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[Ivan]

Oooh! Oooh!
In no particular order.

Also i haven't played alot of console games, so most of these are PC fare.

1. Quake 2.
Ok so there was Quake before that, but Quake2 was the first FPS i think that got the control down perfectly. From the head bob to the way your guns fired. I remember running around alone in empty deathmatch maps just cause it was so much fun to control.

2. Soul Reaver
I know it was based on a million other plaformers and the credit should probably go to them, but this was polished to a tee and popped into my mind before them all, so it takes the cake.

3. SMB
This game has to be included on every top 10 list. I think it's the law.

4. MDK (1)
Ok, this game was like the gaming equivalent of the word "Wheeeeeee"

4. Bloody Roar (all of them)
This is still probably the only fighting game that got it right. Im sorry, no other fighting game rivals BR in the fluidity of control. In fact if i had to choose a number one on this list, this would probably be it.

5. Zelda : TP
This was my 7-day nonstop introduction to the wiimote. And just lots of fun all around.

6. Blade of Darkness
This is an obscure one, but one of my most favourite games (if you have a PC and havent played it, you pretty much have to). Despite its incredibly clunky controls, chopping off someone's arm, then beating them to death with it was pretty much the best thing ever.

7. The Sands of Time
Once again, almost perfect controls.

8. Half-Life 2
I take it back about Bloody Roar. This game is the real number 1 on this list. It was so much fun doing absolutely anything in this game that actually playing it was absolutely orgasmic. It had its flaws of course, but none in its amazing gameworld.

9. World of Warcraft
I don't actually play it that much. I never really got past level 20, and I usually get bored of it after awhile when I do come back. That said, what i usually end up doing in it is wandering around doing absolutely nothing and the fact that that's fun is a good reason for it to be on this list.

10. Halo
I know everyone hates Halo, but tell me you didn't have fun driving around in a Warthog with two dudes firing frantically at everything around you.

[xix]

Btw, Derek, what do you think about Resident Evil 4? GoW seems like RE4 with Western Sauce.

You know, I loved Resident Evil 4!  It's an incredible game.  Great atmosphere, very fun.  Lots of little details.  It's also one of the best-looking games I've ever seen.

I like RE4 better as a game because the design feels tighter.  But in terms of "feel" as I'm interpreting what Steve's asking, I think Gears stands out more to me.  They're very different in that regard.  In RE you feel very human and very vulnerable, but in Gears it's like you're this giant wrecking ball with a gun attached to it, which is pretty sweet.

Honestly, I want to play a game like Gears set in a medieval-type theme.  The same way "giant dudes with guns in games" always seem to control like ballerinas, so do "giant dudes with swords in games."  Rarely do you see a medieval-era game where you feel the weight of all that friggin' plate mail your character is wearing.

Have you seen the movie "Excalibur?"  I love that movie because the fighting is so dirty and everyone looks so tired running around in their armor.  It's like the one knight movie I've seen where it looks like they're actually encumbered.

You're right. Not many games have heft and weight. I think Halo was the first FPS I ever played that had weight. Metroid Prime did the same thing, but I'm wondering how intentional that was. As far as Gears being hefty, yeah definitely. But if we're going to measure how close RE4 feels like a cop vs. zombie game compared to how close GoW feels like space marines vs. baddies? I'm not so sure it even matters.

It feels like they finally got gaming's bass drum going. Walk, stop, and pop. I haven't tried Lost Planet, but I'm sure it's very similar. I'm thinking the rhythmic nature is what makes it feel good.

NEW GAME TO ADD TO THE LIST: PHANTASY STAR ONLINE. amirite?

[Impossible]

10. Halo
I know everyone hates Halo, but tell me you didn't have fun driving around in a Warthog with two dudes firing frantically at everything around you.

Huh? Who hates Halo.  I didn't think Halo was hated even on tigsource.  IMO it has one of the best feels of any FPS.

My list goes something like this:

1) True Love
2) Season of Sakura
3) Three sisters story
4) Virtual Valerie 2
5) Knights of Xentar
6) Sexy Beach 2
7) Rapelay
Battle Rapers 2
9) Do you like horny bunnies
10) Casual Romance club

Wait... you're not talking about that type of feel, nm.

[RohoMech]

I'm really partial to these games, I think they're better than what's being posted (especially Impossible's list)


5.) Windows Solitare
4.) Snood
3.) Minesweeper
2.) Stair Dismount

This one might suprise a few people, but easily #1 on my list

1.) Don't Shoot the Puppy

[shinygerbil]

whut.

anyway, I have a couple of suggestions.

