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Reset,Button,2008,Prince,Persia,learn,skill,shamus young,video game Reset Button: Most Innovative Videogame of 2008Reset Button: Most Innovative Videogame of 2008tags:"An essay on the most innovative videogame of 2008, and on why videogames are too inbred and insular to attract non-gamers." from http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2048 and http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/30/0346216 ...
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Srsly.
I haven't played the new Prince of Persia, and probably never will because of the price tag and the short game play, but I did play Braid, and it was an amazing experience. The puzzles were incredibly tough, but the in-exhaustible time reversal kept the focus on ONE obstacle at a time. Oh, and unlike Yahtzee I LOVED the story(s).
Games like Burn Out are also on the right track (no pun intended), minimizing the set backs and making failure, and therefore risk taking, fun.
I tried the latest Tomb Raider demo. I love the franchise, but after missing that jump from the sliding ramp for the 4th time, I decided it wasn't worth the effort to climb that rock face again (despite the much improved models and animation).
I was more impressed by Flow than GTA IV.
He neglects to mention pressure though, the problem is besides a few sections when you needed to chain actions together it felt like there was none there. You could always be pulled back to where you were a few seconds ago so you didn't really care about aiming the jump wrong or not paying attention for a second, which really does to some extent ruin the immersion and sense of accomplishment when you realise you've completed much of the game absent-minded. So if anything I reckon it can't be this forgiving for your average accustomed gamer because it does take some of the fun and feeling of fullfilment out of the experience.
Always thought Diablo 2 was oddly successful as it. Sure when you died you had to trudge back a fair distance to find your body, but claiming it back was like a seperate mini-game in itself, so it wasn't purely punitive, but partly fun and rewarding.
This should be called "The best videogame review ever".
Srsly.
I think it falls to the social function, the people who dont play videogames I am speculating here but in my experience they tend to be more extroverted and the single player aspect of many videogames is what is unappealing. Then if they do try with other friends it has nothing to do with the game being hard but just other people being much better at it. Guitar hero is really fun if you play with people who are at the same level as you, a group of people all playing it for the first time its a great thing, but if you sit down and the other people just kick your ass or vice versa it is boring. This applies to other things as well if you are good at a sport its alright to play with people who are new to it but its not that enjoyable and you wont continue to play nearly as much as you would with people who give you a challenge.
So I submit that it is the us the gamers and our social actions picking on noobs that is keeping videogames from catching on, the difficulty of the game itself doesn't matter, look at a 2 player game of street fighter. one player loses now seconds after KO they are back up for another round and get to play again, but if the person playing not only keeps beating them but likes to gloat and lord it over them then odds are they will stop playing.
I believe it falls on the douchebag gamers who harass and yell at noobs to chill out and not the difficulty of single player games.
Personally Ninja Gaiden is one of my favorite games evar, and my girlfriend loves to watch me play... but I would never dream of asking her to play it because I like my controllers in one piece. If every time you died, you got all your health back and just had to fight the same room of ninjas over again she might just play it, and after that she might even be confident enough to try "normal." And then she'd probably kick my ass in Soul Calibur even harder than she does now.
I think the reason games have been so damned unforgiving is because the value of a game is largely seen as a function of the amount of time it takes to play. The longer they make the game, even if it's by replaying large parts of it, the more they can justify $50 to $60 games.
Now chill out noobs.
Sands of Time's time rewinding mechanic, to name one of several titles that used that approach, allowed the player to have control over where they were placed after making a mistake. It makes no sense why they would call this generation of Prince of Persia's approach to player-failure "innovative" when the game removes control from the player and forces them to lose progress when unable to surmount one of the platforming segments (sending the player back to a previous point that could be seconds away, or minutes).
At what point are we going to stop simplifying games for newer audiences? Dragon's Lair? Hey, remember adventure games???
But when we got Prince of Persia she could actually play the damn game and thoroughly enjoyed it. The "you can't die" gaming mechanic is misleading. It's simply a conceit that makes sense within the story - if you die in most games there's no explanation for the resurrection. Here you get reset to your last checkpoint after being rescued.
