And also, should EA Sports opt to add vuvuzelas to the next FIFA game, there ought to be a volume slider for those, too. --Me, previous post.
Turns out I wasn't too far off, after all...
Jun 30, 2010
Funny How These Things Work Out Sometimes
Turns out I wasn't too far off, after all...
Jun 25, 2010
Features I Think Are Missing From Modern Video Games
More customization than just your character.
Drawn To Life on the Nintendo DS is a step in an awesome direction - it's a game that you can literally sculpt to your liking thanks to the fact that you can draw most of the major game elements. I want more games to let you do things like this - give me a character creator, sure, everyone likes those...but also give me things like a symbol editor (could end up being a clan logo, a family coat of arms, a graffiti tag, perhaps the letterhead on all documents that come from my organization in case this is one of those kinds of games), a place to write a signature (which would show up in a few surreptitious places throughout the game), hell, maybe even a "Favorite Color" box that affects little things, like subtly offsetting the frequency of cars on the street that are that color, drawing the heads-up display in that color, stuff like that.
Random interactive elements.
Duke Nukem 3D was a pioneer among first-person shooters, not because of its running and shooting gameplay (which was really not that much different from Doom, save for the addition of a jump button and inventory system), but because of how many things Duke can just screw around with (ladies not exactly included, *cough*). Toilets can be used, pressurized fire extinguishers will explode when shot or somehow damaged, the DJ's microphone at a radio station prompts Duke to make a Freudian slip on air, an arcade machine isn't exactly usable but still provides a witty one-liner on Duke's part.
Simply put, I want more games to be like Duke. If I see a toilet on the wall, I want to either be able to utilize it, flush it, or even just be able to use it as a weapon (either in the Burn Notice fashion or the Half-Life 2 fashion, doesn't matter which). If there's a TV, I'd love to be able to turn it on and see what's on (or just smash it for no reason). If there's a soda machine, let me get a soda from it (even if it doesn't mean I get to drink it). Basically, make the world feel alive by letting the player do stuff in it. Even something so innocuous as letting the player use a chair to sit in it is welcomed (and thank you Bethesda for allowing me to do that in Oblivion and Fallout 3).
Independent volume sliders.
The PS2/XBox/PC game Kill.Switch presented a highly annoying conundrum: the music was irritating as hell, but turning off the Music Volume would also mute the cutscenes, as the cutscenes have music in addition to the people talking about the storyline. Basically, I'd love to be able to optimize the volume to my personal tastes. Even something so overdone as having separate sliders for music, ambient sound, gunfire, speech, engine noises, alarm buzzers (how I sometimes wish I could just silence those in Just Cause 2...), character one-liners (getting a little bored of "Makin' bacon!")...hell, an option in any game to toggle the player character's Silent Protagonist status would be welcomed at times. (Hello, Shadow Warrior...)
And also, should EA Sports opt to add vuvuzelas to the next FIFA game, there ought to be a volume slider for those, too.
Drawn To Life on the Nintendo DS is a step in an awesome direction - it's a game that you can literally sculpt to your liking thanks to the fact that you can draw most of the major game elements. I want more games to let you do things like this - give me a character creator, sure, everyone likes those...but also give me things like a symbol editor (could end up being a clan logo, a family coat of arms, a graffiti tag, perhaps the letterhead on all documents that come from my organization in case this is one of those kinds of games), a place to write a signature (which would show up in a few surreptitious places throughout the game), hell, maybe even a "Favorite Color" box that affects little things, like subtly offsetting the frequency of cars on the street that are that color, drawing the heads-up display in that color, stuff like that.
Random interactive elements.
Duke Nukem 3D was a pioneer among first-person shooters, not because of its running and shooting gameplay (which was really not that much different from Doom, save for the addition of a jump button and inventory system), but because of how many things Duke can just screw around with (ladies not exactly included, *cough*). Toilets can be used, pressurized fire extinguishers will explode when shot or somehow damaged, the DJ's microphone at a radio station prompts Duke to make a Freudian slip on air, an arcade machine isn't exactly usable but still provides a witty one-liner on Duke's part.
