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Portables (Games) Entertainment Games

Clock Watching For Improved Gameplay? 50

Posted by simoniker from the brian-stimpson-suitably-impressed dept.
Thanks to GamerDad for their editorial discussing the use of a PC/console's internal clock to drive gameplay. The article starts by looking at GBA title Boktai, which "...knows what the time of day is and adjusts the onscreen graphics and gameplay to coordinate with the conditions", and also applauds "...a number of notable games that have used the internal clock in a console to either drive gameplay or allow for timed release of features", referencing Nintendo's Animal Crossing in particular. But the author also advocates simpler time-based rewards, as used in titles like Ikaruga: "Instead of having all the goodies that come with repeated play be unlocked through tasks, how about releasing some of those things dependent on how many hours you spend playing a game?"
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Clock Watching For Improved Gameplay? More

Clock Watching For Improved Gameplay?

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  • Tamagotchi's (Score:3, Interesting)

    by glassesmonkey ( 684291 ) * on Saturday October 11, 2003 @08:10AM (#7189228) Homepage Journal
    Isn't this the same as the Tamagotchi [virtualpet.com] electronic pets that you have to feed at certain times and sleeps based on internal clock. Also those robotic pets (AIBO, etc) that have similar behaviors.
  • I remember I used to play Wing Commander on my 386DX 20MHz, but when I upgraded to a 486DX 50MHz the game sped up to the state it was unplayable as it didn't use the clock to set tempo.

    Clocks are good.

  • This reminds me of a few games that have used the system clock in ingenious ways.

    In the Curse of Monkey Island On the first Island there is a clock tower that displays the same time as your system clock and if you click on it Threepwood would say the time to you (the time is ... at the beep, BEEP)

    Dungeon Keeper 2 would tell you a funny one liner (can't remember what exactly) if you were playing the game in the early hours of the morning, somewhere around 3am I beleive.

    Warcraft 2 would have christmas li
    • In the Curse of Monkey Island On the first Island there is a clock tower that displays the same time as your system clock and if you click on it Threepwood would say the time to you (the time is ... at the beep, BEEP)

      hmmm i just fired it up in SkummVM, and it shows 10:00 (for the record it's now 8:00 PM) and clicking on it got "TEN O'CLOCK", then "STILL TEN O'CLOCK", and lastly "SEEMS LIKE IT'S ALWAYS TEN O'CLOCK ON THIS ISLAND." could be the SkummVM, or you could be remembering wrong (was it a differen

  • Nethack of course (Score:3, Informative)

    by Przepla ( 637674 ) on Saturday October 11, 2003 @08:26AM (#7189281)
    Nethack [nethack.org] used such features [steelypips.org] for a years. Lycantrophy happens often at nights, undeads are stronger around midnights, Friday the 13th, really brings bad luck, and all dogs-alike creatures reacts to phase of the moon.
  • God, I'm playing always in the night... I would have darkness everywhere :)
    Hubert
  • How about just making the games fun to play so you don't need unlockable content to entice people to play more?

    If the game is fun enough, people will want to play it for the game, not because they're obsessive/compulsive about "finishing" it.
    • Well I'd claim that you are at fault.

      The Hunt for features is by most gamers (that I know anyway) seen as a fun thing, and something to brag about to others that play the game; for example the goal to reach the AX levels in F-ZERO without a AX-Arcade version of the game will take a lot of my time, and I'll respect anyone that makes it.

      So for me, a really good games have a extra, if not more, challenge setting once you beat it the first time; one reason is that I must always the hardest first, forcing

  • Actually, there are several games that do reward players for the more hours put into a game. The one off the top of my head is Project Gotham Racing and its prescursor Metropolis Street Racing. Those games are so damn hard that my first impression of the time-based rewards were that they were pity awards ("Ahhh poor player has only unlocked one car in TEN hours of play, here's a lame-ass car for your troubles). The more recent Otogi seemingly does the same thing.

    And don't forget Seaman for the DC, which
    • heh - the same with IKARUGA

      I guess the writer missed the fact that you can get every feature in Ikaruga locked up after 20 minutes or so - no worries at all, just beat the game on normal without 2 lives not using a continue all the way through.

      but to be nice they hand you the stuff after hours played as well.

