The Gamer's Quarter

[wourme]

This is based on a couple posts in the Final Fantasy 12 thread.

I like it when a video game has elements that a player might not see. It's not that I want to play a game twice (I almost never do that), but I like the idea, or at least the illusion, of my playthrough being somehow unique--the possibility of finding something that few other players find. If you have one quick shot at something essential to the game and don't find out until much later that you missed it (as in the King's Quest series), then I think that's poor game design. But I actually like it when you can miss optional items (as in FF8) or even whole segments of the game (as in Baldur's Gate 2 and Planescape: Torment).

I would also side with Enix where they allegedly wanted to leave things out of a guide so that people would discover them on their own. I can imagine that they wanted to hold back even more but that they were compelled by financial interests. I never use any sort of guide except as a last resort when I've been stuck on some part of a game so long that it just isn't fun anymore and I'm in danger of quitting--or if I find the game worth playing but not worth playing without a guide (Day of the Tentacle). This reminds me, too, of Nintendo's argument against Game Genie. Although I really liked messing around with Game Genie on games that I hadn't touched in years, I can see their point that it can really go against the creator's intentions.

On of my favorite video game-related stories is how in Atari 2600 Adventure, it took years for someone to find that very well-hidden room where the programmer wrote his name. If a game is worth playing, it's going to be played long after its release and I think it would be great if someone found more big secrets in commercial games many years after their releases.

Games with several endings used to bother me--again, because I almost never play a game twice. But I like the way that Silent Hill handles them. It's not that you need to play through again if you get a "bad" ending, but that the ending you get is what actually happens in the story based on your actions. In most games, it's unlikely that any two players are going to have a totally identical experience. Where you get killed or even what direction you walk in a given second makes your experience unique. I think this is pretty interesting.

[Lackey]

The illusion of having a unique experience of a game is very important to me. I value it because it allows for a sense of ownership, or at least participation with a game.

I've lent Shadow of the Collosus to three of my friends, and none of them discovered undocumented features like the fruit or gecko tails. I was surprised myself when I found the little fish pond long after I'd beaten the game. I mean I can see how simply ommitting information can add value to certain features.

On the other hand, it's still less organic than actual emergent gameplay. When advantage of sandbox games is that they have much more potential for the unexpected to happen.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[dessgeega]

there's a lot of undocumented stuff in colossus. basic interacting with agro stuff. i like it; it's probably part of why so many people like to compare the game to the original zelda. i never discovered the fruit or geckos until after i'd finished playing the game.

silent hill's multiple endings are good because the process which selects them is invisible and kind of cryptic. it's not the kind of thing where you save your game right before THE BIG DECISION and then load your file after you've finished to watch the other ending.
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[Mister Toups]

So you're basically saying that you'd like to see a game full of esoteric secrets that are so obscure and hard to find that 99.99% of people playing it will never see close to the game's full content?

Funny, I think I know a guy who's working on a game like that
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

[chompers po pable]

panzer dragoon zwei has multiple paths/endings. the episode 2, route 2 is amazing (reminds me of rez stage 5), and i didn't find the route until i'd played the game through a few times. it was an awesome surprise.

a videogame sandwich.

[Harveyjames]

So many games revolve around exploration but it's a rare game that actually gives you the sensation of being an explorer, discovering beautiful things no-one else has found. This is why one of my favorite Zelda moments is the Beaver Dam in Majora's Mask. I had no idea of its existence until like the third time I went through the game. Most people I know who played the game didn't find the Beaver Dam, either. There's something magical about stumbling across something like that- being rewarded for your deviation from the main path.

Some of the developer interviews on wii.com bode well for this sort of thing in Twilight Princess:

"I was always trying to think of subtle things that might or might not be noticed by players. These things are silly in a good way, and I tried to put in as many of them as possible... if we don't put enough of these things in the game, Miyamoto-san will always notice it and send an e-mail saying something like: "I went to all the trouble of trying this in the game and I was sad because I didn't get a new reaction from any of the characters in the game." I called these his "sob story e-mails".

[helicopterp]

Do you just mean the beaver dam at the end of the race? On that note, the crazy beaver fucking rocks, just like all the other characters in the game.

And to whomever liked the idea of emergent content better: I don't agree. I like finding my own private moments in the games I play from what is already there. It feels more personal and less given to me.

The Pikmin games and I have a special relationship. I'm not sure how much of what I do in them is more-or-less unique to me, but I do feel that I have gained an acute sense for their nuances, which feels just as rewarding. I have played the shit out of them.
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Like you thought you'd seen copter perverts before. They were nothing compared to this one.

