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GameCube (Games) Portables (Games) Entertainment Games

Simpler Sometimes Better In Videogames? 90

Posted by simoniker from the the-gumby-theory dept.
Thanks to NTSC-UK for their editorial discussing why more simple gameplay does not necessarily make a videogame worthless. The piece argues: "So why are there so many howls of derision when a game like Dead or Alive tries to make the concept of fighting entertaining with a button bashing, quick and easy style? [...] Just because an artificial intelligence can come back at you and outplay you on your own terms, is the game inherently more enjoyable?" The piece concludes by praising simple titles such as Super Monkey Ball and Wario Ware Inc., and suggesting: "The important thing, though, is that a game's worth cannot and should not be judged purely on its perceived 'depth' or complexity... there can be no argument that one game is better than another solely because it will take months to learn all there is to learn of it."
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Simpler Sometimes Better In Videogames? More

Simpler Sometimes Better In Videogames?

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  • Wisdom of Miyamoto: (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Rallion ( 711805 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:14AM (#7936163) Journal
    (Paraphrase)

    The best GameCube games would only use the analog stick and the A button.
    • Incidentally, one of the titles praised in the story--Super Monkey Ball--follows that formula exactly. In fact, once you get past the menu screens and into the actual game, the analog stick is the only thing that you need. Despite the simple controls, the game is maddeningly difficult, especially on the expert levels (or master levels, if you ever manage to get there--I haven't).
      • for the other mini/party games you need the button to open the ball and stuff, but that's about it.. monkey target I think was the name of the one I'm thinking of specifically.
    • "The best GameCube games would only use the analog stick and the A button. "

      This isn't funny, it's insightful. That's exactly why the controller was designed that way.
      • I think one button might be pushing it, just the way I think one button is too few on the Mac. (Using the "command" key to click seems like cheating a bit to me)

        One thing the GC controller does well is grouping buttons into a logical hierarchy. A+B, X+Y, shoulders, and then Z, all very well differentiated.

        "Mario Party" series is another good example of minimal control schemes, and not quite so ADD-ish as WarioWare.
    • Donky Kong used exactly that. Mario Bros. upped it by using two. Heck the series stayed like that for 3 iterations (4 if you count SMB 2 or the Japanese Mario 2) Most square games don't use the whole controller layout.

      • Re:Wisdom of Miyamoto: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Rallion ( 711805 )
        Interesting thing about Square games (at least the more modern ones): They DO use the entire controller, but assign the buttons to things you will never, ever use (switch, target, assist...I know not what these things even MEAN). I wonder if that's because of a feeling that the controller must be 'fully utilized' or because the buttons are there, and you might as well just put something in for them to do. Do they do it because they feel the need to, or just because they might as well?

  • Dead or Alive (Score:4, Insightful)

    by unclethursday ( 664807 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:16AM (#7936170)
    Well, I'd say it gets criticised to downright derided because the game focuses more on graphics than gameplay, always has (original ads on the PSOne were for the 'best looking fighter around'). It's Team Ninja's baby, and with such great gameplay achievements such as 'Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball' to emphasise the point, it's easy to see why the DoA series gets criticised.

    Oh, I forgot: She Kicks High...

    • Re:Dead or Alive (Score:3, Informative)

      by Black Hitler ( 687112 )

      It's Team Ninja's baby, and with such great gameplay achievements such as 'Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball' to emphasise the point, it's easy to see why the DoA series gets criticised.

      The funny thing about DOAXBV is that the creator actually admitted [bellsouthpwp.net] the gameplay was so simplistic you could play it with one hand. His explanation was that he wanted it to be easy enough for his 5-year-old daughter. Uh huh.

