Pacing and Games

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What are your thoughts on pacing and structure in videogames? (Not when it comes to cutscenes, but based on pure gameplay)

Okay, I’ve been thinking about pacing, and the obvious observation is that pacing in a video game is way different from a movie or an act of theater. The instinct perhaps is to think of pacing in terms of how developers laid out their content, like here’s a fast section, here’s a slow section, here’s a variety section. I think it’s worth investigating rather the different modes of interaction and how fast those are perceived as. Is the player reacting to an enemy? are they allowed to proceed at their own pace? Are they controlling a character or sitting in menus? Are they allowed to trigger a different phase of interaction? I think more consideration should go to the literal pace in terms of action frequency too. The other major factor is of course the difficulty curve. Continue reading →

Majora’s Mask Boss Review

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What do you think of Majora’s Mask’s boss battles?

Original

Remake

Odolwa because his fight sucked in the original video

They’re weird compared to normal zelda bosses. You’re given a variety of ways to fight them. Each one incorporates the mask associated with that dungeon but doesn’t force you to use it. They all have some spatial aiming element. They’re not amazing boss battles in the scheme of things, but for a 3d zelda boss, they’re pretty good. Continue reading →

Intro to King of Fighters

Celia Wagar2 Comments

Addendum to my KoF question. What makes King of Fighters different than all the other fighting games?

Juicebox said something that speaks to me about KoF, that it’s like the 2d equivalent of 3d fighting games, insofar as you can play any character and do well. What makes top tier characters good isn’t their matchup spread, it’s having better moves and better combos than the other characters. All characters in 3d fighting games can play from a similar template, with unique characteristics like dragon punches, fireballs, and command throws being less defining of the character. This is in a large part due to shorthops and rolls. Rolls are a handy universal option to get out of danger, to get around. Shorthops let you get over lows, and makes the game highly aggressive since every character has this amazing mixup option sitting right there. This is why I can pick random so often and still win, because I get the fundamentals and I can quickly figure out what each character’s moveset is good for in playing that fundamental style of shorthop, pressure with lights, and occasionally throw in a sweep. Beyond that, combos are pretty similar with every character. It’s normals into a command normal, into a special, into a super, and juggle if you can. Continue reading →

God Hand Dodging

Celia Wagar6 Comments

What do you think of God Hand’s approach to dodging?

It’s a unique approach to a common mechanic. Instead of just giving you a dodge that can go any direction, you’re given 3 dodges that all have different attributes, different advantages and drawbacks. The back flip is clearly the most invincible, but also the slowest. It de-escalates encounters, but it can’t get you through sustained attacks or ones that rush at you, like self projectile enemies. It’s the crutch for beginners to lean on, but almost never the truly correct option for a scenario. The side step is really fast in comparison to the back flip, but it’s not very invincible. It’s good versus moves that go straight from enemies, and don’t sweep across, like overhead chops. The key is getting out of the way of the attack. It can also help you get at enemy’s sides or backs more easily, and move away from getting flanked. The up dodge, or weave dodge, is the fastest dodge, and lets you gain sustained upper body invincibility if you mash it (canceling/buffering into itself). It has no lower body invincibility, so low or fullbody hits can still strike you, but most close quarters attacks are high. Continue reading →

Stealth Beat ‘Em Up Pitch

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Metal Gear Rising tried to combine hack and slash gameplay with stealth and most folks weren’t too keen on it. What do you think people could do to make this combination work?

I think it would work with kind of a Far Cry or Crysis style approach, where you move into and out of stealth as you attack enemies. Would require levels that let you escape into cover and move behind enemies.

Here’s my pitch: Imagine pac-man or bomber-man shaped levels from a top down perspective. Similar to the vulcan raven fight in MGS1. You have a bunch of pillars or other forms of cover with ways around them. A few more open areas as well. Continue reading →

Forcing Permadeath in Tactics Games

Celia Wagar4 Comments

Permadeath is a staple of Fire Emblem, but most players just restart missions when somebody dies, which sort of defeats the purpose of the mechanic. How would you redesign permadeath to force players to deal with it rather than cheese to avoid it?

It’s tricky. You could go the obvious route and have no permanent save file to revert back to, but that’s harsh. My first thought was go dark souls and autosave constantly.

But then you run into the trouble of, what if everyone dies? Do you just reset everything? do you give them a checkpoint (that isn’t a save point) and restore the characters to what they had at that checkpoint? Then if they lose one character, they might just intentionally wipe their party, which is dumb and a waste of time on their part. Continue reading →

Minecraft Overview

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Have you ever written about Minecraft? Do you think it’s a good game?

I feel like it has parts of a good game, but it’s not entirely a game, nor a good one. It has a lot of mechanical complexity, but doesn’t totally loop all the systems together into something resembling a complete “struggle”. It has an overarching goal in the form of The End, but many people don’t play it for that reason, and it didn’t always have that. Continue reading →

God Hand and Conveyance

Celia Wagar2 Comments

That stinks that you’re finished with reviewing reviews. I just found this one today that you might be interested in. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGO2dE7GRkg&a=&feature=youtu.be

Nah, just reviewers.

I feel like he misses some history here. God Hand has been a cult classic on /v/ since long before totalbiscuit became popular (or made the video about god hand in 2012). There’s a reason I owned the game in like 2009. Continue reading →

My Standard of Quality for Games

Celia Wagar1 Comment

Your definition of quality in games is meaningful/interesting depth, right? Doesn’t that leave out satisfying gameplay? Melee would have the same amount of depth if there were a big input delay, all the sounds were really annoying, the animations were not as pleasing, etc.

Depth is not my only component for quality of gameplay, it is only the most significant component by a large margin.

Melee and other competitive action games end up being very different games if you introduce significant amounts of input delay, for reasons of reaction time. Though their absolute depth stays the same, their relative depth changes when you introduce a big delay like that, because players are less able to adjust and make fine grain inputs precisely, so the way they need to play the game changes, basically always for the worse. Continue reading →

Micropositioning: Another Source of Depth

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Editor’s Note: I have slightly edited some of these conversations to be slightly more clear in the absence of context, and to elaborate more on details.

Um, Contra is deep? Always thought of it as very constrictive rather than “deep.” Is your argument that the (slightly) different weapons add depth?

Yes, it’s deep. No, I don’t mean the slightly different weapons, I’m more talking about the movement around enemies and the enemy variety and attack patterns. It’s about micro-positioning, same as Zelda 1.

Depth doesn’t just mean the explicit technical stuff. I defined it as relating to tiny game states because I wanted to capture the difference between say Mario’s jump and a castlevania jump, but acknowledgement of redundancy is necessary too, otherwise more restrictive sets of options like the castlevania jump are ruled out completely because something like mario’s jump can totally dwarf it in complexity, and castlevania’s jump works really well in the context of the game it is, allowing certain types of challenges to exist that could not in Mario. So Mario’s jump is invariably deeper of the two, allowing for a massively larger range of expression, but it shouldn’t be judged as exponentially better just because it can produce exponentially more measurable state. A lot of those states are different but achieve similar results.

Also I meant the Contra series, not just Contra 1. Continue reading →