The game is not frustrating at all and yet still poses a challenge. My sister still had to work out where to go, how many seeds to collect, where to find the next gate etc. These are all things she may not have bothered with if the core gameplay hadn't embraced someone of her skill level i.e far from that of the hardcore gamer and yet she is definitely not going to buy a Wii. Like alot of people she wants the cool graphics and the production design of a good 360/PS3 game but she wants something accessible.
We both agreed the ending was a bit rough and there should have been more puzzles but, for us, Prince of Persia is definitely one of the games of the year.
I hate it that more and more FPS games have this system where if you get hit all you have to do to get better is not get hit for a few seconds. Where is the challenge or excitement if all you have to do is move out of the way of the action for a bit. (By the way, I think Far Cry 2's health system is the best ever in this respect, combining health bar, a little bit of auto-health-back (one bar), and applying health yourself (so it becomes a matter of personal responsibility rather than finding health packs).
He makes a comparison to older games, but it only makes sense in the way of controls which were indeed much simpler then (buy a Wii...). But the last time I played it Pacman did not let me start again at the position I ate my last pill, and did not give me infinitive retries to get all the pills. I guess the majority of the commenters here would have liked that way though, and now I understand why I was never able to play that game properly: Just did not get offered a way to learn it by those stupid ghosts killing me all the time making me start over....
The new POP is pretty awesome but really is a bit to easy and repetitive.
To newcomers: there are a lot of games to choose from to cut your teeth on. Choose properly. Pac Man hasn't disappeared or anything.
the resistance 2 joke turned me around.
The same methods for rewarding obsessive compulsive players who need to do everything "right" assists the noob who needs a little extra practice before advancing. Shit, play a game like Fallout, with the ever-forgiving V.A.T.S. system, then you don't even need to develop the muscle memory usually required.
go read his blog if you liked this http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/
Poolcleaner I do think you miss the point of VATS in Fallout. Fallout is an RPG based on a turn-based RPG. It's not necessarily about quick reflexes, it's about tactics. Bringing the best equipment into the battle and using it strategically. Going into VATS gives you the pause of a turn based games and lets you think about your actions. Sure it can be quite easy, but there's harder difficulty and mods coming out on the PC.
tetris was a game the most varied people oved, and we all know how level 40 was hardcore. but no addictive stuff will ever come around in those terms again.
with quicksave as a tool of responsibility for the gamer, this prince of persia approach semms really too easy, to the point of interest-lacking (if console games don't come with quicksave, well... that's what I think of consoles... plus the price...)
what wii has been doing in matter of innovation has more to do with the basic concept of the game being a challenge and not so much the output, that widely receives the tag "games for babies". in other words, creating an alternative to the immutable laws irl is much more needed nowadays in games than anything else. which happens to exist in prince of persia...
in realistic games like many fps related to wars irl, although apparently they look like the opposite of this idea, in fact these realistic games as emulations of "distant" realities come to the gamer as an alternative to what his/her reality is, therefore being just another solution to this alternative reality concept. but in this realistic games it's not just about "you fall in the black misteroius pit, you die because it's very deep". that is the real dumbing down of what we all perceive as everyday life. realistic games must be all about circumstances that could happen irl, if the gamer was something else than a urbanized citizen of the democratic-capitalist world.
Reading through the comments, there seem to be a lot of hardcore gamers who seem to be dissing this concept as superfluous, because there are too many "easy" games out there already.
I disagree.
I've been trying for a while to get mintbbb to try some of my console games. She's interested, since she knows they're very pretty looking games, and given the way that I rave about some of them, she knows they're fun too. She's an EQ/WoW vet, so I know she can play complex and difficult games, that's not what's holding her back. It's the controller.
She simply isn't used to making quick, precise movements with her thumbs, especially when the damn controller has some 16 different buttons that you need to accurately locate and press, often with a precise degree of timing.
I've been trying to find her a good onramp for a while, but she mostly just gets frustrated. Katamari Damacy is a good one, but, well, the King of All Cosmos can be a real ass, and there's not a tight enough feedback loop to really help her learn. I tried Overlords, but the game concept was tough for her to grasp, and past the first level it became clear its difficulty was tuned to be a challenge for someone like me, which made it nigh impossible for her.
