Various musings about games, books and life - By Tony Huynh, Video Game Designer
Various musings about games, books and life - By Tony Huynh, Video Game Designer
Saturday, November 29th, 2008
These are the ten heroes of video game design. They have been responsible for games that have forever changed the medium and consequently the video game industry as a whole is indebted to them. Also included in this list is a career highlight list for each designer, a bit about how they personally influenced me as a designer and some fun trivia about them. This is part 2 of this list.
To go to Part 1 of this list click here.
5. Sid Meier
The owner of my favorite game design quote:
“Gameplay is defined as a series of interesting choices.”
Every time a new Civilization comes out it ends up ruining any productivity of mine for months on end. They are so good and addictive I actually try to stay away from them because I know I will get nothing done as soon as I start playing them.
Also do you remember those keyboard key guides that you had to lay over on top of your keyboard that to came with F-15 and F-19? Those were complicated games.
Career Highlights
1. F-15 Strike Eagle
2. F-19 Stealth Fighter
3. Railroad Tycoon
4. Sid Meier’s Pirates!
5. Civilization
4. Warren Spector
“Hell no we didn’t achieve what we were striving for on Deus Ex. What you do is you aim for the moon so you end up hitting Hawaii or something. If you aim for Hawaii you end up in Keokuk, Iowa or something, you know?” – Warren Spector
Warren Spector’s rules of game design in his postmortem of Deus Ex laid down the starting bumpers for me as a game designer.
a. Always show the goal. Players should see their next goal (or encounter an intriguing mystery) before they can achieve (or explain) it.
b. Problems not puzzles. It’s an obstacle course, not a jigsaw puzzle. Game situations should make logical sense and solutions should never depend on reading the designer’s mind. And there should always be more than one way to get past a game obstacle. Always.
c. No forced failure. Failure isn’t fun. Getting knocked unconscious and waking up in a strange place or finding yourself standing over dead bodies while holding a smoking gun can be cool story elements, but situations the player has no chance to react to are bad. Used sparingly, to drive a story forward, O.K. Don’t overuse!
d. It’s the people, stupid. Role-playing is about interacting with other people in a variety of ways (not just combat… not just conversation…).
e. Players do; NPCs watch. It’s no fun to watch an NPC do something cool. If it’s a cool thing, let the player do it. If it’s a boring or mundane thing, don’t even let the player think about it — let an NPC do it.
f. Have you patted your player on the back today? Constant rewards will drive players onward. Make sure you reward players regularly. And make sure the rewards get more impressive as the game goes on.
g. Players get smarter so games get harder. Make sure game difficulty escalates as players become more accustomed to your interface and more familiar with your world. Make sure you reward the player by making him or her more powerful as the game goes on.
h. Think 3D. A 3D map cannot be laid out on graph paper. It has to take into account things over the player’s head and under the player’s feet. If there’s no need to look up and down — constantly — make a 2D game!
i. Are You Connected? Maps in a 3D game world must feature massive interconnectivity. Tunnels that go direct from Point A to Point B are bad; loops (horizontal and vertical) and areas with multiple entrance and exit points are good.
Career Highlights
1. Wing Commander
2. Ultima Underworld I and II
3. Thief: The Dark Project
4. System Shock
5. Deus Ex
3. Peter Molyneux
This man made me feel like a god. Peter Molyneux is the father of the god game. To his credit are some of my favorite games of all time. Populous was the quintessential god game, Syndicate was way ahead of its time (see my write up of Syndicate here), and Dungeon Keeper turned video game conventions upside-down by casting the player in the role of the villain.
Beyond being one of the greatest designers in history, he has what few designers have, an uncanny ability to sell. In fact he is so notorious with his tall tales; few take his proclamations without a grain of salt nowadays. Despite being skeptical whenever the man opens his mouth, I end up buying whatever the man is shilling because he has an infectious enthusiasm and a way about his personality and demeanor that convinces you that each and every game of his is going to revolutionize the world. With well-over two decades in this industry, Molyneux still remains relentlessly relevant. This is amazing in and of itself. This is a video of him selling you on the dog in Fable 2.
After watching that how can you not like the guy?
Career Highlights
1. Populous
2. Syndicate
3. Magic Carpet
4. Dungeon Keeper
5. Fable
2. Will Wright
In many ways Will Wright is the antithesis of Miyamoto, you can easily imagine Will Wright growing up, staying in doors playing board games, analyzing their systems, and building model airplanes, cars and boats. Where the two are the same are their creative drives to make games that give the user new experiences. Will Wright sums up his own methodology for making games better than I could have:
“Well, one thing I’ve always really enjoyed is making things. Out of whatever. It started with modeling as a kid, building models… I think when I started doing games I really wanted to carry that to the next step, to the player, so that you give the player a tool so that they can create things. And then you give them some context for that creation.”