Soul Calibur II
I can still sit down and play this with my friends, and we make it look so damn easy, because it is. Everything just feels right - even the moves are mapped to sensible buttons. For example, pressing backwards and down along with a weapon button will almost always do the same type of move no matter what the character, and what's more, they're always moves which just fit what you're trying to achieve by pressing those buttons, whether you know what you're doing or not.

Twilight Princess
I'd almost say Ocarina of Time is as good as this, but the Wiimote sets it apart. Sometimes I just find a big patch of grass and run around, swinging my sword, until it's all gone. And then I find another patch of grass. There's this little run he does, you see, and he has a fairly tight turning circle. When you swing your sword, he just keeps running, and I don't know why, but I love it. It's just very tactile. (Especially with the little speaker in the Wiimote - it really adds to the feeling of chopping grass.)

Unreal Tournament
Yeah I know, everyone has their favourite shooter when it comes to feel, but I always preferred Unreal Tournament to Quake. Maybe I didn't play enough Quake (never really played it all that much), but it always felt too slippery. I was never quite sure when I was touching the ground. Unreal Tournament, though; I bought it on a whim, seeing the GOTY edition for a tenner, and I seriously did nothing else for a week but play. It just felt natural. Even Team Fortress Classic - my favourite shooter ever - didn't feel this good. That doesn't have any real sensation of running; like most shooters, your acceleration is essentially a fixed curve, and Half-Life (and its mods) used the wrong curve, or even none at all. Oh, and don't get me started on the weapons. I mean, how amazing is the Flak Cannon? They totally buggered it with 2003, although I did get used to the new one.

Flashback
While it may not have been very fast-paced, I loved the way Conrad moved. So slick, and not just the rotoscoped animations, but just the simple range of moves they had allowed you to do. It wasn't much, but it covered everything you always wanted to do in a platformer, and still look damn cool while you're at it.

Virtua Tennis
This, as many people before me have said, is probably the best sports game EVAR. You actually feel like you're playing tennis. You can actually feel how fast the ball is moving when you hit it. It's almost sad, seeing as how Wii Tennis should have been that game. Still, I'm assuming Nintendo didn't go for a simulation, and left that to another time or another developer. But Virtua Tennis with the Wiimote? I'm not sure. It's just too perfect as it is, with the Dreamcast controller, which I also happen to adore. I hear the 360 version is even better, but I haven't played it, so I don't know.

NEW GAME TO ADD TO THE LIST: PHANTASY STAR ONLINE. amirite?

I kinda agree with you. It's mostly just a "controls" thing, but it does feel nice. Especially when you get the 3-hit-combo thing down with the weapons. That feels gooood.

A couple of others I agree with here - SM64 obviously, and RE4. Personally I never felt the Super Mario World love. Sonic was always my manhedgehog. And though it's kinda floaty and possibly a little too light (and makes some people froth at the mouth for being SO DAMN 3D), I really like the way Metroid Prime plays.

[xix]

I'm too tired to discuss it now, but you have to do an entire chapter on sports games. EA vs. Visual Concepts vs. Konami (Winning Eleven). EA is flashy and fast and rubber bandy; while VC and Konami are methodical, weighty, and hard. Is anyone else here a sports game fan?

[Alex May]

I love the feel of those Capcom animation-driven games. People will say they're restrictive and stuff, but the more you play them the more you get to know exactly what will happen when you do a particular move.

I recently put many many hours in to Monster Hunter Freedom on the PSP. This game rocks! Seriously - if it only had infrastructure built in so it could be played as it was meant to be played, I would still be playing it today. It's not really possible to play through the whole thing in single player, but what a fantastic experience it was to try.

The animations are really well done, if you're using an improbably gigantic sword, it feels like it's improbably gigantic, it's really heavy, it takes time to throw the thing around and then when it hits it cuts right through stuff - or if it bounces off you really know about it.

When you commit to an animation/move you commit to it. You can't interrupt it, it just plays out, while you decide what to do next based on what happens while the animation is playing out. It's almost turn-based, but playing it out in real time feels fantastic to me.

Lost Planet has a similar play style, and I love that game as well.

[Bezzy]

Adam: what you call "pointless fun" is what I call "the intrinsic/implicit joy of core game play". Definitely with you there. It's an important foundation for any game, and creates its own range of emotions which the rest of the game ought really to encourage and feed off of.

