What is Art? Why are Games Art?

Celia WagarLeave a comment

(editor’s note: Another old writing on this topic, relatively close to my current opinion, but a lot of the wording here is hopelessly confused)

One definition of art that is used a lot is that it is the conveyance of information in non-literal terms (I’d add to this that it must be arranged, not natural, because if it is natural then it is your interpretation of natural information, not conveyance of information). The quality of this information is determined by its depth, not necessarily content. Games are a form of art, however we get them confused with other forms of art. Games convey information about themselves, not all in literal terms, all games do. With art we tend to get lost in thinking that the message behind art is a literal thing that is being told to you. It isn’t. A more accurate summation would be that art conveys information, not just a message. A picture conveys visual information. The message is its content. A common practice among painters is to focus on the details of important areas, like the portrait in life drawing and to not add a lot of detail to areas that are unimportant, such as the feet, or the background (in life drawing, curtains are frequently used to intentionally create a background with less detail to add).

This definition is convenient because rules out a lot of things, such as assembly instructions, factual textbooks, strategy guides, and Microsoft Word, unless their design is in some way conveying a sense of aesthetic. It is also inclusive of a lot of things that people might not necessarily consider art, such as advertising, product design, games, and other “artful” things. I like this definition because it gives words to help explain a lot of things I have personally regarded as art for a long time while also accurately separating that which I consider creative work, but not necessarily art. Worth noting is that I personally have a very broad definition of information, broader than most people use the word for, so bear with me a little.

We frequently call advertising a form of art, but we wouldn’t call nutritional information art, or an instruction booklet. This is primarily because advertising is built on not conveying information in literal terms, and the latter are. as advertising evolved, it became more and more artlike, opposed to its early incarnations, which were closer to informing the customer of the product’s features similar to an instruction pamphlet. Modern commercials frequently have no details on the product, and just tons of branding, like logos, actors, feelings, stories, music, and more. Contrast a Coca Cola commercial to a Pepsi commercial, then to an older style infomercial.

What we need to understand about art is that information is not strictly verbal. Games are the art of interaction, puzzles are the art of cognition, paintings are the art of visual data. The “Message” of games is the way they are played. The type of interaction they seek to create. This is why the genres of games are divided the way they are. Genre distinctions exist to tell us the category of message. Whether the message is good or not depends on its depth. The thing however is that we mistake merely having a message for being quality artwork.

It could be argued that the depth of a piece of artwork is in how many layers there are between the surface and its ultimate message and how difficult it is to fully comprehend the piece. I do not entirely agree with this, but it brings up interesting parallels to the nature of depth in games. Imagine that the true message of a game is the best way to play it. Imagine that the true message is the expression of all the mechanics in synchronization. The true message of Street Fighter is conveyed in bouts by the best players of all time. The message of the game isn’t exactly its components nearly as much as how the player interacts with them. It isn’t art based on the quality of the code, but on the quality of the thinking that the player is expected to generate.

This is why objectives are necessary in games, because unless we set objectives, we are not compelled to think. This is why painters appreciate paintings more than anyone else, because they deconstruct it and reassemble it. They want to know what went into this painting. In games, we deconstruct them because we want to win, and the game is structured to force us to deconstruct them in order to do that. When a game has a lot of layers to it, it makes deconstruction more difficult. A game without an objective is a story without a focus. It’s not even a story, it’s just an account of disconnected events. It’s closer to a security camera feed than a film. Games without objectives cease to be games. Incidentally, they lose the message, because without an objective, there is no longer a type of thinking being conveyed, no longer that masterful way of playing. No longer a mode of play being conveyed at all. It is interactive, but without focus, there is no longer motivation to deal with it, unless you construct objectives from it (obvious example to give is Minecraft). It’s not a game, it is a toy. I am not going to go into the art of toys, I do not understand the art of toys except for their potential to be games.

The things we typically associate with difficulty in a game, like lethality and time windows, are not necessarily the true difficulty of the game, they are there to make us deconstruct and reassemble the game, that is the actual challenge. This is why it is very very easy to make a hard game, but very very hard to make a truly challenging one. The flash game titled The World’s Hardest Game is dull because every one of us has already beaten it, same for many other indie games billing themselves as hard, like Super Meat Boy. These aren’t games about understanding or interacting, they’re games about going through the motions until you happen to succeed. Just because you fail a lot on the way to your objective does not mean that you are playing a challenging game, only a hard one.

I believe games are art because they convey non-literal information in the form of their method of play. The method of play is itself an aesthetic that is distinct from its graphical representation. The design of the game conveys itself in non-literal terms. This means that it doesn’t outright describe itself to you, you must understand it implicitly through its means of conveyance. The information conveyed by the game is its strategies, the pace of the gameplay, the model of the actions you perform, the type of thinking required to solve it, the “feeling” of the actions involved, the spaces you traverse and their internal model contrasted with their visual appearance.

I think that by mentioning games like Okami, Journey, Flow, and Flower, people are fall into a trap along the lines of thinking music, painting, movies, etc are art, but games are not. What game would you recommend to a person who only thought paintings were art? A game that looks like a painting! No, that’s only reinforcing the idea that paintings are art. If this game is very artistic because it looks like a painting then you are implicitly admitting that games are not art, only things which stick to the categories we’ve accepted as art culturally are.

An example a friend gave to me was, “Is a hospital art because paintings are hung up in it?” No, a hospital exists for a literal purpose, not to convey non-literal information. Hospitals without paintings are not art, and hospitals with paintings are not necessarily art either. Redesigning the entire hospital to look like a house from Dr. Seuss or something doesn’t mean all hospitals are now art because that one has an artful design. In the case of such a hospital, the hospital itself would not be art nearly so much as the building that houses the hospital is. A hospital is not art until its methods of being a hospital itself are artful. Attaching objects that we accept as art to non-art objects does not make them art by proximity. Okami, as a game, is art because of the nature of its interactivity, not merely because it has a Sumi-e filter on everything. Dwarf Fortress is art despite being composed entirely of ASCII characters, the barest form of visual representation possible. Nearly all games are a form of art because nearly all games convey some form of nonliteral information. To call them art by association is to limit what games are and can be.

Grind and How to Eliminate It

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Grinding is something that nearly every game player is familiar with at one point or another. Grinding is best known from JRPGs and MMOs, and is almost universally reviled.

First, I’m gonna define what grinding is so we can all be clear on terms. Grinding is the repetition of a relatively simple series of actions that do not directly advance the game.

In an article on Critical Gaming, KirbyKid explores what grinding is by attempting to come up with examples of grinding, and ultimately concluded that as long as players are having fun and voluntarily choosing to play there isn’t really any such thing as grinding, and I kind of have to disagree, because I think his examples weren’t really on point.

The first example he gives is repeating Mario levels, and then he argues about how this isn’t grinding, and largely his point is correct. Having mario levels repeat themselves, beating each level twice, isn’t really grinding. But imagine that there were a block in mario that generated a coin every time you pounded it and never stopped (or at least had a very large number of coins). Now imagine stopping and getting a ton of extra lives from that block. You’re no longer progressing in the game or engaging in the game, you are staying in the same place and pressing A for a long time. Grinding is a cessation of progress. A modern example of this, in New Super Mario Bros. no less, is returning to the first level and abusing the giant mushroom to get a ton of 1ups. The result is players repeating the same section ad infinitum until they have enough 1ups. The old infinite life trick on a turtle shell is only vaguely more tolerable because you don’t have to actually stick around for it. A lot of people did similar in Oblivion by making spells that did nothing and binding their keyboard to cast them forever while they did something else and their skill levels rose.

The issue with Kirby Kid’s example is that even with repeated levels, you are still making progress as you play those levels, unlike repeating 1-1 over and over to get extra lives.

A big reason I quit Disgaea is because of institutionalized grinding. I reached a certain stage and realized that to get any further, I’d have to go back and repeat prior stages until my characters’ levels were high enough to continue. Then my items all had levels too, and I had to grind to beat each of their levels. The entire game is built around forcing the player to sink as much time as possible into it. Then the sequels gave you the option to restart from scratch with better base stats. It’s one thing to provide a lot of content, but to require close to mindless repetition in order to access it all is positively painful.

Dark Souls was a huge step up from its predecessor Demon’s Souls because it eliminated a lot of the grind based elements. One of the things demon’s souls players still have nightmares about is grinding for pure bladestone. Dark Souls by contrast seriously eased up on absurd random drops, and gave the player some of the rarest random drop items guaranteed. The big grind issue in dark souls is only really present for people who play online and even then those who lose at online. In dark souls to play online you need humanity, which is an item that is dropped by sewer rats (and gained by defeating an enemy in online play or assisting someone with a boss). This means that to play online consistently, you need to go back to the depths every so often and kill rats and hope they drop humanity. This can be mitigated somewhat. Drop rates on humanity in the last patch were multiplied by 20, and you can use humanity, enter human form, and wear various items to increase your drop rate further. Also an option is to skip beating the boss of the depths, the gaping dragon, allowing black phantoms to invade you while you are farming. All in all this is a step up from the prior method of online play which required you to beat a boss every time you wanted network functions enabled, but it’s stull pretty tedious.

One of the Castlevania series’ advantages after going the Metroidvania route is that they never forced the player to grind in order to beat the game. The level progression enables the player to keep up their health and damage output as they progress through the game and never really fall behind the enemies, meaning that they will never need to grind. The big trouble is though that these games included random item drops, which boiled down to exiting and re-entering rooms to kill the same monster over and over again for hours on end to get rare items, including weapons. Order of Ecclesia eventually solved this problem by having new weapons (in that game represented by glyphs) obtainable by absorbing them when enemies cast spells or at specific hidden locations. It still had randomly dropping items, but these were less required than ever.

The classic deal in every JRPG or MMO conceived is that the entire game has become less about overcoming challenges and more about making your numbers go up. This is why people raid, this is why people battle monsters outside of town for hours on end. The reason for this being popular or people subjecting themselves to this arduous process at all is detailed in my skinner box and sunk cost fallacy essay.

The reason this is bad should be obvious, it’s dull and unengaging. It doesn’t require anything beyond minimal interaction or thought from players. Even in a game with a combat system that has depth, grinding boils down to a tedious repetitive process.

Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne and Digital Devil Saga are great examples of this. They have perhaps the best and most strategic combat systems of any JRPG, but they also practically mandate grinding to succeed, which makes them a lot more annoying to play, which is why on some of the DS titles, I ended up using experience multipliers on new game+ so that I could focus on playing the game instead of wasting time on grinding I had already done.

The next question to ask is, what can be done about grinding? There are a few possible solutions. These include, tying experience gains to plot events, having a finite number of enemies, having anti-grinding algorithms for experience gain, having ability gain be attached to player performance instead of random drops, decreasing level caps, and creating combat systems that enable a low level player to defeat a high level enemy with enough skill.

Tying experience to plot events is something that was done by the original Deus Ex and Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines. You gain experience when you finish quests, side quests, or complete objectives. What this means is the player is only capable of gaining experience in proportion to how far along they are in the plot and they cannot farm enemies for experience, and now have no real motivation to do so.

Finite enemies is very similar to tying experience to plot events. This can provide a more direct reward for combat and can similarly prevent infinite grinding. However without regulation it can lead to grinding just the same. On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness is a great example of finite enemies done right. Every enemy encounter is given care and instead of grinding, it turns into a game where the player actively looks forward to finding new battles. Players are forced into enough battles to ensure their stats are never particularly low, and it’s impossible to grind your way up and destroy the difficulty.

Anti-grind algorithms would be something along the lines of scaling exp drops in proportion to how strong a character should be at a given point in the story. A diagetic rationale for this would be that a character does not gain much by facing the same enemies over and over again, nor enemies below their skill level. By regulating experience more directly like this, it can limit the effectiveness of grinding and generally keep characters on track with where they should be. Underleveled? Defeat monsters way stronger than you for scaled up experience so you’ll be on track in no time. Overleveled? You’ll earn less and less to prevent you from getting too much of an edge. The big trouble with this method is that it takes a lot of effort to balance on the part of the designers, but difficulty is always hard to balance.

Random drops are a big feature in a lot of RPGs with respawning enemies, and frequently players are required to kill the same enemy for long periods of time to farm a resource or obtain a rare weapon. In general I think systems like this are best left out, attach rare weapons to bosses, or secret locations or puzzles. Don’t waste player’s time, give them real nonrepetitive goals. Dark Souls did this by having every unique item and a lot of rare non-unique weapons be tied to a specific location instead of forcing the player to grind for them. There is no item in the game that requires players to grind in order to get it, and that is a good thing.

Level caps should probably be decreased across the board. High level caps are not inherently good nor bad, but it’s better to have fewer levels and make them count than long gradual progression, which almost seems to demand lazy filler level design and grinding to fill out (see Disgaea).

EDIT: Add Ys solution example with enemy quota.

The final thing that can be done is creating battle systems that enable players to win even when locked to level 1. Examples of games that do this are Dark Souls, Castlevania, and The World Ends With You (notable for people frequently doing level 1 runs). The primary thing that creates a game like this is the ability to avoid damage via rock paper scissors type systems. It’s possible to beat all these games without taking damage. An alternative to this is keeping lethality levels consistent throughout the game (such as in legend of zelda which almost never has an attack that knocks off more than 2 hearts). This can help deal with grinding by largely making it unnecessary. If you do not need to grind to win, then it frequently creates a more natural level progression. Dark Souls in particular is notable for penalizing high level players (200 and above roughly) by preventing them from easily invading and being invaded by other players due to how the matchmaking system works (in demon’s souls matchmaking would fail completely).

Not all of these systems are suitable for every game, but between them they can help empower games to be more capable and interesting while also being less repetitive. Grind based games have always had the particular flaw that the player is not really asked to improve nearly so much as their character improves for them and the game actively conspires to force the player to sit through the same content rather than allowing them to keep moving onto new content. It means making battle systems that are themselves engaging rather than the (dying) trend of trying to sell an RPG on story alone.

RNG, How it Can Hurt, How it Can Help

Celia WagarLeave a comment

The mighty random number god is the almighty entity that damns, that saves. In games there have always been the use of random numbers. Even since the days of the egyptians, people rolled blocks to generate random numbers. People have flipped coins, and more recently grabbed numbers off the system clock and a dozen other places and mixed that into something with no predictable pattern.

The first question we’ve gotta ask is, “why?” Why do people use random elements in the first place? I believe this reason is unpredictability. If things are certain, then why bother testing them? People enjoy uncertainty. If you played monopoly or candyland and just picked numbers to move, it would be dull. If you just said put the coin down on the table and said heads, it would be dull. Rock paper scissors and derivative games are interesting because both players are not aware of what the other player has chosen. What makes games interesting is on a fundamental level, uncertainty.

I hate RNGs. My reason for this is that RNGs remove control from a player on the most fundamental level that it is possible to remove control. I believe that games should be fair. Fair means to me that the player is given means to control their situation equally to every other player. There may be systems that act outside the player, but those can be learned and taken advantage of, but an RNG is something that throws that to the wind. Random or pseudorandom numbers by definition cannot be taken advantage of. They are unlearnable, prognostication is not a skill that a player can be expected to develop (and if it was, then it kind of indicates that the number wasn’t random in the first place). The general idea here is, you cannot get better at predicting random numbers.

People can be rock paper scissors champions, but you can never become a coin toss champion. Predicting what people will do is a skill that can absolutely be developed. People aren’t random, but people are complex and constantly evolving. People can be predicted, but people are uncertain. You can never be totally sure what the other person is going to do. They always ostensibly have the option of choosing something different. This is what keeps competition interesting. Competition is in part how well you can perform and how well you can read minds. RNG kills this. The only thing you can do to control the RNG is attempting to cut it out.

In the original counter strike, the bullet spray patterns were static, meaning they moved the same way each time. What this meant was that someone could memorize the pattern and move their gun to counteract the wide and shaky spray pattern. This is what counter strike players actually did. Then counter strike source came along and implemented tighter but randomized spray patterns. This, along with complaints over the physics are the reason counter strike source is disdained by the CS community. The RNG stole their control.

In a way, what we need is both predictability, and uncertainty. We need to know deterministically what the outcome of both player’s actions are, but we can’t know for certain what will be decided. We must be given means to evaluate future outcomes, but not know them for certain. RNG prevents evaluation. You cannot evaluate, cannot guess at the random. You can only do things and pray they work.

A friend of mine coined a term, “intelligent uncertainty”, and I think it entirely accurately describes the phenomena. We are uncertain of what will happen until it does, but we can learn to predict it better and better.

RNG can sometimes play nicely with other components, but only when it’s carefully regulated. Poker for example takes a lot of the luck out of the draw and places it back into player’s hands. It does this by making the game a lot more about bluffs and betting strategies than just winning hands.

Project M had a great fix for Luigi’s misfire which used to activate randomly. Now it can be stored and released when you need it, but you have to keep using Luigi Missile to get it. It will show up randomly within every six times the move is used, and when it does, it becomes optional whether to use it then or store it for a use later. Using it of course means you have to retry 1-6 times to get it back again.

Items have been an issue of contention in smash bros ever since they were introduced, but frankly, I think the easy fix for them is just to make them spawn in regular places at regular times and announce what item it will be before it spawns, like having a ghost item appear there before it can be picked up and used. With regulation, items could go from breaking games to just being another element players use. Items like the quad damage, haste, regeneration, flight, invisibility, battle suit, personal teleporter, medkit, and mega health are perfectly acceptable in Quake 3, and items could have a place in Smash with more regulation.

Randomness is way more acceptable with peach and game and watch. Peach’s turnips have a random chance of producing stitch-face, a really powerful turnip. Game and Watch’s hammer has a random chance of a number of different effects occurring. The big deal here is peach can only pull a bunch of similar objects with similar functions from the ground, and to do so, she needs to use a highly telegraphed and interruptable move. Game and watch’s attack generally doesn’t matter if he doesn’t hit his opponent. He still needs to play well to hit which was the point in the first place. It’s not an advantage or disadvantage being given out at random here, they’re both functions of the character. They are decisions the players actively undertake, knowing what their chances are.

Another example is the 50% miss chance against units on higher terrain in Starcraft, though I am not fond of this particular example (editor’s note: fuck this example, halve the fucking damage, or deterministically make every other shot miss please). What it can create is a gamble where one can pass units through certain locations at a high risk.

Relationships and Dimensionality

Celia WagarLeave a comment

The basis of depth in a game isn’t how complex it is, it is the means by which those complexities interact. The interplay between elements.

This is highly related to our concepts of dimensions. Spatial dimensions overlap and envelope each over and creates depth between them. Even our language mirrors this thought process, such as saying a character is two dimensional, flat or a narrative is deep. Depth as a narrative term comes from the literal meaning of the word depth.

Depth in games should be about adding new layers to games, new means by which the player must interpret them to succeed.

The most basic demonstration possible is to imagine a 1d game, a game where you are on a line. In a game such as this, if you encounter an obstacle. You have no real way to go around it, only through it. Collisions occur when your position is the same as another object.

Now imagine that there are two of these lines, one vertical and one horizontal, and they both operate independently on this principle. This is an added complexity, but it is not really depth. Now imagine that collisions only occur when your position is the same as objects on both axises. Beyond that, that whenever you shift on one axis, the other changes. In accordance with the shift, the prior object is no longer in your way. This is now effectively a 2d game, it has another dimension added to it. It is now possible to go around objects instead of going through them. This could be represented as a flat picture now instead of just 2 lines. But then, how do you get around objects which do not have an opening somewhere for you to go through?

Imagine there being a third line, and objects on that line can only be collided with if you are in the same position as them. Then, you can tie that into the prior two lines, and bind them all together, creating three dimensional space.

Beyond this, imagine that there were another dimension, and that analogous to the prior ones, as you moved through this dimension, objects in the other dimensions seem to shift around you. One such dimension already exists, and it’s time. The difference between time and other dimensions is that it cannot be seen, as our methods of seeing are themselves subject to time, and that collisions cannot occur with time, time passes whether we want it to or not.

Imagine another such dimension, it’s a bit hard to think about, because we don’t actually have another spatial dimension. Imagine that as you travel through this dimension, space and objects around you warp and change. One obvious metaphor for this could be color or temperature. Imagine that you could only see objects if they were the same temperature or color as you, and that you could only collide with them if you were the same color or temperature as them.