Will Wright’s speeches are always entertaining as well as inspiring. It’s incredible how his research and thought process for his games come about. As I could not embed the first video, you will have to click on the link in order to watch:
GDC 2008 – An Evening with Will Wright
This is a second shorter video of another speach he made at TED.
Will Wright: Toys That Make Worlds
Some additional reading:
Will Wright fan site
Career Highlights
1. SimCity
2. Sims
3. Spore
1. Shigeru Miyamoto
“I think I can make an entirely new game experience, and if I can’t do it, some other game designer will.”
If you read the Will Wright entry, I tipped my hand on the #1 game designer, not that there could be any other choice.
If there is a face of gaming, it would be Shigeru Miyamoto. I would describe him as the Stan Lee of video games. After Atari’s collapse, everybody thought games were a fad that would go the way of the hula-hoop, but Nintendo made sure video games would have a bright future. Shigeru Miyamoto was at the forefront of the revival.
As much as anybody, Miyamoto’s creations influenced my childhood. I remember working my ass off doing chores and begging to get an NES so I could play Super Mario Bros. It took two successive Christmases of doing chores everyday and eating my vegetables before my parents finally got the system for me. That Christmas morning is my happiest childhood memory.
As you can probably tell, Miyamoto’s childhood story is a lot more interesting than mine. His upbringing is worth mentioning because it was so influential in his video game creations.
According to Miyamotoshrine.com
“Shigeru Miyamoto was born and raised in a rural community near his current home of Kyoto, Japan. Miyamoto was humbled by the natural world surrounding him. Add to that the lack of a television set growing up, and you have a boy whose sense of adventure and imagination was limited only to what his own mind could produce.
Miyamoto would often explore his natural surroundings in Sonebe to bide the time. Rice fields, canyons, grassy hills, waterways. the ideal setting for such an adventurous young man. Then one fateful day, Miyamoto made a discovery that would later resonate in his future endeavors, as would many things from his childhood. Shigeru had discovered a hole in the ground. Not just any hole, but a large hole. Upon closer inspection it was obvious that this hole was actually something more. It was in fact, the opening to a cave.
Young Miyamoto returned several times before building up enough courage to enter. Armed with only a lantern, he ventured deep inside until he came to another hole that led to another section of the cave. This was breathtaking for such a young man. Unforgettable even. And Miyamoto certainly never forgot.”
This sense of wonderment and exploration of a magical world translates so well in his games. Knowing his past it is easy to see where Legend of Zelda sprang out of Miyamoto’s childhood experiences.
I will never forget his GDC 2007 speech that I attended that implored aspiring game developers to occasionally put down their video games and to go outside to learn more about and explore the world around them. It was such a breath of fresh air to listen to him.
Career Highlights
1. Donkey Kong
2. Super Mario Brothers
3. Metroid
4. Legend of Zelda
5. Nintendogs
6. Wii Fit
See my other related articles also:
Become a Video Game Designer: Everything You Need to Know Part 1
Best Games of All Time by Genre Part 1
Top 5 Greatest Moments in Competitive Gaming (eSports)
What Video Games Taught Me About Life
Low Skill Cap and Luck (RNG) in World of Warcraft PVP
Roger Ebert is Right: Games are Not High Art…Yet
What’s Bad About Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Multiplayer Mode?
Dead Space Through the Eyes of a Game Designer
Call of Duty: World at War Through the Eyes of a Game Designer
Gears of War 2 Through the Eyes of a Game Designer
8 of the Most Underrated or Overlooked Video Games of All Time
Pimps at Sea err I mean Age of Booty & Gen 13 Cosplay
My Student Films 2: EverQuest Documentary and Guilty Gear Isuka Trailer
Best MMA Fights & Genki Sudo: Real Life Video Game Character
Tags: 10 Greatest Video Game Designers, blog, Comparison, game design, Game designer career highlights, limitless units, limitlessunits, limitlessunits.com, Peter Molyneux, riposte101, Shigeru Miyamoto, Sid Meier, ten best game designers, tony huynh, top game designers, video game design, video game education, Warren Spector, Will Wright
Posted in Video Games | 6 Comments »
Thursday, November 27th, 2008
These are the ten heroes of video game design. They have been responsible for games that have forever changed the medium and consequently the video game industry as a whole is indebted to them. Also included in this list is a career highlight list for each designer, a bit about how they personally influenced me as a designer and some fun trivia about them. This is part 1 of this list.
