I work best when I’m allowed to go at my own pace. One of my tasks at the office is to sort all the outgoing mail. In order to accomplish this task I have, over a period of several months, developed an incredibly complex procedure which you would likely try to talk me out of if you ever saw it. I actually have the urge to describe this process in painstaking detail, which I would probably enjoy reading six months from now when I flipped back through my archives. I’ll spare you that, though, because it’s not really important to my point, which is this: I work best when I’m allowed to go at my own pace.
The tasks I accomplish best are the clearly-defined ones that are placed in front of me with a nice, relaxed time limit. I know when I go into work tonight I will have about 30 minutes of mail-sorting to do, and six hours in which to accomplish it. I can go in and do it right away, if I were so inclined. Or I could play DS for a few hours first. I could do it in ten minute spurts. I could do it, decide I didn’t like the way it was done, then undo it and redo it. The mailing machine does not care how much experimenting or screwing around I do, so long as the envelopes end up in little piles I can feed to it.
The tasks I’m not good at are the ones that ask me to improvise on a tight deadline. Sadly, another major aspect of my job is to take phone calls. Sometimes the person on the other end of the line will ask a question I have no idea how to answer — but I must answer them, for it is my job. Sometimes this ends up reflecting poorly on me, because I end up responding to a question about elevator safety or valet parking with an irrelevant haiku or perhaps simply the word “elephant”. This sort of thing makes me less valuable to my employer, but man, did you see how awesomesauce those piles of sorted mail look!?
More importantly, this mindset translates over into the subject of gaming, and more specifically into the subject of this new Metroid whatever thing. I haven’t played this game, and I probably won’t, but the over-generalized opinion of it seems to be that they have streamline the exploration sections and made the combat sections more engaging. Or, put another way, they’ve reduced the sections I can take at my own pace and built upon the ones where I need to improvise.
A buddy of mine has recently been playing some Batman: Arkham Asylum, which is a good yes-I’ve-played-that example of what Other M looks like in my head. Much of the game involves exploring the nooks and crannies of Arkham Island, and the game does a bang-up job of just getting out of your way while you go about this. The game doesn’t care if it takes you an hour to find the wall you need to tear down. It doesn’t care if you decide to solve Riddler’s puzzles by carefully examining the clues and thinking about them logically, or systematically taking a photo of every brick of the island from every possible angle.
I still haven’t beaten the final boss, though, because the final boss is just wave after wave of Joker goons. And I suck at killing Joker goons. Arkham Asylum has a very deep combat system involving combos and positioning and long-distance attacks. At any given moment during combat there are three or four things Batman can do, and if you’re the type of player who is good at always picking the right thing combat probably plays out like a very violent ballet.
You’ll note that all I’ve really done here is compressed the timeline. Do you have hours to discover the Next Right Thing? Or do you have a fraction of a second?
I’ve just recently finished replaying realMYST, which is a candidate for one of my favorite games ever. The basic gameplay concepts in realMYST are that you can stand places, and you can click things. Which are also the basic gameplay concepts in Doom or Halo or any other FPS you care to name. The goal in both games is to always stand in the right place and click the right thing to advance, though the “right thing” might be a button panel in realMYST but an alien monster in Halo.
The difference is the timeline. You can stare at a button panel in realMYST for as long as you want, trying to consider what it might mean. In Halo if you spend more than two consecutive seconds staring at an alien monster you will probably die.
That’s the direction modern games are heading, though. They’re being made “easier” in the sense that the player never has to think very hard about what broad goal they should be accomplishing next, but “harder” in the sense that there’s more emphasis in quickly accomplishing the dozens of little goals along the way.
I suppose what I’m getting at here is that I’m ready for another round of games that want me to Think More and Twitch Less. It bugs the piss out of me that everyone in the world has finished Arkham Asylum except me… probably as much as it bugs the piss out of you to ask a question about whether your insurance covers homeopathic treatment and receive a response of “Elephant.”
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I wouldn’t necessarily call Arkham Asylum’s combat system deep, it’s essentially the same as Assassin’s Creed’s combat system with fancier animations. Sure, you have to stun some enemies instead of parrying but that doesn’t add enough variety.
To be fair, I think everyone has that problem with Arkham Asylum – at some point the combat system gets too bullshit for them to advance. The combat system isn’t what people are there for, and I’d be most pleased if it was somewhat de-emphasised in Arkham City or whatever they’re calling the sequel.
This is exactly why, no matter how much everyone else gushes about it, I will never be able to play Majora’s Mask. Having to solve puzzles with a constant deadline breathing down my neck is just not Zelda to me.
The deadline in Majora’s Mask doesn’t really exist. It’s a gameplay mechanic more than a time limit.
If it doesn’t exist, then what gameplay mechanic are we talking about? Who are you? Where are my pills?
I feel exactly the same way, Brick, in both games and in life. It’s the main reason, I think, why I’ve never been able to get into shooters or fighting games — I don’t have the reaction time to really get good at them, and games aren’t fun to me if I can’t see myself improving. (The other reason, I guess, would be that those games tend to be focused on multiplayer and I’ve got no interest at all in multiplayer, so.)
I see what you mean, although I personally feel comfortable with pretty much any pacing (I play shmups and shooters almost as much as I play RPGs).
I do, however, wonder what you think about the pacing of Mario.
Halo is an interesting example. According to an interview I remember reading about somewhere, there was going to be an escape timer at the end of the second(? – it’s been a while) level of Halo 3. There were a lot of bitter comments aimed at Bungie, but if they had gone through with it, I may have just given up on that level. I don’t care how generous the timer might be, I hate the things. They stress me out, and they stand in opposition to one of my favorite things about Halo.
Battles and other events in Halo are usually triggered by your actions, not a timer, and it’s generally pretty clear when something you do can lead to one. There are no exercises in puzzle solving, but in one sense you have more control over the pacing of a Halo game than certain others I could mention (in which event triggers are, e.g., invisible or obtuse, or run by a hidden timer).
I find it ironic that once you really learn a game by taking it at your own pace… you post youtubes of you doing it faster than humanly possible. That’s kind of amusing. Also, I love the combat system in Arkham Asylum, Merus. You can’t put me in your little box.
The problem is whether or not it’s fun to really learn a game. I find that in my adult life I tend to enjoy games that give me a good, solid experience more than games that mimic old arcade tropes. When I was a kid, if I died ten times on Level 1 my response was to play Level 1 until I didn’t die. As an adult my response is to put in a new game.