Unlabelled True Gaming Resident Evil 4 and Incredibly Tight Mechanics.

9/03/2018 05:47:00 am
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True Gaming Resident Evil 4 and Incredibly Tight Mechanics.

Resident Evil 4 and Incredibly Tight Mechanics.

Posted: 02 Sep 2018 11:42 AM PDT

Resident Evil 4 is arguably one of the best games of all time. That isn't nostalgia talking for me, I played it a year ago and it's almost instantly shot up to one of my favorite games of all time.

I have no affinity for Resident Evil. I've always been a Silent Hill kind of guy when it comes to how I like my horror games. And while I can certainly applaud some of the level design and differing routes in RE 1 and 2, nothing will ever feel as tightly designed as the 4th game.

I made a video on RE4 on my YT channel, for my first video. It's not really all that great, and I really didn't articulate exactly why Resident Evil 4 feels so good, and I'd like to do so now.

Resident Evil 4's gameplay loop allows for an asinine amount of actions to take place, with only seconds given to make many tiny micro-decisions in a given scenario.

Each mechanic is layered on top of one another and loop back around in so many ways.

Let's just take Leon's pistol. Facing one enemy, he's given 5 different spots to shoot at on an enemy that will effect it 5 different ways. Head shots will inflict more damage on top of opening up the oppurtunity for a QTE. The body will do some damage, the arms open up another QTE oppurtunity, and the legs will drop the enemy.

Throwing in just one more enemy is going to effect how you handle a situation. You may opt for a quick few headshots for a single enemy, but with 2 you'll be prioritizing some QTEs that are effective for crowd control.

And, that's just with your more standard enemy type, with one variation. Every enemy added adds another layer of depth and decision making that you're not actively thinking about, you're being forced to make snap decisions based on what's best.

Now, let's take enemies that have helmets, negating an entire method of disposing of him. Another way RE4 forces the player to constantly switch up how they go about a situation is with ammo and weaponry.

You're given quite a few options in terms of weaponry. And while a shotgun is almost always effective, you're not always going to have ammo for it.

A game like MGSV gives the player a massive arsenal, but you can actually just ignore 90% of it in favor of 2 or 3 go-to weapons.

RE4 has a whole lot less in terms of sheer number of weaponry, but instead opts for making each weapon count. There is no weapon, other than the SMGs, that I found 0 use for. I was almost constantly popping into the delightful inventory to switch in and out of different weapons to best deal with a given scenario. Limited ammo ensures that the player will almost always be put into a position of having to switch things up, even if they wouldn't try another weapon out otherwise.

Weapons and enemies are the most obvious ways it presents the player with a myriad of options to toy with, but that's not mentioning player/enemy placement, environmental hazards that effect both player and enemy, level design, tactics the game doesn't tell you about, mini-boss enemies like the Chainsaw Ganados, as well as regular bosses that also switch up how you have to tackle a situation, such as the lake monster.

And all of these tiny things have a handcrafted feel to them. All these tiny details all add up to an experience where you'll almost certainly never handle a situation the same way, even on different playthroughs. There's always something more to be learned from every playthrough.

None of these things would matter if the core of RE4 didn't feel so tight. Once they had that core, you could build off of it in so many ways.

Which is why a 'mini-game' like The Mercenaries, a more score-attack focused affair, can have a player sink as much, if not more time into as they did the main game.

Adding just another layer of depth by having different playable characters, all with their own methods of play that feel vastly different.

So yeah, another post talking about how god damn great Resident Evil 4 is. I'll leave off with a question, are there any other games that have this level of depth to them? And I don't mean in the sense of a New Vegas, where different playthroughs will see the player going to areas they didn't just spot, but games that have mechanics that build off of and flow into each other in such a smooth and organic way.

I'd say Metal Gear Solid 2 and 3 have this depth as well, but the player is by no means forced into doing so, mainly due to how broken the tranq gun is. (Try replaying those games stealthily, without the Tranq dart and without killing anyone, and there's a whole lot of fun to be had.)

Thanks for reading.

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Less wow-factor, maturing gaming industry or just a result of growing up?

Posted: 02 Sep 2018 02:32 AM PDT

Hi,

I am curious on your thoughts on a topic I have been struggling with.

My first steps into gaming were on a pentium with (I think) 8mb of RAM and buying floppies with shareware. I believe what really got me into gaming was each time again not knowing what you were getting into, figuring out where to go, how the controls worked and eventually discovering what the game was all about both in terms of gameplay and story.

Fond memories growing up while pushing all the walls in Wolfenstein, being completely blown away by Max Payne, being amazed by all the great gunplay effects in F.E.AR. endlessly goofing around with the physics in the first Far Cry.

I truly thought it was just me getting older, ruining my own experience by reading and watching all the previews, until last year Prey hit the shelves. It is still possible to lure me in and be truly amazed by the thought and attention that went into creating a world!

So now I am pondering; is it still me, or is it the gaming industry maturing towards safer business models (online, loot, royale, argh) that simply do not allow (as much) for the things that appeal to me. Or, is it a phase and will the games of "WOW" that once were return?