10. Tim Schaffer
The consummate storyteller. Tim Schaffer’s talk titled: Adventures in Character Design detailed his method of research in creating characters was a big inspiration to me.
Here are some of the notes I took while listening to the podcast so you don’t have to:
Characters should be wish fulfillment. This doesn’t mean they can’t be goofy, or nerdy, or losers. There are lots of ways to make characters that are fun to play. Guybrush might not be a badass, but he always has a comeback. Create supporting NPCs as you would the ideal road trip buddies. Making them annoying, offputting, needlessly stupid or generally hateful and then sticking the player with them through the whole game is just sadistic. Write the player character as you would a character in a movie, a character that a good actor would jump at playing. Backstory. Making up pasts for every single one of your characters, big ones or not, makes it insanely easy to imbue them with neat little traits by pulling from the past you’ve created. Steal stuff, but steal it right. Steal stuff from life, especially. From your own life, from your friends’, from crazy things hobos tell you on the street. And steal stuff from other fiction, but don’t steal the surface junk. Steal what makes good things good. So if you’re stealing from GTA, stealing the hookers and mobsters and violence is missing the point. Steal the fun, the open-ended gameplay, the facetious attitudes.
Career Highlights
1. The Secret of Monkey Island
2. Day of the Tentacle
3. Grim Fandango
4. Psychonauts
9. Ken Levine
Ken Levine speaks to the nerd in all of us.
Ken Levine: PAX 08 Keynote Part 1
Ken Levine: PAX 08 Keynote Part 2
Ken Levine: PAX 08 Keynote Part 3
Here is a really good write up of Levine’s 2008 GDC talk.
Empowering Players to Care About Your Stupid Story
What we realized at some point doing the narrator is not a cutscene, it’s not live digital characters, it’s not lip-synching… it’s the world. What is the thing we render best in video games? The world, all the benefits of graphics… this incredibly detailed world. What is your player honestly engaged in most of the time? Think about most games — the warehouses, the sewers, the office buildings… think about the missed opportunities there, in the primary experience, to give the player narrative.
Career Highlights
1. Thief: The Dark Project
2. System Shock 2
3. BioShock
8. Yu Suzuki
Suzuki was the Miyamoto of Sega. The first fighting game in 3D was no clumsy effort like you would expect from developers trying to cope with an extra dimension, it was polished, complex and beautiful. Yu Suzuki is the man to thank for the Virtual Fighter series.
The man had the clout and vision to really swing for the fences. Shenmue cost an astounding 70 million USD to make and is the second most expensive game ever created (only recently surpassed by GTAIV’s 100 million USD). Shenmue was a martial-art action RPG game that Suzuki dubbed “FREE” (Full Reactive Eyes Entertainment). It featured “Free Questing” the ability to explore the city of Yokosuka speaking with the populace to obtain clues and further the narrative or the player can simply roam around the city and not advance the narrative and engage in a number of mini-game-like activities. These included Space Harrier, Hang On, darts and snooker. You could also complete a number of side quests and take on jobs to earn money. The game also featured a fully-fleshed out “Free Battle” system. This was a game similar to the side-scrolling Golden Axe only with the complex move set brought over from Virtual Fighter. Not only that the player could learn additional new moves as the game progressed.
Shenmue was the most visually stunning game at its time of release and featured a full day/night cycle with dynamically changing weather. The Passport feature took advantage of the Dreamcast’s internet connection and allowed players to upload their high scores in the variety of mini-games to online leaderboards.
Plus, goddamn I loved my Dreamcast.
Career Highlights
1. Hang On
2. Space Harrier
3. After Burner
4. Virtual Racing
5. Virtual Fighter
6 Shenmue
7. Hironobu Sakaguchi
Hironobu Sakaguchi saved Square Soft. During 1987 Square Soft was close to bankruptcy. The game was titled “Final” Fantasy because if the title failed it would be the end of Square Soft. Needless to say, Final Fantasy was released and Square is still around.
The first time I played Final Fantasy I thought finally, somebody made the first real D&D game. Final Fantasy VI (III in America) is the only game I can remember that made me really care about 2D sprites.
Hironobu Sakaguchi’s team up with Akira Toriyama led to Chrono Trigger, which remains one of my favorite RPGs of all time.
Career Highlights
1. Final Fantasy – Final Fantasy X-2
2. Final Fantasy Tactics
3. Chrono Trigger
6. Richard “Lord British” Garriot
Richard Garriot is the creator of the Ultima Series and the founder of Origin Systems. He would have a hand in every Ultima game through Ultima Online, which being one of the first graphical MUDs ushered in the new era of MMORPGs.
