Notes on rarely-seen game mechanics
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boktai:_The_Sun_Is_in_Your_Han...
Dean Hall, the creator of the viral survival sandbox mod DayZ, was obsessed with realism-based immersion, and also tried something similar in his game in 2012. One of the updates tied the in-game time to the real time at the location of the server you were connected to. It also made the moonless and/or cloudy nights impenetrably dark, even GPU gamma correction wasn't able to help you see anything. Considering that the majority of players played the game in the evening, that the game was set in the fictional Balkan country (they only had an hour or so of twilight at best), and that the night vision device was a top-tier item hard to obtain in a survival sandbox, the majority of players just played on servers in distant timezones, preferring huge latencies to playing in the dark.
The update was reverted shortly after that, as it was obvious that it degraded the gameplay quality immensely.
For instance, an RPG where your time of day combined with in game locations could change what enemies spawn, or characters that get sleepy and less capable after so long, but it should also be able to cause unique time events to happen, and not just spooky Halloween season or Xmas spectacular, either.
Moving on a night with a full moon was even more terrifying - trying to build up the courage to cross a moonlit field that someone might be watching.
If anyone else is a fan of the original Deus Ex, one of the writers for it, Sheldon Pacotti, has been writing science fiction for years:
Haven't had the chance to read anything by Chris Todd yet (the writer/curator of all the snippets you come across within the game, as opposed to the plot itself), but I remember enjoying his in-game style a lot too at the time.
Kojima's final game at Konami was Metal Gear Solid V. After he left, Konami shrugged and made Metal Gear Survive. Suffice to say, the non-Kojima metal gear was a flop. Itagaki is another example. He's the creator of Ninja Gaiden, and also ended up leaving Team Ninja after a dispute. His final game was Ninja Gaiden 2, their first game was Ninja Gaiden 3. And again, the reception went from positive, to flop.
And to be clear it's not like these series waxed and waned. Every single Metal Gear game with Kojima received exceptional praise. Similarly for every single Ninja Gaiden game, to a lesser degree. Then they leave, and the series collapse. Obviously far more people work on these games than just the singular name, but if most of these people were replaced with somebody of a similar skillset, the final product would be largely unchanged.
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Reception for Metal Gear Solid V: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Gear_Solid_V:_The_Phanto...
Reception for Metal Gear Survive: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_Gear_Survive#Reception
Ninja Gaiden 2 Reception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja_Gaiden_II#Reception
Ninja Gaiden 3 Reception: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninja_Gaiden_3#Reception
Of course you can say "well if this is true it only shows that Kojima can attract the best talent to work for him" and sure, that's probably true. But then we can't claim it's all completely Kojima doing the work.
Go back to the original 1987 Metal Gear on the NES and you'll find 0 overlap except for Kojima. Kojima was a new hire at the time and thrust onto a completely new team on a project already in development. He dramatically shifted the direction of what was being built, and what was born was Metal Gear. And, as would become a recurring pattern for every single title he's been involved in, it was met with phenomenal reception.
I think the truth is somewhere in between. Kojima benefits from relying on a highly skilled team that deserves more credit than they get. At the same time he probably doesn't get enough credit for attracting that talent and creating an environment they can flourish in. If that were easy then anyone would do it.
Hidetaka Miyazaki,for example, is one such “auteur game designer” and it’s very clear when he has had his influence on a game.
Just compare Dark Souls 1 or 3 (which he worked on) to Dark Souls 2 (which he didn’t work on) and Bloodborne (which was created by Miyazaki in parallel with DS2) and you’ll see that his influence on games that he has a direct hand in is massive.
Or for something more relevant, the first and only Metal Gear game released after Kojima was fired by Konami - Meta Gear: Survive - was an unmitigated disaster. Metal Gear Solid 5 was unfinished and flawed, but there’s no denying that it had Kojima’s flourish on it.