    • A big reason it is criticised and derided so much is because some Westerners, especially Americans, cannot reasonably handle anything above mild sexuality in their videogames. Just basic everyday ethnocentrism, like people complaining that the relationship-sim DOAXBV doesn't feature deep enough gameplay (which is, incidentally, worlds deeper than most similar games). It is like complaining that Super Mario Bros. doesn't adequetely simulate real plumbing techniques - you missed the point of the game, and its

  • To butcher Einstein (Score:5, Insightful)

    by etymxris ( 121288 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:21AM (#7936184)
    Everything should be as simple as possible, but no more. How simple you can make a game really depends on the type of game. And whether you enjoy the complexity of the game really should be a reflection of the genres you enjoy. Do you like to spend your time immersed in the fantasy realm of an RPG, or do you just like to kick back every now and then for a short FPS session?

    And some things are obvious. Should you have separate buttons for opening a door, opening a chest, and pressing a lever, or should you have one "do stuff" button? In this case, the answer is "No" of course.
    • That reminds me of old console RPGs where you had to open an action menu to select talk, search, pick up, open, etc. God that sucked. I think Square were the first ones to replace that goddamn action menu with a do-it-all button. Also, the game Earthbound had, strangely, both an action menu button and a do-it-all button (well, it wasn't the only strange thing in this game, heh).
    • And some things are obvious. Should you have separate buttons for opening a door, opening a chest, and pressing a lever, or should you have one "do stuff" button? In this case, the answer is "No" of course.

      You think?

      I'd've said that the answer is "yes" ...

  • "Simple Gameplay" Games (Score:3, Interesting)

    by The-Bus ( 138060 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:25AM (#7936203)
    (Personal Favorites)

    Both modern and old:

    Super Mario Bros.
    Excitebike
    Marble Madness
    Pole Position
    Gradius
    Pokemon Stadium 2 (mini-games)
    Fuzion Frenzy (most underrated multi-player game on Xbox - try the Sumo minigame which uses only a joystick)

    Those are based on simple controls... Others, like the SSX series, are easy to pick up, but take months to master. I think that's the true test of a game. Can a newbie enjoy it and can it continue to challenge you?

    • Others, like the SSX series, are easy to pick up, but take months to master. I think that's the true test of a game

      That my friend, is why Super Mario Brothers 3 is the greatest video game ever. It was easy to pick up. It was fun. It was easy. And you could really master it. Hell, remember that video that came out like 2 months ago of someone beating it in 11 minutes? Everybody watched that and was amazed at what was happening (yes, I know it's fake. For those of you who didn't know that, run a translator th

      • "Fake" isn't the right word. No one claimed it was in a row, and he did still beat the game in 11 minutes. Nothing was speed up, all he did was piece together the 'best of' runs, which is the exact same thing done in any other speedrun of a game( see quake done quick).
        • No. He played it at 1/30th speed with tons of quicksaves. It was not like quake done quick, which was also fake. A real speed movie is played from start to finish at normal speed on a real console (see the metroid speed runs).
      • I sucked at all of the Super Mario games. I mean really sucked. And, to be honest, I never really got better.

        In Super Mario Brothers, I was perpetually falling down the little one-block-wide holes in an otherwise relatively safe screen. In SMB2, selecting Luigi was an automatic game over for me, as I could never control his extra-high jumps (which, for me, would always end with a magnetic attraction toward a one-block-wide hole on the screen). SMB3, I was still falling down holes, but I also could neve
    • So true. The Mario Bros. games were a perfect simplicity vs. challenging example. When I first received my NES, I received a bunch of games with it, one of which was the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt combo cartridge. It took me a couple of months to get past world 1-2 (I was 6 or 7 at the time), but it was challenging and fun, even though it did frustrate me that I kept dying.

      Marble Madness was just plain fun. I could never find anyone that wanted to play against me though. I'd love to find that for the

    • Man, when that "backwards" level came up on Marble Madness my mind was blown. I think I only got up to the level past that one, maybe one more or something? I forget. I wish I could play that game again. The music's bizarre and good too.
    • Super Smash Brothers on N64. A and B to hit, C buttons to jump, and joystick to move. Took me two days to master. Long live Kirby!