Perhaps this idea could itself be used as the basis of a game?

Competitive Games: RPS and Efficiency Races

Celia WagarLeave a comment

In general, as I look at competitive games, I see two big styles emerge, that which I call efficiency races, and rock, paper, scissors. I believe that good competitive games are a blend of both, but that RPS should generally take priority over efficiency races.

A classic quote from Sid Meier, creator of civilization, “A [good] game is a series of interesting choices.” An interesting choice is a choice that has advantages and drawbacks so as to make it not explicitly better than any other choice the player has, except in the context of a specific situation. Ideally players must carefully evaluate their situation and make the right choice to come out on top.

By contrast efficiency races are not about making interesting choices nearly so much as perfect performance. Racing games are inherently efficiency races most of the time. There is a definitive path to victory and may woe befall all those who do not copy it as perfectly as possible. The issue with efficiency race style games is they end up with brain dead gameplay. In a shooter styled as an efficiency race, the game becomes, who can fire first and hit most consistently, without any other sort of mitigating factors.

Without RPS interactions, a multiplayer game cannot have strategy, comebacks are only possible by the lead player screwing up, or an external comeback mechanic forcing that player out of the lead, like the blue shells or lightning in Mario Kart.

Having a mix of RPS and efficiency race styles of play is generally speaking ideal, because it enables a depth of interaction, while giving players a basis to make their predictions on. When they know how much payoff their opponent gets from particular options, they can see what their opponent is biased to pick. Things based purely on efficiency (like tricky to perform execution based techniques) are often looked down upon by outsiders but they help create a sense of progression in the game and enables a whole range of interesting choices to be made that couldn’t otherwise that are balanced on the basis of how tricky they are to perform.

Quake 3 is an example of a great mix of efficiency and RPS. Quake 3 is a game about map control. In any other game this would be camping the best powerups, but in Quake 3’s speed prevents effective camping from ever being too viable. Essentially map control consists of grabbing power ups, like the red armor, yellow armor, and megahealth, so that you get an advantage over the opponent in battle. Beyond this, Quake champions watch the clock to determine when these power ups Respawn so they can be there when it happens to keep their advantage up. Quake is a massive battle of information. Metagame tactics include delaying when you pick up a power up to change the timing of that power up so it is harder for the enemy to pick it up and monitoring the timings of the power ups so you can predict where the enemy will want to go in the future.

Another example is in fighting games, where you have efficiency in the maximum combo punish you can pull off when you hit your opponent, and RPS in trying to hit them at all.

Fun Movement Systems

Celia WagarLeave a comment

(terribly simple old essay on movement systems, doesn’t really examine what should go into one, just recounts different existing ones)

The thrill of moving fast is awesome. The fluidity and flow of fast movement can be pretty incredible. One thing I’d personally like to see from more games is nice movement systems.

I’m usually in support of rock paper scissors style stuff and interesting choices, but with movement you can’t totally do that. Fast movement is typically just about efficiency, either you’re faster or you’re not, it’s a pretty linear progression. So what can you do to make moving fast interesting? My answer is making it hard to solve. Give players a challenge to figure out new pathways and the perfect methods, give them means to drag themselves forward. Make the game such that it’s paced as fast as they can handle. Whenever they can handle one level of speed, always leave options dangling in front of them to make it faster.

What players really enjoy in games based on movement are when they feel like they have transcended the system. Gunz was a game that allowed players to air dash and run on walls. When players mastered it, the game allowed them to soar.

Throughout history, all the best skill based movement systems have been the result of glitches, such as bunny hopping, snaking, wave dashing, butterfly canceling, skiing. These weren’t exactly anticipated by the designers in every case and they ended up kinda dominating the games they cropped up in, ruining: a lot of the balance. But the question we have to ask is, which is more important, balance, or ascending to a higher level of game? I think that we should recognize how these techniques arose and strive to integrate them into our games to make them greater than before, to introduce new elements of skill and strategy. If it breaks the balance, rebalance it around the new elements, make the new elements more accessible without compromising them.
When I first started snaking in Mario Kart DS, I saw the courses in a new way. It created new paths and forced me to think about the course in new ways and to plan differently. Instead of the trade off between going in a straight line and turning, I had all sorts of new things I had to manage, the angle of my hop, the way the road bent and how wide it was, how fast I could mash left and right, and frankly, I’d rather have a game with all of these things to think about and work with than a balanced one. Snakers broke the game and left a more interesting one in its place.

In Quake 3 derived movement systems the movement mode of choice is strafe jumping. This consists of moving your mouse back and forth like a whip to try to maximize your acceleration on every jump. I’ll explain why and how this works in the next paragraph, but to put it simply, this enables people to move very fast sometimes and makes building and managing momentum as big a part of the game as the shooting and map control.

I confess that I don’t have a complete understanding of strafe jumping (ammended in a later essay (Ammended again in a later later essay)), but from what I know, it’s based on abusing rounding errors. In a lot of older games programmers made the mistake of having the forward button make you move a certain velocity forward and the strafe button make you move a certain velocity to the side. The trouble with systems like this is if you press both forward and strafe buttons at once you move that entire velocity both forward and sideways, which anyone who took physics realizes creates a larger velocity vector than either speed individually. Id however knew better than this and used trigonometry to calculate the velocity at diagonal movement angles. Then they decided to round all non-round results up. This means that every time the velocity is not an integer, it gets rounded to one. Trigonometry almost always results in irrational numbers being produced as results. The goal of strafe jumping is really to force the engine to recalculate and therefore reround your momentum as frequently as possible. This is what produces the acceleration. There are a few things I still do not understand about it yet which I am working on learning, but I believe this is the reason strafe jumping exists and why it works.

What movement systems should strive to do is enable the player to move faster, move in new ways and give them more to manage for doing it. If they can be tied into interesting choices, like rocket jumps and losing health, then do it.

Tribes Ascend (regrettably the only Tribes I have played) has an amazing movement system based on skiing. By skiing you can use slopes to build velocity and slide around then soar through the air. To make matters more interesting, your fired projectiles inherit your velocity, affecting their trajectory. Tribes as a result is a game about building velocity, retaining it, and constantly watching the terrain to keep up speed. It’s about moving to avoid enemy shots and going fast as possible. To win you need to determine where the enemy is gonna move in the future, how they’ll accelerate, how far to lead your shot to connect it, adjust for your inherited velocity, and keep track of which hill you’ll ski down next.

Dishonored Review

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Dishonored is a game I wanted to love. I was excited with all the features they were originally planning on integrating into the stealth system, but ultimately it all fell flat. when I picked up the game, I was glued to it. It seemed like the son of Thief, but after the initial rush, I began to notice how stupid the guards were, and the laziness in level and puzzle design.

I’m gonna start with the good first. One thing that is awesome about this game is the spotting mechanic. Frankly, throughout the history of stealth games, stealth has been really unforgiving and not necessarily the most intuitive with their spotting mechanics. Pretty much everyone knows the pain of edging into the enemy line of sight and suddenly full alert that you have to wait out until things die down. In Dishonored, guards spot you based on how close you are, what’s blocking the line of sight, relative darkness, and partially spot you or fully spot you based on how long you remain in sight, and how obvious you are. I think this type of spotting mechanic is what the stealth genre has needed for forever.

https://i0.wp.com/i.imgur.com/GXYuf.jpg
Now if only the guards were a bit more persistent.

Blink honestly is a really fun way to move and it has enabled a cool stealth design that allows for guard sweeps without any breaches to sneak through, which has really helped move the stealth in this game past the timing puzzles you commonly find. Another cool feature of blink is that even on full alert or investigation phases, you can still keep moving around enemies and trying to get better positioning. When changing anything, I’d balance it around Blink, because it’s a feature I really wouldn’t want to lose. Blink would also be nicer if it made a slight sound with a very short range around you at the start and end of it, and lead guards a bit when trying to find you. Like, if they already see you, give them a clue where to investigate. As is, it’s a get out of trouble free card that you can almost always use, which is kind of disappointing, especially in levels with high areas and no direct line of sight or way up for guards.

The bad however is everything except this exceptional spotting algorithm. Up to a level 2 alert, guards won’t investigate at all. You’re given a short opportunity to run away if you get seen at a distance, but the guards won’t even follow up by investigating. They just stand where they were awkwardly staring at where you were until they dismiss it as rats. They won’t investigate around until a level 3 disturbance, which is relatively hard to provoke without being seen. On full alert, enemy guards will chase after you, but if you find a hiding spot and they don’t see you duck into cover, it’s pretty much guaranteed that they won’t find you. Cooloff times for full alerts are short as hell too, nothing compared to other games. I once ducked around a corner, and the guards never even made it that far. I never liked waiting for cooloff times in other games, but here it feels like they’re not even trying to find you if you escape, not to mention that Blink should have solved that issue and allowed the player to keep active even during full alert while trying to be stealthy. Escapes are much too simple. After full alert, guards are still on guard for you and will make comments about finding you again, which is a nice step forward from older games that totally forgot that you were around if you escaped detection, but ultimately this doesn’t change anything. Guards still patrol the exact same routes, and they don’t patrol it any differently than they did before, just they’re always at level 1 alert and so spot you quicker if you enter their view.

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A guard standing around on level 2 alert staring at where you just were is a pretty common sight
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It’s almost sad to see him give up that easily

One feature they originally said the game would have but didn’t was the guards noticing missing guards on their patrol routes and adjusting their patrols to cover the missing ground. I noticed a few guards remarking on missing guards, but patrol routes never changed unless I forced them to temporarily change with a disturbance or a scripted event like guards talking to each other happened when you passed by.

Another issue I have is with how unconscious bodies are handled. There’s absolutely no difference between an unconscious and dead body except that an unconscious body is liable to become a dead body if you drop it from too high, or drown it, or have rats eat it, and therefore get a black mark on your record for killing someone. Unconscious people never wake up, either by their own volition, or when another guard tries to wake them up, which they are actually programmed to do. Not to mention that there is a hard limit of 7 bodies at any given time and older bodies disappear as you take out more guards, removing a lot of the reasons to worry about hiding bodies well. Patrol routes never change or move in any unexpected ways so there are tons of blind spots that are useful for body stashing. One of the later levels really compounds the unconscious body issue with a moral decision to either incapacitate a ton of guards or turn them to ash. There’s honestly no difference at all, and if you choose to exercise either choice, the level is over anyway. It doesn’t alter the experience in any meaningful way and that is depressing.

