design

Game Design Talk – BlazBlue: Continuum Shift’s Tutorial Mode

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Over the weekend, I thought a bit more about whether or not to buy BlazBlue: Continuum Shift. After more deliberation and talking about it with my brother, I totally caved and picked it up. I did get it at way less than retail price though. I gathered up a bunch of the free games I got during my Blockbuster raids that I had no intention of playing and traded those in. On top of that, my brother agreed to pay for half of the remaining cost. Sweet!

Unlike 99% of the games we’ve ever played, we started out our experience by jumping into tutorial mode. Knowing the difficulties we had with the first game and hearing that Continuum Shift supposedly has an awesome tutorial mode, it made sense to start at ground level rather than button mash and wonder why this game doesn’t play more like Street Fighter. If you’ve had any reservations about learning BlazBlue, then I have (mostly) good news for you.
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Impressions on Limbo

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There seems to be a lot of artsy/high-concept games hitting  of late. Games like Braid, Flower, Echochrome and P.B. Winterbottom have really pushed the boundaries of what a game can look and play like. I have nothing but respect for those developers who are actively trying to move the medium forward. However, none of these games have personally appealed to me. I’d much rather watch these games for a few minutes than actually play them, mostly because the gameplay elements don’t appeal to me.

Limbo was just released on XBOX Live Arcade and is the latest in artsy-high concept games. The black-and-white aesthetic is amazing and is matched by equally awesome atmospheric sound. But will it turn me away with gameplay that doesn’t appeal to me? I tried the demo and I’m here to relay my thoughts to you.

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The Death of 1 vs. 100 on XBOX Live

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Nine months after 1 vs. 100 launched on XBOX Live, Microsoft announced earlier this week that the game would not return for a third season. While I did not play the game that often myself (which sort of makes me part of the problem), I thought that the game was very forward-thinking in its execution and quite fun to play. I’m sad to see it go.

Why did this happen? I don’t have any insider information on the situation, so anything I’m about to say is strictly speculation. But based on the information that’s publicly available and my understanding of games and business, I’m going to try and write my way through what I think happened.

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Game Design Talk: Gap It Up

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I’m still playing (and for the most part) enjoying Skate, which I’m playing at a very leisurely pace. While it’s a lot of fun to just cruise around the world and bust tricks, there are some very awkward design choices that can annoy the heck out of you when you play Skate. The inability to walk can be infuriating due to the way the world is designed. Bystanders always seem to get in the way of your objectives, which leaves you skating into them more than you would like. But I wanted to talk about one very specific case of poor game design that drove me nuts.

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de Blob Makes Me Think About Pacing

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I’m just over half way through de Blob and I’m still enjoying it. The gameplay mash-up of Katamari Damacy, Super Mario Galaxy and mercenaries mode in the Resident Evil series works really well and the developers at Blue Tongue have done a great job of polishing the details around that core experience to make the game a pleasure to play.

With the core game mechanics of de Blob, I would like to play this game in 20-30 minute chunks, with the ability to save mid-mission at any time. All things considered, I think this game works great in short bursts. If you want to speed run through it, you can beat each level in about 20-30 minutes. However, if you want to get a reasonable chunk of the levels done, your time per level will balloon to the point where it’s no longer a pick-up-and-play game.

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Game Design Talk: The Money Play

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The first time I remember finding a “money play” was in the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game for the Nintendo Entertainment System. After a few fights with Rocksteady, I figured out a cheap way to beat him without him ever touching me. If you’ve ever played this game, you probably figured this trick out, too. If you don’t, the image above shows how to do it. If you’re perched up on those boxes with Donatello and attack down, Rocksteady will just eat your attacks until he dies with no way to fight back. I was only six years old when I figured that out. Before I ever took the time to think about how video games worked, I had already figured out how to exploit the system.

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Call of Duty: World at War Pushes Me to the Brink

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Call of Duty: World at War was a game that, even after Modern Warfare 2 blew my mind, I had no interest in going back for. It had two major hurdles: it was a World War II shooter and it was made by Treyarch, whom I’ve been lead to believe made the “not-so-good” Call of Duty games.

Well, I decided to give World at War a shot when I saw it on sale at a price I couldn’t refuse. Did it earn a Purple Heart, or make me wish I was killed in action? After finishing the solo campaign, I would say a little from column A, a little from column B.

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Game Design Talk: Soul Calibur IV and the Apprentice

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Within minutes of first playing Soul Calibur IV, the game has already figured out how to infuriate me. I’m not even close to being a good player at any Soul Calibur game, but I did play enough Soul Calibur II to beat the game on normal difficulty with every character. Having been out of practice, I decided to get reacquainted with the systems by starting out in Arcade mode.

Up until the second last level, I was doing just fine. But it was then that I was pit against the Apprentice.

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Game Design Talk: Taking Control Out of My Hands

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(SPOILER ALERT: This post will discuss major plot points in Modern Warfare 2 and Prince of Persia)

The terrorist scene in Modern Warfare 2 has been dissected from every conceivable angle by now. Odds are if you’re a fan of reading niche video game blogs like mine, you’ve probably played this sequence and have already come to your own conclusions about it.

For the record, I hate it. I hate it for a number of reasons, but for the sake of this discussion, I’m only going to get into one reason why I dislike this scene. I don’t hate it for the fact that you get to shoot innocent people. I applaud Infinity Ward for leaving that option open. However, that entire scenario is fundamentally broken because of the people you can’t shoot.

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Game Design Talk: Burnout Paradise and the Feeling of Progression

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For a game that is fairly one-dimensional at its core, Burnout Paradise does a lot of little things to motivate players to keep playing. You will unlock new cars by either winning races or taking them out as they randomly drive by you on the road. The game keeps track of all the super jumps you complete, fences you smash and billboards you drive through. You can even race for the best time on basically every street in the game against your friends or against the world.

Those little things have kept me playing this game longer than I usually plan to. However, each of my sessions usually ends when I realize how far away I am to making progress in the most important measure of progression in the game: the licenses.

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