Qualities Of A Good Videogame

If I get stuck in longer games I just say ah well I've played enough and the buzz is over, like the Getaway or GTA3. I think games should be easy, Unreal Tournament on the PC was extremely easy but also long, and it was pretty violent too. I think there is something to be said for violence in games, it is a good escape. I'm not a nut or anything.

The most important quality is that they are good for more than one person, 2 player or 4 player or 8 or 16 player games are amazing, I am quite a big fan of football games like this, because you can have a great rivalry going with friends or whatever. Nothing like a few drinks and a game of Pro Evo 2.

The best way to look at how to make a video game is to compare Championship Manager with any other management game of the past ten years. What the former has that the latter doesn't = what makes a good game.

an uzi

http://images.google.com/images?q=tbn:SOkHB1zndO0C:www.robpatton.com/pics/arcade/opwolf.gif

1) well balanced sense of inertia in character movement (the inertia on Mario and Sonic was not actually that different - example: you had to time your jumps and directions with precision and steer them around in mid-air a lot - it was part frustrating part joyful but a very good balance overall). similar character inertia in Rainbow Islands made it such a classic platform game. it was also spot-in in two of my favourite amiga series - the Turrican and Sensible Soccer games

2) must combine MUSIC with sound effects simultaneously. sounds ridiculous now but a lot of Amiga games failed to do this and suffered from lack of atmosphere as a result.

of course there are other criteria such as 'sense of progress or indeed, ascension', 'variation in levels', 'recurring elements/subtle touches you don't notice first time i.e. attention to detail even where not needed', 'broad range of things to do i.e. weapons to use, movements to make' and the character must be likeable and allow you to form some sort of emotional connection to them (if you're controlling a spaceship you can pretend you're flying the ship, if you're Mario - well he's cute so you can't not love him etc.)

One of the reasons FIFA has never worked and this started way back on the Mega-Drive is that they haven't managed to configure the players' inertia properly. On the MD their movements were too viscous (& they constantly sprung back a millimetre when they received the ball). That is why Sensible Soccer, perhaps, still reigns supreme because they had the perfect pitch of speed, pinball-ness, and gravity.

It's really important. For certain types of games. (Tennis games are another one, but that's enough for now or I'll start going into the relative fixities of Super Tennis players vis-a-vis Smash Tennis players.)

i agree about FIFA - they could never quite get the inertia right - it's not too bad tho - FIFA's bigger problems were poor learning curve, restricted game options, badly programmed tournament fixture system (they didn't follow the rules of real tournaments properly i.e. not meeting a team you played in qualifying group again until the semi-final or final) and a bit too complex generally.

why don't they do a sprite-based football sim today? it could be awesome!

for the games i play, i like a good narrative built into the game, and, for 3rd-person-type games, ability to identify with your character. the bit in the Tomb Raider piece about players feeling a loss when Laura dies is spot on.

i dunno -- it's a mix of characteristics that are a new jumble with each game.

For completist nuts like me, though, it is important that the game ends, that there's always some sort of thermometer moving across from just started to finished.

I disagree with pretty much everything Ronan's wrote, but I don't imagine either of us are very surprised by this.

I also think - mostly about narrative-based games - that if there's something you can't do there should always be several other things you can be getting on with. This is why I really dislike boss levels.

the most fun multiplayer game experiences i had were:

Dyna Blaster / Bomberman - up to FIVE players! using just two joysticks and a keyboard - absolute mentalism. hopefully some of you know what i'm talking about. on TV once they had all 5 of take That playing this game on that Gamesmaster show - and it really was great to watch.

Super Mario Kart was also enormous fun playing with friends (4 player madness) on the SNES

remember the 4-player Ninja Turtles and Simpsons arcade games? both practically identical in every way other than aesthetics, but pretty classic...and a good example of teaming up with friends rather than trying to beat the crap out of them

Daytona USA - 8-player version - my favourite arcade racer ever. even tho it was just driving around in a loop for 3 minutes trying to cut each other up. landmark graphics too (along with Ridge Racer).

(see: Oddworld)

ha ha, it is frustrating - but this is like saying 'i fail to see why i shouldn't get a promotion, just because i'm not very good at my job' isn't it?

xpost: but if you've already paid for your promotion?

(...Can you sign me up as a beta tester?)

A decent learning curve. Tony Hawks 1 and 2 were perfect for this (dunno about later incarnations - not played them), every level was just hard enough, with mega-difficult extras for if you were feeling cocky. An example of a shit learning curve would be Jedi Knight 2 - the opening few levels are far harder than later on when you are wafting 20 stormtroopers around the floor with your force powers.

Similarly, each new section should seem to have a point to it, theres nothing worse than a silly jumping puzzle that seems to exist for no reason (eg. something like "Why did they put the main power switch to this building 40ft in the air on a platform that you have to backflip in mid air to reach?").

For online multiplayer, as few exploits as possible. Quite a few I've played have been ruined by certain annoying things that a player can do to spoil everyone elses fun. There seems to be as many people in online gaming who'd rather piss everyone off as play the game. (Example - in Generals online, people will ctrl-alt-delete when losing to stop the game recording a defeat for them in their stats. This means a lenghty wait in a "Someone has disconnected" screen before you can carry on - immensely annoying when you spend a quarter of your time online looking at that screen)

More than anything I'd say a good game would

a)not take itself to seriously
b)have a story that isn't playground childish
c)is released utterly complete without needing a patch

There are no games around at the moment, nor will there be for quite some time, that are like that.

a) because the gaming world is marketed at teens who want to go boom boom with guns
b) like John Fowles would get into game development
c) patches are a great anti-piracy measure and pretty much every game is rushed out before its been properly completed due to tyranic publishing houses *cough* EA *cough*.

Which is why I suppose a lot of people I know are still rocking Monkey Island et al. My biggest dream in gaming is for the Spectrum classic "School Daze" to be remade with the Half Life 2 engine or somesuch. Probably because I want to play something where your main goal isn't blowing the shit out of a tank, alien or whatever.

Your list of needs matches Planescape Torment pretty clearly. I suppose it does take itself pretty seriously by, say, Crash Bandicoot standards, but it's good at being funny as well.

I'm also coming to accept the hard truth that I don't like hard games. I THINK I do, but I really like accomplishment and familiarity. I would rather play any of the above games again, or go through the shareware levels of Doom for the billionth time than slog through one of their harder sequels or learn some newfangled 3-d game.

For multiplayer games, no overload of features (why Mario Kart > Mario Kart 64).

As RPGs go, acquisition/progress, unlocking/discovering new spells/abilities, and customizing said abilities.

I do think easiness is really important, but it's more about intrusion of game mechanics into the experience. PS:T is easy and has to be, because constantly reloading would destroy the unbelievable MOMENTUM that it gets going. Whereas GTA3 is a lot harder, in terms of how often you fail, but as the tension-release thing operates within individual missions, that's not a problem. (Rise of Nations = best sense of gathering pace in an impersonal-type video game evah?)

The real thing in /fun/-type games seems to me about having huge, cool, complex shit on screen that's totally responsive to your actions, without you having to actively tell it what to do - hence Soul Calibur, Vice City, Rez for that sense of synthaesthetic conducting. Sonic was genius because (at the time) it was so fast that you felt the environment shaping in response to your vapour trail... this why sensi > fifa. In one you're in control, in the other you're instigating animation sequences.

>that sony has Nothing to do with it.
Ico lovas to thread!