Simply put, I want more games to be like Duke. If I see a toilet on the wall, I want to either be able to utilize it, flush it, or even just be able to use it as a weapon (either in the Burn Notice fashion or the Half-Life 2 fashion, doesn't matter which). If there's a TV, I'd love to be able to turn it on and see what's on (or just smash it for no reason). If there's a soda machine, let me get a soda from it (even if it doesn't mean I get to drink it). Basically, make the world feel alive by letting the player do stuff in it. Even something so innocuous as letting the player use a chair to sit in it is welcomed (and thank you Bethesda for allowing me to do that in Oblivion and Fallout 3).
Independent volume sliders.
The PS2/XBox/PC game Kill.Switch presented a highly annoying conundrum: the music was irritating as hell, but turning off the Music Volume would also mute the cutscenes, as the cutscenes have music in addition to the people talking about the storyline. Basically, I'd love to be able to optimize the volume to my personal tastes. Even something so overdone as having separate sliders for music, ambient sound, gunfire, speech, engine noises, alarm buzzers (how I sometimes wish I could just silence those in Just Cause 2...), character one-liners (getting a little bored of "Makin' bacon!")...hell, an option in any game to toggle the player character's Silent Protagonist status would be welcomed at times. (Hello, Shadow Warrior...)
And also, should EA Sports opt to add vuvuzelas to the next FIFA game, there ought to be a volume slider for those, too.
Jun 24, 2010
Spend Them Wisely; They're Not Easy To Come By
It occurs to me that I never blogged my birthday at all this year. Well, I'm now 23 (for sake of being a stereotypical gamer let's assume I just reached Level 23 and have a few skill points that I need to spend), and my birthday present from Mom was, well, not having to pay out the $65 that week to help with rent. I took those $65, as well as a little extra I'd been saving for a rainy day, and purchased a new laptop screen for this Acer Travelmate that a friend from the D&D group had no use for and gave to me for free.
Well surprise, surprise...the screen came broken.
I've got nothing against the seller at all (though this will make me think twice about ordering parts on eBay anymore). My current target of frustration is UPS, who not only wouldn't give me a tracking number without paying an additional $40 on the return shipping, were probably also responsible for the screen being broken in the first place. Damn you, UPS!
As for those skill points...uh...probably spending those on actually getting good at playing Hidden & Dangerous 2. Hard frickin' game.
Well surprise, surprise...the screen came broken.
I've got nothing against the seller at all (though this will make me think twice about ordering parts on eBay anymore). My current target of frustration is UPS, who not only wouldn't give me a tracking number without paying an additional $40 on the return shipping, were probably also responsible for the screen being broken in the first place. Damn you, UPS!
As for those skill points...uh...probably spending those on actually getting good at playing Hidden & Dangerous 2. Hard frickin' game.
Jun 21, 2010
Long Forgotten Design Elements
Video games have clearly matured over time. And by "matured" I don't mean that they've become old enough to own their own homes, vehicles, and alcoholic beverages. I mean that we, as gamers, have started figuring out just what makes a game good and what makes it a frustrating mess.
In the 30-some years that video games have been in the mainstream, game mechanics have clearly been evolving, and evolution implies natural selection. Basically, game mechanics and ideas that people don't like will end up on the cutting-room floor and eventually forgotten about, until years down the line somebody coincidentally comes up with the same idea, and the cycle repeats. Here's some of the game mechanics that I notice have been pushed out of gaming's gene pool, so to speak...
Extra lives. These aren't really dead and gone as much as the others in the list, but it seems to me like more than 90% of games released over the last ten years or so have not had any sort of limit to how many times the player can die or fail a mission before reaching that ubiquitous "Game Over" screen. Of the remaining ten percent that I can recall off-hand, the majority of those are Nintendo games. This is mainly due to the advent of the check point system, in which progress in a game is rewarded by allowing the player to restart somewhat closer if he dies. These days, dying in a video game has far less of a penalty than it did in the 80's and early 90's. If you died in Super Mario Bros, you'd go backwards to the beginning of whatever level you're in, or if you're halfway through, back to the halfway point. Continued deaths result in having to restart the entire game from the beginning. If you die in, say, a LEGO Star Wars game, you don't go backwards at all; you merely respawn in place and drop several of your studs. Even if you're out of studs, dying merely has you respawn in place.
