BAM HAM CITY

Celia WagarLeave a comment

I was reading your “BAM A HUM YAM” article (or whatever the fuck its called) and while I agree with most of it (srsly put that thing on GYP) I still think that even a game whose combat system is supposed to make you: “feel like batman” can have difficulty and depth if you have lots of options which can all take out bad guys easily but some are more effective on various enemy types than others. Add a time trial mode kinda like MGS2’s VR missions (but with longer maps) AND BAM? Would that be a good game?

I’ll consider putting it up.
“Feel like batman” doesn’t mean anything. That’s a problem up front. There’s a bunch of different interpretations of batman, the animated series had an episode titled, “Legends of the Dark Night” http://dcanimated.wikia.com/wiki/Legends_of_the_Dark_Knight That was specifically about the different interpretations of the batman character. If you want a character that feels invincible and can easily crush the opposition, then where is the difficulty coming from? Where is the fear of failure coming from?

Much as I hype up game modes about optimization (speed runs and score attacks), I don’t think they should be what a game’s difficulty is built around, because people don’t know how to intentionally design them, and they tend to be more interesting when they emerge from a system built to be complex for a different purpose. (that and the existing batman arkham games have pretty alright speedruns honestly, though I won’t say it saves them as games) I frankly don’t tolerate games that are good speedruns but not good games to just play (which is why even though I encourage you to watch the speedruns for the 3d zelda games, I still criticize them as the worst of the series).

And it’s called BAM A HAM YUM because I didn’t play BAM HAM CITY.

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Trouble here is, that idea’s too vague. As in the prior post, what’s the failure condition? Being ground into a pulp? Being seen? not being fast enough? not getting enough bad guy beat-up points?

Not to mention there just aren’t enough details there for me to really work with. The existing batman arkham games have attacks that are more effective on various enemy types than others. The trouble is they chose a really weak differentiation between the enemy types.

How do you reconcile weak non-threatening enemies that you can speedily eliminate? Don’t think it’s really possible.

Perhaps the best route to take is to focus on the stealth sections, and traversal rather than the thug combat outright?

Rather than give him moves that are more or less effective on different enemy types, give him moves that let him move around space differently and take out enemies while moving differently. Focus on the dynamic between armed thugs and unarmed ones. Armed are lethal, unarmed are generally nonlethal. Unarmed search better, can climb better, armed try to oversee the unarmed, and occupy locations where they can see the most things. Getting seen is fine, but you’ll soon get shot, because the armed thugs have ranged superiority and are highly lethal. It’s about walking on the razor’s edge, much like Hotline Miami.

Instead of regular thugs doing HP damage to you, their role is to stun you so the armed thugs can take you down. When armed thugs are all taken out, unarmed thugs prioritize becoming armed. The core dynamic is essentially the unarmed thugs seeking you out so you get wrecked by the armed ones. Playing on this would of course be things that draw attention to a spot (like noise emitters), block line of sight (smoke grenades), burst movement with attack options (batman kick!), stealth takedowns, probably which require commitment for a period of time (charge your ability to knock them out before doing it), a dodge or quick evade option of some kind, multilayer multithreaded level design, no hiding spots or safe zones.

I dunno. That’s all that’s at the top of my head and I don’t want to do a full redesign of their combat system because I dunno where to even go with it. Most of the combat systems I come up with try to play on more specific ideas and Batman’s is just generic in the scheme of things.

What do you think of the stealth in the Arkham games?

It was the only part worth saving in any respect. It created a simple dynamic, you can’t stand up to dudes with guns at a distance, and you need to eliminate enemies quickly before their friends with guns are called over. That’s the heart of the game. It played with it by having enemies stand back to back so you couldn’t stealth kill them, and with the noise collars to bring other enemies over. But other than that, it didn’t really do much. This is why I said that if I were to redo it and couldn’t make a combat system that didn’t suck, I’d focus on that stealth element, because it’s all the game had going for it.