We have a Wii, but that controller won't teach her how to play a 360 or PS3 game. I admit I haven't plonked her down in front of Zelda or Metroid which have traditional-ish control schemes, but I don't know that it'd get her comfortable enough with the controller to pick up something like Mass Effect or God of War on a more traditional controller.
This vid has me thinking I should give the new Prince of Persia a try for her. I'd crossed it off my list after hearing the reviews, since I don't want to pay $60 for a game I'd finish in an afternoon without breaking a sweat, especially when they didn't rate it as being some sort of must-see story or gameplay experience along the way.
At a minimum, a rental might be in order.
Still, he's one of the best writers I've ever seen, very entertaining stuff.
But in my opinion at least, I think it's best if both of those options are restricted. Think I remember Hitman had (or still has, haven't touched the series since the second one) limited savegames per missions. That seems like a reasonable way to offer up some challenge but not force you into endless frustration.
Otherwise, what's wrong with checkpoints really? I mean they're transparent, and besides the odd badly chosen one, seem to do their job just fine.
Poolcleaner I do think you miss the point of VATS in Fallout. Fallout is an RPG based on a turn-based RPG. It's not necessarily about quick reflexes, it's about tactics. Bringing the best equipment into the battle and using it strategically. Going into VATS gives you the pause of a turn based games and lets you think about your actions. Sure it can be quite easy, but there's harder difficulty and mods coming out on the PC.
Naw, I get it. The reason I mention Fallout 3 is because it's an example of one of the MANY games that cater to newbies. (Fallout 3 being an example of a GOOD game that does this.)
Bottom line, I think this video is dead wrong. The people who don't play video games are not looking for an easy game, they just don't want to play video games. (If you think video games are hard now, you're dumb.) I grew up playing hundreds of games that I could never beat, yet I continued to play them because I liked to play. I know A LOT of people who just don't care about games. Do you think they even bothered to wonder if a game was too difficult? No, because they don't care.
Looking at demographics and percentages of people who do anything at all is so gimmicky to me. It's like he's comparing video games to television. It's the silent victim in this horrid review. Why have gamers not exceeded the television audience? It's rather silly to do these comparisons. From the perspective of the aficionado, you could say the same thing about anything, really. Skateboards versus Basketball: Only 20% of people skateboard despite the rise of Tony Hawk as a popular sports figure.
Holy jesus, why is skateboarding less popular than basketball? Why can I walk into any Wal Mart and buy a Spalding basketball, sponsored by the NBA, yet I need to go to a specialty store to get a skateboard that doesn't have trucks made out of fisher Price plastic. Oh, I know! It's because skateboarding is too hard!
Skateboarding is pretty hard, but those who are going to skateboard will skateboard despite the difficulty. So the answer is to dumb down the experience? Put some training wheels on the fucker? As if training wheels on bicycles weren't bad enough. Did I use training wheels? No, I scraped up my fuckin' knees, bleeding upon the cement like Jesus Christ down the streets of Jerusalem.
Television and (perhaps basketball was the improper comparison) baseball are learned behaviors, taught in more households than video games. AND it's accepted by more families -- though video games are slowly making their way, the violence/sex issue has some families in the closet. Many, many, many families grow up around the boob tube. Hell, that's where video games became and remain popular: in front of the television. We see people watch it, we watch it, other people watch us watch it, we play our video games on it. Also, sports and television = match made in heaven. I grew up in a television family; almost everyone in the family watches television, talks about it, breathes it, it permeates all aspects of life. Oh, did you see what's his face on American Idol? Oh, no! I can't believe he was kicked off the island -- he made such good soufflé!
It really isn't surprising at all that video games haven't touched the same demographics as television: Not everyone wants to play a game. Most people just wanna stare at something and not think. And when they are thinking, they're thinking that video games are for nerds that kill their classmates in bouts of gnerd rage.
(Also, if you have ever played World of Warcraft, you already know what types of people are drawn into a game when it's dumbed down. Do not want.)