None of mine ever did. The best lighting seemed to be sitting with a lamp behind you but with actual sun overhead everything was too dark to make out.
It's almost as if the peripheral port was made for it.
One of the coolest games is 'ball count'. All you do is tilt the controller. The force feedback is so accurate it feels like metal balls are moving inside of it, and you win if you guess how many balls are in the controller.
Never seen anything like it, and it changed how I think about the relationship of sound and what causes a specific sound. I'm trying to remember a TV show that joked about this, about some engineers making a device and a superior asking for the machine to make a different sound. The joke was that the sound any machine makes directly correlates to it's function, but this never made 100% sense to me until I played this switch game.
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Another game that comes to mind (although it might also be a stretch) is F-Zero GX, a Gamecube race game I got into well after the Wii was already released. To unlock every track you had had to take the GC memory card, find a F-Zero AX arcade machine, insert it there and win every race.
This was in 2008, decades after the arcade heyday. I was super lucky I lived in a big city that had an arcade (now closed) that also happened to have this machine. According to my research there were only a few in North America. So I found myself freezing in Toronto winter in my 20's throwing quarters in an arcade machine several nights. This added a lot to the F-Zero experience. (later on I found out I could have unlocked everything at home, but I'm glad I never found out until later). The era of Arcade gaming always spoke to my imagination so I was grateful to have this (belated) experience.
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I can go on. I think all my examples are by Nintendo. Pokewalker comes to mind and also Streetpass. All these ideas really speak to me. The common thread is probably that they all create some connection to the real world.
I don't know in America but least in the EU version, winning the first 4 cups in Master difficulty was enough to unlock the AX cup; no need to go to an arcade.
(Spoiler alert on a game from 1998.) https://www.thegamer.com/metal-gear-solid-psycho-mantis-boss...
I was in university when Snake Eater came out and I got to play it when I went home during the Christmas break. I got to The End fight and had to go back. When I came back during March break I didn't have to win the fight because he died.
https://metalgear.fandom.com/wiki/The_End#Avoiding_the_fight
Otacon: "there should be a codec number on the back of the game box"
I do enjoy when they include pseudo-reality in to character.
[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190625150528/http://www.ninten...
Or, from youtube said, you can defeat him without both, since he'll evade seven attacks and will be hit by the eight.
(Also I love that this and the comment chain immediately above it are both Kojima games. Can't wait to see what kind of mechanics he throws at us in DS2.)
The book "Characteristics of Games" exists as well, that might have a good list in it. It's for all types of games, though, including sports. Richard Garfield (creator of Magic The Gathering) is one of the authors of that book.
There's also Unpub: The Unpublished Card Game, which is a deck of cards that each has a theme, a core mechanism, and game component listed on each card, and you combine cards to pitch a board game design based on it. It's not still in print but you can get a copy cheap (I think I have one somewhere).
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/175848/unpub-unpublished...
Also BoardGameGeek has a list of common board game mechanics here:
https://boardgamegeek.com/browse/boardgamemechanic
Dice Tower did a live show on Youtube where they made a tournament bracket of 64 board game mechanisms and let the audience vote in real time for each match-up. So you can see what the most popular game mechanics are for board gamers from that:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PainStation
Each time your opponent scores a hit in pong against you, you get an electric shock. The person first letting to of the metal handle delivering the shocks loses.
See it in action here: https://youtu.be/JEfCGsXIeRY
Reminds me of Lawrence of Arabia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvQViPBAvPk
> Ow. It damn well hurts!
> Certainly it hurts.
> Well what's the trick then?
> The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.
Edit: found an old forum post talking about this so I know I'm not insane: https://boards.straightdope.com/t/penny-arcade-shocker-at-di...