Deus Ex vs DXHR

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Deus Ex or DXHR? I’ve hardly ever seen you mention the original.

DXHR. I played the original prior to DXHR’s announcement, and predicted DXHR would be a complete failure prior to the leak. The leak changed my mind on it, and in time since I think DXHR is actually the better game despite its more narrow focus.

My primary issues with the original Deus Ex are that the gunplay isn’t good, enemies aren’t interesting, the stealth isn’t good, the hacking/lockpicking are one dimensional, there isn’t a significant platforming/area traversal element. Dialogue basically never constitutes a good gameplay challenge, and Deus Ex isn’t an exception there.

On the level of simply the game living up to what it. The game doesn’t really care if you go lethal or nonlethal in any of the missions (after the third one it stops tracking the difference completely). The overall story arc is completely linear, you always have to betray unatco, you always get captured by gunther, you always break out of unatco, go to hong kong, infiltrate versalife, etc, etc. There are tons of invincible NPCs in many of the levels, especially the early ones. You’re required to kill multiple NPCs to proceed (even if there are clever workarounds for all but one of them).

I went into Deus Ex thinking, “Wow, I can do anything.” After successive playthroughs and learning more about the game, I realized, “Wow, I can’t do anything.” My opinion on the game changed over time as my opinions about what made a good game or not became more refined. Deus Ex is complex, but it isn’t deep. There’s a lot going on, but none of it is interconnected, meaningful, or challenging. This is what lead to my change in opinion.

DXHR, it fell flat in a number of areas, lacking features of the original (melee weapons) and having smaller more constrained levels generally, but it had stronger stealth, better gunplay, an actually involved process for hacking, and did pretty alright with the level design in of including multiple paths/approaches, and goodies hidden around. Kinda sucks that the entire world wasn’t like detroit and that SO MUCH CONTENT was cut (upper heng sha, montreal, india).

Plus I’ve speedrun both of them, DXHR is an awesome challenge, Deus Ex is boring cheese. Deus Ex is one of the easiest speedruns I’ve done yet (primarily about memorization of the order you have to do things in and not forgetting steps), DXHR has hard tricks, is a super fast stealth run (one of the rare stealth games to actually have a speedrun about being stealthy instead of just running through every blockade), and it’s tricky to avoid enemies while trying to pass through them ASAP on low/no resources.

Deus Ex still has a crazy complex system, which made for good fun in Illiterate Child’s Glitchy Walk Through, but none of the game is designed to be particularly challenging or mentally involved, so a lot of that ad hoc complexity goes to waste.

Glitches and Features, Patching the Unsolvable

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When creating a remake of a game with sequence breaking glitches, do you think the glitches should be removed because the people who appreciate these things can play the original if they want to or do you think they should be kept in, potentially ruining a new players first playthrough on the remake?

I don’t see how the glitches are ruining people’s playthroughs in the first place, unless they’re easily triggered and can prevent you from completing the game. My big thing is, you should treat glitches like they’re just another feature.

Toggle Escape in Dark Souls is done by mashing to switch your weapon, it can cancel stunlock and let you escape when you might otherwise die. Of course if you roll then that can be punished and you might lose ground, so it’s not without risk. This is something the developers probably should have considered when they made the game in the first place, a way to escape stunlock. Poise was already a measure in that direction because stunlock was such a problem in demon’s souls. Meanwhile, the infinite dragon head duplication glitch that let you infinite dragon roar or spit an infinite number of knives or sparkling stones to lag the game to hell, definitely something that should be patched, because it’s broken and there’s no fixing it.

Cancels in Street Fighter 2 aren’t good because the developers decided to include it in future games, they were kept in because they were a good mechanic. This isn’t something determined by the developers, because someone can entirely deliberately make a game that is stupid and horrible. Someone can also intend to make a great game and it ends up stupid and horrible because they have no vision or understanding.

