11. Metroid Prime (the Super Metroid
plan in 3D)
It still seems amazing that Metroid
could have been to made to work in three dimensions. Point for
point, everything Super Metroid had is here, and with a
Z-axis.
Published by Nintendo
Developed by Retro Studios
Primarily designed by Mark Pacini, Karl
Deckard and Mike Wikan
Platform: Gamecube
Length: Medium
Of Note:
Most of the Metroid games have proven
to be paradise for sequence breakers (especially Zero Mission,
which was designed with sequence-breaking in mind!), and Prime is no
exception. Progress through these games is driven by abilities
gained due to found powerups, but sometimes this is done in a binary,
get-the-boots-to-jump-the-wall fashion. If one can find a way to get
over the wall without the boots, then it might be some time before
the next wall shows up. Sometimes bypassing the wall nets the player
a new powerup that makes some walls obsolete. In the very first room
on the planet surface there's a door high up that leads to the Space
Jump Boots. Some versions of the game have a subtle bug that allows
players to propel themselves onto the high ledge that leads to the
boots, opening their vistas tremendously from the start and making
the game far less linear.
The Game:
Ultimately, Metroid Prime is Super
Metroid in 3D. That itself is reason for amazement.
The biggest thing the series gains from
the transition, it seems, is atmosphere. Of course the Metroid games
have always been atmospheric, but there's a qualitative difference in
seeing these things in three dimensions, and rendered in realistic
polygons instead of tiles. Yet there is also a drawback to this; it
takes far much more work to produce an equivalent room in a 3D game,
to current graphic standards, than a 2D one. Modellers, texturers,
and level designers must be employed to create all the assets
required, while a 2D room can still conceivably be created by one or
two people. This matters because, as mentioned earlier, an
exploration game is ultimately about consumption. Terrain is
consumed by the player's travels. Once it is seen once it'll never
have the same effect on him again.
If a designer is smart, he'll try to
work around this by trying to get more use out of each place.
Sight-seeing need not be the only source of interest from a room.
Metroid Prime attempts to get around this in the traditional
Metroid ways: by making players backtrack between points, which
provides the navigation challenge of getting around, and by hiding
important powerups around the landscape to give players a reason to
investigate each area. That also makes the scenery more interesting
by forcing the player to pay attention to it, instead of treating it
like mere wallpaper.
Another way they do it: later on the
monsters in some areas changes to the difficult-to-kill Chozo Ghosts
enemies. Backtracking through an area long after it was first seen
is usually trivial by the time it's seen again, since by that time
the player has much more power and health. The Ghosts help to
counteract that, yet they don't really replace the normal enemies.
They randomly infest certain rooms. If they're killed, the room goes back to
the previous enemies for a while, but if the player leaves without
killing them, they'll still be there when he returns.
Something must be said about the
artifact search late in the game, in particular the reaction of some
reviewers to this kind of task. I'm all in favor of it. Engaging
the player in a treasure hunt is a substantively different task than
the step-by-step objective chasing that forms the rest of the game's
structure. It makes the game world seem much more like a real place
besides. If the player never had to go back through old areas, or
search through them, then why should they be arranged as a complex to
be explored at all? Why not just arrange them in a straight line and
prevent backtracking, and save the player the effort of navigation?
If a game is truly about exploring
then these kinds of tasks should be seen as the main objective,
instead of a bothersome distraction. People who complain about
wandering around are missing the point. While I would caution
against rejecting these players outright, I consider that they should
be included by expanding their perspective through entertaining
discovery play, rather than by making yet more straight action games.
On a personal note, Metroid Prime
remains my favorite of Retro Studios' updates of the classic games.
Its story is the least infested by the cliches of game-writing and
its loathsome short-hands, with "corruption" and "darkness"
lathered liberally over its polygonal surfaces. (The worst game in
that regard: Kingdom Hearts.) The second game went and made
that the theme, and the third puts it right into the title. There's
only so much of that a gamer can take, and at least the first Prime
game kept it to a minimum.
Design Lessons:
It seems like the first Prime
was mostly R&D, proving the classic Metroid structure could work
in a 3D game. The later games expand upon the basic concept, with
stuff like Prime 2's parallel world, but there's no real
indication that it particularly needed expanding. At least 3
does bring in many new powerups and intra-planet travel.