(The short version is there were three players left: Richard, Rudy, and Kelly. Rudy was popular, Kelly was a hard competitor, and Richard was sly. If Rudy made the final two, he would win against either of them. Richard and Rudy had long standing deal to help each other, and if Richard broke that then Rudy would vote against him from the final jury, and Richard had burned enough bridges that he needed every vote he could get. By Richard deciding to step down, he made the bet that Kelly would win the challenge and the immunity, and would vote off Rudy, because she would know she couldn't win against him. So Richard made the final two, against Kelly, without burning his friendship with Rudy. And he won.)
A short term benefit traded for a longer term cognitive disadvantage in a mental game. Unfortunately, I could see it inevitably devolving into a straight-up drinking contest, with the actual chess gameplay only benefitting you by 1 drink (and maybe a longer clock).
Do you just decide to make two moves?
That is you make a move, opponent makes a move, you undo your opponent move. Now whose turn is it? is it your turn? where you have effectively moved twice, your opponents turn? but we can't can just let them make the same move, that goes against the spirit of the thing. So perhaps their turn but they can make any move except for the one you undid.
Nepo, playing white, makes one of those “bad” moves, theoretically losing the equivalent of almost four whole pawns, a terrible blunder in the eyes of the all-seeing computer. But use the Next link to look at the position in “analysis after 59 Qc7”. There is one move, black Queen to g6, that takes advantage of the “blunder”. There is a second move, black Bishop to f8, that completely cedes the blunder and returns to a mostly-tied position. The third best possible move loses 32 points (going from -4 to +28, which is the equivalent of losing both knights, both bishops, both rooks, and your Queen in a single move - the computer equivalent of saying “you lose the game, it just takes 20 or more turns”). Then there’s two dozen more possible moves, all of which literally lose the game on the spot.
So to recap: one move gets your opponent ahead, one move keeps him tied, and twenty-four moves loses him the entire game. Being able to cut off your finger to undo and prevent that one good move would change the entire dynamic from “a terrible blunder” to “a bold stroke of pure brilliance”.
In the winter sport of biathlon (skiing and shooting), if a target is missed, there are penalty laps around a small loop before they can continue. It's partly a time penalty, but also just uses up more of their reserve.
Then there is the steeplechase which is basically running around the track with the misery of running in wet shoes.
Or maybe all of running, really. I was in a running club years ago. Professional coach, and athletes from high schoolers to hobbyists to the world record holder in the 5k. We were at breakfast and one of the hobbyists asked when it stopped hurting so much. The pros laughed and said, "It never stops hurting. It's about making them hurt more."
Now that I think of it, my kids have seen great success in wrestling from the same approach of just being more willing to be miserable than their opponents. It's not simply a matter of being more fit, either. People just give up due to pain at different points.
What’s interesting though is that you don’t know how much pain everyone is experiencing for a given level of fitness. I ran D1 track and cross-country but was not the fastest on the team. So I would often wonder: did I get beat because my teammate was able to withstand more pain than me or because they could run faster with less pain than me? Then on one of our strength training days, we decided to have a planking competition, and I ended up winning. What surprised me though was that there was no correlation between the order of the fastest runners and the order of who lasted the longest planking. Maybe I just had some genetic advantage with ab strength that made it easier for me?
It would be cool if there was some sort of competition where you could measure the perceived pain each person’s brain is experiencing, normalize the pain to be the same for each person, and then see who lasts the longest (this gets into the problem of qualia though, so not likely to happen).
You have to drag to move. Sounds painful, and it is. That's really weird and you have to re-learn how to move your character, which can be frustrating and show how used we are to standard movements. After a few minutes you get used to it and it becomes fun.
I made it when I researched how to "physically" play differently.
Also, drywall bingo: there's a wall of drywall that is about to be demolished. Pick a spot near the middle of the wall and headbutt it. If you hit a stud, you lose.
They're fun for very short party games; but with many you could see how they'd be horribly annoying over an entire feature-length game.
https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-DS/Make-10-A-journ...
