Good and Bad Games That I Learned From
Since I'm still stuck as far as working on Sciophobia is concerned I feel like I might as well take the time to talk about some game design type things that are important to me. This will probably just be a long rambling post about things that matter to me in games, and a few games that I like and hate and whatever else. If that interests you then, I hope you enjoy and feel free to send me a message, because I love talking about this stuff.
P.S. Possible spoilers for The Witcher 2, and Silent Hill 3
I guess I'll start with my gaming history. I didn't start gaming until fairly late. Around the time the N64 came out my neighbor decided he was going to get one, and when he did he gave me and my brother his old NES. My first real gaming experiences were playing Ninja Turtles, Batman, Mario and Duck Hunt. From then on I was mostly a Nintendo kid, up until Xbox and Halo became really big. But I've always remained a bit of a Nintendo fan generally. At least until I finally got Steam a few years ago, and since then I've been horribly addicted to PC gaming primarily thanks to the indie crowd and the general convenience of it.
So in that time I've played a lot of different games and different genres and there have been a lot of good and a few really bad. Out of all of them I think that the bad have been the most interesting, because they've taught me a lot about game design and what I personally don't like. I've also noticed fairly consistently that most games that I don't like, I don't like for a few reasons, but they still have quite a few things that I really like and appreciate about them.
One that really stands out is Zelda II for the NES. This was one of the most frustrating and broken games I've ever played, and yet I still really enjoy a surprising amount of that game. The combat system, in regards to you the player's interaction, is very fun. It players very similarly to Super Smash Brothers if they had a SSB for the NES, which I found very engaging. The other thing I really liked was that you could level up, and improve your attack power, health, and mana, which is very unique within the Zelda series.
The thing that makes the game incredibly frustrating is the enemies and level design. The shield enemies take forever to kill and it's purely luck if you hit them, because they react far to quickly and accurately to your attacks, which just becomes frustrating and tiresome. This is a really good example of a game that is blatantly unfair to the player.
The game doesn't try to be unfair though, it does give you a bunch of power ups and items and new attacks to make traversing the dungeons and levels easier, but it doesn't change the fact that you're either being overwhelmed by endlessly spawning monsters, or trapped fighting shield enemies that take 5 minutes of spamming and luck to kill.
Level design is also a huge problem, there are several areas where you're almost forced to be hit. Having enemies is small spaces is incredibly unfair in a game like this where the majority of your interaction with the world relies on you being able to move.
I question whether some of these issues are related to the NES's processing ability and the technical limitations, but overall the game is just frustrating. However, I think that the RPG-esque overworld, and random battles, mixed with a Smash Brothers-esque combat system is very interesting, and a really fun style of gameplay. The game itself is a good idea, that was poorly executed in my mind, which is unfortunate, because (to my knowledge) Zelda II didn't do very well, and/or was not very well received which I feel is why this style of gameplay wasn't revisited later.
Touching back on the too-cramped level design issue, a great game that suffers from that is The Witcher II. This game is easily one of my favorites, the combat system is super engaging and has tons of customizability, the characters, world and story are all interesting and fun. (It does get a little fan service-y at times, but it has a sense of humor about it) The potion system is a little weird but I do understand why it's done the way it is.
The real issue that I had with the game is the boss fights. This game is hard, it's designed to be hard, but it's mostly fair about it. The majority of your combat however is very reliant on movement, you're constantly running around, doing crazy sword attacks and throwing bombs and generally just going crazy. It's not quite as over that top as something like Dante's Inferno but you need to move around a lot. Unfortunately every boss fight except for I think two, one of which is optional you're stuck in an incredibly tight space, fighting a boss that has mass attack range. Which I found very frustrating, because the majority of the game felt very Dark Souls, it's hard as fuck, but it's fair and satisfying when you win. But the boss fights, like the first fight with Letho, and the dragon just feel frustrating and like the game is overly limiting my abilities in an attempt to artificially make the boss harder then it really is.
SPOILER ALERT**************************************************************//
The thing that really proved this for me, was when I decided to kill Letho at the end. During the first fight it must have taken me 20+ tries to "beat" him, but this last time I beat him in 1 try. Even if taking improved armor and weapons into account the main thing that made it so easy was that I could actually move and get away from him, because that was the only "boss" fight that you actually are given a serious area to fight in.