Ultima 4 was the first game that had a sense of morality. The player had to obtain various virtues in order to beat the game. While the player could commit any evil act they chose to (murder, theft, boasting, etc…) they were punished through a morality system that would prevent the player from obtaining virtues, which were necessary to beating the game. This concept of good versus evil and morality versus immorality was a new concept in gaming that would heavily influence future games.
In Ultima 6, did anybody else collect every cannon in the world and stuff them all into one castle like I did? It is a tragedy that Ultima has faded away. If there is one game series I would like to have a revival it would be Ultima.
At NCSoft, Garriot gave us, City of Heroes, City of Villains before the commercially unsuccessful Tabula Rasa.
This is a video interview where Garriot describes the innovations in his games better than I can.
Career Highlights
1. Ultima 1 – Ultima Online
Click here to see Part 2 of this list.
See my other related articles also:
Become a Video Game Designer: Everything You Need to Know Part 1
Low Skill Cap and Luck (RNG) in World of Warcraft PVP
Dead Space Through the Eyes of a Game Designer
Call of Duty: World at War Through the Eyes of a Game Designer
Top 5 Greatest Moments in Competitive Gaming (eSports)
What Video Games Taught Me About Life
Best Games of All Time by Genre Part 1
Roger Ebert is Right: Games are Not High Art…Yet
What’s Bad About Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Multiplayer Mode?
8 of the Most Underrated or Overlooked Video Games of All Time
Pimps at Sea err I mean Age of Booty & Gen 13 Cosplay
My Student Films 2: EverQuest Documentary and Guilty Gear Isuka Trailer
Best MMA Fights & Genki Sudo: Real Life Video Game Character
Tags: 10 Greatest Video Game Designers, blog, Comparison, game design, Hironobu Sakaguchi, Ken Levine, limitless units, limitlessunits, limitlessunits.com, Lord British, Richard Garriot, riposte101, ten best game designers, Tim Schaffer, tony huynh, video game design, video game education, Yu Suzuki
Posted in Video Games | 8 Comments »
Sunday, November 23rd, 2008
Thanks to Berenice Limon for the use of her image.
I am sick of people telling me to take the safe route and to not take chances. There will always be people that will advise you to live comfortably and not take on any risk or hardship. Get away from these people. They will only derail you from achieving your goals. Being comfortable never prompted anybody to change their situation or achieve their goals. Being comfortable should make you feel uncomfortable. People will allow themselves to be pushed around and bullied in order to remain comfortable. People will act in a painful situation to ease the pain or remove the source of that pain. Security and comfort is not afforded by a job, it is provided by your ability to produce.
“When you are tough on yourself, life is easier on you.” – Zig Ziglar
1. Achievement starts with a goal
Start with a goal. Desire and enthusiasm without direction is wasted. A goal will give you a direction to channel all of your enthusiasm and desire. How do you know your goal is a worthwhile goal? Ask the question of “why you want to achieve this goal.” If your answer is strong enough, then you know that you have a worthy goal.
2. Imagine the pleasure of achieving your goal
Close your eyes and see yourself in the future having achieved your goal. Think about all the benefits, pleasure and possibilities that will open up to you if you attain your goal. Doing this will help you visualize in your mind and emotionally commit yourself to achieving your goal. Remember that feeling of pleasure at reaching your goal. Latch onto this image and it will help you manifest your mental creation into the physical.
“Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.” –Gloria Steinem
3. Imagine the pain of failing to reach the goal
Now close your eyes and imagine what the consequences are of not reaching your goal. What type of painful existence would you live or continue to live if you did not continue to move forwards and achieve you goal? Embrace that feeling of pain and let it drive you. Pain can be the greatest of all motivators.
4. Remind yourself of your goal
Reinforce your goal everyday. Keep you goal fresh in your mind. By doing this you will prod your mind to work out the problems in your way of achieving that goal. A goal that is constantly bubbled up in your mind will allow your genius to work on figuring different methods on how to achieve it. Never underestimate your genius.
Some of the methods to remind you of your goal is to write your goal on the ceiling of your bed so that you wake up and see it every morning and every evening when you go to bed. The headline of my IPhone task list is always the goal I am currently working on. I check this list several times a day to keep on task and remind myself of my goal. Whichever way you remind yourself of your goal do it at least once daily.
By keeping yourself focused on your goal you will remove distractions. I do not know who originally said this, “When you eliminate all other possibilities other than success, you are left only with success as a possibility.”