Granted, the extra life (and its distant cousin, the Continue credit) aren't gone from gaming. Some genres refuse to live without it, such as scrolling shoot-em-ups, most 2D platformers, and other arcade-style games.
Passwords. Suppose you did run out of extra lives, and you exhausted your last continue on that one boss. Rather than making you start over from the beginning, the game would give you a series of letters, numbers, or symbols to make note of in case you wanted to start from a relatively nearby point in the game. Anybody growing up on the games of the 80's would inevitably have to write down a password for a difficult game, like Castlevania 2, Mega Man, or Metroid. I know at least one person who has an entire notebook full of them.
Why are passwords gone? Well, to borrow a rather out-of-context capitalist idiom, "I have people who do that for me now." More accurately, battery-powered save RAM, flash memory cards and hard disk drives, which take the writing-down of passwords out of the player's hands and instead inscribes a 32 KB chunk of data describing your exact location, inventory, objectives, and other pointless statistics. No more remembering random strings of characters like "QHXF", "7791-5446-6584", or "JUSTIN BAILEY ------ ------". Game saves couldn't have come sooner, either; Famicom games like Dragon Quest were beginning to have pretty ridiculously long passwords due to the high number of stats that the game needed to keep track of (the US localization, Dragon Warrior, removed the password system and instead shipped with battery-backup save RAM).
Manual-based copy protection. Here's one for the computer gamers. Look up Post #332, paragraph 5, word 17, then type that word backwards into the box indicated by the symbol "NADIR" on your code wheel. Got that done? Okay, now pitch your code wheel in the recycle bin (we at Blaugh promote environmental friendliness!) and just insert your disc into the disc drive. Or toss that too, and just log into Steam. Basically, modern copy protection doesn't involve manuals (which can easily be photocopied, or the results compiled into an Excel spreadsheet and then distributed among friends - both of which I've personally done!), it's (supposedly) about convenience for the end user. Granted, many folks think we should go back to manual-based copy protection, as modern DRM really kind of sucks, and it'd get people to read those forgotten old tomes once in a while.
What I think should happen? Instead of CD keys and online authentication, game installers should have you look through your manual to answer one question. Even for something like, "Read the Credits section of the manual and enter the name of the third Bug Tester under Capcom QA Department." It's not ever going to stop piracy and admittedly is more here to prove a point than anything else. There's no stopping piracy, especially as pirates are willing to jump through more (self-imposed?) hoops in order to Stick It To The Man(tm).
But I ramble.
Warps. Before there were passwords, there were level warps. Want to start your game of Super Mario Bros at World 4? Just head for the secret Warp Zone at the end of World 1-2. Who doesn't remember that? The Warp Zone is rather missing lately; most games don't offer more than one way to get where you're going. These days, warp zones are (unintentionally) replaced with sequence breaks; getting to a place ordinarily inaccessible through clever use of glitches or advanced maneuvers that are not ordinarily learned until later in the game. And to the best of my recollection, only games like Shadow Complex have been explicitly designed with sequence breaks in mind.
Gaming still continues evolving to this day. But what game mechanics will continue to fall to the wayside as we, the gamers, decide that they no longer contribute to an enjoyable game experience? As usual, only time (and vitriolic message board rants) will tell...
In the 30-some years that video games have been in the mainstream, game mechanics have clearly been evolving, and evolution implies natural selection. Basically, game mechanics and ideas that people don't like will end up on the cutting-room floor and eventually forgotten about, until years down the line somebody coincidentally comes up with the same idea, and the cycle repeats. Here's some of the game mechanics that I notice have been pushed out of gaming's gene pool, so to speak...