[Lackey]

[Dracko]

The original Soul Reaver had a few areas which were gratuitous but available if you cared to explore. You had the hidden temples which gave you new powers after you completed their puzzle, or more interestingly, if you found the last human stronghold and infiltrated it, you could interact with human beings whichever way you wanted. At first, they'd fear you of course, fleeing or attacking you with flamethrowers or crossbows, but if you left them in peace instead of using them as a source of energy, they'd grow accustomed to your presence, even worshipping you as a saviour against the vampire menace. This added strictly nothing to the story or even the gameplay, but it was a nice touch to make the world come off as alive.

I bring it up constantly, but LucasArts' earlier adventure games, like Maniac Mansion and Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders, often boasted multiple solutions, something which later games lost, becoming more stream-lined. I find that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the best example of this because the solutions you come up with seem natural, so it's not like you feel you're missing on an opportunity and selecting one alternative over another. The illusion of a coherent world is there.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Harveyjames]

[Ketch]

[Harveyjames]

I haven't played it. Why is it demeaning?

[Lockeownzj00]

[Ketch]

[quote="Lockeownzj00"]

[Harveyjames]

I agree, there's lots of really beautiful areas in GTA:SA. The 'view' from the top of the mountain has to be one of the most disappointing things I've ever seen in a videogame, though. I mean, it was the whole point of my climbing to the top, and I was rewarded with nothing.

In Ocarina of Time there's a rock (or a giant felled branch, I forget which) in Jabu-Jabu's lake, upon which a Scarecrow will appear if you play the Scarecrow's song. Then, you can latch onto the Scarecrow with the hookshot and pull yourself up to it. There's no reason to be up there, though, expect for the thrill of getting to a place you previously thought unreachable and for the view it affords you of the lake. I think there are a few instances of this in the game.

[Cycle]

Deus Ex is full of little details that make it worth replaying. I've played through it about 8 times, and EVERY time I've foudn things I didn't notice any other times. Plus it's fun just seeing what you can get away with, kinda like Goldeneye.

Some examples!

First, the most obvious and widely known one. If you walk into the ladies toilets, you'll bump into an irate woman and get a stern talking to from your boss once you meet with him.

During one playthrough, I decided to kill everyone I could. When returning to Hells Kitchen (after killing the bartender), there was a new guy there who told me "Someone killed the bartender. Drinks are free!", shortly before I killed him.

At UNATCO HQ, there is a locked door in Alex's office. I noticed a poster next to the door though, advertising some geek convention. I punched in the year that was advertised on the poster, and hey presto!

After sneaking into an enemy base, I saw and heard two people having a conversation that I didn't see the last few times I played. If I saw this conversation the first time, it would have warned me not to trust one of the people in the conversation. (both, in fact).

It's the little details like this that made Deus Ex so great.

[Dracko]

The problem I have with Deus Ex, more so with Deus Ex: Invisible War, is that all those added details and alternate routes were set up in such a way considering how basically stream-lined (and frustrating) the play experience was, that choosing one route, whether in the form of a dialogue choice, a locked chest or door, an encounter with hostile individuals, or a solution to a set problem, always made me regret not taking the other. Alternatives always felt high-lighted to the point were it mattered little which road I'd follow, as the story was always bigger than my own decisions, and I'd feel like I wasn't playing the game properly or something, afraid that I was missing out on something massively important, thereby no longer playing in character and reduced to constant exploratory fits no matter what.

I hope games like Bioshock, with all their talk of emergent gameplay and story-telling, won't suffer from this.
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"This is the most fun I've ever had without being drenched in the blood of my enemies!"

[Cycle]

I don't!

[dhex]

yeah, there's nothing like regret and mystery to make one think "shit, that's neat."

it's like quicksave syndrome; sort of takes the fun away from fucking up and being lost forever.
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[Lockeownzj00]

I'm a quicksave addict, a la the odl gamespy daily victim (don't ask me about the mirror. blame google). But I've been getting better about it. Example: Hitman Contracts apparently has a mid-level save feature--but I didn't know about that since I've been playing the professional mode, which allows no such tomfoolery! Difficulty ++!

Also, you guys sound like you'd enjoy Sunglasses at Night (or, "Deus Ex gets turned inside-out by DOUG the Eagle") if you don't already know about it.

[helicopterp]

[Lockeownzj00]

dinner is served! *boom*

[Harveyjames]

[Scratchmonkey]

3 games that would initially seem dissimilar; however, they all work on the same principles, as have somewhat been mentioned above:

Hitman
Dwarf Fortress
Football Manger/Championship Manager

All of these games rely on the player having an intuitive idea of how a fairly complex and abstract system work and then experimenting in order to do what they want. These games are successful because they are broad enough to accomodate a wide range of possible inputs and coherent enough that a player can, if they're clever enough, successfully predict the behavior of the game, meaning that the game will be as sophisticated as the player wants it to be.

