My work-in-progress, though a very different game, also has a trait system, which is used for all non-player characters in the game. At first I had a scale similar to the above with opposing pairs like Cautious vs. Brave (in my game it's Cowardly vs. Adventurous), Shy vs. Proud (in my game it's Shy vs. Talkative) and upwards of 45 pairs for 90 traits total. It was getting too complicated so I changed it to a binary system where the character either has a trait or doesn't. It's still very complicated.

The above poster is right that this amounts to truckloads of writing that needs to be done. In my game, story events are generated based on which traits npcs have and there need to be enough of them for each trait. So to have even three story events for each trait means I have to write 270 scenarios. I better stop wasting time here and get back to writing all these scenarios.

If measured by how many hours I've sunk into them, these games I've given at least 50-100 hours to, in some cases much more. On that basis I'd have to call them my favorites.

Disgaea (any of them)
Resident Evil 4
Resident Evil 5 (Mercenaries, baby!)
Brogue
Super Metroid (on account of playing every well-designed hack I can get my hands on)
Little Big Planet 2 (THE most replay value on this list)
Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup
Dark Souls
Dark Souls 3
Bloodborne
Starcraft (maybe more time watching pro replays than actually playing myself)
Elder Scroll IV: Oblivion (probly Skyrim too)
Street Fighter 2
Street Fighter 4



If including ones I haven't racked up quite as many hours on:

Spelunky
Dance Dance Revolution
Sekiro ~Shadows Die Twice
Demon's Souls
(Forbidden) Siren
Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
Kakyusei
Ninja Gaiden 1-3
Shadow of the Colossus
God Hand
Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords
Silent Hill 2
Super Punchout
Katamari Damacy
Brain it On!
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night
Mega Man 2 or 3
The Fool's Errand (if you even know what this is you're as old as me)
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain
Tokimeki Memorial
Monster Hunter 3
Ouverture Facile
Portal 1 or 2
Final Fantasy 12
Tetris

ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS Tokimeki Memorial

must see of one of the most important underrated interactive narrative game

Lots of fond memories of that one. It's a total classic and definitely influenced me as a game designer. Interesting that he likes Nozomi best. My friend liked Yuina best, I liked Yukari best. Everyone really did have their own favorite.

In fact my current project (that I've been at for several years) combines some of the mechanics of Tokimemo with procedural generation by creating at runtime romanceable characters, each with their own visuals and own personality.

I'm a little bit surprised that some people seem to dislike silent protagonists in general (unless I am misunderstanding).

That's probably because we're in a writing forum    Ask a bunch of architects where they'd rather spend the afternoon, in a gothic cathedral or in a field of wildflowers, and see what they say.

Silent protagonists and blank slate protagonists are a time-tested approach when designing games. Plenty of players prefer them. I prefer them myself, if I had to say which.  Every time a character I'm supposed to be controlling does or says something I wouldn't have done or said myself, I withdraw from the immersion of the fantasy a little bit.

There is also the fact that the player character moves slowly, can't change his jump arc (depending on which game in the series), and must rely on a basic attack that uses precious frames of animation during which he's vulnerable. You are constantly weighing the advantage of getting one more crack of the whip in against the risk of getting hit during its animation by an enemy who can deal more damage than you can. It's what good gameplay is all about. Give the players tough choices. Make them weigh the pros and cons.

Hint: you arbitrarily exclude a pretty fucking major subgenre of action games dominated by western developers (seemingly because you happen to suck at them?) instead of removing your "period" and adding an exception.

(shrug) If all it takes to make you happy is removing the "period", fine, remove the period.  It was there to contrast with the statement I was originally replying to. That is, it's not just the best shmups that come from the East, it's the best action games generally. In a similar way, a person might say people from Country A are the best at swimming after seeing Country A win 70% of the Olympic swimming events even though Country B might have won a few. (not that that in any way proves such a statement of opinion any more than anything I can say can prove my statement of opinion; the best one can do is state reasons to support the opinion) I thought all this was understood.

Would replacing "period" with "generally" lower your irrate meter? Because in case you didn't realize it yourself, a person comes off as irrate when they suddenly start cussing and caricaturizing another person's posts with unsubstantiated nonsense like saying he doesn't like Western games or that he sucks at them.

In case I'm still not being clear, I'll go out and say that the West *does* make some great 3D shooters. No, the East doesn't own us in that area. I just don't think this counts for as much as some people do. Not when these games tend to rehash the same mechanics and same engines that weren't that good in the first place. The East makes fewer 3D shooters but sometimes, ya know, they impress me more. (For instance, RE4, which influenced several notable Western shooters such as Gears of War, Dead Space, and Uncharted--all good games, I'd agree) I think they like to build engines for specific games, which results in the games being more unique albeit fewer in number.  Just that someone makes more of something doesn't impress me. Just because someone makes something that is popular doesn't impress me either. Otherwise I'd be worshipping Farmville.

Gumshoe is unplayable unless your light gun is pressed right up to your TV screen, at which point it becomes borderline unplayable.

In case you didn't realize it yourself you changed your position from "The best action games come from the East period." to "I don't like action games from the West period."