  • Best one button game? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by heldlikesound ( 132717 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:42AM (#7936243) Homepage
    Anyone else think of a good one button game? My all time favorite is SFCave (weird japenese name) it runs on the Palm platform, although the concept has be ripped off for Flash games and the like.

    Basically the concept is that you are in a little ship always moving forward and down, pushing "the button" makes you go up, now try not to hit the ceiling or floor. REALLY fun game.
    • Phrozenbubble or whatever it's a derivative of. They used to have a machine at a cinema I went to that played this (it was a NG machine, so it had several games). Can't tell you how many quaters I wasted on that game. Tetris, classic. Pacman, and that didn't even have a button!
    • "Anyone else think of a good one button game?"

      Ballblazers. Useta play it on the old Atari 800xl. (I assume there was a C64 version as well..) I should mention, though, that the real fun in the game came from playing it multiplayer.

      So what was it about? Sorta like a cross between T-Mek and air hockey. Each player had a vechicle they drove around a map that wasn't much different than a chess board. There were goals on either end that moved from left to right. Down/Up = back and forth, left/right =
    • One-button? I prefer no-button myself. Pac-Man (actually "Ms." was my favorite) and Robotron: 2084 were particular favorites way back in "the day."
    • Any Missile Command game will keep me busy for a while, actually.
    • I did a poor job of explaining the game, there is one button and that's IT, no control stick. you are always going forward and always going down, so you change your lift by pressing the one button, a true one button game. Pac Mac is more a 4 "button" game as you can go forward, back, left, right...
    • What you're describing sounds very similar to this [liquidcode.org], which I agree is a great example of a game with LITERALLY only one button (not even a d-pad!) providing a great deal of entertainment. (Beat 1629.)
    • Mario Party has some good ones.

      I've made some games you might be interested in ...
      game button arcade [kisrael.com], reasonably playable games that take place ENTIRELY in a single normal HTML grey pushbutton (via javascript)...the only input is the button, and the only output is, in effect, the caption on the button, but I still came up with some half decent action games.
    • Oh, also, I'm making a game for the 2600 called "JoustPong" which is "Pong with a Flap button"...a bit like SF-cave in that regard, using "going against gravity" as a way of making a minimal-control, decent-movement-complexity game.

      The page for the atari 2600 version is here [alienbill.com], or you can check out an earlier java version [alienbill.com].

  • What was the point of video games again? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by yeoua ( 86835 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:44AM (#7936244)
    Why do we play video games?

    For fun.

    It's a pretty obvious answer. And struggling through pages of manual text to get to the point of being able to proficiently play a game may not be considered fun to some people (though some PnP players may disagree... I also enjoy going through manuals sometimes). If there is a high learning curve, it just is a barrier to the real point of the game, fun.

    On a similar note, there are just some people who do not get the point of RPG's and won't try them, probably because they won't try to learn the interface and the rules behind it and would rather play an fps which takes no time to learn (in most cases).

    • Personally, I've judged a game's "fun factor" as how frustrated I get with a game. I play games to escape from the normal every day frustration of work. The last thing I want to do when I'm supposed to be having fun is getting more frustrated or have to study some manual to figure out how to do something.

      I pass on high learning curve games, but don't play FPS games(I'm susceptible to FPS-induced vertigo). I just want to dive in and escape for an hour or so.

      Been playing a lot of old games on MAME late

    • Sometimes there is a whole lot of fun in digging deep, seeing the amazing varities of play and using that "research" to explore and have a blast within a game. Witness the Civ series.

      Othertimes, you dig and you dig and as much as you want the super-deep game to be fun, it just never really materializes. Witness MOO3.

      The authors are right though. We shouldn't say simplie is bad. Likewise, we shouldn't say complex is bad. Games need to evaluated for how fun they are. If they are meant to be complex and do t
      • Based on what they re meant to be. He really liked Tomb Raider because it was fun, there were nice breasts and life was good. The movie did what it was supposed to well. He also really likes the recent film Monster, which has a very low hotness factor, but is deep, moving and has excellent acting. While not "fun", it does what it's meant to do very well.