We need to stop thinking of glitches as some alien thing outside the game, glitches occur in board games too. Sometimes the rules read as written resulting in a funny interaction, Magic the Gathering is full of this type of thing, it’s practically how the game is played at this point. Not to mention the yata-lock in yugioh or peasant railgun or Pun Pun in D&D 3.5. When you have a system of rules, there are going to be some interactions that are strange and can’t realistically be predicted in advance, which is why every TCG has a ban list (though I am impressed with how short cardfight vanguard’s is). And video games are about as complicated systems of rules as you get in games.

The primary question should be, is this something that is realistically likely to ruin someone’s experience or make the game impossible to complete? The second question should be, does this overshadow other aspects of the game so nobody uses those other things? Do you gain more in the main active decision-making part of your game from having it or losing it? Alternatively, take the example of Wind Waker HD, by patching out storage and making zombie hover useless, a lot of other tactics suddenly came into prominence, making it a different glitchy experience from the original (the WR is even 2 minutes faster).

Consider glitch patching like any other piece of game design. Would you patch out save states in Half Life 1? You should.

Okay rephrase, Lets say there is a glitch that can be performed that allows the player to travel into an area they aren’t supposed to be in yet. This area requires the games “HI-JUMP item” to get through but if a speedrunner takes a very careful route then they can avoid falling down pits that need the “HI-JUMP” to get out of. This glitch could create interesting routes for speedrunners and could add depth to the game by allowing you to get certain weapons early for example, but if someone playing through the first time were to trigger it and accidentally save the game, their playthrough is potentially ruined. Should such a glitch be patched out in a re-release, on the chance it could ruin someone’s playthrough or should it be kept in as it makes the game more interesting to play for some players? Would the difficulty of executing the glitch change your opinion on this matter?

I answered this in the original ask actually, you should under no circumstances allow the player to create a state that makes progression impossible.

In such a game, the pits should either have exits that lead back out to areas where the player can get the high jump to progress normally, or the player should have a function to warp back to a prior point, a la the souls games where you have homeward bones and the like, so even if you do get stuck out of bounds or some business you can always warp out.

In the rerelease the route shouldn’t be patched out, the way it makes progression impossible should be. This of course means that it’s still open for speedrunners without impeding ordinary players.

Actually I think there is a case like this in La Mulana, if you save in the Temple of the Moon without picking up the holy grail that allows you to warp between checkpoints then you’re screwed. I think this is true in both the original and the remake.

Property destruction and contracts of consent.

Celia Wagar1 Comment

You have repeatedly used the example of the interesting aspects of trading card games and unintended use of certain cards to argue for glitches in video games. This is an opinion i agree with but thanks to you I stumbled upon this in a google search: (http://tappedout.net/mtg-decks/legally-rip-your-opponents-cards-to-pieces/) . How do you feel about something like that? Would you say this is interesting enough to keep in the game, as nearly all opponents will concede when you start performing this combo, on top of the fact it would still practically be a guaranteed win if you replaced “rip up” with “send to the discard pile”. Alternatively, do you think it crosses the line of an unintended mechanic actively harming other players enjoyment of the game?

That’s really hysterical. I’m really surprised that they would print a card that has an effect where you tear it up, but significantly less surprised that there is a way to transfer the effect to other cards. Of course, it’s only natural that it came from the set Unglued.

What I’d say in this case is, rules are formed by the consent of the players. It’s us who agree to play with the rules presented on the cards in the first place, or with cards of those dimensions and so on. You should probably discuss it with the person you’re playing with before you play, unless you want to be a huge dick. Also I doubt this is among the legal sets allowed in tournaments.

It does raise the question of what I guess you could call implicit versus explicit rules (or formal versus informal, there’s no agreed upon term for this far as I know). Rules in a video game are almost all implicit, regulated by the physical structure of the device, much like the physical game snafu, or ball & cup. In the case of video games, a lot of how we play them are explicit rules actually, things we agree upon, like the goal, map pool, or other modifiers. The goal of a game is always an explicit rule, something that the player(s) accept and agree to play by, where the programming is an “embedded rule,” much like the form of the baseball bat, or that card games are played with cards instead of round chips or kept in memory. This means they work a certain way and serve the game in a certain way. Just something worth considering.

