One thing that makes SotC stand out is the fact that there are no random monsters. There are very few obstacles, and these usually only appear right before the area where the colossus can be found. The focus in the game is about travelling, admiring the forest, marveling at the lake, and climbing up a mountain path. It's a lot more of a fantasy hiking game than anything else. But the game focuses on that single element, travelling across the world, without resorting to annoying random battles or trivial platforming segments, and it's a unique feeling you don't get from many other games.

3-d games have an inherent advantage here, in that you can see forward, noting nearby terrain up close, and distant features either towering overhead like a mountain, or down a hillside spread out before you. As much as I like Knytt and Knytt stories, the experience they provide really can't be compared to what SotC gives you.

-SirNiko

Yeah I never really bought that explanation.  They disappear, and the first game says they "stopped moving".

Don't worry, they're only sleeping.

-SirNiko

Here's the game I want somebody else to make for me:

Platformer game. You start off on the peak of a mountain, but there's nothing around you. The world is gone. You can find broken pieces of the world as you solve puzzles, complete quests, and defeat monsters. For example, when you start there's a piece near you that you just grab that creates a mountain path, albeit sort of broken up because parts are missing. Along the way, you might grab more pieces that make caves or new paths appear for tiny incremental upgrades (jump +1 pixel, defense +1 point when you start at like defense of 20, etc), although the real thrill is getting to see the world slowly reassemble piece by piece.

The game's appeal is mostly aesthetic. The first time you enter areas they're weird and broken, like islands floating in space or features (trees, houses) that are partially complete and non-functional, or maybe create mazes (such as a broken house that has holes the player can use to reach an otherwise inaccessible cliff). As you collect the broken world pieces, these are gradually repaired and made functional, possibly surprising the player as they see how the pieces go together and compare to what they imagined from the parts. Over time the world is fleshed out, so that empty backgrounds are later replaced by the image of the partially assembled forest or the floating lake you assembled nearby.

The game could be short and simple, (no more than 50 fragments to collect), or larger and more complex with hundreds of fragments to collect (many unnecessary to finish the game). A full game could even include challenge modes that cap player abilities just as restricting them to a low jump height or simple time trials of particular regions.

-SirNiko

To answer the topic title, "No", but only if you don't want to make equipment an interesting part of the game.

In some Final Fantasy games (FF1, for example), getting the equipment was more significant that equipping it. You put forth some effort, and your character got stronger. The decision was which item to buy from the list, or solving the puzzle to acquire the item. In some cases, the way you grow dictates the playstyle. If you just got a sword that boosts your Fire Attack by 40, you're going to make that character target Ice monsters to maximize damage, even if he can target other foes and still be just as effective as before. Your decision there is how to make the equipment you have (which is the best and need not be changed) give the best results.

Sometimes the equipment is a puzzle. In Kingdom of Loathing, for example, the puzzle might be to find the combination of gear that gives the best result. Which is better, equipping the full brimstone outfit for +items and +meat, or to make up a set of random items that gives more meat or more items, but not both? This can be used in conjunction with the player's actions while wearing the equipment, for a double layered puzzle: maybe one set is the best if you just mash attack every round, but another set is better if you use a specific set of commands in a specific place to push it a little further.

Other times, it's just to suit the player's playstyle. FF13 has no "best" weapon, in the sense that each level 1 weapon you get is equally powerful in a different way, and can upgraded to level 3 which is likewise balanced with all level 3 weapons. One weapon is high damage, low magic, another is balanced, another is also balanced at lower power but gives some special ability. The player can pick (somewhat arbitrarily) which weapon s/he likes best and upgrade it to its maximum tier (which is different for each weapon, but otherwise equal in most situations.

All of these are good ways to utilize equipment in a game and have meaningful decisions come as a result.

-SirNiko

I think Shadow of the Colossus is a tough sell. You're hunting down and killing a bunch of giants who are basically totally innocent. I always felt like the idea was you were supposed to feel guilty part way through when you got the feeling that killing the giants was bad for everyone except your girlfriend.