If you look up at the sun, you seldom see the shadows. – Helen Keller
5. Public Accountability
Tell others what your goal is. Arnold Schwarzenegger related a story about how he used public accountability to get the burning desire in his belly to achieve. While still in Austria and with little ability to speak English he would tell people that he was going to America to be a great actor. Because he let people know his goal, he used public accountability to strengthen his desire to achieve a goal that seemed impossible. Even when he arrived in America he was told his accent was too thick and his body too weird to ever make it. Despite it all he willed his way through all of his detractors and made it by never giving up on his dream.
Blog about your goal and give frequent updates. Here is a video of a guy that used public accountability to get to his goal. He posted a picture of himself on his blog everyday as he used public accountability to achieve his goal of weight loss.
Make a deal with somebody you care about. For instance, you could make a deal with your wife that you will quit smoking if she does the same.
Tell your co-workers about your goal. “I am going to quit smoking for the next 2 weeks” and give them frequent updates. Doing this will even encourage people to ask you for an update about your goal when you neglect to update them.
6. Do something each day that will get you closer to accomplishing your goal
Before going to bed each evening, take out a note taking device and create a stack ranked list of what you need to tackle tomorrow to get you closer to your goal. Start on the list from highest priority and focus on it until it is complete.
By doing something everyday to get you closer to your goal you will be surprised at the progress. This will also make your progress steady instead of having peaks and valleys of activity.
7. Fail your way to success
People are so afraid of failing and making mistakes that it often stops them from even trying. This mentality is completely wrong. If you want to succeed faster increase the rate at which you fail. We learn more from failure than we learn from success. Embrace and learn from failure and get back up and keep swinging. When obstacles arise you change your direction not your decision to get there.
After Thomas Edison failed 9000 times trying to create a practical electric light he was asked by a reporter whether he felt like a failure. Edison replied, “”Young man, why would I feel like a failure? And why would I ever give up? I now know definitively over 9,000 ways that an electric light bulb will not work. Success is almost in my grasp.” Edison invented the practical incandescent, electric light after he failed 10,000 times.
“The world ain’t all sunshine and rainbows. It is a very mean and nasty place and it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it. You, me, or nobody is gonna hit as hard as life. But it ain’t how hard you hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward. How much you can take, and keep moving forward. That’s how winning is done. Now, if you know what you’re worth, then go out and get what you’re worth. But you gotta be willing to take the hit, and not pointing fingers saying you ain’t where you are because of him, or her, or anybody. Cowards do that and that ain’t you. You’re better than that!” – Rocky Balboa
Each misstep is an education. There are two reactions that a person can have when hit by an obstacle. One, give up. Two, redouble your efforts. When you get knocked down, how you react to it shows your character. Bottom line is: do not be afraid to start something because you could fail and if you do fail learn from it, get back up and attack. An example is investing in the stock market. Invest slowly with money that you are not afraid to lose. If you do lose money do not let it stop you from investing, instead learn from your mistakes and consider it as an educational tuition fee. You will never learn, let alone succeed if you never try.
8. Create a mantra
Mine is: “I will do what it takes.”
We need more people that don’t know what can’t be done. – Henry Ford
May all your dreams but one come true. – David Gemmel
This has been my most personal blog to date and I was very hesitant to publish it. Nonetheless, I hope this post is helpful to you.
If you enjoyed this post you might be interested in my other articles:
Why and How I Broke My Addiction to Caffeine
Bet on the US, I am
Money: What Steps I Have Taken to Save It
Tags: 8 Ways to Make Your Goal a Certainty, achieve, achievement, achieving your goals, blog, create a mantra, fail your way to success, goal setting, Investing, limitlessunits, limitlessunits.com, motivation, never give up, pain as a motivator, pleasure as a motivator, public accountability, riposte101, tony huynh, work ethic
Posted in Investing, life, money, motivation | 14 Comments »
Thursday, November 20th, 2008
These are the video games that have defined their genre. They are the standard by which all other games in their category are judged.
Best Flight Combat Game of All Time
Wing Commander 3 (1994)
Platform: PC
Developer: Origin Systems
Publisher: Origin Systems
The popular vote here is of course Tie Fighter. While great, Tie Fighter did not measure up to Wing Commander 3. Keep reading because I am going to convince you why.
Wing Commander 3’s impact on games is still felt very clearly even today. Wing Commander 3 is what I like to call the Star Wars of video games. This goes a lot further than just having Mark Hamill star as the protagonist. Like Star Wars did for movies, Wing Commander 3 literally invented the big-budget blockbluster style of games. Costing a then unheard of 4 million dollars to create and packed into 4 CD-ROMs (when CD-ROMs had just come out), Wing Commander was unabashedly pushing the envelope and spared no expense in doing so. Marketed as the world’s first interactive movie, Wing Commander 3 broke new ground by using an enormous amount of full motion videos to tell a branching story through and included the use of CGI backgrounds and greenscreens. This was technology that was not even broadly in use for films at the time.