Good glitches and Piqued Interest

Celia WagarLeave a comment

I know you hate Borderlands 2 but you also said you were planning on writing that good games make good glitches article… What do you think of this Speedrun of BL2: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2YYwM1coOU)?

I saw it before, I was impressed. Mostly by the exploit that lets that one guy move absurdly fast by stacking a buff over and over again due to poor netcode.

I wouldn’t call Borderlands 2 a good game, but the point is to describe a tendency in games that give rise to interesting glitches like these. I think there’s a connection, a common thread. There’s a reason new things keep getting figured out for smash bros melee, and it’s not just the dedication of the fans.

A lot of bad games are glitchy too, but not in interesting ways usually. Glitches tend to arise when the programmers or animators or other people putting together the interactive components tend to “over-model” something. Like when they put more detail into something than is strictly speaking necessary. When variables carry over from other places, or certain things have dependencies on other variables.

Like bunnyhopping in Quake, they could have done something simple and just capped the max speed you can go, easy. Instead they decided to do something really silly, limit the amount of acceleration you can obtain on a given frame versus a vector projection of the current velocity vector onto the prior one.

Another example is how a lot of out of bounds areas have collision. Honestly it would take less time and effort to just use a ton of invisible walls, kill volumes, etc. Nobody is ever supposed to get over to those areas or outside the bounds of the game, so it shouldn’t matter if they can walk correctly on OoB areas, yet frequently they’re perfectly accessible.

When something carries variables over, reacts differently in response to different variables, it exponentiates the number of states that a game has. This means more depth, and in the cases of useful glitches, more depth that is actually relevant to the player. This is good game design in a nutshell.

This video is full of stuff I’d normally expect to see in a glitch exhibition. It was made by the game’s programmer, showing off that this ability, Center Stage, is capable of doing a massive number of things. When I first saw it, I thought it was kind of cool that they were playing with the standard fighting game convention of the camera controlling the walls, but never expected such application. I saw a few combos that used it and those seemed kind of cool but gimmicky, however because Mike Z allowed you to set any move as an assist, naturally this is included and clearly can be used for a lot more than basic combos.

This is the type of game design I’d like to see from major companies. Ori and the Blind Forest has it (at least partially intentionally), Axiom Verge doesn’t.

How can a game pique your interest personally?

By giving me the impression that it has some type of potential. What originally piqued my interest for Ori and the Blind Forest was seeing this video:

I was like, “Wow, what the fuck is going on? What’s he doing?” Because I didn’t know how bash worked. I went around, saw some other videos, couldn’t tell much of how the game worked, but I had this hunch that it would be good. Probably not the best reasoning, but my intuition paid off.

Demon’s Souls I got into because I heard yahtzee and other internet people whine about how hard it was, and I was like, “I want in on that.”

God Hand had a good reputation and I didn’t know much about the game other than that it was a cult hit. I was lucky to find it, my brother actually spotted it at a gamestop.

Again, maybe those aren’t the best case examples.

Though for upcoming games, only The Phantom Pain really gives me the impression that there’s something special to it. Kojima has all these systems working together in it, all these things to mess around with enemies using.
I was drawn to Skyward Sword initially actually, because they had implemented a stamina meter, you could run up walls, the item switch menus were in realtime, you could swing your sword in 8 directions and spin attack costing a chunk of stamina. It seemed to me like they were trying to give 3d zelda a depth it didn’t have before. I was really disappointed to say the least when all of these things only really had one purpose, could only be used in specifically designated ways, had no interaction between the different elements.

DNSQ

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Do you feel sorry for the guy who makes that one DNSQ show that used to be put out on the shill show (Game Theory channel)? He seemed pretty passionate about games and all though his videos stated the obvious sometimes he clearly wasn’t as much of a hack as the other people on that channel

Alright, I went and watched his videos, tons and tons and tons of filler text. He’s got some insight, but he’s not funny in my opinion, and he wastes a ton of time getting to anything important. Also a lot of his conclusions and premises are vague.