I loved the Trauma Center games for this. Every level is saving somebody's life, and several times it's actually a bad guy you're saving. Why? Because you're a doctor, and it's in your Hippocratic oath! You get this great feeling when you finish a level, and think "They're going to survive!".

Boxxel on the gameboy was another really super-innocent game. You're just pushing around crates (it's your job!) to save up enough to buy her a gift. No crates were harmed in the making of that game.

-SirNiko

Smart Ball on the SNES was so awesome. The level design and concept were pretty average to poor, but it made up for it with a bizarre sequence of almost totally unrelated levels and crazy random monsters and bosses.





You started in the grasslands, went through a city (sewers and telephone wires) then inexplicably fly to the moon, go inside the moon, then somehow wind up back on earth to explore more levels like an ice castle, a mountain, the Dark Castle, and other things.

One of the enemies is a GIANT SHARK but it's actually a cardboard cutout that falls away if you kill the enemies holding it, and that giant shark doesn't appear again in any other level.

It's a game worth experiencing just once if you like 16 bit platformers.

-SirNiko

Asteroids has simple art, but it's not considered pretentious because it serves another purpose, to facilitate play. The logo Neoshaman posted is simple (a five year old could create that) but that's just an image to represent the company, not the company or the product.

The art displayed by agj is just that: it is the art, the whole product. If you are either unsure or disbelieving of the artist's intent, the whole thing fails.

As a graphic designer, I think you get some leeway because what you are creating is part of a whole. It's okay if your graphics don't have any meaning to them because there are other places where (hopefully) the overall game will derive some meaning.

A designer creates some media (game, art, music) that is relatively simple. The designer genuinely put intent into it (so it isn't pretentious) but everyone who consumes that media fails to see that intent, and informs the designer that his intent is unclear or believed to be nonexistant. The designer ignores this, and continues to create similar products that have real intent but that intent is not communicated. Is this pretentiousness? What is this?

Having intent is not enough. If you can't effectively communicate that intent, it is worthless. If you are forced to argue your intentions to your audience, you're indistinguishable from the truly pretentious designers.

-SirNiko

The other issue is games that pretend to be experimental, but in reality are cliche.

For example, you sometimes see games introduced that have no instructions: you learn them as you play through. This is hardly a new concept, since Myst basically did this as a commercial game over a decade ago. If you started Passage by being told that you were on a time limit, and you could find more treasures below if you went that way, would it be the same game? The only thing deep about it was that you weren't told what to do and had to figure it out.

Redder seemed like it was pretty much non-experimental. You were told how to play and the objective was to collect the diamonds. Yet, the game has a quirky twist to it that makes it different to play. Is it experimental or not?

All we have are varying degrees of willingness to experiment. Some companies will just update a control scheme and build a few new levels, others will create new powerups and stories, and others will create totally new games with new objectives. All games can be considered experiments, until every game is identical to the last.

-SirNiko

Games like WoW create their own logic. Certain zones are attractive for farming, and so players flock there. Other zones are empty. Back when I played ages ago, the elven capital city was constantly empty, simply because it was inconvenient to reach and removed from any important locations.

Stranglethorn vale became a gank zone, not because the developers decreed it so, but because of the proximity to high-level dungeons and the convenience of the shipyard and blimp for transportation.

Attempting to force the population to behave the way you want by locating useful things where they realistically should go doesn't create any sort of exploratory element. You're just obeying the laws sent down from on high.

-SirNiko

I'm currently playing through Treasure of the Rudras, an old SNES RPG by Square that never saw stateside release (but there's an english fan translation).

You have a spell book that has 32 slots for spells. To make a spell, you open up a screen identical to the screen you use to name your characters, and you punch in a word. Every word makes a spell, but a lot of them are useless. To learn good spells you:

A: Find them in treasure boxes, talk to townsfolk, or watch monsters cast them. Words in treasure boxes are usually more useful, but they have missing letters. You might have to guess them.

B: Break existing spells apart into prefixes, suffixes, and roots. You learn early on that "LEF" is cure, and "IG" is fire. You might see a monster use "IGNATES", which is a multi-target fire spell, so a smart player might try "LEFNATES" and you get a multi-target cure spell.

