Avoiding Wasted Time With Prince of Persia

Zonk pointed out an interesting video presentation by Shamus Young on the importance of the new Prince of Persia, calling it the most innovative game of 2008. Young brings up the fact that many of today's games punish failure by wasting the player's time; being sent back to a check point, the beginning of a level, or sometimes even further. This cuts into the amount of time players have to enjoy the meat of the game — the current challenge they have to overcome. Unfortunately, as Young notes, modern controllers are designed for players who have been gaming since they were kids, and have evolved to be more complicated to operate than an automobile. The combination of these factors therefore limits or prevents the interest of new players; a problem Prince of Persia has addressed well through intuitive controls and the lack of punitive time sinks.

Re:Console vs. PC

[grumbel]

Other Console annoyances include:

Those really have little to do with consoles, PC games had plenty of all of them as well and the video in the last issue isn't even a real game, its a ROM hack meant to be nearly impossible to solve.

Re:If you can't fail, why bother playing?

[kreyg]

People keep complaining about this, and having finished the game, I think they should just shut up and play the game. Let's put this simply: "Can't die" == "Auto-restore to the last safe point" You can fail, exactly the same as you would have with a death mechanic. Over and over and over until you get it right. You just don't have to quicksave/quickload every time you screw it up, and get a nice animation instead. It's a minor semantic/presentation difference, and everyone bitches like it's the end of the world.

Done

[kurtis25]

Lego Star Wars has been doing this for years... Even my wife can play and beat the game.

Re:If you can't fail, why bother playing?

[slim]

I just started playing grand theft auto 4. The worst part of the game is exactly what the video describes -- when I get killed in a shootout, I have to go back to the start, waste a bunch of time getting across the city, only to risk more time wasting.

I enjoyed GTA4 for many hours, but exactly what you describe is the reason I put it away never to be played again. It was the strip club shootout:

while (motivated) {
      Spawn at spawn point
      Find mission trigger
      Find car
      4 minutes of driving (no challenge, no interest)
      2 minutes or less of shooting: get killed
}

But there's nothing novel about this. It's just a matter of sensible checkpoint placement. Here, GTA4 got it wrong.

Re:missing the point

[russotto]

The only winning move is not to play.

How about a nice game of chess?

But Dr. Falken, the same is true of chess, for at least one player.

Re:Predictability

[slim]

Can you imagine what a typical shooting game would be like if the enemies were moved around on the map every time?

It would be like Left 4 Dead, in which replaying a level is a joy instead of a chore.

Re:Predictability

[Jerf]

I can only think of one title in Video Game History that had both dynamic maps and interactive elements that were different every time: Larn. It's a 20 year old DOS title that used nothing but ASCII characters. But hey, it rocked since it was new every time.

I almost hate to do this to you, but... are you aware that that's actually just one member of the genre called "roguelikes"? My preference is for Angband, but you should also try Nethack. There are tens of other good ones. (IIRC, Angband is closer to Larn writ large, but Nethack has its own charms.)

I'm sorry for the hundreds of hours I just sucked out of your life. Perhaps you should just ignore this message and forget about it.