There’s absolutely no difference between a sleep dart and a normal crossbow bolt except that sleep darts take enemies out in one hit and crossbow bolts take a few and that you can carry less sleep darts. One of the upgrades allowed you to use sleeping darts in battle, but I used them in battle anyway and they worked fine. Frankly, this simplicity takes a lot away from the stealth style of gameplay. The game was promoted as a stealth game, yet stealth feels extremely sterile. More than half the powers aren’t terribly useful for stealth, and way more than half the weapons are lethal. Worse, you couldn’t customize your power wheel menu to only have the options you wanted, so it got cluttered fast. The inventory screen did absolutely nothing besides show your inventory. Also irksome was the sword CONSTANTLY being held out. I went through my entire playthrough using nothing but the right mouse button, yet I constantly had that sword there ready to kill someone.

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I tried to make a body pile. This did not end up terribly successful as the bodies began disappearing very quickly.

The lighting system generally worked really well, but I can’t help but lament the baked lighting. It was announced late into development that the environments were very pretty and so the team elected to use baked lighting instead of dynamic lighting like the old thief games, so they could show off all the world. As a result, dark areas never looked terribly dark, and they totally lost the old element of the thief games where you could create patches of darkness for yourself to hide in by putting out torches and candles.

The entire stealth style of gameplay would be more interesting if sleep darts took a while to make enemies drop and headshots or shots closer to the head made it happen sooner, so you had to plan for where they would drop in the future so as to avoid rousing suspicion. It would be more interesting if partial alerts drew guard attention and caused them to investigate instead of staring blankly. Blink should give guards an idea where to investigate if they partially spotted you, and make a bit of noise up close too, to discourage its use or make it at least somewhat trickier. It would add another consideration if guards noticed doors opening and shutting and reacted to that in a meaningful way. It would be more interesting if discovered dead bodies kicked suspicion up a lot and caused a full search of the level, but unconscious bodies resulted in the guard getting woken up and a minor search of the area. Having guards eventually wake up on their own and resume their patrol after an investigation would also add more depth to the game. Having multiple dynamic patrol routes would add to the game. I wish guards actually noticed missing comrades and searched for them. Having Thief’s water arrows and dynamic lighting would have given the stealthy player more things to do and more ways for the guards to interact with the player. There are so many ways they could have made the stealth more dynamic and fulfilling that they completely fell through on.

This is honestly a minor issue but guard conversations bugged the shit out of me. There are a few stock phrases that guards say to each other as they pass by and unfortunately that means you’ll be hearing the same ones a lot. I heard the same ones repeating before I beat the first mission past the tutorial. Other minor issues were a lot of things with the settings. FOV maxed out at 85, when I prefer FOVs around 110 or so (not having at least 90 is pretty sad). Mouse sensitivity by default was in the toilet, and I could never raise it to a totally acceptable level. A lot of the UI elements dumbed down the game, like constant tutorial messages, objective markers, heart markers and others. I disabled the lot of them as soon as I got the game, and frankly, it was much more rewarding to search through the levels based on the clues I was given rather than having things spelled out for me, but I’m still not happy the options exist at all. There was also a hard cap on the number of save files you could have at once and I hit it only halfway through, and the save files weren’t very clear about where you were in the mission, so you sometimes had to try random files, sit through the loading screen, and see where you ended up, unless you could identify files purely by their time stamp.

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Why are these even an option?

The item distribution through the level was planned well generally, except that there was too damn much of everything. There were rare loot items to discover and tons of trinkets to steal, but not much reason to, unlike thief. You could use it to buy ammo, but ammo was so common, and very frequently offered as a reward for exploration itself, so that was relatively pointless. Very soon I found myself with more money than I ever needed and nothing to spend it on, and full ammo and potions of every variety. I’d frequently only use potions when I found a new one to replace the top one in my stock. They absolutely showered the player in powerups and yet there was often so little reason to ever use them at all. Finding item caches in the level ended up feeling disappointing because it was a lump of things you couldn’t pick up because you were already full up.

Darkvision was a nice power that deserves a mention of its own. Darkvision honestly broke a lot of the information game. There wasn’t a lot of reason to not have it active at all times. Any mana it consumed simply recharged. The original developer talks on Dishonored said it would drain mana at a slow rate, but this didn’t end up being the case. Dishonored had a nice leaning system, and it was pretty fun to use in the first mission to get information, but Darkvision really killed that interesting choice by providing you with sight through walls, and highlights on areas of interest to boot. About the only reason not to use Darkvision is it’s a bit harder to spot books. I like the concept of Darkvision as it was nice for determining where view cones were and helping to teach the player that, but this fell apart as it became a mandatory tool to pick up the loot scattered through the level and there was no permanent cost to using it. They also had a really nice keyhole feature where you could peek through the keyholes of doors to be sure there weren’t enemies lurking on the other side, but it was totally pointless due to Darkvision rendering it invalid. That and Darkvision is so cheap to purchase, it’s stupid not to buy it.

In Developer talks and a lot of chats online, “Isn’t this going to break the game?” was a question that was asked a lot about various powers. The reply was, “That’s the point.” To a large degree, yes it is. You’re supposed to allow the player to come up with clever and ridiculous strategies, but Dishonored makes feeble attempts to resist being broken, even on the hardest difficulty, the only one I played. For breaking a game to be worth something, there has to be a level of difficulty worth breaking in the first place, and the game still needs to remain engaging beyond that. And as I covered, it generally doesn’t bother with that.

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Nothing to it, regrettably

The story was frankly predictable and that’s your indication of a spoiler warning for the rest of this paragraph. It’s predictable from the instant you get the heart. You can hear the secrets about the people around you, so the twists ahead are really plain. The other major twist is straight from the line said by Leo Gold in Deus Ex’s opening level, “I think the government made the plague on purpose to control population growth.” Subtlety is dead. I liked some of the flavor text found in books, but it’s not really a world with much mystery. It’s a world with no secrets worth sharing. It doesn’t seem like much work was really put into the setting apart from putting some corrupt bureaucrats into power. None of the characters were terribly likeable or had much dimension to them. There were no affectionate touches in any of their actions and they never really engaged with the player in any way that would enable them to become endearing in any way. You were practically encouraged to ignore them entirely when you visited the hound pits. None of them really acted out of the ordinary or showed any special strength of character, except maybe for high chaos playthroughs where Samuel is close to outright hostile towards you, going as far as to fire a flare, warning the enemies ahead on your final mission. The alternate dialog for various levels of chaos was fairly interesting in concept and execution though even if it changed basically nothing.

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I almost wish these numbers were higher.

The levels are generally well constructed with a lot of Z axis focus and tons of details scattered everywhere and things to find, even if most of it is useless. There are loads of routes through and the powers you have as well as your attentiveness greatly affect that. There were a few puzzles in the levels, like getting safe combinations, and a couple of these are relatively ingenious, like the seven strictures one, because it’s impossible to know the seven strictures without sneaking into an area with a ton of eyes on you or searching the level thoroughly (unfortunately the reward for that one was completely worthless, just ammo I couldn’t use, and it was a bitch to sneak into the drop zone too, huge disappointment to not have a reason to even bother), and one with paintings in a man’s house that I honestly had a lot of difficulty realizing was a puzzle in the first place, and so greatly enjoyed when I figured it out (then to my disappointment realized it told me everything in the mission clues). But as I go over in more detail later, the level design generally never tried to force the player into confrontations or tricky situations and almost always let the player avoid whatever threat was headed their way, which lead to more dull lethal and nonlethal, stealth and non-stealth playthroughs.

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A pretty genius puzzle totally ruined by the mission clues

On the whole, Dishonored is a game that wishes it tried to encourage intelligent play and discovery, but ultimately is forced to explain everything to the player. It’s like a riddler who blurts out clues and solutions right after he’s told the riddle. One of the later safe puzzles had a note next to the safe it unlocked that literally said, “If you want your share then remember this poem” and the poem listed 3 months in a specific order, then a book next to that note listed the 28 months, and solving the puzzle was literally as simple as checking the order of the months. One nice thing about the levels is the lack of a map screen of any kind, and maps being posted up in the levels for you to examine, so you need to figure out the map layout based on that instead of some sort of minimap telling you where you are at all times. With objective markers turned off, this meant that I had to use a lot of environmental clues to determine level layout and where I had to go, which was very involved and interesting, although I could have negated all of that at any time, which is depressing.

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This was a neat touch, I wish they had gone to this much effort for something worthwhile instead of another completely replaceable elixir, by this point you probably have an inventory full of them anyway.

There were a lot of complaints about the length of the game, and I’d say that the total mission count felt a bit low, but really I just wish that each mission engaged you a lot more. I’m not sure of my exact playtime, but I’d imagine it was at least 15 hours if not in the range of 25, although I did a very comprehensive playthrough. I later did a lethal playthrough that I didn’t need to spend nearly as much time on. Blink and the other powers made blazing through the game a breeze.

Unfortunately, even in a lethal playthrough it’s difficult for the game to ever force you into a tough situation (I had to practically create my own), and I didn’t really have any trouble until the later missions, like the return to the tower. And that was in tight quarters with literally every guard alerted. Not to mention that I rather deliberately didn’t take terribly safe routes. Dishonored, even on its hardest difficulty is an easily cheesed game. For all the talk of the amazingly clever combinations you can do with the engine, it’s all totally pointless. Why on earth would I summon a rat swarm, stop time, and attach a razorwire trap to a rat when I could shoot the guard in the face? Bullets are a more common resource. For that matter, why bother with that silly combination when the rats will just eat the guy anyway and disappear?