The street fighter interface vid has solid info and is thorough, thought the guy could have condensed the information more. So points for that. Dude should have mentioned the improvement to the meter from SF3 to SF4 in showing how many units of EX attacks you have.

His video on Super Metroid repeats some of this article: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/HugoBille/20120114/90903/The_Invisible_Hand_of_Super_Metroid.php in video format, with poor jokes, filler text, and less information. It does talk about the opening, but it kind of begs the question of “Do you really need to go into this much detail?” and “Are these really what the opening teaches?” and “Is the opening even necessary to teach this information?” (I ask this last one a LOT with game analysis themed around how something stealthily teaches you something) He repeats the point about the plasma beam/hi jump boots almost verbatim. I’d like to see a repackaging of the staff interviews he mentioned more than this video really. I hadn’t heard the term perceptible and hidden affordance before though, though I have heard of the concept of affordance. I’ll keep those in mind for the future. As a corollary I’d like to also cite Sean Malstrom’s response to the invisible hand of super metroid: https://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/email-the-invisible-hand-of-super-metroid/ I think both the original article and this are important perspectives to keep in mind.

He does a decent criticism of Link to the Past versus the original and how it’s weirdly linear or not linear. Also identifies some of how LttP didn’t really live up to the original design. Kind of the irony of the miyamoto interviews is that Zelda 1 was more popular in the mainstream than LttP. I think it goes to show that people’s efforts to cater to a broad audience by making things easier don’t really work out.

The smash video could have gone a lot more into the alternate constructions between smash and SF. It focused too much on the UI. It does this because talking about game design is hard, especially as you get closer to things like how attacks/movement are actually constructed, and ui design is a totally separate and well documented field.

Now last I heard of him, he’s the video editor for Game Theory now. [2/2] What do you think of his work on DNSQ? Do you think if he improved the show had potential to become something pretty good?

Possibly, his heart’s in the right place. He needs to learn to animate and draw better. Also motion graphic better. I appreciate the effort that went into making motion graphics at all though. Also I think the jokes are just painful. The guy’s not a comedian. Most game reviewer guys aren’t comedians. The jokes are there because AVGN and TGWTG did it back when this schtick was new and others like Egoraptor kept doing it after them. It’s considered obligatory. When I hear a game reviewer/critic/analyst do lame jokes constantly, I’m just like, “please get on with it.”

His info’s not wrong. He makes some actual conclusions. He could totally hack it on his own if he wanted to. I give him a 3/5, or 6/10. Guy needs to think less about the big outside picture and more about the core gameplay to really get anywhere. Most people do. It’s really easy to address big design things and really hard to address smaller ones, but the small ones count for more, they’re what make the game fun at all, where the big ones are kinda nice, but wouldn’t ruin the game if they were done wrong.

On more of his videos:

The survival horror video tries to claim that survival horror is a unique genre for tapping into emotions unlike other game genres and like traditional literature/movie genres and because it doesn’t refer to a specific overall game form like first person, 2d platformer, etc. He does identify some mechanical consistencies between survival horror games though that bridge them together. In this way I’d argue that it’s like RPG as a genre, where we have tons of games with “RPG elements” and Mass effect, Final Fantasy, Dark Souls, and Deus Ex are somehow all RPGs (because your character’s numbers go up persistently). Shallow video.
Earthbound video, don’t really care about it.

Pokemon video, don’t really care.

Tetris video, I wish people would stop with the phony emotional arguments in game analysis, it’s like bad film theory is how I like to put it. Though his overall analysis is good. He has just a few too many buzzwords. I think the video would be better structured if it tried to break down the structure of tetris and determine what strategies it creates and how those strategies can vary in implementation and situationally. Here’s a guy beating tetris for fun: http://www.twitch.tv/kevinddr/c/5983832 and another: NES Tetris “Fastest 999999” by Acmlm in 03:11.78

If he could also try to derive how someone else could replicate tetris’s success in another game, what principles could be learned from tetris, or improve tetris, then it might be better. Probably his best video.

