Well Tom, while I agree an understandable lack of experience might be behind
the changes, at the same time there are some very basic things which could
be done to improve the players interaction with a game.
One example is character movement. In a game like shades, you move at a
fixed speed, turn at a fixed speed etc. One of the hardest things in Super
marrio brothers is simply the act of jumping, since marrio's jumps require
handling and marrio's walking and running speeds both have different
accelleration, much like a car in a racing game. You can see this when
playing as Luiji, who's over all hight and distance are greater but who's
handling is worse.
yet I've not seen an audio game use this sort of character handling to
enhance difficulty. Even when audio games feature two movement speeds such
as walking and running, stopping is instantanius and jump mechanics are
pretty stable.
The second is environment. Most audio games happen on a flat plane, either a
mostly 1 dimentional strip, or a 2D area seen in the first person. Yet, even
a game like original marrio had far more to play with in this respect.
Marrio could jump approximately two and a half times his own hight, and the
screen was roughly 6 marrio hights high, with each level being very very
long (I don't know the precise distance inved but I'd guess it's somewhere
in the region of 500 Mario standing spaces).
This gave lots of room for environmemntal hazards and puzzles which, when
combined with character handling made even the land scape difficult, indeed
in some games, prince of persia, ice climbers and not a few sections of MEga
man negotiating the land scape itself could proove a hazard.
I have seen some approaches to this, such as the pits in some side
scrollers, but not really anything that had a complexity which affected
character movement, indeed probably the most difficult pure landscape puzzle
I can think of is the second plane jumping level of Jim Kitchin's awsome
homer game, since that rquired judging of position of two ledges and
tracking character jumps, though even again you didn't have movement
independent of the ledge.
Of course, lack of vertical audio view restricts this somewhat, but at the
same time, thereis more that could be done. Swamp has started this with the
maps for buildings and the different surfaces, but more could be done, eg,
surfaces that affect the players' walking speed, or objects that provide
degrees of cover from enemies (the bushes did this in Gma tank commander but
again this was just one factor).
The third factor is enemy design and behaviour. Even in original marrio
brothers which has perhaps 10 sorts of over land enemy (and that is counting
the flame bars and shooting podobu fireballs and counting the two different
sorts of cooper para troopers separately), most enemies had something
different about them, not just altered movement speed and hp.
For example, the green cooper trooper had the same walking speed as a
goomba, however knocking it on the head made it retreat into it's shell, and
the shell could be kicked across the screen which could be either a good
thing, (when taking out enemies behind it), or a bad thing, since you could
risk kicking the shell into a block behind and having it rebound and hit
marrio. Indeed, it's not surprising the shell sort of became Marrio's weapon
of choice in future games in the series.
I've not seen an audio game enemy with this sort of behavioural interaction
with either the environment, or with the players acts upon it.
This would be simple to add, say for example that the cyborgs in shades of
doom rather than just dying exploded in a large explosion, meaning that you
had to kill them at a distance.
Then of course, there is the fact of enemy behaviour itself. In Metroid 2
Return of Samus, the ost common bosses were alpha metroids. Their only
attack was running straight into Samus directly. What however made them
challenging was that since Samus could only fire in four directions, the
metroids had a nasty habbit of attacking at diagonals, meaning the player
always had to be on the move.
that brings me onto a last factor, character weapons. I've noticed in audio
games with a few exceptions such as the Gma tank commander shell, the sniper
scope in Swamp or torpedos in Zero site or Lone wolf, weapons tend to all
hit instantly and do a fixed amount of damage. yet, one simple way is to
change the hit properties, meaning that a player needs to anticipate enemy
movement in order to nale them.
Another is to alter rate of fire, rather than having a weapon instantly
activate everytime the player hits the button, have some cool down so that
the player doesn't just hammer the button constantly, but needs to wait for
the enemy to be in range, attack, and then re adjust for the next attack
since she/he can't attack constantly. This was certainly true with missiles
in the first two metroid games and was another reason the player had to be
careful. Same goes for enemies. It wouldn't be difficult in an fps game to
have some enemies with distance attacks with a scope that locked on and give
the player some sort of imaginary device (like the eva of shades), which
gives a beep when she/he is in range of enemy fire, rather like the
"incoming" warning of gma tank commander, though with the proviso that
different enemmy attacks took different amounts of time to hit.
These are some examples, and I could probably think of others, but really I
don't see any of this as that difficult in design concept, although perhaps
that is as you suggest simply because I am well versed in mainstream games,
particularly those of the 8 and 16 bit eras which did not employ much in the
way of addons or downloadable content or too much complexity, and generally
stood or fell on their design alone.
In fairness though i don't think things are that grim. though simple
Papasangre has a very nice design, and I've mentionedswamp several times.
I'm pretty sure David Greenwood could update shades somewhat, and I wait to
see what Aprone will come up with next, so it's not quite all doom and
gloom, although I confess I do get rather tired of the "hear it, hit it"
type of games which some people produce.
Beware the grue!
Dark.
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