        ...which points to my only disagreement with the posts in this thread. "Fun" is a nearly meaningless word when you really begin to question what constitu

        • Dead on. I should have replaced "fun" in my what's important for video games with something more akin to "rewarding". When one thinks back to playing Doom 2 as a youth, it wasn't fun as much as it was scary, intense and challenging. "Fun" games don't get much better when you play them in the dark.

          My personal tastes tend to be away from "fun" games as often as not. However, when I had to tell someone why I liked the most recent Zelda, I stuggled a bit before describing it as "just a joy to play." That's a f
          • Thank you Derkec; I've posted along these lines repeatedly, and you're the first to bother replying at all. It's such a joy to know someone else in the world (besides my small band of fellow academic game theorists, and not even all of them) take games seriously. Now, if only most games took us more seriously...
            • You're welcome :). I tend to reply to those who reply to my comments out of courtesy if nothing else. I figure that's why they made the feature that lets you check if anyone replied to you.

              I hadn't thought very much about funness of games in the past, never for more than a minute or so while doing something else. However, reading your comment was a "well duh" moment for me. It all came together a bit. Looking at your website url, I'm fairly confident you think more seriously about games than I do.

              Regardin

  • Simplify, simplify... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by shadowcabbit ( 466253 ) * <cx AT thefurryone DOT net> on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:54AM (#7936267) Journal
    It's not just the gameplay that needs to be simplified, it's the control schemes more than anything. Let's take a look at a couple recent games-- Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, and Sonic Battle. Same platform (GBA), same controller (obviously), but different genres. M&L is an RPG, known for having very simple controls (d-pad for menus, OK, and Cancel), but M&L's controls seem needlessly complex and somewhat overdone. Does the game really need separate buttons for Mario and Luigi each? In battle, it's a neat concept, but outside of battle it's really irritating.

    Contrast that to Sonic Battle, a fighting game. Fighters are known for overly complex combo moves and unforgiving command sequences, but SB manages to avoid all of this. One button for attack, one for defense, one for jumping, and one for a super move. Much easier to pick up and play than, say, Mortal Kombat Eleventy-Billion.

    I spent WAY too much time last night playing Enigma, a game that's included in the most recent Knoppix distro (+1 Linux Karma Whoring). Simple game-- use the mouse to control a marble, or several marbles. Very easy to learn and frustrating as hell (in a good way).

    You can have a simple game, or a simple control scheme, or both. If you have a complex game, it might necessitate complex controls, but that doesn't mean the manual PDF must be larger than the size of the actual game.
    • Let's take a look at a couple recent games-- Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga, and Sonic Battle. Same platform (GBA), same controller (obviously), but different genres. M&L is an RPG, known for having very simple controls (d-pad for menus, OK, and Cancel), but M&L's controls seem needlessly complex and somewhat overdone. Does the game really need separate buttons for Mario and Luigi each? In battle, it's a neat concept, but outside of battle it's really irritating.

      Having Played Mario&Luigi:
      • I think perhaps he was complaining about the incessant need to do pair jumps by switching primary characters (how many places has lift/tornado/lift/tornado alternations... that's not a puzzle, that's just gratuitous).

  • Deus Ex vs Deus Ex: Invisible War (Score:4, Insightful)

    by balthan ( 130165 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @03:36AM (#7936375)
    On the other hand, simplification doesn't always lead to a more fun game, either. Ion Storm took Deux Ex, a game greatly praised by gamers, got rid of all the complex parts and made Invisible War. What happened, though, is they got rid of most of the parts that made the first game so good. IW is nowhere near as good as the first game, and the lack of complexity has a lot to do with it.