Asymmetry video, should have brought up how player 1 is prioritized in some games like marvel or smash bros for certain things. Also the hypothesis that left handed people have an advantage in a fight. His statement about the sides of a screen for SF is mostly a matter of experience, not actually matchup imbalance. Mostly accurate information overall. Doesn’t seem like it has much of a point.

Difference between Smash and Trad Fighters

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How do you answer people who ask what Smash does that other FG don’t also do? Or how Smash does certain things better? Or what the difference between Smash and other FGs is (aside form obvious stuff like movement and environment)?

If I had to describe overall differences, I’d say that smash bros versus other fighting games is based a lot more on unclear spacing mixups. Other fighting games tend to have much more clear situations with regards to the timing and spacing of actions because jump arcs are fixed, you always block in specific directions, and you tend not to really be moving as attacks go on. Smash bros information tends to be fuzzier because there are so many different ways to modulate speed and position. Describing the neutral game in street fighter can come down to some simple clear cut rock paper scissors games, but doing the same for smash is a lot trickier in my experience. In teaching people street fighter I find it comes a lot more naturally to describe the right way to play versus smash bros where I found I was at a loss for how to describe the right way to play the neutral game. Not to mention that it varies a lot between characters. Dash dancing creates crazy footsie-like scenarios at high speeds.

More specific things would include the use of sweet spots, moves don’t just have one type of hitbox everywhere that deals a consistent amount of damage and pushback, they have weaker and stronger hitboxes based on both timing and positioning, and people frequently use the weak hitboxes on purpose to knock back less to keep the combo alive.

There’s a level of control during combos with DI that not only allows people to escape, but makes it a mixup situation, because they can’t move closer or further, just tilt the angle. This is why DI wouldn’t work in a traditional fighter, people stay locked to the ground, you could only have DI left or right really, not angular DI, it wouldn’t make much sense to have angular DI, and when you can only DI in two directions it soon becomes clear that either the combo dies or it doesn’t die, there isn’t long enough hitstun or flexible enough movement to make it work otherwise.

The ledge guard/recovery game as an okizeme equivalent. Lots of options there that don’t make sense in a traditional fighter.

Ability to change velocity in the air and inherit velocity from the ground. KoF and Guilty Gear sort of do the last one. Marvel 2 and 3 do the first one on super jumps.

Comboing into grabs and chaingrabs, as well as letting you hold people to pummel them and choose the direction they’re thrown in.

A crazy shield tilt system that degrades over time, requiring you to cover the parts of your body that will be attacked. Also it can vary in density for more pushback/coverage.

SDI and shield SDI

Wavedashing, the idea that you can invest startup frames now to move in a neutral state later.

Sniping people after they double jump to cut off escape options

Functional team matches.

Lots of stuff.

Axiom Verge, no depth?

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How do you distinguish that Axiom Verge has no depth against, say, metroid games? do you consider metroid games to have depth? They look very similar mechanically.

To be totally clear, axiom verge has some depth. Rock paper scissors has some depth. I just think that axiom verge has very little depth in comparison to Metroid or Super Metroid. The reason for this is because there isn’t much mechanical interaction between the different parts. I am actually not a fan of super metroid, I think it’s too easy. I beat most of the bosses in the game on my first try. I didn’t have much trouble getting from place to place. However Super Metroid is something you can come back to and play in a totally different way. There are things to learn about the game and things to master.

I have 3 criteria for depth, it’s a simple rule of thumb to keep in mind. Does this mechanic/option/tool have multiple uses? (can it be used to do multiple things? Not just one primary function) Does it have its own niche relative to the other options so it is not overshadowed and so it does not overshadow other options? Can a player change their input to get a variety of results from this tool?

