How Games can interact with the Player

I realize that the tone of my last few posts has been pretty grouchy, and I'll more than willingly admit that the previous one wasn't my best and only served to enforce that image.  A figurative tidal wave of Jell-O was descending upon me, and ignoring it would have seen me swallowed up never to emerge, while only making a modest effort to prepare for it would leave bits of gelatin all over the floor for me to grind into the carpet at a later date.  Basically what I'm saying is I was busy and this week I've had time to actually plan out this blog post rather than hammer on a keyboard for ten minutes and call it a day. This week I want to talk about something I really like for a change rather than harp on about the next thing about the industry that makes me mad.

Like David Cage.

I've noticed that I talk an awful lot about survival horror games like Silent Hill 2 and Resident Evil, and the reason for that is simple; having only just gotten interested in the genre, I'm discovering new and interesting things about it that make it unlike any other kind of game I've played before.  You see, when I played Resident Evil for the first time, I ended up in a situation where my regular storeroom and save point became less accessible after a door got stuck and I didn't want to waste ammo killing the zombie in the room.  It was then that I did something very unusual: I thought about how to play the game after I'd put down the controller for the day.  It's not unusual to want to play more of a game to see where it goes or think about playing the game later, but Resident Evil made me think about how I was going to play the game the next time I turned fired my Gamecube up.

 The next time I found myself doing this was with 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors.  It's a visual novel with a well-written plot that has more twists and turns than a warehouse full of spare plumbing parts.  The character in 999 all have numbers assigned to them that prevent them from entering certain areas (it's a lot more complex than that), and when one character suddenly died, I did what I could to figure out who could have done the deed by comparing and working with these numbers. It was a futile effort because of plot shenanigans, but again, I actively took part in the game when I wasn't playing it.

What I'm getting at is that games that involve the player in an act outside of playing the game are more likely to leave a greater impression.  A really direct example would be Metal Gear Solid, which features a sequence where the player character encounters a psychokinetic boss demonstrates his abilities by reading your mind (the other games on your memory card and tracking your in-game stats), moves matter with his mind (makes the player's controller rumble) and finally disrupts the player's movements.  The only way to beat him is to move the controller to the system's second controller port.

I'm not even playing the game and he's reading me like a book!

There's been a lot of interest in augmented reality games recently, what with AR cards being included with Nintendo 3DS systems that take pictures like a camera and overlay them in gameplay. I suppose a point that I'm trying to dredge together out of all of this is that augmented reality games don't have to center around taking pictures or all that.  Developers should feel free to go ahead though, my friends and I had a blast blowing each others faces up when the first of us got a 3DS. I think that "AR" is at its strongest when it supplements gameplay or maybe doesn't actually augment reality.

A further point I've though of after meditating on inviting the player to play the game when they're not is that it's extremely difficult to do intentionally. Sure, you can go the Metal Gear Solid route, but while it's memorable, it doesn't particularly add to the game's plot or gameplay in the same way that 999 and Resident Evil did. If a developer's goal is to make consumers want to continue playing their games, wouldn't hooking them in this manner be the optimal solution?  Let's see more of this in the future, games industry!

Image Source
www.giantbomb.com

Further Reading
Augmented Reality Games article on Wikipedia

Will Remakes Trend in the current Industry?

I know what you're thinking.  You're thinking that I'm going to talk about two of the biggest recent "things" in gaming right now; Square Enix's money problems or the statement by Irrational Game's Ken Levine that having female characters on the front of a game's boxart doesn't sell after a female central character in Bioshock Infinite was relegated back of the box.  Jim Sterling's weekly video show The Jimquisition covered the latter more eloquently than I could hope to, and  just did a bit on the instability of the game industry as it is, so what I'm going to talk about this week is Ducktales.

Ducktales was an early example of how to license an existing property and make it into a great game.  Capcom was the go-to company for adapting Disney licenses into games, and pretty much all of them are bang-up jobs.  In particular, Goof Troop for the SNES was the first game designed by Shinji Mikami, the big brain behind Resident Evil; one can even see the parallels between the game's single-item inventory slot and the limited carrying capacity in RE.

Speaking of Resident Evil, the Gamecube Remake of Resident Evil is - in my opinion - the golden standard for game remakes.  Released in 2002, it was the start of an exclusivity agreement between Capcom and Nintendo to give the Gamecube a line of games to appeal to mature gamers.  Given Nintendo's traditional "family friendly" background, Capcom pulled out all the stops, giving the games tons of new content, like new areas, new mechanics that change how the game is played, redone music and sound effects, an attempt to make the storyline more coherent, and gave it graphics that for their time were incredible.  Nintendo had a modest hit that secured future releases like Resident Evil 4 and other games that weren't Resident Evil 4.

It's generally agreed that RE4 is the magnum opus of the series.

Since then, Capcom has rereleased several of their older titles, and long-running series like Mega Man were compiled onto one game disc and sold as collections.  While it's cool that they're releasing all of these classics for future generations to enjoy, I'm concerned that not enough of these future remakes will have new content.  The Ducktales remake promises to have voices provided by Disney's cast (I found a particularly heartwarming article about how the 94-year old voice actor for Scrooge McDuck breezed through the recording session), a more-fleshed out story and updated graphics.  However, arcade games like Final Fight see ports onto newer consoles with little to no new content.

Here's the kicker; this is a safe trend for the industry.  Capcom has seen botched launches of  big-name titles such as DmC and Street Fighter X Tekken; the former was a reboot of a franchise that had run low on ideas and the latter a team up from two well-known names in fighting games.  Both of these games failed to live up to sale expectations, so I feel that Capcom is "retreating" into safe territory with remakes of older titles after being scared away by trying something new with their reliable franchises. What this means is that it will be difficult to see fresh new content from Capcom in the near future.

I understand the need to play it safe after lackluster sales, but Capcom has made this a running trend.  If Ducktales Remastered sells well (which I really don't doubt) then it will encourage more HD remasters of other titles.  I'm fine with that, but the industry has had one fiasco after the other, and I want something that will give me confidence that the industry is headed in a bright new direction rather than wallowing its past successes.

Too obvious of a joke?

 Images Source:
Wikipedia.org

Further Reading:
Original voice cast returns for Ducktales HD Remastered
Street Fighter X Tekken sales fall short
DmC projected sales almost halved
More remastered Disney titles are a possibility