    "When we started working on Invisible War, we targeted the console from day one. This time it wasn't an afterthought. Every decision we made along the way considered that we would be running on a console. And I think you'll notice the difference." -- Matt Baer, Ion Storm
    • "On the other hand, simplification doesn't always lead to a more fun game, either. Ion Storm took Deux Ex, a game greatly praised by gamers, got rid of all the complex parts and made Invisible War. "

      Well, hold on. The game was a sequel, right? *anything* missing from the first game would be cause for bitching. In other words, if Invisible War were developed by a different company, and not as a sequel, the simplification could have been just fine. (Note: Never played the game so I don't know if it's a
      • My review of DX:IW [gamesarefun.com]. I compare the two games throuought the review for people who haven't ever played the first (which you can find, if you can find it, for $10 brand new for the PC).

        DX:IW is in no way a bad game, but, it certainly isn't as good as its predecessor.

        The first Deus Ex, in case you didn't know, had a lot more RPG elements in it, as well as being a FPS game. Experience points, skill building systems, etc., all made Deus Ex much more than a simple FPS game. If you ever played System Shock 2

        • I would agree that Invisible War isn't nearly as good as Deus Ex. It seems like they concentrated on stuff like "real world physics" and lighting effects that are cool for about 5 seconds, but they got rid of the depth of play.

          One important point is that even though the original game had a lot of depth, it was not complicated to learn. Also, the game "flowed" really well. You never felt like you were "finishing a level", you felt like you were exploring the world. Invisible War feels a lot more like a
    • Yeah, but some people love IW. Some people say it's miles ahead of the original!

      Personally, I do find that hard to believe, though my geForce4 MX keeps me from even playing it. Still, there are people who loved the downshift in complexity.
    • I disagree completely. The game has problems, but not due to simplification. Everything they took out from DX1 was a correct decision in my opinion. However, the game needed about 3 or 4 months more work to smooth out all the bugs/glitches/performance issues and a little tweaking in general. Hopefully additional patches will fix more problems.

  • As opposed to? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by __aatgod8309 ( 598427 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @03:47AM (#7936412)
    I almost exclusively buy games second-hand, which means i sometimes don't get a manual. One test of game design is whether a game is playable sans manual - lets mention Master of Orion 3 here...

    I think games that are 'intuitive' and easy to pick and just play are getting thin on the ground on the pc, as it's easier just use lots of keys or some fancy mouse-driven system. I'm not saying that the consoles are neccesarily better due to their comparitive lack of control options, but that lack makes an intelligent system more of a necessity.

    The trend (on the pc) to make the same games (FPS/RTS) and then just try to differentiate on minor details doesn't help much.
    • Excellent point about manuals. If you're going to make a game that _needs_ some sort of reference, put it in game, or at least stick it in a PDF on the CD. It's really too bad about MOO3, because I absolutely loved MOO and MOO2. The interface was just awful and unusable.
      • If you're going to make a game that _needs_ some sort of reference, put it in game, or at least stick it in a PDF on the CD.

        A PDF? Dear God No. I may be in the minority here, but I -like- complicated games. All the Jane's simulations, Falcon 4.0, that sort of thing. (Whether or not this makes me a nutjob is beyond the scope of this post.) If your game is THAT complex and you're going the no-ingame-tutorial route, you -need- to be including a printed manual, preferably ring-bound. Don't make me print

    • Not to mention the number of kids I know who don't read the manual anyway. Just got back from visiting my cousin's, playing some sort of game, and they had no clue what I was doing when I pulled the manual out after I lost. (Some Mario 4 player fighting game, I never looked at the title)

      Then again after reading the manual I know why they didn't bother. It might have had everything in there that I needed to know, but I couldn't understand it, and I always tested in the 99% for reading. (writing on the

  • Pong. Move paddle left, or right, try to line up paddle with moving ball coming towards it. Can't possibly get simpler then that, can it? lol.

    • Re:The Simplest Game, Ever (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 10, 2004 @04:21AM (#7936516)
      I don't know about that...