Honestly lethal is more interesting to play than nonlethal, but only marginally, because it’s faster, and generally involves more of the game elements, however at any time you can pull out a pistol or crossbow and wail on the enemies. In general though, it’s easier because of that, and just because you have to be a lot less cautious with the choking and the stealth. There are many great setups you can do, but precious little reason to bother because the enemies aren’t challenging enough and the level design isn’t constraining enough to really force your hand ever. I still had inventories filled to the brim with elixirs and remedies What the game should really focus on isn’t just making open levels that can be traveled through in a wide variety of ways. Open level design is really cool, but it isn’t everything. What the game should try to do more than that is to create interesting situations with its levels that require clever thinking to pull yourself through. One of the most interesting parts of the game for me was breaking down the bunker in the return to the tower mission, then throwing the target’s corpse off the tower and diving down after him into the water and attempting to escape when literally everyone in the surrounding area was alerted to me. I ended up replaying those two segments back to back a lot to find the way through, and I ended up finding out more new information about the game in those moments of crunch than anywhere else, like how you could bake grenades by holding down the button, music boxes could be used as a weapon, and possessing a summoned swarm rat for the first time all game. Honestly, I could have bypassed all of that by just taking the stairs back down after killing the target and sneaking out the front, but to make the game interesting, I had to impose a few challenges on myself, leading to some actually interesting complex gameplay when I was being mobbed from all sides by defense towers, tallboys, dozens of soldiers, and briefly some of my own rats.

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I seriously question why anyone would put the rewire panel here from a level design or diegetic perspective.

What Dishonored really needs here is better AI and general planning for player interaction so it can actually cope with the player and provide some sort of challenge and engagement. Why swordfight when I can just walk backwards and drop razorwires as I go? I killed three guards in a row this way, just dropped one after another as they came around the corner. The guards take so long to aim their pistols it’s silly. I mean, obviously they’re compensating for the melee playstyle, but why not have pistol aim times be slightly shorter all around, and twice as short if the player has already used a ranged weapon? Why should I be able to cross the border into a new area and suddenly have all the guards in the last area not bother to follow me? We had that in MGS2 and MGS3 years ago. Why don’t guards run away from grenades and rats? Why can’t guards recognize that I placed a tripwire, or that I rewired a wall of light instead of idiotically running straight into it? Why bother buying shadow kill when there is a 7 body limit anyway? A lethal character would never really need to worry about hiding bodies, and a nonlethal character would never kill. The amount of time guards spend searching when they find a body is too pathetic for it to even matter. In the golden cat mission, I killed the first guard I saw, others approached after him and found the body. I was behind the railing of the stone staircase they were standing on, and they never got as far as searching anywhere around there before giving up. Why give all these tools to the player if there is no reason to use them? Why make an engine with such sophistication when none of the gameplay demands it unless you really force yourself up against a wall? It really kills the whole assassination thing to know that you could seriously just walk up to most of the targets and shoot them in the face and be done with it.

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This assassination method felt really redundant. Especially when there’s a random chance the target might not even be here, or that you might obsolete killing the target completely with the nonlethal sidequest.

Dishonored gave the player a ton of really powerful tools to use. Even the ordinary weapons are really powerful and can shut down enemies easily. I think that empowering the player this way is generally a good thing. What Dishonored truly failed to do however is give the enemies any sort of recourse against your powers. They failed to design the levels to play off them at all. Abilities like Blink should enable them to design tighter stealth than ever before, because they know that no matter what they throw, the player can handle it. Guards should recognize the razorwire trap in the middle of the floor their buddies ran into and got cut up by and avoid it if they can. If the player uses it as a wall to harass the guards, they should take cover. The guards should flee from rats, prompting the player to use mice and razorwire to lead the guards into ambushes. For every measure the player has, the guards should have better countermeasures than swinging blindly and trying to kill you before they die. There should be tighter guard patterns that need to be disrupted, rather than my nonlethal routine of choking each and every single guard to death then running around looting the level. The limits sorely needed to be pushed here in all sorts of ways but they never were. They had the framework, but lacked the substance. No matter how you play Dishonored, it ends up braindead, because it never forces you to think and easy solutions are always viable and simple. Sure, you could go for fancy sophisticated solutions, but you just end up wasting more and more valuable resources than the simple method, which is faster anyway.

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In this mission, I decided to clear out literally every soldier in the entire indoor area with just crossbow, windblast, and pistol. It was no contest.

Before I wrap up, one thing that has to be praised is the way they handled the morality system and the effect it has on the world. Most games have you make blatantly black and white moral choices which do fuck-all to determine how you play the game. Dishonored has a system called Chaos that measures how much chaos you cause in the level, meaning how much violence you commit and people you kill, and whether you help civilians in need. As your chaos goes higher, events in the levels become crazier, more rat swarms spawn and more weepers walk the streets. This eventually has reflections in conversations with your comrades and Emily’s character development, as well as the ultimate ending of the game. I honestly think this is one of the best morality type systems I’ve ever seen, as it is affected by and ties directly into gameplay, determining the contents of levels, without asking dopey moral choice questions up front like other games.

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Definitely one of the game’s most charming lines.

Dishonored is Thief for a modern audience in every way you think that means, and I believe it’s going to kill Arkane, being too niche of a game for general audiences and castrating itself in front of the people who would have loved it for what it was. The game is polished to a fine sheen, but in the process of making it accessible, they destroyed all hope of making it an entertaining or engrossing game, so I’m left wishing for the game it could have been and hoping Thief 4 (or Thiaf if you prefer) won’t be a similar disappointment. Dishonored really was a game that had a lot of love, effort, and dedication put into it. At the end of it, I really wouldn’t mind a return to the world of Dishonored, hell, I’d welcome it, because there was so so much untapped potential here and places in its setting that could be explored, but ultimately it fails to use any of its vast potential in any meaningful way and falls flat. I honestly hope Dishonored 2: Rehonored is a game worthy of the legacy it has inherited from the pioneering stealth titles before it and tries harder than ever to show us Arkane’s talent has not gone to waste under Bethesda. Dishonored has its heart in the right place all around, just it was forced to pander so much it ended up breaking mine.

Randomized Horror

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Horror games are a genre infamous for almost no one doing it right. Creeping horror is in uncertainty. It’s in tension. It’s in that horrible dread that tightens up your chest and slows your pace to anxious steps. A big trouble with too many mainstream horror games is you can metagame them. A while back I streamed some early areas of penumbra. I did some unfunny joking about the night vision and the various bits and bobs around the environment, and upon review of the footage, the only times I was really scared was generally when something was uncertain or acted in a way I didn’t really expect. The trouble with a lot of horror games is that a player can easily extricate themselves from the situation. They know their surroundings are not going to hurt them generally, so a reasonable player feels totally safe in an area they’ve already explored or know has no enemies. What a horror game must do to terrify a player is threaten them personally through deception and subtlety.

I think in a way that horror movies have a power stronger than games because in a horror movie, that shadow on the window isn’t a scripted sequence that your can run around or ignore, it could very well be a real threat. They don’t have to obey the limitations of the game engine, in the movie’s world, that black tome with blood running out of it is scary for being what it is, whereas in a game’s world, you know it’s just another trigger for an event flag.

Playing penumbra, the moments that scared me the most were when you entered the work area past the first dog, opening the gate into the next area after the power generator puzzle, and the spider cave.

When I entered the work area the first time, I had to pass through a wooden door. I assumed at that moment that the dog couldn’t open it. In most games an enemy like that couldn’t. Then I got a little pop-up telling me I should block the door. I thought it was rather clever of them to plan like that. So I stuck a barrel in front of the door and stood back to watch it as the dog approached. Then the door opened as the dog nudged it and I gasped really hard. I hadn’t blocked it terribly well, but I had no idea the physics would work like that. Afterwards the dog immediately discovered me and I ran away only to die. At that point I commented nonchalantly on how I was gonna die and all the tension was really gone. The true tension wasn’t the thing itself, it was the horror of uncertainty.

The second time I entered the work area I was certain to place a barrel in front of the door, the another, then one in front of the two to stack further weight onto the door. This time I was sure the hound wasn’t getting through. Again I watched the door. The dog approached and I thought it left. Then the barrels exploded as the dog crashed through the door. I shouted and was chomped down by the demon dog soon after. They managed to catch me with the same trick twice. The third time I wasn’t fooled and left immediately onto the next area. I even ended up running around the dog a bit to lead it out of the way and grab things I needed around it.

The gate opening and spider cave were both freaky for similar reasons. I had the enemy right in front of me and had to brush up close to them to get past. Before opening the gate, I ran around the surrounding area a lot. I was sure there weren’t any enemies except the dog behind the gate I was unlocking. When unlocking the gate itself, I had to run up to the button, lead the dog up to a catwalk, then hop down the catwalk, and with the time I bought, get away. It was tense and in the process I was even bit once. The spider cave was worse.

In the spider cave, I soon discovered that the giant eggs hatched and I needed to run away, warding off new swarms of spiders as I went. It was very claustrophobic and I died a few times. I always hated approaching it again because of how harrowing it was. At one point I got autosaved in a section where I had to bust down a wall and of course the hammer’s controls are very awkward. The auto save however was not far along enough in the tunnel and I replayed over and over only to discover it was impossible to break that wall with the time allotted before the spiders killed me and I had to restart from scratch.

If you’d like to see my freakouts, I have a trimmed version of the stream on youtube, mostly with me being unfunny. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGnWlPEUnac

A recording of someone frantically trying to convey information only to be squelched by some unknown enemy. This is a common horror trope that, to me at least, completely fails to scare. In real life, it might make me worry about what sort of creature might have cut the informant short. In a game, it’s usually an abstract threat at best. A lot of these narrative set pieces are, and a big issue with them is how scheduled and by the book they are. The writing in blood on the wall doesn’t scare me because it’s not real blood. In a movie’s world, it’s real blood (but still the effect is dampened because it’s not real real blood). In the real world it is real real blood and jesus christ, why is someone bleeding out here. In a game’s, it’s a decal. Blood isn’t a sign of a struggle in a game’s narrative, it is wallpaper. The only place where blood is a sign of struggle is a multiplayer game and in those, the decals vanish rather quickly (for that matter, why has no one tried making a multiplayer horror game? Dead space co-op doesn’t count because it’s not a horror game.)

What games must do to scare us is make these set pieces into real threats. They must educate us about their threat worthy nature, but not drag out the fountain of blood every time they pop up, they must create uncertainty. Silent hill 2 gave the player a radio to help detect monsters and at first it was accurate, but over time it sent out false positives,warning the player of threats that weren’t there, and misdirecting the player. This would only be possible if it first gained the player’s trust.