    • Re:Hours Played (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Jimmy_Chi ( 635947 )
      On a related side note: Metropolis Street Racing was the first game I played that also used the internal clock to adjust gameplay. When you first play the game, you choose your time zone, and from then on that's the time in the game.

      The kicker was that the different cities were in different time zones. So if you lived in NY and its (realtime) noon, but were racing in Japan at the moment, it'd be (gametime) nighttime where you're racing because of the time zone difference. If you were racing on NY thoug
      • I loved that about MSR too. You know, I've always wondered why we don't see this more, especially in sports games.

        What with always-on net connections like XBL, is why not pull the exact weather for the stadium's zipcode?
    • Actually, there are several games that do reward players for the more hours put into a game.

      SoulBlade kept a total time played count, and would unlock the boss character if you played it long enough.
      It was probably easier to just beat the game without any continues, though.

  • Basing events and unlocking of goodies around the system clock is cool, but if game consoles are going to be network-connected, then I want a game that can mirror local weather conditions.

    For example, if I'm playing the latest Final Fantasy during the winter, it'd be cool to have flurries, or snowstorms, or blizzards if that's what's going on outside. Or hot humid days that slow down the characters during the summer.

    • flight simulator 2004 does this, its pretty cool.

      I'm not so sure about Final Fantasies, which are set in another universe, but it would be cool to have real-world games take advantage of this when appopriate.

      It would be a neat side feature, to say, Madden Football games, if when you played a Buffalo-Miami game and it was pouring in Miami in real life, it was also raining in game.
      • Yeah bit FS you can switch it OFF. Else it would suck if you live say in holland. 99% grey and overcast. Wheee. Where as people in california would never ever see a single cloud. Bastards.
      • Fair enough. But suppose you were playing GTA6 while a hurricane was howling its way past Miami. Wouldn't it be cool if the game's weather mirrored real conditions? After all, you could probably pull a righteous heist during the storm. And if the hurricane actually tore through Miami and wreaked havoc? Looting a go go, baby!
      • Actually, I remember tons of prerelease paperwork for NFL Fever 2003 (I think) for the XBox that claimed exactly that - if you had your XBox set up on XBox Live, you would get actual weather for the games you were playing. They were trying to hype up the reality angle pretty heavy. Too bad when the game came out, that "feature" got ignored...
    • it'd be cool to have flurries, or snowstorms, or blizzards if that's what's going on outside. Or hot humid days that slow down the characters during the summer.

      ...or not being able to play Winter Games at all, because it's summer, etc.

      • Fair enough. But if $GAME_DEV is capable of mirroring real-world weather conditions, it should be a trivial matter to include an option to disable weather emulation. Don't like it? You don't have to use it.

        Besides, how is your PS${WHATEVER} going to obtain weather data for emulation without a net connection?

        • Fair enough. But if $GAME_DEV is capable of mirroring real-world weather conditions, it should be a trivial matter to include an option to disable weather emulation.

          I was joking. I don't think anybody would do anything quite that extreme.

          However, I can imagine that the Japanese might actually do something like have the game runnable only at certain times of the day (and not be able to turn it off) in a Japan-only release. So, for instance, you'd have to play Silent Hill at night.

          Besides, how is your

    • Black & White does this.
      However, since time proceeds faster than normal, a snow storm that lasts all night in the real world can end up lasting months in the game.

      • Really? I didn't know that Molyneaux had thought of emulating weather. Since I only do console gaming, I never played Black & White. I heard it was somewhat overrated, though.

        I suspect that Iron Maiden's new album, Dance of Death will end up badly underrated. Up the Irons!

  • Let's not forget the Pokemon games with the internal timer. It was really cool that catching some pokemon forced you to play at night. Also, there's Smash Bros Melee, which requires a certain number of matches / hours played to unlock certain secrets.

