Chardish Games

I had a brief conversation on Twitter with the designer Alexander Ocias. This is the same guy who made the very interesting Loved, which is a clever piece worth a few minutes of your time to play through if you haven’t yet. Anyway, I saw this tweet of his: 

I’ll include a function in my games to turn off the audio the same day I include a function to turn off the graphics. And the gameplay.

This was consistent with neither my personal experiences nor my discussions with others. So I replied:

@AlexanderOcias Is remapping the controls a grave sin too? What about any other way to meet the user’s wants? Audio controls are a courtesy.

Alexander responded:

@chardish Absolutely, if controls need remapping: they’re not good enough. Other ‘ways’ are granted if it improves the experience for all.

I strongly disagree with this, and I felt an explanation deserved more characters than a tweet.

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I saw a couple weeks ago that the classic Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was on sale on Xbox Live for five bucks, and I decided to take the time to revisit this old classic. It’s a game with a remarkable reputation: it frequently shows up near the top of game critics’ “best-of” lists, and deservedly so: it’s an excellent game. It’s loaded with secrets, brimming with atmosphere, host to some of the most unintentionally funny (read: poorly acted) game dialogue of all time, and practically the entire reason why we call its genre “Metroidvania” and not merely “Metroid-like.”

Let me make it clear: SotN is a fantastic game. It’s not to be missed, and if you haven’t played it, you should. But it’s not perfect, and its imperfections stood out to me upon a replay, particularly now that we now have much better examples of the genre (Shadow Complex, Metroid: Zero Mission, Batman: Arkham Asylum, etc.) Of course, the original Super Metroid is a far better game. So what’s wrong with SotN? Find out after the jump.

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Final Fantasy XIII is getting an outstandingly bad rap in the gaming press. Metacritic rates it as the worst Final Fantasy ever, though I don’t know how worthwhile that metric is (I’ll never understand the logic of the critics that lauded the deplorable Final Fantasy VIII, which was a bad game at its release and is a bad game now.)

Say what you will about the pacing, the plot, or the characters (only the formermost of which I feel is weak): the battle system is, to wield the slang, off the hook.

First, a bit of background:

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I said earlier that I wanted to talk about the dynamics of Team Fortress 2, and here it is. In my earlier post about Star Trek Online, I discussed the challenges of designing a class-based team multiplayer game.

I will define a “class” as being a pre-configured set of abilities (or ability options) designed with the intent that a) most abilities are unique to configurations, b) most abilities cannot be switched between configurations, and c) no single configuration can adequately fulfill every role on a team.

Making Games Classy

So what are the design challenges surrounding developing a fun, class-based team multiplayer game? I believe there are five:

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I managed to get my hands on a beta key for Star Trek Online before the game’s launch. I approached the game with a sense of cautious enthusiasm. On the one hand, the game had switched developers, design paradigms, and guiding concepts during its development cycle. On the other hand, if the game carried through on its promise to offer the experience of being a part of the Star Trek universe, it would be impossibly incredible.

Obviously, some things are too good to be true. I knew the game was in trouble as soon as I heard one of the lead designers, in a video interview, describe the player as being able to choose between piloting, essentially, a tank ship, a healer/buffer ship, or a DPS ship. Ugh. All of the detail of the Star Trek universe - the dozens of races, the cavalcade of fascinating technology - and Cryptic chose to stick with the “holy trinity” of MMORPG combat?

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If there’s one genre I’m an absolute sucker for, it’s abstract music games. Whereas games like Rock Band and DJ Hero try to replicate the experience of playing music, abstract music games (Rez, Lumines, Vib Ribbon, and the like) eschew that goal for the simple objective of trying to connect the player to the music. So when I heard about the music puzzler Chime, I figured it would be worth a try, even if it was created by Zoë Mode, a developer that doesn’t have the best track record of producing quality works. (The uninspired and derivative Rock Revolution and SingStar were both creations of the UK-based studio.)

I was pleasantly surprised by how well-polished the game is, particularly for a $5 XBLA title. The menus do a good job of drawing the player into the experience, which has a decidedly chilled-out atmosphere about it, a mood reflected in the gameplay itself in spite of its energetic soundtrack. While there is a timer on the level, unlike most puzzle games, you’re not limited in the amount of time to drop a piece. The object of the game is to rotate and place pentominoes to form rectangles (or “quads” as they’re called in the game) and fill the entire grid. A Lumines style beat-sweeper is present, traversing the grid once per measure; however, the sweeper has the added effect of causing objects it touches to create noise. Lone tetrominoes each create their own percussive sounds, and filled quads contribute to the music itself. The effect is striking - much like Rez, Chime starts the player in a quiet state and slowly turns up the musical intensity. The more of the board that has been covered by quads, the more danceable the soundtrack gets.

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Capcom’s community manager Seth Killian, usually fairly on-the-ball with his analyses of community trends, totally drops the ball on the issue of unlockable disc content:

DLC costs money because it costs additional money to create. Those costs are the same, regardless of whether the created content gets delivered on a disc, or as a download. I can understand wanting as much as you can have for the lowest price (and SSFIV will give you a lot at a low price), and not wanting to pay for DLC at all, but I have never been able to understand the whole “on the disc” vs. “downloaded” distinction.

To sum up: you’re going to pay for DLC anyway if you want it, so who cares what form it comes in? The answer is: everyone. Let me offer a brief rundown of why unlockable disc content (I’ll adopt the acronym UDC) is objectionable:

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