To create true uncertainty, I believe that fractal or random elements must be introduced. Games by their nature are frequently replayed. Because enemies kill you, and you restart at checkpoints or save states, you may find yourself replaying the same section a few times or even ad nauseum. If everything merely repeats itself, then there is no uncertainty. What may have shocked you the first time could become mundane, dull, or worse, tedious if repeated. To ensure total horror, the game needs to mix it up. This could even be as simple as scripted events like a torch igniting on its own, a bat swooping down and shrieking, or a shadow crossing past a window, having a 1 in 10 chance of activating as you pass them.

More pertinently, the enemies of the game should have calling cards. They should have distinct recognizable sounds, marks they leave on the environment. Have them kill the player in certain ways, then leave bodies in new areas behind for the player to discover and recognize that loathsome nemesis is back. Better yet, have these calling cards be randomized, have them sometimes tell off the player and some playthroughs not be there at all.

Play with common fears, especially those which are in some way physical and can affect the way the game is experienced: fear of tight spaces, fear of insects, fear of heights. Most of all, make them intermittent. Games have this fantastic possibility to directly engage and horrify like nothing but life can, but best of all, they can do so in ways that can’t be metagamed, solved, or even remembered, unlike a movie that always pulls the same tricks and plays the same way every time. The key to this is randomness.

More than anything, prey on a player’s lack of information. Make them believe there are threats there aren’t, but also give them a legitimate reason to believe there is a legitimate threat by sometimes having it be an actual threat. Make visibility difficult and give them a hard time figuring out the positions of enemies, through darkness, obstruction, or camouflage. Have the enemy’s silhouette flit by. FEAR absolutely terrified me with the cloaking device ninjas or any hint of them where the actual scripted horror sequences I was more bemused by. I even took pictures. I know I shouted several times when dealing with the ninjas and my general strategy with them was always to crouch in a corner and desperately try to ward them off until I was sure the area was clear.

Glitches augment games

Celia WagarLeave a comment

Games like any other form of art are a work of design and interpretation, and sometimes interactions occur that the artist does not intend and sometimes they aren’t entirely mistakes. In Animation we call these happy accidents and they often occur when a sequence isn’t animated pose to pose. When designing layouts, or dealing with moving scenes in film, there is a huge potential to create bizarre, flat, or varied compositions within shots. In programming games or even board game design, there is a similar potential. Sometimes rules interact in ways that cannot be predicted or the precise algorithms function weirdly in some corner cases.

In general, most glitches are destructive, falling through the world, causing something to fail in function, freezes, etc, but sometimes these glitches can add a lot of flavor to a game or enable new strategies that increase the overall depth of the game. I would say that it is the role of a designer or programmer, like any other artist, to figure out what role these glitches play in the game and whether they add to it or not instead of rigidly abiding to their design document. Works of design are frequently a process of trial and error to discover what works and what doesn’t. Glitches can be just another possibility in the system.

In general, one of the goals of game design is to give the player a bunch of cool tools to use and give them reasons to use all of them, glitches sometimes result in new tools, or new uses for old tools that can spice up a game. Sometimes glitches can completely invalidate other aspects of the game, and you gotta make a decision, does that glitch add enough to the game to be worth it?

Beyond this is the topic of what exactly is a glitch or not? A lot of “glitches” are just uses of intended game mechanics in unconventional ways to derive an advantage, such as wavedashing or SHFFLing in Super Smash Bros Melee or snaking in Mario Kart DS and are closer to exploits than glitches outright. This invites a lot of questions over what comprises intentional or unintentional programming or how glitchlike something has to be to be classified as either a glitch or an exploit. I’ve personally looked into the means of various advanced techniques coming about for a lot of games and I hope to explain them in ways that make them easy to understand and help illuminate both how they came to be, and how they have augmented the games they came from. I obviously cannot list every amazing glitch ever, so I’m going to stick to some of the bigger, more iconic ones.

One of the most classic advanced movement tricks in video game history is strafejumping or bunnyhopping. Another contributor covered Bunny Hopping quite extensively with his video here:

Before strafe jumping there was another trick that dominated in old FPS games such as Doom, Goldeneye, System Shock 2, Perfect Dark, called Straferunning. A common programming practice among amateur programmers is to simply say that when forward is held, to move X speed forward, and that when side is held, to move X speed to the side. The result of this is that when both forward and side are held, you move both forward and sideways at the same time at that speed in both directions. Anyone with basic experience in trigonometry will realize that this means that you could move 1.4 times faster in a diagonal direction than if you were to move either cardinal direction independently. Therefore, to move fastest in these games, one simply had to turn to the side a bit and run diagonally all the time.

In developing Quake, Id Software knew about this exploit and decided to patch it by having your velocity vector be computed by your player speed variable in all 8 directions of movement using basic trigonometry. This means that no matter what they set the speed variable to, you would always move the same speed, diagonal or not. However what they didn’t realize was that in doing so, they had created an even greater source of speed, strafejumping. In the development process for Quake 2, Id decided to use integers for velocity instead of floating points. This meant rounding whatever velocity calculations were done into integers. Incidentally they set all velocity variables to be rounded up no matter what their values were (so 5.2 would be rounded to 6 and so would 5.8). What this means is that every frame in which you have a velocity that is an irrational number, your velocity will be rounded up. This creates the effect of an extremely slight speed boost. Since diagonal velocities were now computed with trigonometry, every time they were recomputed they would be an irrational number and need to be rounded again. So what players discovered was that by jumping while pressing forward and side at the same time, and moving their mouse in a whiplike pattern, they would steadily accelerate (jumping was required to prevent ground friction from reducing your velocity).

The funny thing about this glitch is that because it’s dependent on how often velocity rounding occurs, when Quake 3 was first released, players with better performance and higher framerates were capable of moving a lot faster due to it. Eventually the CPMA mod altered the game and the server software, changing the calculations and management of player velocities from clientside to serverside with a stable tickrate, preventing players with better computers from having an unfair advantage over others.

There are actually multiple styles of Bunnyhopping and they differ between Quake games and Source engine games. Both styles exist in Quake in the form of Strafe Jumping and Circle Jumping, but only Circle Jumping exists in Source engine games and it’s the dominant means of travel, referred to exclusively as Bunnyhopping. Valve in the creation of the goldsrc engine, a modification of the Quake engine, didn’t intend for bunnyhopping and fixed the rounding error that caused it. However this left a completely different exploit in place that no one could have predicted. One facet of the engine is that while you are in the air, you have a limited means of controlling your velocity. Pressing a direction will redirect you slightly, enabling you to control your jump direction after you have left the ground. In addition to this, strafe movements arbitrarily have a higher value set, making them more effective than forward or backwards movements. This can also be noticed by climbing ladders in Counter Strike, you will climb much faster with strafe movements than forward or backward ones because strafing movements simply have a higher air velocity. Turning while pressing strafe will result in this velocity addition being repeated every frame you turn. This effectively enables you to build velocity by jumping, strafing, and turning smoothly with the mouse.

Valve further attempted to limit this style of movement by making it very difficult to repeat jumps. Quake has a buffer in the air that catches your jump inputs so that you will jump again the next time you touch the ground, making it a lot easier to avoid ground contact and friction slowing you down. Source engine games have no such buffer, so you need to hit jump on the exact frame you touch the ground or you will begin walking on the ground, slowing you down. A lot of Source engine players get around this by taking advantage of Source’s support for scripts to make one that repeats the jump input in one way or another. A popular method is to bind jump to both up and down on the mousewheel, remove the binders preventing the mousewheel from being spun freely, and spinning it every time you come in for a landing, so that the jump input will be repeated every frame, ensuring that no velocity is lost to friction.

Valve eventually got wise to players circumventing their countermeasures and added a server variable called sv_airaccelerate that limits maximum accleration while in the air, to prevent players from moving fast in the air. Initially this was set to 20, but eventually Valve locked it to 0 in most of their games including Counter Strike: Source and the entire Orange Box. This effectively ended Bunnyhopping in Source games. Despite the death of Source Bunny Hopping, the techniques lived on in TF2 in the form of Air Strafing. Air Strafing took advantage of the air velocity system in much the same way Bunny Hopping did before it, by making smooth mouse motions in the air to repeat the slight burst of aerial velocity from strafing. The big difference however was that sv_airaccelerate’s systems prevented one from acceleration, so all that was possible with Air Strafing was redirection of movement. Rocket and Sticky jumpers in TF2 were capable of turning in smooth curves around corners using air strafing, which enabled movement between a lot of points that were otherwise not possible, or costly in terms of health to attempt. On 2fort, using air strafing, one could rocket jump entirely around the small room on the front upper level of each fort.

Overall, Bunny Hopping in its various incarnations adds an incredibly mesmerizing and blindingly fast style to the games where it is represented. It requires players to evaluate the terrain in much different ways than normal running because of the snaking motions it requires, and opens up a lot of pathways across far horizontal gaps in a lot of levels, like the rail gun to the overpass on Campground, but only to those who are skilled enough and have invested the time into building up velocity first. Bunny hopping also make aiming harder, as one is not only moving faster, but needs to keep up the serpentine motions of the hop as well or you’ll lose speed. Players who can bunny hop have a lot of advantages over those who can’t, but in many situations it simply isn’t a good idea, meaning that it doesn’t completely overshadow normal running or walking as a movement option, and players can express a range of skill with how well and consistently they can Bunny Hop. Normal movement, as opposed to Bunny Hopping, in games like Quake 3, has the advantage of being quieter, because every time you jump in Quake, your character grunts, which can be used by the enemy to get a hint as to your position in the level. In other cases, it simply pays off more in terms of accuracy to not be moving so wildly.

Another classic glitch that shaped fighting games forever is special canceling otherwise known of as 2in1 canceling. When Capcom designed Street Fighter 2, they added a feature where for the first 5 frames of a normal move, you could cancel its startup into a special move. This is believed to be a form of “input leniency” designed to make special attacks a bit easier to perform. Fans of the series call this Kara-canceling or “empty” canceling because it is canceling from nothing. This feature however gave birth to special canceling, which has since become a staple of all traditional 2D fighting games. One feature of Street Fighter 2 and many other games featuring melee combat since, is that when you hit an opponent the screen freezes for a few frames. This is known of as a Hit Freeze, and it exists to help make the impact seem harder animation-wise. Despite coming to exist as a fighting game concept, a lot of other games make use of it for mostly the same reason. The weird thing about the hit freeze though was, it paused the kara-cancel timer. What this meant was that if you successfully hit an opponent, the hitfreeze would make it so you could kara-cancel into a special attack even though it wasn’t the startup period of the move. One could chain attacks one into another using this technique, giving birth to the concept of combos, which have since become a nigh universal foundation of fighting games. Since SF2 invented the concept of canceling moves into each other in combos, many other fighters have used the concept creatively to make their own combo systems, such as chain combos in Marvel and Guilty Gear, and Guilty Gear’s roman cancels, Street Fighter 4’s Focus Cancels, or King of Fighter’s HD Cancels. Even series far outside of fighting games like Devil May Cry have implemented things such as jump canceling.