      When I played Final Fantasy X, I didn't touch the controller for *days*. (Endless Cutscenes)

    • "Pong. Move paddle left, or right, try to line up paddle with moving ball coming towards it. Can't possibly get simpler then that, can it? lol. "

      Actually, yes it can. I had a game for my old Vic-20 that only had one button to play. There was an array of missiles at the bottom of the screen. Pressing the space bar fired them sequentially. [Press]- Missile 1 goes up. [Press]- Missile 2 goes up. [Press]- Missile 3 goes up. There is some traffic at the top of the screen. I think it was enemy airplanes,
    • JoustPong [alienbill.com] controls more simply....press button to flap and move your paddle/player into position, against gravity. (I'm also trying a port for the atari 2600 [alienbill.com].

      Trickier to control than pong, but in some ways simpler.

  • Simplification in games (Score:4, Interesting)

    by neostorm ( 462848 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @04:19AM (#7936506)
    Games will generally always benefit from a more simplified control scheme. The easier it is for a player to jump into a work and play, the more potential fun and wider potential audience.

    It doesn't always end up that way, which is an interesting loophole to that rule. I carried the torch for the "simpler=better" argument until I played R.A.D. (Robotic Alchemic Drive), which places you as the pilot to a giant robot in a very Japanese style fighting/adventure game. The premise of this game is like many other 3D robot games, with their control scheme being a large exception. The game treats the interface as thought the player is controlling a giant remote control toy, using L&R 1&2 for control of the legs (forward and back) and the analog sticks for control of the arms (left and right punches). Turning a standard 3D action titles' controls upside down provided me with the most entertaining experience in years. Half of the games challenge was learning to effectively control your larger, onscreen avatar, and it was a blast. Just for argument, there was an "easy" option for the game that reverted the controls to a simplified control pad = direction of the robot, etc. control system. However this took absolutely all the fun out of playing the game when used, because the main draw to the game was the experience of surmounting the more immediately challenge: that of your own motor skills.

    So that just goes to show that in some cases simplicity is better, but it doesn't always apply. If the controls in R.A.D. weren't as logically placed, or as responsive, it may have turned out to be an ugly experience. In the instance of Deus Ex 2, this title is just another addition to a long line of games in one particular genre. A genre that has built upon its series' standards for many generations and players have come to expect certain things. The attempt to simplify this title was not so directly relevant to gameplay as the previous example, and instead was receive poorly due to expectations of those standards by series' fans.
    (I think this is akin to an American driving a stick-shift in the US for most of his life, and then buying a new car only to find it's an automatic whose steering wheel is on the right-hand side. It may essentially be a much "simpler" control scheme, but our American driver has come to expect the standard he was raised on, and would probably reject it.)

    I think the moral here is to not pigeonhole your designs, and experimentation is still a viable strategy in this medium.
  • Is a perfect example of control gone bad. The whole feel is so wrong its not funny. It seems as though a game that is so similar to Grand Theft Auto would try to make the control similar feeling, it seems as though they went out of there way to make sure the controls were made to be as far away from GTA as they could get, and I'm not even going to get started on the inability to control your character, let alone drive, with the d-pad.

    You play the cop brought from suspension back onto L.A.s Elite Operatio
  • At first, video games were simple and limited not just because of a lack of design abilities, but because of technical limits. We all know that, but we don't necessarily look at the other side of the story...

    As the barriers to creating video games with more technical sophistication went away, games naturally moved in the direction of becoming sophisticated themselves, because that's generally agreed to be the best way to eke out every last drop of play value for your development time. And so features like

  • It's all relative (Score:2, Interesting)

    by badfrog ( 45310 )
    A simple game can still be loads of fun. I bought a GBA for the sole purpose of playing WarioWare on planes, and it worked great!
    Then, I became addicted to the 'old' games being released, like Super Mario World, which I had already beat every world on my SNES back in 1994. However, it had been so long, that I couldn't even remember how to get to some of the secrets, and I had to resort to my GF sitting next to me. "Hey, do you remember how to beat this Ghost House?"