Now, none of these games is really playable without some bit of system manipulation. Given enough hardware (guns or a really good team), you can brute force Hitman and Football Manager, although it isn't really that much fun and you'll eventually run into a brick wall or two. Dwarf Fortress is fairly difficult to just bull through, mainly because basic survival requires a fair amount of understanding how the game works.

The main problems with these games is that they take a lot of investment in terms of time and planning. You have to be willing to spend a lot of time with these games and you might not get anything back from the investment. I love these games; it's rare that I can really give them the attention that they deserve.

[Shapermc]

I'm pretty suprised that none of the Elder Scrolls games have been mentioned yet.

Morrowind was the first game in a long time where I felt like I was playing a game that no one else was playing. Even the other people that I knew playing the game were telling me about completly foreign things. To date it is fairly hard to find someone who played the same way that I did. Oblivion seems to be a bit closer because there is less overall to do, and it is more structured.

Anyways, Metroid is one of those games that I hold dear to me because it always felt like my own. I played it in a similar way that everyone else did, but it is just so devoid of explination and details that you have to fill in the gaps yourself. This is mainly why I get angry about the remake of the game with Zero Mission (as I just stated about 10 min ago in another thread). I had a story that I created, and even filled in some of the back story in my ten year old brain when I first played it, then Nintedo comes and tells me that is all wrong. Anyways, I hope that makes sense.

Castlevania (particularly Simon's Quest) was one of those games where finding things felt like I had actually found some thing hidden. Like when you got down a flight of steps and at the top a crown apears from the floor. Or you just happen to be whipping too close to a wall and you break it to reveal meat. Great things like that. Simon's quest was just so obscure that figuring anything out without a guide felt like a personal acomplishment.

On the note of Game Genie... well, I used mine to cheat a lot because I wanted to see more of the games than I usually could in a rental peroid. But for games that I owned I loved to do things like moon gravity in SMB3 and what not.
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“The average man has a secret desire to be a swaggering, drunken, fighting, raping swashbuckler.”
-Robert E. Howard in a letter to a friend circa Decmber 1932

"There is no place in this enterprise for a rogue physicist!"

[Lestrade]

[dessgeega]

[Lackey]

Ha, climbing those shrines was the first thing I did, even before fighting the first collosus. It looked like that's what they were for!

[dessgeega]

[OtakupunkX]

[Harveyjames]

Yeah. I was just expecting a view of the surrounding land. Even Ocarina's Death Mountain has that.

[dessgeega]

[dark steve]

Maybe space out the stronger colossi so they're at farther and less accessible ends of the world? Use this as a reason to stress the cloud effect on the map?

SotC was only one big push from being as good as it deserved to be.
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[Harveyjames]

The first Legend of Zelda, which Shadow Of The Colossus seems to draw a lot of inspiration from, lets you attempt the dungeons in any order. If you find you're not good enough, not strong enough or whatever, you just leave that dungeon alone and go for the next one in the correct sequence. Shadow could have done that too- it could let you meet the super-powerful ones out of sequence so you go 'HOLY CRAP' and run away, or even take it on and try your luck. But the developers chose not to do this.

I figured it was maybe something about destiny and about making you feel powerless. All there is to discover is that there is nothing to discover, and following orders is your only option. Perhaps this is what makes the game feel so powerful and opressive.

[chompers po pable]

yes, like the ending SPOILERS when the game gives you control, and ofcourse you try to get away from your inevitable death. which ironically contrasts with Mono's subsequent revival. Northrop Frye would have a field day with SotC's narrative, like a kid in a candy store.

"But I tried, though...Goddammit, I sure as hell did that much, now, didn't I?" - R. P. McMurphy.

[Harveyjames]

Right, I'd forgotten about that. So right from the start, we thought we had freedom but in fact we were bound to following orders. And this climaxes with that part you mentioned- the game lets you try to get away, but you eventually just have to accept that you cannot. Blimey. Cheery stuff.

I personally don't think it means anything specific, I just think the game is like a very fine tuned machine (or piece of art) designed to produce a certain set of emotions. You're only given freedom so you can realise it is worthless, because this realisation then magnifies the sense of helplessness/isolation/whatever you're supposed to be feeling.

Especially when you start to notice that through performing this task you're bound to do, the main character is gradually destroying himself.

I have more to say on this but I don't think you want to see me pull my wank hat over my head any tighter, so I'll let someone else have a go for a change. Does anyone else have any theories?

[chompers po pable]

[Harveyjames]

Pull away!

[Lackey]

[Harveyjames]

I guess the poisonous fruit could be there to show you that there's no respite from your task. No matter how hard you try to find something else to do, you'll meet a dead end. Just when you thought you'd finally found some kind of reward, the game kicks you in the ass.

Or perhaps it's there to cast a sinister gloom over the ending sequence, like 'sooner or later they're going to eat that fruit and die.'