I still really loved this game, and it's still on my favorites list, but it does have several frustrating elements. Otherwise the game is gorgeous, the gameplay is tons of fun, and the story alone makes it worth playing.
SPOILER ALERT***************************************************************//
Recently I've also starting (but haven't finished so please don't spoil it) playing Silent Hill 3, which I've noticed also has that problem of too much shit in a tiny area. I'm playing it on Hard combat so this may just be an issue with the game not really being balanced for hard mode. I don't exactly know what gets affected with Hard if they have more enemies or if they just have buffed health and you get less ammo, but if it's the latter I feel very strongly that this game id designed to be unfair. At one point when you get into the subway train,and they have one of the giant fat fuckers there. He literally takes up the entire walkway, unless you can wedge yourself against one of the doors and wiggle past.
This happens several other times in far more obnoxious ways, where they have a hallway, which has five of the crawling fuckers, AND they don't even have the camera face the right way, so you can't see where you're going unless you manually change the camera which takes forever, and by the time it has you've gotten hit. The crawling guys are hard enough to see without the crappy camera angles. At that point you have no good weapon for handling large quantities of monsters all at once.
The way the game uses camera angles feels very similar to that horror mentality of if it's so dark you can't see your hands in front of your face it's scary, which just isn't true. Not being able to see while playing a game is far more frustrating then scary. So when Heather runs face first into a wall because the camera wouldn't point the right direction I don't feel like that's a fault of mine, and it's more a fault of the game for not letting me look the way my character was facing.
That being said, when Silent Hill 3 uses camera angles to show important items, it's done very well.
Since Sciophobia is going to have puzzles, I decided to play Silent Hill 3 with Hard puzzles too. If you haven't done that, don't. It's completely idiotic, the lack of information and how insane some of the codes is worse the Anna Extended Edition. How anyone is supposed to figure them out without a wiki is beyond me.
The first puzzle is the Shakespeare puzzle,which first strike, demands the player has fairly deep knowledge of Shakespeare's plays. So essentially you're in a book store or something, and there are five Shakespeare anthologies each with one of his plays in it, and a number from 1-5. There's a bookshelf that allows you to place the plays back in an order. There's a locked door that needs a code to unlock, and a paper with a poem on it. The poem very loosely tells you the order of the book. The problem is, your ability to place the books back on the shelf is COMPLETELY arbitrary and does NOTHING. Even if you put the books in the right order on the shelf you don't get a little ding noise, nothing opens up, nothing! Which is just distracting and unneeded. It's only real purpose is confusing the player, which is unfair and obnoxious. All the puzzles are like that, so far. They give you a bunch of unneeded information and no direction to use the information you have.
Puzzles don't need to be easy, and I don't think they should. You should feel like you've accomplished something, and feel rewarded for completing it, but you shouldn't need to spend 3 days to decipher a 64 line poem where only 6 lines are important just to unlock one door. The main issue with these puzzles as far as I can tell is that they lack direction. The player isn't given enough information about how to solve the puzzles, and that at least left me feeling very overwhelmed and cheated.
Anna Extended Edition has a somewhat similar problem where you're given a lot of items, and little to no direction. That's really the bottom line, that game artificially lengthens itself by not giving the players a suitable amount of information to complete the puzzles.
That being said, I feel Anna is definitely worth playing if you like horror or are making a horror game, because of the way it creates fear and tension. The game doesn't use a lot of jump scares, the majority of the game is things appearing that weren't there before. These events are also randomly the longer you take to progress, which is a great way to encourage people to solve the puzzles and advance.
The story of Anna isn't anything to write home about, it's got a lot of tropes for horror video games, and is fairly cliche in my mind. But I think the game should really be played for it's atmosphere, because it's done very well.
Okay, my back is killing me so that's gonna be it for now, I shouldn't have written so much in this crappy set up XD For anyone that's made it this far thank you I hope you enjoyed my ramblings and it all made sense and was maybe interesting or something. And honestly even though I ragged on these games I do highly recommend them all, and even though I'm still in the process of beating Silent Hill 3 I am actually enjoying it aside from the puzzles, I actually may try replaying it on Normal and see if that's any better.
But yeah. Hopefully Scio updates soon, I should be able to start getting my computer set up properly in the next few days ideally.
I hope you have a good night and thanks for reading. And feel free to send me a message if you want to talk about game design and things because I'd love to hear other peoples opinions and suggestions for games good and bad.