Axiom Verge has like 10 different weapons (IGN says like 20 though). They mostly don’t vary much in damage or DPS. If you’re just trying to take an enemy down, most any weapon will do. The speedruns only pick up 3, the one you start with (normal projectile fire), one you’re required to get to open certain walls (nova, shoots stronger projectile, can explode with mini projectiles in 6 directions), and one that can punch through walls (slightly stronger damage, shorter range). Most of the levels are accommodating enough that the other weapons aren’t really that useful, except for hitting around corners, which nova can do.

Most of the powerups are really self-contained. Laser drill only lets you break bricks and hurt enemies up close. Field disruptor lets you jump higher and that’s about it. Address disruptor lets you glitch enemies and the environment, which sounds cool, but you really only use it to reveal platforms in specific places and glitching enemies isn’t that useful, usually they can still hurt you. In one spot you use glitched enemies as platforms, but that part is optional. The drone deactivates your main body when in use, and has its own self-contained sections, so it’s not something with real synergy with your main abilities, just like an alternate character for some sections. In the late game you can teleport to the drone, and launch it really far, which is cool and creates some actual synergy and depth between mechanics, but by that point it’s too little too late. The lab coat allows you to only go through 1 block thick walls where you can walk into them, so it opens up a few routes, but isn’t good for much else. The trench coat is slightly more versatile, because you can use it anywhere, allowing you to teleport 2 blocks in any direction, and you can teleport up through platforms blocking you from above. Though even this, it’s like the most uninteresting “advanced” movement mechanic I’ve ever seen. A double jump is more interesting.

On the trench coat there’s no factor of acceleration, decceleration, next to no tie or relationship to the environment, no gravity, no way to amplify it. It’s just that you appear two blocks ahead of where you were. An airdash is more interesting. A glide is more interesting. The Mockball in Super Metroid is more interesting, speed booster too. Also the shinespark. Not to mention that it’s obvious application, getting out of bounds, isn’t even applicable in most locations, because almost all the walls in the game are designed to be totally solid and resist attempts to get inside. There’s a few out of bounds spots in some corridor type rooms that let you jump up without being disturbed by enemies.

The grapple has a bit more to it, because you can grab areas above you and swing, so you can get up a bit higher and move along ceilings which is nice, though it’s kind of a pain to use, in the way it controls and grabs onto things, and the levels aren’t designed to give it much application beyond the small area where it unlocks new.

There’s like a glitch bomb, it opens glitched out areas like a lock and key (lame) and glitches all the enemies in the room you’re in (glitching enemies doesn’t do much in the first place).
There’s so little to using all these powerups, and they’re all designed in such a lock-and-key way to just barely allow you to get to areas that you couldn’t before so you can move along to the next boss and piece of the plot.

Compare to the Ice beam in metroid, it was in the original metroid even. The ice beam isn’t just a powerup that opens ice colored doors (no doors responded to specific element beams until metroid prime actually), it allows you to freeze enemies. This has multiple applications. Obviously it makes them easier to hit, but also you can stand on top of them and use them like platforms. This can be used to not only allow progression into new areas, but the player needs to shoot enemies in the right place so they will actually allow them to move up. And it opens up the potential that enemies can be lured into position then frozen to use as a stepping stone to move forwards.

In super metroid there are all sorts of tiny optimizations to movement that can be performed.
http://deanyd.net/sm/index.php?title=All

Plus the enemies are lame. A TON of them mob you and stay on top of you without much chance to get away from them on flat ground. There isn’t a lot of give and take with enemies. Most of the time it’s just a matter of killing them before they can reach you, or getting into a spot where you can hit them but they can’t hit you. Compare to metroid enemies which are usually more like passive hazards. Castlevania enemies which tend to be more active but give you a fair chance to avoid their attacks. Megaman enemies, ninja gaiden enemies. The bosses are ULTRA lame. They have massively simple patterns, most of them have relative safe zones. All of them can be massively cheesed in some way or another, many in multiple ways

Any companies that you wish to see improve?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Any companies that you wish to see improve in terms of quality games and business models?