What 2in1 or special canceling, and later super canceling, enabled is they added a means for greater payoff for attacks in exchange for more vulnerability in case they fail. Special moves as a design point, usually have longer periods of recovery than normals, making them more vulnerable to counter attack. If one is skilled, they can use cancels to their advantage to squeeze out more damage, but against more skilled opponents they need to be careful not to hand their enemy a huge advantage. Since the invention of special canceling, it has since been programmed intentionally as a function of the hit freeze and certain moves are given or not given the special cancelable property. When Capcom added Supers in Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo, they also added the ability to cancel certain normal and special attacks into supers, further increasing the range of what was possible with combos and cancels, and adding the potential of wasting your super on a bad setup.

Gunz: The Duel, is a game with niche popularity made by a Korean company called MAIET that later got bought out by Ijji and is currently free to play. Gunz styled itself as a modern game that took a lot of inspiration from the Matrix and similar modern films where the gunmen have supernatural ability to run along walls, dodge bullets, and wield guns akimbo. Gunz also allowed players to fight with katanas, daggers and kodachis (two swords at once). Early in the game’s life span, it was noticed that a lot of animations could be canceled by slashing with a katana or kodachi and it would usually reset a number of variables, like the ability to airdash or walljump, much like jump canceling in Devil May Cry. Furthermore, the slashing animation could then be canceled with the blocking animation, so one could dash, slash, block, and dash again without the normal cooldown time. This trick became known of as the butterfly step and it completely tore out the original foundation of Gunz by the roots, replacing it with one of the fastest and wildest shooters around.

The collection of sword tricks, all originating from the butterfly cancel became codified as a style, called K-Style, because it was Koreans that invented them. In contrast to K-Style, there was E-Style, meaning European Style. E-Style in contrast to K-Style’s focus on swords was much more focused on guns, especially those that sprayed a steady stream of bullets which were unsuitable for the butterfly cancel because they required the weapon to be out for extended periods. E-style was derided by K-stylers as spray and pray, and didn’t rely on nearly as many tricks with the game engine. Alternatively there was D-Style, which relied on tricks with the dagger, but was incapable of using the butterfly cancel due to the dagger simply not having a block.

Using the butterfly cancel it was possible to scale walls by walljumping, canceling the waljump animation with the slash and block, then dashing forwards to stay close to the wall, and repeating. Suddenly, the players were no longer confined to merely the sections of the stage you could reach with walljumps or wallruns, absolutely anywhere there were walls was now a battleground. The butterfly step could also be used to glide through the air with a very slow rate of descent to cross large gaps at a high speed. Players upped the ante from there with the slash shot, essentially the butterfly step, except now with a swap out to a gun, like a shotgun or magnum, a single shot, then switching back to sword and doing the butterfly cancel. Using this weapon switch technique, they could continue scaling walls while also firing their guns at an even higher rate than the guns would normally allow fire, because the butterfly cancel also reset the refire times on the guns. This meant that shotguns became the weapon of choice. To make it even sweeter, the butterfly cancel could even be used to cancel reload times, making shotguns essentially automatic.

Beyond the fundamental tricks, K-Stylers took the butterfly cancel to further extremes with double slashing, where one would butterfly cancel twice in the same dash, slashing twice as much as normal. Once they mastered that, they moved onto the triple butterfly which used 3 slashes in the same dash. Instant Falls were a trick done with the katana’s ability to flip people into the air, where they would flip, block, jump and slash the person they had just flipped. Slashing the enemy this soon canceled the otherwise long animation where the enemy was knocked into the air and given a large window to escape from knockdown. The instant fall sent the enemy into knockdown immediately, leaving them open to get shot up. An auxillary trick was the reload shot, where by reloading a shotgun, one could then switch to a second shotgun and immediately fire.

Many more K-style tricks were invented that got progressively more complex, with the culmination of it all being the instant kill that would seriously do enough damage in one go to instantly kill the enemy. This one was done by flipping the enemy, blocking, jumping, slashing to trigger instant fall, switching to shotgun, firing, reloading, switching to a second shotgun, and firing to finish them off. Absolutely brutal, luckily rather rare in actual play.Between all of these tricks, Gunz was transformed from an average pace shooter with dodgerolls and wallrunning, to an absolutely insane shooter with people constantly slashing and firing shotguns as they crawl all over every vertical surface.

Super Smash Brothers Melee is one of the best known and widest played fighting games of all time, despite it’s extremely alternative take on the genre. This was by and large created by not only having an intuitive base level of gameplay, but having more mechanics than anyone initially realized, taking players a full decade to unravel and integrate into tournament play. Many traditional fighting games tested player’s skills with tight timing windows and muscle memory. Melee’s approach instead encouraged players to play as fast as they possibly could, with the upper limits on the game’s speed being completely unattainable by any human player. Though to be honest, Melee doesn’t fall into the same territory as the other games in this article, because every advanced feature wasn’t the result of a glitch, it was an intentional feature of the game, with few exceptions (Samus’s super wavedash being a notable one).

Domination in Melee all starts with the SHFFL. SHFFL is an acronym standing for Short Hop, Fast Fall, L cancel. In Smash 64, there was a technique called Z Canceling (the official Smash website called it “smooth landing”). If you pressed Z after performing an aerial attack shortly before landing, it would completely cancel your landing animation. This feature was brought back in Melee under the fan name L Canceling, only instead of completely canceling landing lag it now played the landing animation twice as fast so you had half the landing lag. Shorthopping and Fast falling are both standard features that despite not being listed in the manual or how to play video, nearly every player knows about. Shorthopping is performed by pressing the jump button and releasing it before the pre-jump crouching animation ends. Fast falling is done by pressing down on the control stick any time after hitting the apex of your jump. What professional players do is, they shorthop, attack, fast fall, and L cancel to get rid of most of their landing lag. Between these 3 techniques, one can attack at a highly accelerated rate and threaten land and air. Luckily for people defending against SHFFL assaults, Melee is a game where you almost never get frame advantage from air to ground on a blocking opponent. This means that SHFFLing can be defended against by simply blocking it and hitting A to shieldgrab while they’re recovering from landing lag. SHFFLing offered players a massive advantage as they got better at it, being able to chain together attacks more and more quickly as their timing got more accurate. It was SHFFLs that truly transformed Melee into a combo game.

Wavedashing is ironically a situational move that doesn’t see terribly much use (though definitely an essential part of any player’s repitoire) which receives tons of criticism despite being a really well balanced movement option and not impacting the game nearly as much as SHFFLing. In the transition between Smash 64 and Melee, Airdodges were added as an aerial defense against attacks. Players could airdodge by pressing shield in midair and holding a direction to move a small ways over in that direction, or stop in midair briefly if they held nothing. This also granted them a small period of invulnerability and put the player into a special fall where no jumps or attacks could be used. Initially this was just used as a defensive measure for avoiding aerial attacks in high risk situations, however players eventually noticed that if one airdashed diagonally against the ground, the momentum from the airdodge would carry over into ground velocity, with friction determining how far the character slid. So players would jump and immediately airdodge diagonally at the ground to produce a motion that looked like an instantaneous slide across the ground.

This varies a lot from character to character based on their friction, with most of the characters having wavedashes too small to be useful, including many of the better characters in the game. The three best characters for wavedashing are Luigi, Ice Climbers, and Mewtwo due to their low friction (although ironically none of them are ranked terribly high as characters). These three characters have such good wavedashes that they are actually faster than their normal dashes, and capable of being used as a replacement for normal dashing. Luigi replaced his dash attack completely with wavedash into down smash. The primary advantage of wavedashing is that it enables a character to slide in a short burst while still being in a neutral standing position. This can be useful for situations in which you don’t need a roll dodge’s invincibility frames or don’t want to have your attack options limited like a normal dash.

A common use is wavedashing backwards as an attacking enemy approaches, then charging up a smash attack as you slide to punish the enemy’s recovery time. Another common use is preventing enemies from recovering successfully by wavedashing backwards off the ledge they are recovering to. If performed correctly you will grab the ledge and be able to roll back onto the stage as they approach, preventing them from grabbing it because you already occupy it. Furthermore the wavedash concept can be put to more use with wavelands, which are just airdodging diagonally before you hit the ground on landing. You can even jump up through platforms and waveland as you go up through them to get a boost. Wavedashing has for whatever reason attracted a ton of controversy over glitchiness despite not being a glitch of any kind and having limited use. In the original beta testing Sakurai noticed it and left it in the game for players to discover on their own.

Melee is unique among fighting games for another feature that is never brought up in any of the tutorials called Directional Influence (DI). When you are hit by an attack, you can tilt your control stick to control the angle of your flight trajectory. Despite not being mentioned in tutorials, players definitely do this instinctively, enabling them to survive at much higher percentages. DI has no effect on how strong the knockback of an attack is, so pressing towards your point of origin is useless, with the most effective DI being perpendicular to your trajectory (In Brawl, DI is no longer computed radially, instead the most effective is always up and towards the stage except when you’re being hit straight upwards).

In Smash 64, DI actually didn’t exist, but another one called Smash DI (SDI) did, which has persisted through all 3 versions of Smash Bros. Smash DI is named because players typically do it with the C-Stick so they can focus on regular DI with the control stick. Smash DI involves mashing the control or C-stick over and over again during the hitfreeze of a move to slightly jiggle your character in the direction you want them. Some characters have more effective versions of it than others, with Luigi’s being the most powerful (try getting Luigi caught in Zapdos’s lightning stun, he can fly). By using both DI and SDI in conjunction, players can survive at higher percentages and escape combos by redirecting velocity. You have some level of control in Melee on absolutely every frame. Using both in conjunction, a perfect Melee player could survive at ludicrous percentages over 200% against even the most powerful attacks.