    However, this can also be a pain in the ass. It took me forever to do certain things in Animal Crossing because I ended up having time to play only at night. I missed a lot of great events. I set the clock forward in another game and then somehow only had
  • Nethack [nethack.org] has been doing that since the beginning. You never want to play on Friday the 13th....
  • Many Nintendo games make use of the clock in interesting ways, but even better are the ones that provide Easter Eggs on holidays (which is great, if they pick Christmas, as most people find out about those ones ;)). But it's not the only platform. The .HACK// games on the PS2, for instance, reward you new sounds and images depending on the number of hours you've played your current saved game.
  • "Pro Pinball: Timeshock" had a special mode which would be enabled if you were in the middle of a game when the stroke of midnight passed. It put about 10 balls on the table, with about two minutes of ball saver, and did other things turn all the bumpers up to maximum strength. It was worth almost no points at all, but a lot of fun!
    • Who Dunnit is a pinball machine that also has a "Midnight Madness" mode activated at midnight. This mode however was worth quite a bit of points, and always pissed off the other players if you hit it during a pinball league game.

      Who Dunnit Rulesheet [pinball.org]

  • During the wee hours of the morning, I started YDJK up to hear the normal intro replaced with "aaaand welcome! to the insominiac edition of you don't know jack!"

    I'm pretty sure it had knowledge of other holidays too, I think it had a few special questions for columbus day and stuff. Have to dig out the CDs and find out.

    • Yep, it recognizes Bastille Day, Halloween, Christmas, and even Super Bowl Sunday. Play one of the episodic versions on Super Bowl Sunday and you get a football/sports episode. :)

      And of course it also does the other cool stuff, like responding differently whether you buzz in constantly or never buzz in, how often you answer incorrectly, and even referencing your earlier stupid, wrong answers.

      Jellyvision has a whole manifesto and philosophy about making games that appear to interact in such ways. They

  • I'm a night guy, and because of that this game really cracked me up. I was up playing one night and it first told me that it was the witching hour and that curses were half-price. Finally, about 3 AM a voice announced "your nocturnal prowess has earned you a special gaming tip: GO TO BED". Needless to say, I had a little laugh and took the hint.
  • If you play on the one of the designer's birthdays, Raptor: Call of the Shadows [3drealms.com] will give you a silly song for the beginning instead of the usual Apogee ditty.
    • Rise of the Triad did something similar -- if you played the game on certain holidays, the group picture showing the five heroes would be altered in some way (i.e. one of the characters would be wearing a sombrero on Cinco de Mayo, a witch's hat on Halloween, etc.). Also if you played on Christmas the music on the first level was replaced with a bouncy Christmas tune.
  • "Instead of having all the goodies that come with repeated play be unlocked through tasks, how about releasing some of those things dependent on how many hours you spend playing a game?"

    Whee! Time released gaming! Another slashdot discovery! Gosh, what would we ever do without you people!? [xbox.com]

    And that's only one. Cripes, it's like we missed the last 5 years of gaming around here or something...

  • This would be a fine feature if I could "set the time" in game to be on a different schedule from real life. The problem arises when the user has other more important obligations, such as school...that would prevent them from doing key things in the game. Or maybe they would miss school to do it, also a bad thing. God, I remember back when people would be paid to "babysit" Tamagotchi's......god what a dull job that must have been.

    • I don't think it would have been dull at all. However much you get paid for the one pet, it isn't hard, so why not do as dogwalkers do? Two, or three, or ten? BEEP BEEP BEEP!

      By the end of the week you'll be jumping out of your skin everytime someone's watch goes off.

  • Think about it, when do you usually play games? Your average gamer is nocturnal. I am posting this at two in the morning, and this is when I normally go to sleep (at least when I don't have morning commitments).
    • (at least when I don't have morning commitments)

      The rest of us call those jobs.

    • One of the Dreamcast racing games...MSR, I think...looked at the hardware clock to set the lighting conditions, but the races were set in various locations around the world. What that meant in-game was that it would set the lighting to reflect the time of day in the local time zone--Japan, England, whatever else--relative to you. So you don't necessarily always have night races if the race location is sufficiently far ahead/behind your zulu.
  • I think a lot of Nintendo games do this. Some of which have already been mentioned. Star Wars: Rogue Leader [lucasarts.com] had different missions based on what time of day you played. Some missions would be played a night with different ships. You could also take the training level on Tatooine [lucasarts.com] at four different times; morning, day, dusk and night. If you completed all four, you were awarded with a special ship to fly in other missions.

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