Extra lives. These aren't really dead and gone as much as the others in the list, but it seems to me like more than 90% of games released over the last ten years or so have not had any sort of limit to how many times the player can die or fail a mission before reaching that ubiquitous "Game Over" screen. Of the remaining ten percent that I can recall off-hand, the majority of those are Nintendo games. This is mainly due to the advent of the check point system, in which progress in a game is rewarded by allowing the player to restart somewhat closer if he dies. These days, dying in a video game has far less of a penalty than it did in the 80's and early 90's. If you died in Super Mario Bros, you'd go backwards to the beginning of whatever level you're in, or if you're halfway through, back to the halfway point. Continued deaths result in having to restart the entire game from the beginning. If you die in, say, a LEGO Star Wars game, you don't go backwards at all; you merely respawn in place and drop several of your studs. Even if you're out of studs, dying merely has you respawn in place.
Granted, the extra life (and its distant cousin, the Continue credit) aren't gone from gaming. Some genres refuse to live without it, such as scrolling shoot-em-ups, most 2D platformers, and other arcade-style games.
Passwords. Suppose you did run out of extra lives, and you exhausted your last continue on that one boss. Rather than making you start over from the beginning, the game would give you a series of letters, numbers, or symbols to make note of in case you wanted to start from a relatively nearby point in the game. Anybody growing up on the games of the 80's would inevitably have to write down a password for a difficult game, like Castlevania 2, Mega Man, or Metroid. I know at least one person who has an entire notebook full of them.
Why are passwords gone? Well, to borrow a rather out-of-context capitalist idiom, "I have people who do that for me now." More accurately, battery-powered save RAM, flash memory cards and hard disk drives, which take the writing-down of passwords out of the player's hands and instead inscribes a 32 KB chunk of data describing your exact location, inventory, objectives, and other pointless statistics. No more remembering random strings of characters like "QHXF", "7791-5446-6584", or "JUSTIN BAILEY ------ ------". Game saves couldn't have come sooner, either; Famicom games like Dragon Quest were beginning to have pretty ridiculously long passwords due to the high number of stats that the game needed to keep track of (the US localization, Dragon Warrior, removed the password system and instead shipped with battery-backup save RAM).
Manual-based copy protection. Here's one for the computer gamers. Look up Post #332, paragraph 5, word 17, then type that word backwards into the box indicated by the symbol "NADIR" on your code wheel. Got that done? Okay, now pitch your code wheel in the recycle bin (we at Blaugh promote environmental friendliness!) and just insert your disc into the disc drive. Or toss that too, and just log into Steam. Basically, modern copy protection doesn't involve manuals (which can easily be photocopied, or the results compiled into an Excel spreadsheet and then distributed among friends - both of which I've personally done!), it's (supposedly) about convenience for the end user. Granted, many folks think we should go back to manual-based copy protection, as modern DRM really kind of sucks, and it'd get people to read those forgotten old tomes once in a while.
What I think should happen? Instead of CD keys and online authentication, game installers should have you look through your manual to answer one question. Even for something like, "Read the Credits section of the manual and enter the name of the third Bug Tester under Capcom QA Department." It's not ever going to stop piracy and admittedly is more here to prove a point than anything else. There's no stopping piracy, especially as pirates are willing to jump through more (self-imposed?) hoops in order to Stick It To The Man(tm).
But I ramble.
Warps. Before there were passwords, there were level warps. Want to start your game of Super Mario Bros at World 4? Just head for the secret Warp Zone at the end of World 1-2. Who doesn't remember that? The Warp Zone is rather missing lately; most games don't offer more than one way to get where you're going. These days, warp zones are (unintentionally) replaced with sequence breaks; getting to a place ordinarily inaccessible through clever use of glitches or advanced maneuvers that are not ordinarily learned until later in the game. And to the best of my recollection, only games like Shadow Complex have been explicitly designed with sequence breaks in mind.
Gaming still continues evolving to this day. But what game mechanics will continue to fall to the wayside as we, the gamers, decide that they no longer contribute to an enjoyable game experience? As usual, only time (and vitriolic message board rants) will tell...
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