In no order (and attempting not to repeat anyone else's stuff):

Tie Fighter - That strange bank/roll you get when moving the mouse horizontally completely broke the feeling that you were just controlling simple variables like elite did (pitch or roll for each axis in that). The slightly complicated nature of the game made it feel more real, as if to say that real life can't be broken down into totally elegant rules (although... erm... it sorta can in a lot of cases )

Quake 2/3: I think both these games had fantastic movement, even if it was initially a bug. I mean, rocket jumping is one thing, but add strafe jumping and circle jumping to that, and you have a wonderful pallet for motion. And then in Quake 3 you get plasma skipping, too! I love the fact that a few whole mods (rocket olympics / defrag) have been dedicated to the movement of that game. Plenty of mods added movement abilities to the game - offhand grapplehooks made lithium really enjoyable since they let you move and fire independently.

Tribes: Skiing. Lovely. Again, unintentional.

Strider: Something about being able to transfer to so many surfaces makes me happy. It makes the world feel that much more tangible if your avatar is touching every surface, acknowledging it, rather than simply being stopped in mid air, frozen in a frame of animation, or worse, performing running cycles while not even moving. Also, sliding for a quick speed boost/attack is great.

Tenchu: The series needs a goddamn proper reboot. That initial feeling of freedom and exploration with a grapple hook which didn't care what surface you used it on, or where you wanted to go... flipping fantastic. The flipping was also fantastic. Controls are probably a bit dated now, but that grapple hook... oh man.

I can't remember the game, but I'm sure there's one where if you roll and then jump, you get a speed boost out of it. That was nice.

Hoop\/\/orld: Alright, I'm totally biased, but the early stages of the previous version of this had movement which was shaping up really nicely... somewhere between Mario 64 and N.

N: Can't ignore Raigan and Mare who seemed to have this natural understanding of motion. So many games take this approach of letting the animation dictate a humanoid character's speed and behaviour. In N, it feels like it was done the opposite way - their pseudo physics with its feeling of weight and inertia made you happy when you transferred built up speed into a huge wall run, and sad when you got fast enough to crater into the ground. Lovely balance of risk and reward, that.

JediKnight: had a few awkward movement modifiers (not exactly fun reaching up to F2 to do a force jump, and having force speed last a fixed amount of time felt weird, too) but I wanted to point it out as one of the few games where you can crater when hitting walls! Makes a lot of sense, really. More consisent. I'd rather not crater at all, and simply encourage smooth movement through positive re-enforcement, though.

Prince of Persia Classic: Actually, I mention this because of the recent XBLA update. I really HATE PoP's movement in terms of "Feel". There's the arguement that it's very realistic, because choosing to jump does involve readying ones' self and the lag inherent in that, and one is not always in control of ones' movement - if you're knocked off balance, you're out of control, right? I never really bought that argument: If you're knocked down, you can still choose how to fall, and possibly even right yourself. If you're making a jump... well, there's an infinite number of ways to jump - not just the way Jordan Mechner's brother did it once. That's the fundamental problem I have with a lot of finite state machine based animation - so many of the animations have no interactivity. Motion and choice are minimized to what the animators prescribed, and you're simply left waiting for windows to open for your tiny bandwidth of input. The mistakes you make are amplified as you wait for the prince to step one step after briefly fudging a movement on the joypad. The new XBLA version of PoP has done a lot to make the game more responsive - quicker animations, more transitions etc. All good stuff. Unfortunately, you can't "fix" this gameplay without fundamentally changing it. You can only really improve what's there. Ideally, I think you just want to make sure that for every state you give a player, they have some kind of control, even if it's limited. Example: in Hoop\/\/orld, when you were knocked back, you could still alter your direction... give the fall a bit of "english" as it were. If you mashed buttons, you could "snap out of it" mid air, going into a double jump, a bit like StreetFighter Alpha 3. Ofcourse, it's always hard to marry the ideals of realistic/smooth animation with responsive controls. PoP: Sands of Time does a lot to remedy this though...

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time: While this is still a finite state machine based animation system, and while very few of the moves have any "english" i.e. you can only really wall run in three discrete directions), I still felt great moving around in this game. The controls remained fairly responsive, not by breaking the animation (much) but by introducing loads and loads of transition opportunities within the animation. Wondering why the prince takes so many mini-steps in a wall run (apart from trying to seem a bit realistic)? Well, its because each step on the wall can transition out to a wall-jump animation, so the quicker the step, the quicker you could typically transfer into an alternate state without the transition looking broken. When you use a horizontal bar to swing around, you don't have to wait to circle the bar before you make a jump like you do in Tomb Raider legend, allowing you to speed through sections of the game. The level design was remarkably consistent in this first game, never leaving you too confused about your route once you learned the conventions of what you could and couldn't use for movement. Bit linear, but assassin's creed promises to remedy that. PoP:SoT proved to me that FSMA is not as fundamentally flawed as I thought.