    Anyway, the ultimate in simple games wa

  • Bishi Bashi Special [reviewindex.co.uk] and Rocky Hopper [intensegames.com] (I could only find a review of Rocky Hopper 2, but it's pretty much the same thing). Excellent fun when you got a room full of drunken friends.

  • Simpler is often better (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Saiai Hakutyoutani ( 599875 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @10:02AM (#7937186)
    I think the best games are those that have an original CONCEPT, though they're not necessarily better because they're simple.

    The most enjoyable games I've encountered so far are Pong, bzflag and Weichi/Igo/Baduk (A Chinese board game), and all three are games with relatively simple rules, but a very original concept. Tetris wasn't bad either, and follows the same pattern. The only game of these four to actually have anything that resembles an engine is bzflag, and it's a simple one at that.

    A notable thing about Igo is that with its simple rules set and 19x19 board, it's actually more complex than modern games, and even more complex than chess. So sometimes less is more.

  • What about middle ground? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Masami Eiri ( 617825 ) <brain.wavNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Saturday January 10, 2004 @11:42AM (#7937510) Journal
    Some games are simple in control, but need some thought to utilize said controls.

    Prince of Persia: Sands of Time has a pretty simple control system, but it can be challenging in learning how to use the Prince's abilities effectively. When there's 4 big sand creatures with swords as big as the Prince, you need to pull off some fancy stuff :D

  • I think they are missing something (Score:4, Insightful)

    by newsdee ( 629448 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:03PM (#7938277) Homepage Journal
    I don't buy the fact that simpler games means better. They may be fun and have a lot of "twitch factor", but after some time you get tired of them. I think rather that games should only *start* simply. A lot of games (especially on PC) throw you with full control of the interface and drive you through a tutorial so that you can learn how it all works. Sure, its cool to have a lot of options, but it takes a lot of fun of discovery away.

    Compare with, for instance, Super Metroid. You can do some basic stuff (run around, shoot some monsters) with the D-pad and one button, but to finish the game, you need to learn the rest of the commands. However, you learn them slowly as needed... I noticed that this "simple-to-harder" gameplay seems to be a design choice in a lot of big N games.
    • One of the reasons that Super Metroid is still my favorite game is because of precisely this: anyone can pick up the controller and get all the way through the game with nothing more than walking, shooting, jumping, and running.

      But the more advanced players will learn how to do the wall kick and boost jumps, enabling them to find new areas and shortcuts and get through the game faster. So even after beating it once, there's still tons of room for improvement.

      Basic control is both easy and adequate to f

  • Two For The Price of One (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Black Mage Balthazar ( 708812 ) on Saturday January 10, 2004 @02:20PM (#7938403)
    Personally, I like it when games are easy to pick up, but difficult to master.

    My prime example is Soul Calibur II. Any newb can pick up this game and beat the computer with some button-mashing finesse. They might have trouble against an experienced player, but if two friends pick up a rental and proceed to smash each other with no thought as to what the buttons do, it can still end up being lots of fun.

    However, each character has at least 100-150 moves, many have multiple stances, and more characters are unlocked as you play. This leaves room for a great deal of time spent mastering your character, developing combos, etc.

    I think it is very important for a game to be both accessible to the casual gamer, as well as the hardcore, and this game does it well.
  • It's like food really.

    Some foods are complex, composed of multiple layers of delicate pastry. Others are very simple like a bowl of chicken soup. What the whole thing is about though, is how does it taste?

    A good game is a good game. Length, complexity, graphics, sound, none of these things by themselves make a great game, and no single ratio will give you the perfect game either. It's all about if the game is good, or crap.

    It doesn't mean that we can then go about selecting prototypes in an effort to def
  • Be sure to try out the game "Chopper" for OS X. Anyway, it's damn fun (and pretty) --- you can download it here http://www.majicjungle.co.nz/chopper.html
  • Didn't those guys publish an article insulting people that play older, simpler games a little while back? ;P

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