No, I didn't notice, and still don't.

The Extra Credit guys have also argued that genres should be defined not by mechanics ("it's got a first-person camera and you shoot things, therefore it's a first-person-shooter") but by what the player gets out of the experience. (competiton, satisfaction of overcoming a challenge, a cinematic experience, etc)

Japanese eschew the first person camera for reasons given in the article Derek linked. Anyway, imho first person shooting works better when it's on-rails (Virtua Cop, House of the Dead) than it does when the player is expected to navigate a character he can't even see. Their efforts to find other ways of delivering action shooters, including 3D actions shooters, makes me appreciate the Japanese more, not less.

And Bunny Must Die was great. The Japanese own metroidvanias, arguably. They own shmups. They own fighting games. (for the latter, does anyone else even come close?)

I'm not even arguing that DS is great because it does everything. Only that it does everything.

A kid playing with a stick doesn't count as a game if we define a game as having rules. Nor can every aesthetic be found in every game. Skyrim doesn't have an ounce of the Competition aesthetic.

You're right, silly me.

The best shmups come from the east.

The best action games come from the East period. They always have been better than us at that, imho. (Probably a result of their history of developing games for the arcade while we were developing games for the PC)

Within a Deep Forest would count, I think. And it's better than the Knytt games.

But if a core aesthetic is "why you play a game" then depending on the player, and depending on his mood, I think you could make a case for any of those ('cept maybe narrative). For instance, some people really get into the pvp in DS though they're not required to.

That's just one list anyway. Other people who have thought about games have come up with different lists of aesthetics. It's not too hard to think of new ones, really. How about Humor. I'd say it's a core aesthetic of, for instance, Plants vs. Zombies.

I thought so.

In trying to think of a game that succeeds at every aesthetic, frankly, the only ones I can think of are Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. Challenge, Discovery, Expression they have in spades. Fantasy is obvious. Competition should also be obvious. Fellowship is to be found in the messaging system as much as in the co-op. Sensation from the breathtaking visuals. Abnegation since grinding for souls is a crucial mechanic.  Narrative is their weakest suit, but it's there. Those two games nail everything that can make a game fun.

Next closest would be another MMO, I guess. The Extra Credits guys did mention WoW a few times.

This caused me to realize that my current WIP is attempting every aesthetic on the list except Sensation and Competition. I hope I'm not crazy.

Not any first person view game I know. First person view feels like driving a car with your face pressed up against the windshield.

Maybe stuff like Uncharted and Tomb Raider. Those kind of games require a smooth feel as a well as a good camera so that you can see and navigate all the traps. They like to deal with the problem of falling off ledges by making you automatically hang from the ledge when you walk off.

SotC has more replay value than ICO though. Try playing through ICO again and you'll find that while you may have loved it the first time, the second time there's just no point. I think I actually did play through SotC three times. It has a second difficulty level at least.

Most games make sure to milk every little feature until the fun is completely drawn our of it, you end the game feeling tired instead of excited.

That would be because most games are depressingly linear. I think a better way is to design in such a way that the player can feel satisfied ending the experience approximately whenever they like. There is no reason a game has to have a single set ending at a single set time. There is no reason a game has to have a single ending. There is no reason it has to have an ending at all.

I can't remember The Sims having an ending. I played it for as long as it was fun for me. In Disgaea I deliberately avoided finishing the story for over a hundred hours because I was enjoying the Item World so much. In Bethesda games I tend to ignore the main story too. These game take the opposite approach to "milk every little feature" by enticing the player into spending time in the world because he or she wants to. For those who aren't enjoying themselves as much, an official-like ending can be reached relatively quickly, so everyone gets the mileage they're happy with. In other words, plan non-linearity from the start and the problem of game length becomes moot.

I'd have to admit that even Dark Souls does some padding, like in the dlc where you are fighting the same enemy type over and over for whichever area you're in.

But if I'm enjoying something enough, I don't want the experience to end. I like my entertainment hardcore. (prog rock, too  )

With films, they are forced to adhere to a roughly 2 hour time limit in order to be viewable in a theatre. If you took away movie theatre, films might very well have evolved into a longer medium. I am certain that constraint has worked against the creative interests of the masters at times, including Kubrick, Kurosawa, Leone, who all have a slow-paced style and who have all liked to make "character" films. Stories that focus on characterization rather than plot arguably suffer from a 2 hour constraint because it takes time to develop characters. Could be why the 3-hour Barry Lyndon went under the radar despite it being an excellent film? (I think it's my next favorite of his after 2001 and Dr. Strangelove)

But you have to be careful that the advertising goals aren't in conflict with the developer goals.

For instance, at rpgmaker.net developers can create a project page with a blog, pictures, and can customize it by adding new tabs for pages. All that is great for the developer. However, it also tries to be a site that showcases, rates, and reviews games. As such, a random person can write an unfair review of a game that isn't even finished and that review will be stuck on the project page forever. There's nothing the developer can do to get rid of it. There are also frequent debates and drama among the community about what games deserve to be featured on the front page and stuff like that. If a community is supposed to be for the developers, sometimes it's better if it's not also for showcasing.