Additionally and more accessibly, there is Automatic Smash DI, which applies Smash DI on the first frame you are hit in the direction you are currently holding the control stick. This is frequently used by players to crouch cancel, which enables them to absorb blows and retaliate by bracing themselves against the stage, which becomes less reliable at higher percentages as there is a strong chance of being pushed hard enough to go off the edge of the stage, and inadvertently DIing straight into the pit, dooming yourself.

In terms of the real Melee glitches, there are a lot to list, like Samus’s super wavedash. Samus has a capability to slide all the way across the stage (or further with better execution) by using her morph ball bomb. If you hit back then forward exactly on the 40th and 41st frames (exactly when Samus touches the ground) she will hurtle forward. This can even be performed in midair, although it is significantly harder to time without a visual guide. High level players like Phanna can use this almost on command, giving Samus a tremendously useful movement tool in ground combat. Another Samus glitch is the extended grapple beam. By pressing Z and up down up down and the direction you want it to go, you can make the grapple beam extend an extremely far distance in any direction, even directly behind Samus. Oddly though, Samus’s grapple beam is coded to be completely incapable of grabbing people in the air, unlike every other grab in the game, making this not as useful as it should be.

Another odd one is Moonwalking. A small handful of character can do it, such as Ganondorf, Link, and Young Link, but only Captain Falcon is really good at it. No one is quite sure how moonwalking works, but it’s possible by smashing forward to dash, then immediately doing a half circle back motion like from Street Fighter. This causes Captain Falcon to first dash forward then slide backwards while still running forwards. You can jump during this for a big boost in backwards velocity. A lot of older smashers mostly used this move for mixups and mindgames, whereas newer smashers generally only do it for show.

Jump Cancel grabbing is a staple, involving pressing jump before you dash grab so that your dash is canceled into prejump frames and those prejump frames are canceled into a standing grab. Nearly all characters have a faster standing grab than dashing grab, so jump cancel grabbing is generally preferable. It’s a bit like Kara-throws from Street Fighter, only with more lenient timing. Some characters also benefit from boost grabs, which involve starting up a dash attack for added momentum, then canceling the startup into a dash grab, which gets additional range from the cancel. Boost grabs cannot be jump canceled due to the incapability of canceling a dash attack into a jump, but in some cases can greatly increase a character’s range. Sheik’s boost grab range is 3 times her normal dash grab range.

While not a Melee trick, the DACUS doesn’t deserve to go without mention. In Brawl, dash attacks can be canceled into jumps, which lead to people canceling dash attacks into up smashes. The Dash Attack Cancel Up Smash (DACUS) enables a character to use the momentum from their dash attack to slide across the stage while charging their up smash. This is most effective on Snake, who can use it to slide into his mortar launcher, which bizarrely has a hitbox in the charging animation where he pulls out the mortar. This means that he can slide nearly an entire stage length, holding out a hitbox that sends anyone foolish enough to stand in the way into the air, then he can launch a mortar at them to boot. The DACUS is typically performed by smashing forward to dash, then using down on the C-stick to activate the dash attack, sliding the control stick upwards to trigger tap jump, and hitting Z, which will combine with the tap jump input to cancel the prejump frames into an up smash. Though every character can perform this, only very few actually have a useful DACUS, and this varies with friction.

Dark Souls has its fair share of advanced tricks. It’s getting close to the bottom of the barrel now after a good 2 years of investigation, but new stuff is still turning up. A basic one is block canceling. At the end of attacks that have a successful hit, and a lot of actions in general, there are these frames that Melee players would call, “IASA frames” or “Interruptable As Soon As frames.” These frames can be canceled into any other action except walking around, so you can block or dodge a bit sooner than when the full swing animation ends. In Dark Souls terms, this means making a bunch of attacks a lot safer on block or hit than on whiff if you block as soon as those frames come up. Not exactly a glitch, but certainly worth knowing about.

One glitch worth mentioning is the spell pivot cancel. Back in Demon’s souls this was all kinds of broken, but in dark souls its efficacy was severely limited, so now it’s just good for mind games. The pivot cancel itself is a trick where the walking pivot animation will cancel the casting of nearly offensive spell. This means that you can start casting a great fireball, pivot and instead of actually casting the spell, you will instead just flash a fireball and turn around. A lot of spells are typically difficult to hit with, so having the option of canceling them instead of casting them means that you can threaten with a spell but only throw it when you think it will hit. For the opponent, t

Dark Souls: Are glitches cheating?
http://Dark Souls: Are Glitches Cheating?/watch?v=cn–ZDU2nvuw

Dark Souls: Pivot Cancel, toggle escape, bleed reset, block canceling, dead angle
Quickscoping sucks
dolphin diving
Skiing, Tribes
BXR, in halo along with doubleshotting rrx and quadshotting, rrxyyrx http://Double Shotting and Quad Shotting Compilation by TD5x D5/watch?v=aeFfWD1EaCU and superbouncing http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Super_bouncing
http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Double_fire
snaking in mario kart and F-zero
GTA and the police chasing glitch
Mario backwards longjumping
Zelda speedrun tactics
Missingno and pals
DMC Jump Canceling, distortion burst, and all the other tricks
alternate guard (KOF)
Jump install (guilty gear)
Dust Loop (guilty gear)
Urien unblockable (3s)
Cross Assault (MVC3)
Kim stomp (kof)
http://wiki.shoryuken.com/The_King_of_Fighters_98:_Ultimate_Match/Mechanics_and_Notes
Painkiller-jumping

>What kind of advanced tech is in DMC aside from jump cancelling(enemy step cancels included), royal guards, and jump invincibility usage? Most if the “cuhrayzee” comes from people using them creatively.
in DMC3: Ultimate Tempest, sword hangers, buffering, switch cancelling, shottgun knockback cancelling, mini DT flux to prevent enemies from touching the ground, or to inflict stun mid air combo where another action that does not hit must be performed, stun and knockback launching, reversed attacks, reversed attacks with direction inputs, JC tricks like E&I raves, Artemis Raves, Shotgun raves, or trick up helm breakers, attacks that get cancelled faster than they can hit, side switching, using walls to continue combos past the point of knockback, doppelganger desync, wildstomp cancelling, E&I cancelling, twosome time cancelling, literal shit-tons of boss glitches, exploits, and loops and probably dozens of other things I can’t think of right now. DMC4 has tons as well.
doing iori’s taco kick during backdash
sprintmash GTA

Vanquish weapon analysis

Celia Wagar1 Comment

I’ve been playing through vanquish (hahaha, I’ve beaten it long since this was written) and I really love the weapon design so far. it’s the only game with 3 weapons that has ever actually made me consider the weapons I choose for the situation instead of just an optimization function.

The LFE gun (which shoots a huge bubble of energy in case it isn’t obvious) is great for encounters against small enemies that clump together because it destroys them instantly and has a wide fire radius. it’s balanced by having a short range and only 10 shots max. It’s useless against larger units, barely doing damage, if any at all, but can be useful against romanovs because it knocks them down, opening them up for melee attacks. It totally ignores obstructions so it’s good for catching enemies behind cover too.

The shotgun is one of my least used guns, having a pretty miserable effective range. It has huge damage output up close though, so it’s really useful against larger units if I can get in close. It has only 20 ammo, so it has a reasonable amount of firepower.

The Disc launcher strikes me as one of the less useful guns, only being good against single enemy units. It has limited ammo, like 40 I think, and it homes slightly. It has decent damage and great range, so it’s better than a shotgun in most situations, but I think it’s a bit underpowered.

The armor piercing pistol is great against armored units and takes out regular units in a single shot, but that is a complete waste of ammo most of the time. It does damage like a shotgun does up close. They’re extremely rare drops however, but come with more ammo than a shotgun does, like 26 shots. Has more potential firepower than a rocket lawnchair, but takes more shots and is even more rare a drop.

The Rocket Launcher has a manual firing mode and a lock on that takes time to activate. It does tons of damage, and stuns romanovs. It has a very wide blast radius, like a grenade, making it useful for clearing tons of standard units in a close area. Better than a grenade on heavy units. Balanced by the fact that it has only 3 shots, less than anything else. Despite doing the best single hit damage, I tend not to choose it in situations with diverse enemies because it’s not flexible enough.

The laser cannon is a huge laser with great damage over time. It requires a few seconds to warm up though, and it drains energy directly from the suit, and can even overheat it. It’s really useful in situations where you won’t get fired on and need to do a lot of damage over time. It has no ammo limit, but I end up discarding it when I enter standard sections because it’s just not practical against regular enemies.

The sniper rifle is a sniper rifle. It’s useless against armored units, because a regular submachine gun gets better damage output. Its most useful in sections where the enemies are far away and you are free to line up headshots with the scope. It nearly kills an enemy on a body shot, and kills them instantly on a headshot. All the submachine guns kill instantly on headshots too, but the scope is the difference here. Also good for when an enemy is even slightly weakened.

The lock on laser locks onto a wide array of targets and fires at all of them with lasers kind of like a predator missile or something, but has shit for damage. I think it may be the most useless weapon. Takes a long time to kill even a large amount of standard units. I didn’t pick it up much at all.

There are 3 types of submachine guns and they’re all pretty similar, and good for long range engagement, and dealing damage to heavier units.

The boost machine gun is the best of the three I think, balanced by poor accuracy, small clip, and smaller ammo supply. Great damage output though, more than worth it. Drops rarely, so it’s a bit of a bonus weapon.

The heavy machine gun is my favored over the assault rifle, for better damage output despite smaller clips and less ammo. The boost and heavy machine guns both have around 260 ammo versus the assault rifle with 600.

The two grenades are also really cool and have nice application. The standard frag grenade has a great range and does great damage, which is useful against enemies big and small, especially if they’re clumped together. The EMP grenade has a wider radius and freezes the robotic enemies for a decent period of time, enabling moving forward, melee while they’re stunned, taking them out with an AOE, or just plain shooting at them.

Melee attacks are massively risky, because they instantly overheat the suit, and require moving forward into enemy lines. They leave you defenseless, so they’re a terrible idea except as a clutch defense or for attacking unassisted romanovs (large enemy units).