If you're making a open world game,
don't get pulled off-track! I consider exploration to be a primal
impulse up there with fighting, eating and sex, and is better suited
for games for being more intellectual than those others. But the
degree to which players will be enthralled by their discoveries is
directly proportional to the imagination you put into your world.
There is definitely no shame in including combat portions, but decide
early on if it's a shooter or an exploring game, and then don't
lessen the one you prefer at the expense of the other.
Links:
Wikipedia
StrategyWiki
GameFAQs
MobyGames
12. The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
After Ocarina of Time's quest
approach and Majora's Mask's ruling gimmick, Wind Waker returned
Zelda to an emphasis on poking around and finding stuff.
Developed by Nintendo EAD
Main designer: Eiji Aouma
Platform: Gamecube
Length: Long
Of Note:
While host to a much greater
exploration aspect than the Zeldas just prior, the game puts off
access to the full world for a surprisingly long time. There are
effectively seven dungeons in this one, and the player's talking boat
prohibits access to places outside the direct route between essential
places until three of them have been finished.
Some vocal players reacted with dismay
towards the Triforce search quest immediately before the final areas.
There are aspects of make-work in it (since essential maps to this
part cost lots of rupees to use) but all-in-all, it was a welcome
change back to the original Zelda pattern, involving the players
using their wit in a search for artifacts, more than straight-up
combat and puzzle-solving. When it comes down to it there are not
that many kinds of activities available for game developers to put
into games, and most devote themselves to narrow subset of those:
fighting, talking, and solving abstract puzzles. Hunting for
treasures is severely under used, not over.
The Game:
Ah, another Nintendo product. This one
makes five in all on this list. I apologize for this, but then,
Nintendo did a lot to popularize this kind of game, especially in
their 3D efforts. Anyway, here I spare no words, other than these,
to discuss the developer's bold decision to cel-shade the game. If
you are one of the many who dislike Wind Waker for attempting
a comic art style, there are plenty of alternatives for you to enjoy.
Wind Waker makes the list for
one over-riding reason: the sea. It is an amazing thing. It
is the first game to bring back to the series that feeling of
stumbling upon awesome things just lying around that the first game
had. Even Link to the Past had secrets that felt more like
the player was being led to them, or that weren't meant to be secret
at all. Wind Waker brings navigation in to become a much
larger part of the game, and makes the map facility much more
important than before.
In addition to the individual area
maps, there are maps that point the location of upgrades, maps that
show treasure locations, maps that show triforce pieces, maps that
show secrets, and maps that show giant squid. There's even, for the
first time in any Zelda game, a map that helps players find Heart
Pieces, an aid that was reprised in Twilight Princess' fortune
teller.
But I shouldn't neglect why it is the
secrets seem harder to find here, or why the maps are important.
It's because the game world is freaking huge. Although it's
mostly water, it's true, in size it begins to approach vast-scope RPG
worlds like that of Oblivion. Both games tend to have less
going on per square foot, however, than a simulation sandbox game
like a 3D Grand Theft Auto.
Design Lessons:
Plenty of the islands in Wind Waker
utilize a technique I like to call the Significant Void. If you see
a button on a speck of land in the middle of a vast field of blue,
who could bear not to press it? Even if there's no other clue nearby
to indicate there's a secret there, the presence of the button
itself is a clue.
Many of the islands in the game work
like this. One that sticks out in memory is an island with a
step button, a hammer button, a flame wall, and a hidden spike wall,
among other things. Just pressing one of the three buttons there
wasn't enough to reveal any secret; it turned out each had a timer on
it that caused it to pop back up. So, the player has to figure out
the right order, hit them all in time, and find out how to get
between them quickly enough. Not only that, but some of these
buttons required using items found elsewhere in the game. By the
time I finally got the stuff I needed and figured out the puzzle, I
hadn't even realized that there was no other clue that anything was
hidden there! The presence of the puzzle elements there was enough
to indicate a secret could be found.
Take that a step further: if there's an
island in the middle of nowhere with nothing on it, the player would
be greatly disappointed if there turned out to be no significance to
it. It is the responsibility of level designers to not just produce
significance leading to goodies, but to reduce significance when
there are no goodies to be found.
Links:
Wikipedia
GameFAQ
Speed Demos Archive