The game ALSO is broken up into three simultaneous scenarios, so the game practically encourages you to play one character, learn some spells, then switch characters and teach the good spells to the other characters. There's some trial and error involved, though, as the game doesn't give you any indication whether "CONTAQU" or "YOUAQU" is the better water spell, since they both seem to do the same thing.

It's a pretty clever concept, and if you generally liked Square RPGs for the SNES you'll enjoy it for reasons other than just the unusual magic system.

Also, Tactics Ogre had a magic system where you started with 0 MP and you charged magic as the fight dragged on, so instead of using your best spells off the bat, you instead had to wait and save up to launch battle-changing spells midway to late through the fight.

-SirNiko

There was some RPG on the Nintendo DS where the hero acquires a magic book that contains all the information about the world in it, and if he mixes around the pages or rewrites them, he can alter reality to match the book. So if he goes to the page about his best friend who is ill, he can cut out the part about being sick, put it on the page about Goblins, and then take the part about Goblins being strong and put it on his friends page. Now goblins are all sick and weak, and his friend is strong.

That's how I envisioned this.

The idea of a card game is cool too, though.

-SirNiko

The other focus is that you should make sure that the player is the one doing the impossible thing. It's easy to make a cutscene where you chop the badguy in half in midair and woah that's cool but you didn't really do it you just watched a movie.

In Zelda: Twilight Princess, on the other hand, I feel like a badass when I take out three spiders without taking a hit, finish them off with a spin attack and then sheath the sword and get the little swish-swish sheath animation. That's awesome.

Sometimes impossible is just getting to explore an ancient derelict moon base with just a flashlight and a pistol. The hero's not really doing anything they couldn't do in real life, but because the setting is so outlandish it still falls in the impossible category.

-SirNiko

am I the only one that absolutely hates the tapping a button multiple times for the fastest run thing?

I don't think I've ever played a game like that before. Swimming in some games (eg. Zelda) works this way, but usually running is hold down B or tilt the analog stick all the way. I had assumed he meant that by tapping B you get a run that's not quite a full run because you keep letting go, sort of like tapping the gas while taking corners in a racing games.

-SirNiko

The "Shrink" in Specter Spelunker really didn't do anything for me. What made that game deserving of the praise it is getting is that it has that fun exploration element that is facilitated by the shrink/grow mechanic. You navigate a little space at the beginning, then grow larger once you're outside and suddenly everything you've passed is visible beneath you while you move to the next. Or maybe you approach a structure filled with traps and platforms, inspect it, then you shrink down and navigate it up-close.

You could get (and do get) exactly the same effect if, say, instead you were climbing a mountain and then at the end you could turn around and look at all the cliffs you just climbed and reflect on how it looks from your new perspective, or to look up at a maze of catwalks and buzz-saws and mentally navigate the whole thing before you actually climb up and do it.

Braid featured a number of mechanics in addition to "Rewind". Gish, likewise, had "Slick" and "Heavy" features in addition to "Adhere". They weren't as simple as you seem to be implying. They were governed by more generic actions, such as Braid's "Manipulate time" or Gish's "Change form".

I agree with the overall point, though. Your game should have one major mechanic that is fun to play with in order to tie together the rest of the game. If that mechanic isn't fun, then the whole game will be average at best. At the same time, a single fun mechanic doesn't make a game bulletproof. Scribblenauts had a brilliant concept "Imagine", but it just didn't translate well into actual play. With luck, the sequel will address that problem and make it work.

Good article overall, though. Definitely useful food for thought.

-SirNiko

I always consider there to be two types of piracy: pirates who get the game on or near release when it's hot and new and pirates who scour the web for 5+ year old games that are no longer readily available (Or weren't available at launch, ie, fan translations). I think if you could find a way to get rid of the former, then the latter would be pretty negligible.

I don't really think launch-pirates have any excuse. You don't have the money to buy it? Then you don't get to play it. Wait until it gets cheaper, it'll still be there. You've got 20 years worth of computer and console games to pick from. There's really no excuse that you MUST have that hot new title the first week and get it for free.

