to go against my prior comment about increased arbitrariness in a game producing weaker designs. But there's a lot of things about game design that are like this, the best ones tend to come way out of left field. To some extent, I suspect both of us are full of crap.
When a game is about offense, defense, counters, and meta-counters, the number of unique gameplay situations does in fact make the game deeper. Exponentially so.
But I tend to not be fond of games that are essentially about just these things. A game that isn't *just* about these things, thus, has the potential to be greater than a game that is just about them. Which is why I think Smash is better, in some respects, because there are other factors there that come from its platformer nature.
Fighting games benefit from the fact that there's been so many of them, because there's an established language for discussing and creating them, and a wide library of ideas that have been tried before. But they also suffer for that, fighting games are almost as insular a genre as FPSes. Smash also suffers from that, but to a lesser degree.
But if you polled the Nintendo fanboys, I'd venture a guess that the overwhelming majority of them just happened to have an NES or SNES as their first video game system, and that's why they're such die-hard Nintendo fans.
Yeah, I can see that. I kind of think it's cool to have a romantic notion of a game system, but yeah, it's also important not to be blinded by that.
I was simply citing an early reference for swapping out a character with a completely different one -- I wasn't making any comment beyond that.
Well there are other instances of this concept in gaming from far before Altered Beast. It's just another version of Super Mario's mushrooms and flowers, and even that's not the origin of the idea.
Though not an exclusive innovation, since the first SSB and Power Stone came out around the same time.
Well that gets us to the question of what is innovation. It's one of those "All things are X/No things are X" situations. PS and SSB are sufficently different from each other than dying from falling out the stage doesn't mean quite the same thing in each game. I'd say that Nintendo probably came up with their idea independently, since they have a bit of a "not invented here" policy (which sometimes works to their detriment).
(Also, I seem to remember Smash being out a little before Power Stone, but my memory could be faulty here. It's not a big point.)
Me, I'm an old coot from the Atari / Intellivision days, so I don't have anyone to be blindly loyal to anymore. I personally don't care for Nintendo's approach to things most of the time -- it's too cutesy and childish for my taste. But that does
Aaaah... now *that* could be cool, if it connected to the PSP.
Perhaps it's the story line more than anything. I can't relate to some young little boy dancing around in some medievel fantasy world with Deku trees and all that. I don't care if he can't find his magical flute.
Spoken like a man who's never fought Ganon in Ocarina of Time or Wind Waker....
You obviously never played with Gen since his entire normal move, special move set, super move set, movement and even his stance changes when he switches styles.
Well, I may have to bow to superior knowledge on that one. But Zelda/Sheik's different forms also have different physics. Can the same be said of Gen? If so, then you're right, and this one character concept in this one game may have been done before.
You're defending Smash Brothers on all the wrong premises.
But that would only be true if you had countered *all* the points I had made. You have not, sir.
I'm not denying it is a great game, but to deny that it has pulled a lot from fighting games (or other games in general) is a disservice to all of the games that came before it.
Of course Smash pulled from other games. All games do, unavoidably.
Of course Smash pulls from fighting games. The whole style of the game is based around that.
But in other areas, I'm less certain if Smash takes elements of other games, or just devises them from the ground up anew, and ironically, this may be because of one of Nintendo's greatest flaws: they have a severe case of "Not Invented Here" syndrome. They don't look outside the company much, and historically, those times when the company does innovate in outside genres, the game's from one of their subsiderary companies, like HAL Labs, Intelligent Designs or Retro Studios.
But your argument was that it made the game deeper. How does being more limited create depth? Isn't it a tougher problem if you have the opportunity to make a move that will K.O. your opponent if you succeed, but leave yourself open to a Ring Out if you fail?
Replace the words "K.O. your opponent" with "Ring out your opponent" in the sentence. Your scenario is possible under both systems. Ring Outs require that players worry more about positioning, and less about just tearing down (or up) a number. But it's difficult to explain, like more things concerning game design than people will admit, exactly *why* a Ring Out only system is deeper.
Multiple win conditions automatically make the game more complex.
This is not always true. People tend to go for the easiest condition. Further, more complex is not the same thing as deeper. Sometimes, added complexity makes a game more shallow!
Quite true. Though the Power Stone games are very much in the same vein as SSBM.
I believe I mentioned PowerStone, if memory serves....
Remove the similar characters from MvC2 and you still have well over 40 very distinct fighters -- everything from screen-filling monstrosities to tiny football-sized robots -- and they can be lumped together in arbitrary teams of 3, giving you a pretty insane arsenal of swap-in combos and simultaneous multi-character attacks.
Well that's more of a judgement call. More options doesn't always make a game deeper. Restricting options based on the individual selections made can add depth, because the individual parts aren't interchangable.
Guardian Heroes on the Saturn had the magician Randy with his little rabbit Nando who would attack semi-independently, even though they were controlled by the same player.
Guardian Heroes isn't the same kind of game, however, it's a side-scrolling Beat-em-up in the vein of Double Dragon and Final Fight. Of course, neither is Smash the same kind of game. But its closer, to the sake of this argument, than Guardian Heroes is.
Or go back to Virtua Fighter 4, where most characters have multiple fighting stances (at least one character has 4 of them) that completely change the way they approach combat. Start working fighting stance changes into your combos and the number of possibilities becomes ridiculous.
Once again, sheer number of possibilities doesn't necessarily make a game deeper. Number of *useable* possibilites is closer, but even then not always.
I mentioned so many (though not all) of Smash's elements because of the way they all work together during a game. Look at it this way: in almost all fighting games, sure you can move around in a 3D area, you can move around a bit, but the most important directions, almost exclusively, are "towards the opponent" and "anywhere except towards the opponent." Many fighting games (although not all) implicitly acknowledge this by keeping the camera oriented so it looks like a Street Fighter-style fighting game. Smash has a lot of coolness in it, but maybe its best innovation is that other directions mean a lot more, like "away from the gaping pit" -- even though, ultimately, the game isn't really 3D.
There's prior art going at least as far back as Altered Beast for that one.
Well if you're going to go to Altered Beast, then the gloves are off: Rampart is twice the game that Smash Bros. Melee could ever hope to be. So is Katamari Damacy. So is Ocarina of Time. So is A.P.B. (Atari Games).
My original point was that Smash compares favorably to fighting games, not all-other-games. (And for the record, I hated Altered Beast. Lame Genesis pack-in, grrrr!)
Well, random item drops automatically debalance a game. That's their entire purpose, after all.
I'm not sure. Nethack is composed of almost entirely random items, and yet it's exquisitely balanced....
But leaving that aside, balance is really a matter of making sure that the risk/reward ra
Real triple-A titles are those which achieve critical and commercial success. So, things like Deus Ex, Half-Life, Mario 64, Zelda (not that I like it personally), Goldeneye, GTA3, etc.
This is off the topic, but I'm curious. You mention liking Mario 64, but not (I assume Ocarina of Time) Zelda.
I've wondered, in a way, how anyone can not like Zelda. I mean I'm sure it's possible, but when I get to the specifics of it, it doesn't fit into my brain, I guess.
Would you mind explaining what it is about it that doesn't agree with you? I'm not intending to ask this in an argumentative way, just out of curosity, my own theories of game design might benefit from an answer.