Make 10: The Nut Tapper subgame.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm8v_WJ3Xek
1-2-Switch: Ball Count
The game also used the dreamcast clock to age the fish even when the game was not running. It had an anti-cheat mechanism where it would detect if you altered the clock and would punish the cheater accordingly.
In Lords of Xidit, you have to remember each time a player puts something in the central bank to time when it's worth getting it.
In the just freshly out zelda, you can cross ceilings, but since you are often in caves, you have to approximate the volume of the above structure to figure out where you exit.
In the exceptionally good "Inscryption", you win/lose by tilting a balance 5 ticks in the other direction. There is a bonus item, pliers, that will let you pull one of your teeth out, and put it in the balance to add one tick. The animation and noise are sick.
And it's the mark of great games to have great gameplay, so you can be sure game creators are trying them all. We are not in the 80' anymore, games are crazy.
Give a try to Ark Nova, Great Western Trail or Mind Bug and you will see how vast and diverse the possibilities of gameplay are. That's on board games, so you can image what happens with a computer where you have very little limits. The indie scene is fantastic, I haven't had that much fun since the 90'.
A ham (technical, a prosciutto) is hanged on a rope and people have to guess how far it is from the ground.
The winner takes it home, of course.
>> Will we ever hear about why the aliens might already know how to play Go?
Which I found a bit more interesting (as an avid board game player).
>> “There is a mathematics game,” said the alien.… “The game involves a screee—" Some word that the autopilot couldn't translate. The alien raised a three-clawed hand, holding a lens-shaped object. The alien's mutually opposed fingers turned it so that Louis could see the different markings on each side. "This is a screee. You and I will throw it upward six times each. I will choose one of the symbols, you will choose the other. If my symbol falls looking upward more often than yours, the artifact is mine. The risks are even."
>> "Agreed," said Louis. He was a bit disappointed in the simplicity of the game.
If you died repeatedly in body form the game got harder as tendency tended to black (dying is frequent in souls games and if you are in body form you have more HP, dying in body form put you at 50% Max Hp and uou had to use a consumable item or kill a boss or invade another player and kill them to get your body back). Killing bosses moved it toward white.
Tougher enemies would appear in black tendencies, but you’d get more experience points. The game was slightly easier in white tendency. Different paths would close or open depending on your tendency.
Trying to figure this stuff out in 2009 before the ubiquity of internet wikis was something else, as this mechanic was not explained very well (souls games are obtuse in general, really by design).
There was also a separate “character tendency” mechanic that affected quest lines and other things.
It made completionist runs annoying and it was just a pain to manipulate it in certain ways to get the outcome you wanted - would have loved a rework in the later souls games but they just abandoned it.
Demons Souls is probably still my favourite Souls title for just all of the weird, quirky, unpolished/jank things about it it made it quite a unique experience.
The winning strategy seemed to revolve around being able to launch a coin fast enough to significantly bloody your opponents knuckles, and then take advantage of their flinch response to rack up points, all while grin-and-bearing the opponents attempts to do the same. By the end of the evening, the table was smeared with blood on both edges, and the nickel they were using was so caked with the same that it was difficult to differentiate between heads and tails.
You can Freeze Time to do things like turn water into a walkable surface, go through electricity, throw a bunch of bolts at once (this one also exists in Dishonored).
Reverse Time is more rare (I recall only Braid having something similar ?) and is even used in one of my favorite speedrun tricks ever: shoot at something to make it explode (such as a motorcycle), reverse time to bring the exploding fragments back into their original object's shape, jump on one of the fragments (such as a tire) and let time play again, catching a ride on the explosion. You can even influence where the fragment is going by shooting at it in Slow Time before reversing, it's not precalculated physics.
It’s a great addition to the game and makes it a positive to be the dealer.
Tell that to Fortnite and other battle-royale games.
> And there's that game where two players take turns hitting each other in the face until one gives up or is too battered to continue — I don't know what it's called.
Hilarious!