All of them. I’d like to see people across the board step it up. A bit more specifically than that, I’d like to see Nintendo, Valve, Platinum Games, Capcom, and From Soft step it up.

Nintendo has a ton of great IPs under their belt, but they’ve basically fucked up in managing them. On all fronts they seem to be mismanaging their assets and not playing to their strengths. If they can’t make games that leverage the Wii U’s controller and are actually fun/profitable then they’re fucked.

Valve has fallen short on the gamedev side and they generally seem to be growing more evil by the day as a publisher/distributor. I hope they put the consumer’s interests first soon or we’ll be in trouble and the market might fall out from under them.

Platinum need to stop being losers. Sure, we love them but they never sell well in part because they always have these ridiculous setbacks, like the chain combo systems that nobody wants to deal with, QTEs, Shop systems that encourage grinding, a reputation for making hardcore games, just to throw out some guesses. I think their games could be better and better connect with audiences at large, but I’m no marketing guy.

Capcom are idiots who need to stop milking their customers. They’re generating a lot of ill will for their DLC bullshit, they need to show people that they care and provide value for their customers or they will die. it’s especially dangerous to focus on japan only and mobile like they have, they don’t have IPs that can leverage mobile very well and they have a ton of games that would succeed outside japan.

From are cool, but Dark Souls 2 was a failure from a marketing perspective. They need to keep their shit together and stick to the plan, weed out the big mistakes they keep making each game and stick to improving on Dark Souls’ formula, because it was their best selling game and in my opinion best overall.

Do you think the souls games would be better if they weren’t rpgs?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

I’m inbetween on that. The big benefit the stat systems bring is that characters have this differentiation from one another, you can’t just switch the items, you have stats invested that make you proficient with the items you have. And different characters can approach the game in very different ways with varying levels of efficiency at different parts. That’s pretty cool.

The upside of getting rid of it is, if you have no stat systems and just let people pick whatever armor and weapons they want, and balanced all the areas so they would fit the correct levels of damage for the mono-leveled character, then you can avoid the player grinding and becoming overpowered or underpowered. You’re less forcing the player to make his character good, and more asking them to get good at consistently performing the challenges inherent of the system. Players can’t make areas really easy by using overpowered gear/stats. Players aren’t forced to go grind so they will keep up with the difficulty of the area. This means a lot less wasting of players’ time and probably a more consistent difficulty curve.

These are the benefits of a stat based system contrasted directly with what you gain from doing away with it. I don’t think the Souls games would really benefit from not being RPGs as they are. Also cleverly, the Souls games have that online multiplayer aspect giving players a motivation to not overlevel, because then they will be left behind relative to everyone else (though admittedly this is more of a social contract than anything inherent in the game design).

A game like Ys would receive almost pure benefit for switching, but Souls, not nearly as much.

Do you think level grinding is a poor game design choice?

In general, yes, though recently I have found some good reasons for it. When the player’s needs experience from fighting monsters to progress it can be a motivation to fight otherwise easily avoided monsters in games where the monsters aren’t very good roadblocks, such as the recent Ys games. Another reason is trivializing early roadblocking enemies in nonlinear exploration games. It can be irritating to pass through an earlier area only to be held up by stuff you’ve dealt with before. With big enough number buffs a lot of challenges become trivial.

Despite these good reasons it can still be a pain in the ass to level grind, worrying about being overpowered or underpowered. Some solutions I’ve thought of include limiting the amount of experience you can get in each area by having it be totally static item drops. Like imagine that when you kill an enemy they drop 1 XP token each time up to a maximum of 3. To level up you need roughly 1.5 tokens from every enemy in the area and on collecting that amount you level up. This gives the player a reason to actually fight the enemies and keeps grind time short, also limit in how many times they can grind the same enemy set to level up.

Another solution that can be combined with the above is dispensing the level up on beating the area/boss so it comes at completely static times. If they didn’t get these level up from the enemies of that area then beating the area grants it, erasing the XP tokens of the monsters in the area too.