Behind the ground-breaking wrapper of Wing Commander 3 there was an amazing core game. Wing Commander 3 brought the Wing Commander series into polygonal 3D for the first time. The game was among the first to use full motion video to not only tell the story, but in-game as well. Right out the gate, Wing Commander 3 blew minds its technology by having your wingman communicate and respond to orders through full video on the bottom of your HUD. During the game the other crewmembers’ disposition towards you and the mission selection were influenced by conversation trees as well as how well you performed on previous missions.
To sum up Wing Commander 3, it married great mission design, the ability to select your fighter, select your armaments, select your wingman, branching missions and a branching storyline told through hours of full motion video into one of the most insanely fun packages ever put onto a disc. This game from top to bottom was every gamer’s wet dream.
Best Turn Based Tactical Game of All Time
X-COM: UFO Defense (1993)
Platform: PC
Developer: Mythos Games
Publisher: Microprose
Incredibly deep, X-COM has still never been matched as a strategy role-playing game. X-COM’s two distinct gameplay phases placed you in charge of Earth’s defense against an alien invasion.
The first phase was the world map. This is where the player first chooses a spot for their base and where the player would manage their funding to recruit, research technology and equip their soldiers. Financial resources came through successfully repelling aliens and earning the approval of a ten-nation league. If the player is not active or effective in combating the alien threat funding would dry up and even result in some of the nations signing treaties with the invaders and completely yanking any financial support for the player.
Each member of your squad could be named, leveled up and equipped like an RPG and this really helped you grow attached to them. Interceptor planes could be placed on patrol to defend the skies and shoot down alien craft. Alien ships could also land and it was up to you to send out small squads of soldiers to kill the aliens at these sites and bring back their artifacts and bodies for the research. Research of these alien artifacts unlocked new equipment and weapons to give you an edge on your next encounter. Once the player landed their squad at the crash or landing sites the game would shift to the second phase.
The second phase consisted of turn-based tactical squad gameplay. This gameplay phase was incredibly well executed and introduced such tactical staples as line-of-sight and opportunity attacks. Even the time of day would be taken into account and affect your soldiers’ vision. One of the greatest moments in gaming history was moving your solider around a corner and having an alien pop into view right in front of you and not having the action points to respond.
X-COM is a game with so such depth and when taken as a whole is so much more than a sum of its parts. It is the title that invented the modern turn-based tactical game and has yet to be equaled since.
Best MMO of All Time
World of Warcraft (2004)
Platform: PC, Mac
Developer: Blizzard Entertainment
Publisher: Blizzard Entertainment
When the topic of MMOs comes up, what game immediately pops up?
World of Warcraft was created from the ground up using what Blizzard calls the “donut design.” This is where outside of the donut consists of the casual players while the center is where the hardcore players reside. WoW is a game built for casual players with enough depth to draw in the hardcore players. This philosophy is easier said than done. Through expert design choices and more layers of polish than the MMO space had ever seen before, WoW revolutionized the MMO genre. The more than 10 million active players speaks to the successful execution of Blizzard’s donut design.
As with most MMO’s they continue to evolve and World of Warcraft is no exception. Not content with the donut, Blizzard has created a new category of user, dubbed the casual-hardcore. With the introduction of the arena system and invention of separate branches of gear optimized specifically for Player-Versus-Player (PVP) as well as for Player-Versus-Environment (PVE), Blizzard has separated their users and allowed the creation a new audience entirely in the casual-hardcore player. This is a player who wishes to only play PVP and not be hamstrung by the need for gear obtainable only through PVE raiding. The PVP gear is entirely optimized for PVP while the PVE gear is optimized for PVE. For the PVP specialist (myself counted in their number), who can climb the arena ratings ladder, they have the ability to maintain the best (or near best) PVP gear in the game by only devoting a few hours a week to WoW.
Blizzard has been so successful; many believe (including myself) that it is stifling the entire genre as newer titles in this category continue to fail to break through World of Warcraft’s stranglehold on this market. Can a game be too successful?
Best 2D Fighter of All Time
Guilty Gear XX Accent Core (2007)
Platform: Arcade, PS2, Wii
Developer: Arc System Works
Publisher: Sammy Studios
The most balanced 2D fighter in existence. Nearly every character can be played at a tournament level and has a chance of winning.