-SirNiko

I don't think studio size really has much of anything to do with game quality. Big corporate studios can manage to make a brilliant hit, and little indie studios can make derivative shit. The big studios, especially, can have several teams working on different games, so even though two games might have the Electronic Arts logo on them, they were made by totally different teams and can be drastically different in quality. SquareEnix is a big example of this, with different Final Fantasy games made by different teams, so you can love some and hate some based on which group made it, not just the parent company.

I recently noted I've been picking up a lot of Atlus games. I finished Ogre Battle 64 and Metal Saga very recently and enjoyed both thoroughly, even if Metal Saga felt a little unpolished and rough towards the end. I'm eagerly anticipating the next Trauma Center Wii game, as it looks like they're making efforts to differentiate it from the first few games, which is good.

Insomniac has a few really fun series (I love Ratchet and Clank), but they did not make Crash Bandicoot. You're thinking of Naughty Dog. Naughty Dog and Insomniac were working in the same building for a time, and they frequently let each other cameo their characters in each other's games, which is the reason why you'd associate them with each other. The more you know.

Sucker Punch is one of my favorite mini studios. They did Rocket: Robot on Wheels for the N64 and the Sly Cooper games on the PS2. Both games show a lot of attention to detailed settings and exploration, and are great if you're a fan of Super Mario 64 style collection platformers. Rocket also boasts a great physics engine, and has a puzzle where you cheat at tic-tac-toe by throwing rocks at your opponent when he's making his move. Brilliant stuff.

-SirNiko

[Your]

Your a terrible speller, Bood.

I was going to comment on it, but then he also misspelled basterd, and then I decided he did it intentionally.

-SirNiko

The flash game should have a system for players to submit screenshots to a database, and then automatically add them to the pot. Then maybe a system that automatically ranks the shots on difficulty based on how often players fail the shot on their first few tries (the first few tries so as to not incorrectly weight them as easy after everyone has memorized them). Add in a report system in case somebody incorrectly attributes a shot to the wrong game, and you have a pretty robust online masterpiece.

Also, I knew Megaman 5. I wish this wasn't just first-come, first get points!

"OLD MAN, YOU SEEK THE SPELL OF MASTERY."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMNk-YlpuBo

-SirNiko

We don't eat human corpses because there are perfectly good cows and chickens to eat. Who in their right mind would eat a human instead of steak and eggs? Steak and eggs are delicious.

This makes the dangerous and short sighted assumption that you won't discover human flesh is better than steak and eggs. Or have you already tried this and determined it to be true? If so, please share.

I'm always astonished by the popularity of steak. To me, it's one of the most boring meals you can conceive. A slab of beef, cooked, possibly with some sauce on top and maybe grilled onions or mushrooms at the most. That's it? I'd rather use that beef to make a delicious hamburger, ground up so the quality of meat is of less importance and then placed on a bun of any type you like, with vegetables to top it and your choice of several condiments. More options that are more meaningfully differentiated.

So yeah, I think maybe it'd be better if we had ground human burgers instead. Wait, what was I talking about?

-SirNiko

Sometimes the nonlinearity IS the game, though.

Megaman does this by making the acquisition of the weapons a key game mechanic. "Who should I fight first?" is an important, meaningful decision, as is "Who is weak against this weapon?".

Metroid Zero Mission did the same by making the Low% game have multiple avenues to attempt, so the player was really open to find what works best (like if you could bomb jump well enough to skip the speed boots).

But yeah, sometimes you need to look at your non-linearity and question what it gets you. Final Fantasy 13 was totally linear (Except some parts near the end), and it worked out well. Compare that to, say, FF7 where the non-linearity mostly meant you could do optional sidequests and totally overpower the final boss, or Oblivion where the nonlinearity just meant wandering around disconnected from any sort of plot while you did the root picking sidequest.

I don't think I've ever played any of Paul's games, or if I have I didn't realize he made them, so I can't comment on whether his titles would be improved by more linearity.

-SirNiko