[Bezzy]

When you commit to an animation/move you commit to it. You can't interrupt it, it just plays out, while you decide what to do next based on what happens while the animation is playing out. It's almost turn-based, but playing it out in real time feels fantastic to me.

This is another case when FSMA can work: when the animation is a core part of the gameplay, and all these commitment times and wind-ups are factored into the balance of the game... the risk and reward of throwing a heavy wind up attack in something like Soul Calibur 2, for instance.

It's when animation is long for the sake of the animation that it doesn't make sense. It wasn't until recently that animators defining the reload times for weapons in FPS games was considered irredeemably bad design.

[sega]

Strider: Something about being able to transfer to so many surfaces makes me happy. It makes the world feel that much more tangible if your avatar is touching every surface, acknowledging it, rather than simply being stopped in mid air, frozen in a frame of animation, or worse, performing running cycles while not even moving. Also, sliding for a quick speed boost/attack is great.

Alec and I were just talking the other day about how Strider felt totally out of control a lot of the time.  The world around you collapses, bends, disappears, explodes, changes gravity, and you're doing all you can to grab onto whatever surface while you're progressing through.  It made moving Strider feel out-of-control, but on the other end of the spectrum, they gave you COMPLETE control over that sword.  No matter what, when you pressed that sword button, a sword slice came out.  You could time it, slam on it as fast as you could, whatever.  It didn't matter if you were landing, jumping, running, slipping, dropping, hooking onto something... they made sure you had the attack in control, most of the time.  Both of those things together made Strider feel very unique.

[Alec]

I actually kinda like the jumping in strider, even though its pretty limited. I guess it felt deliberate / timed, like you had to really focus to get it right in certain situations.

[ravuya]

Is the deal with Strider's feel simply that it's context sensitive implicitly?

You can bolt yourself onto walls without much thought towards picking the action. Defender is an example of a game I'd say has a very rigid control structure (and a terrible button layout). A big, big, big part of what Jef Raskin had to say is that modes are bad.

Certainly a lot of feel (like Derek implied when mentioning GoW) is gonna be physics based; a big character should feel more like driving a tank than a smaller, more nimble character.

For example, in Splinter Cell the character "leans" into turns at full speed, sort of like a motorcycle. In Vampire Rain, even though the player is running very quickly, they turn on the spot cheaply without acknowledging the speed they're going. That ruins part of the feel. The lack of tuning on things like speeds, controls, joystick sensitivity and other attributes of control also make the game shit.

Even though SC2 has "slow" attacks, the animation and reaction are instantly starting after you hit the button. It doesn't seem like they're lagged at all; there's some kind of confirmation of your attack even if the actual damage hasn't been done yet.

GDNet had a discussion on this, I think JBourrie did it. He was talking about how 'verbs' impact the design of the game's interaction. Very interesting thread, I'll root it out.

Edit: JBourrie post

[Matthew]

Waverace 64:  Totally playable even today.  Perfect carving, and the ability to optimize the impact of waves on your top speed (if you bob in time with the crests).  I dislike the GameCube version--the scale is all wrong.

Rocket Jockey:  Completely intimidating learning curve.  Still, some amazing feels moments.  Tugging matches with other riders feel right, especially when something rips free.

Bionic Commando:  I haven't played this recently, and I don't plan to.  It probably plays like crap today.  But the memory is awesome!

Ski Stunt Simulator:  1-to-1 controls you can actually learn.  More info at Fun-Motion, of course:  http://www.fun-motion.com/physics-games/ski-stunt-simulator/

Die by the Sword:  1-to-1 controls you can't learn.  Not on the good side of the spectrum, but worth discovering why it failed.

FlatOut 2:  An arcade driving game that makes you feel like you're a much better driver than you are. (Fun-Motion link)

Lugaru: My favorite 3rd-person avatar game.  Good jumps, rolls, and responsive controls.  (Fun-Motion link)

Big Red Racing:  Haven't played in years, but I remember it as a great racing title with exaggerated physics and a variety of vehicles (hovercraft, car, etc).

[AdamAtomic]

just want to second the Wave Race 64 vote there, I'd forgotten how absolutely new and good that game felt when it came out.  I still think they did the best job of really simulating a changing watery environment, and having it affect your racing...but not TOO much   it was a little weird to play at first (as was mario64) but once i was over the initial weirdness i never wanted to go back...

[ravuya]

The Wipeout series has always had a special place in my heart for feeling good despite having rather floaty (har har har) ships.