Let’s run through this game’s new and creative mechanics that developer Arc System Works has introduced. The gameplay is incredibly fast. Most of the characters can, double jump, dash in the air or run along the ground. Low air dash attacking is a common strategy. This makes for lots of action and a frantic pace.
Custom Combos: An endless variety of custom combos can be created by a mechanic called the Roman Cancel, which ends the animation frame of an attack as soon as you press the button, allowing you to chain any move you wish.
A Tension Gauge limits the use of Roman Cancels. This bar fills up as you move towards the enemy, inflict damage or receive damage. A Roman Cancel would take 50% of the Tension bar and an exactly timed False Roman Cancels on specific attacks take 25% of the tension bar.
Fortress Defense: An impenetrable defense that uses up the Tension Gauge to block both high and low attacks and nullifies special move blocking damage.
Burst Gauge: This bar fills up as you receive or inflict damage and serves two uses. If being attacked, it can be used to break out of any combo or it can be used offensively to refill the Tension Gauge.
Guard Gauge: Another common problem with fighting games is the turtle (ultra-defensive) strategy, which leads to boredom and little action. Guilty Gear has largely alleviated this issue and keeps the game’s frantic pace by introducing a penalty for employing this strategy in the form of the Guard Gauge. The Guard Gauge begins a fight half-filled. As the player blocks, the Guard Gauge increases and as you takes damage the gauge empties. If the player neither blocks nor takes damage, the gauge returns to the middle. The emptier the gauge is, the less damage you take. Therefore, if you continue to turtle you will take more damage when you do get hit. Also if the player refuses to attack, they are warned and then hit with a complete reduction of their tension gauge, a 20 percent fill-rate of tension for 10 seconds and suffer an increased likelihood of becoming dizzy when hit.
Since the number of hits received drains your Guard Gauge, attacks had a built in diminishing damage return. So the subsequent hits in a combo do less damage than the previous hit. This forces combo creators to frontload the heaviest damaging attacks at the beginning of the combo string for maximum efficiency.
When you look at all the innovative fighting systems in place coupled with really crazy character design and finely balanced characters, Guilty Gear is the pinnacle of all 2D fighting.
Best Survival Horror of All Time
Silent Hill 2 (2001)
Platform: PS2, Xbox, PC
Developer: Team Silent
Publisher: Konami
Despite my review of Dead Space, on the topic of survival horror games, I simply do not feel qualified. It is simply a genre that I do not seek out. While I have played quite a few survival horrors, I have too many holes in my experience and missed too many of the widely lauded titles to feel comfortable giving an answer to this one. If pressed I would give it to Resident Evil 4. However, I will defer to my good friend and survival horror specialist Jared King.
On the subject of Survival Horrors, I have to go with Silent Hill 2. Basically, my theory of how good a survival horror is depends on the level of fear or anxiety you have while playing the game. SH2 creates this feeling in several ways.
One, limited save points. Obviously the more you are afraid of dying and going all the way back to a save point, the more anxious or fearful you will feel.
Two, limited visibility. There is a fog in all of the open areas of the game (attributed mostly to the PS2’s limitations), which obfuscates everything. The things that you can seem especially when you travel to the otherworld, are freaky as fuck.
Three: The enemies, especially the invincible Pyramidhead, are difficult and your weapons limited.
Four, for a lot of the game, you must protect your female companion from harm, always difficult.
Five, and most importantly, the game is FUCKING FREAKY. It is psychological horror at it’s best. The endings and meaning of the game have been written on in the form of a psychological analysis. I personally, had several moments when I figured out what was going on and said OMGWTFBBQ!!!!11!!.
Anyhoo, this thing is kinda rambling, so I’ll sum up with this: SH2 is (so far) the pinnacle of the survival horror genre. And until I play Dead Space, it doesn’t seem like anything has come close. Because I know you’re wondering, Resident Evil was a different animal. I don’t know if my soft spot for the original RE has more to do with zombies or because it was a good game that came along at a very impressionable point in my life. However, even despite the advantages RE has, SH2 is STILL a better survival horror game.
Best Mech Game of All Time
MechWarrior 2: 31st Century Combat (1995)
Platform: PC
Developer: Activision
Publisher: Activision
MechWarrior 2 is one of, if not my favorite game of all time and going back to play it today reinforces why. It is a great game that holds up incredibly well. Being of the first CD-ROM games ever made, MechWarrior changed what I thought games were capable of. It featured two full campaigns as either Clan Wolf or Clan Jade Falcon, which followed along faithfully an epic storyline written by Michael A. Stackpole.
The game was deep and complex. The controls promoted fast reflexes and the ability to pay attention to a lot of things happening simultaneously. MechWarrior 2 had dozens of mechs to choose from and they could be completely customized from their armaments, engine, armor and ammo. Location based damage rewarded skill and even influenced the player to allocated weapons and ammo on hard to hit areas on the mech’s chassis to prevent damage to them.
Activision nailed what it is to be a mech pilot. MechWarrior 2 realized what every BattleTech tabletop player ever dreamed piloting a mech could be. The BattleMechs had real weight to them. The audio was perfect. The necessity to juggle different weapons to manage heat was the exact mechanic described in all of the novelizations of the series.
MechWarrior 2 was also one of the first games to ever have a CD audio soundtrack. The soundtrack featured Jeehun Hwang’s electronic music, which is so good I still occasionally listen to it.
There are few things more fun than marching your fully-customized mech around to an amazing soundtrack. I just had this grin from ear to ear plastered across my face the entire time I played this game.
Best FPS of All Time
Halo: Combat Evolved 2001
Platform: Xbox
Developer: Bungie
Publisher: Microsoft
If I let my game designer in me write this section, I would have given the honor to the brilliant Half-Life 2. The only problem is that when I analyze this category from a personal-had-fun-playing-the-game standpoint, Halo wins out over Half-Life 2, no contest.
Say what you will about Halo, but when this game came out it changed the FPS genre forever. It popularized the “Halo” control scheme, invented the 2 weapon limit, recharging shield, split screen co-op, vehicles, a dedicated button for grenades, had insanely good multiplayer and was blessed with AI that was smart, but more importantly made the player feel smarter for outwitting them. Halo came along at a time when I had forgotten what the magic of games could do. Halo came together and was just fun. Simple as that. Luke Smith said that Halo was his Mario. That line to me summed up Halo. It is that, when you are kid on Christmas day feeling. The Gregorian chanting when the game boots up still sends chills down my spine. That’s how good this game is.
Without this title it is my belief that the Xbox would not have been able to survive, Xbox Live would never come to be and the Xbox 360 would never have been created. Microsoft would not even be in the console game space anymore. The gaming landscape has been changed forever because of Halo: Combat Evolved.
I hope you enjoyed part 1 of this list.
Click here to see part 2 of this list.
See my other related articles also:
Become a Video Game Designer: Everything You Need to Know Part 1
10 Greatest Video Game Designers Part 1
10 Greatest Video Game Designers Part 2
Top 5 Greatest Moments in Competitive Gaming (eSports)
What Video Games Taught Me About Life
Low Skill Cap and Luck (RNG) in World of Warcraft PVP
Roger Ebert is Right: Games are Not High Art…Yet
What’s Bad About Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare Multiplayer Mode?
Dead Space Through the Eyes of a Game Designer
Call of Duty: World at War Through the Eyes of a Game Designer
8 of the Most Underrated or Overlooked Video Games of All Time
Pimps at Sea err I mean Age of Booty & Gen 13 Cosplay
My Student Films 2: EverQuest Documentary and Guilty Gear Isuka Trailer
Best MMA Fights & Genki Sudo: Real Life Video Game Character
Tags: Best Games of All Time by Genre, best video games ever, blog, Comparison, favorite games, Guilty Gear XX Accent Core, Halo, limitlessunits, limitlessunits.com, mechwarrior 2, riposte101, Silent Hill 2, tony huynh, top games, video game education, Video Games, Wing Commander 3, World of Warcraft, X-COM
Posted in Video Games | 15 Comments »
Wednesday, November 19th, 2008
Today this blog turned one month old. Looking back at it, I’m proud of what has been accomplished in the last month. I’ve learned a lot and gotten a taste of it and enjoy it too much to stop now. I will be trying to increase the amount of original content coming to this site. Currently I am exploring several options to get the site updated everyday, but the last thing I want to do is sacrifice any quality for more updates. I was just over at penny-arcade and they are celebrating their ten-year anniversary and that puts this one-month anniversary in perspective. Well, just wanted to say thanks and I hope that I brought you some value.
I won’t make any promises, but barring anything catastrophic I should have a more substantial video game post tomorrow. Here are some things for you to pass the time in the interim.
Peta’s Version of Cooking Mama
The game is surprisingly fun and in terrible taste. It is worth a play through.
Mirror’s Edge in 2D
Really good looking animations for a flash game.
Couple of videos to top it off.
Tags: 1 month anniversary, blog, japanese trick pitch, limitlessunits, limitlessunits.com, peta attacks cooking mama, peta cooking mama, riposte101, tony huynh, Welcome to 1 month, yo yo tricks, yo-yo kid
Posted in Video Games | No Comments »