Is there hope yet or am I simply a dinosaur from an era passed? :)

submitted by /u/iam_aha
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most 'new game+' modes feel boring/unnecessary for me

Posted: 02 Sep 2018 03:00 PM PDT

Many games give you the option to play in a 'new game+ mode after the first play through. the problem lies with what they provide. Some of them just give you increased difficulty, with no other changes. others add things like a bonus dungeon/alternative ending.

Couldn't they just add those bonuses without the requirement of finishing the game first? Why would you go through the exact same scenarios just to get to that 4 min alternative ending after spending hours to get to the normal one? Or to fight the same enemies but this time there are more versions of them? (Different color/silver/metal/gold ect)

Take breath of the wild for example, the master mode is just enemies with ridiculous hp that take more weapons to kill. It's frustrating to break 4 weapons to kill one enemy and get one weapon as a prize right from the beginning with absolutely no story changes or new areas to explore?

Shin megami tensei IV unlocks a new difficulty after finishing an ending. While it may makes sense since it has 4 endings in total, you experience the exact same scenarios minus some minor dialogue changes and the last part of the game if you choose options you did not pick up in the last play through. And even then you have to experience the same last dungeon/boss twice at the end of the game if you're going for all endings.

If you have extra scenes related to the story, you could just put it in the first play through? if someone starts a ng+, he most likely will get bored because he's weak again/op because the stats transferred over. Then he'll probably watch the extra scenes on YouTube.

some games like Mario galaxy give you new levels when you finish the final boss. No need to play the levels again.

However, I don't mind that the story does not change if the experience changes. ocarina of time for example, has a 'master quest' mode unlocked after you finish the game. The dungeons change, with different puzzles and maps. And they're generally harder. They didn't just make enemies change color and deal double damage. They made it feel like a completely different game.

I get that some people like a challenge when replaying a game, but the replayability value is mostly low and new game plus is looking more like a lazy feature

submitted by /u/mrissaoussama
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Are there any strategy games with RPG style exploration between battles

Posted: 02 Sep 2018 01:03 PM PDT

In most of the strategy games I've played, the story unfolds outside of combat. Between battles there will be dialog between characters and occasionally the player will have to make a decision that might affect the outcome of the game. I'm curious if there are any strategy games where after combat, the player explores an area (village/castle/base/whatever) and the story and character development happens as a result of actions that player performs in this area. So instead of being presented with a scripted dialog at the end of a battle, the player might visit other characters in their quarters and initiate conversations that will allow the player to learn about the motivations of other characters, the history of the world, affect the outcome of the war, etc. Does this exist and are there any games that do it well?

submitted by /u/Ctrl-Alt-Mango
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What aspects are most effective at making platformers stand out?

Posted: 02 Sep 2018 01:00 PM PDT

The indie games market contains a relatively large number of 2D platformers. One of the reasons for this is that they are relatively easy to create compared to 3D games, but as a result the market has become quite saturated with them.

Super Meat Boy was based primarily around running and jumping without many complex core mechanics, but it combined tight controls with hard-but-fair difficulty and had instant respawns and replays to make the experience less frustrating.

A number of other popular indie platformers (such as Braid and Fez) stood out more because they used a particular innovative mechanic (changing time/rotating between 4 planes) that was not commonly used in other platformers.

Given the saturation of platformers in the indie market, what features are most important in making platformers stand out from the crowd? Is a single "new" mechanic enough, or are there ways for more traditional platformers to distinguish themselves using different methods?

submitted by /u/LimeCub
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«Spec Ops: The Line» is a pro-imperialism piece even if it’s not trying.

Posted: 02 Sep 2018 06:26 AM PDT

«Spec Ops: The Line» is a third person shooter and a darling of artsy gamers everywhere, it has being celebrated as a glorious triumph of gaming as a narrative medium and (this is the tricky part) as a critique of US militarism. I would argue that regardless of whether it success as the first, it utterly fails as the later.

The plot of Spec Ops starts as this:

Six months prior to the game's events, the worst series of sandstorms in recorded history began across Dubai. The city's politicians and wealthy elite downplayed the situation before evacuating secretly, leaving countless Emiratis and foreign migrant workers behind. […]

Konrad volunteered the 33rd Infantry Battalion of the United States Army to help relief efforts, defying orders by the Army to abandon the city and its refugees and deserting with the entire battalion. 1

This entire thing is an embodiment of a sentiment that the USA population seems to have about their foreign policy. One that was best expressed by George W. Bush of all people:

We judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions. 2

Part 1: "The baggage of the source material" or "Joseph Conrad was your racist aunt on Facebook"

Everybody and their mom know that Spec Ops is an adaptation of "Heart of Darkness" by Joseph Conrad, hence the name of Konrad. So any analysis of the politics in Spec needs to start at Heart.

Heart of Darkness is often described as an anti-imperialist novel, one that could be applied to any imperialism, but this is not really the case. Conrad wasn't reacting to imperialism in general, he was reacting to the horrors of the Congo Free State, a particularly cruel colony in which 10 million people were exterminated.

Conrad's complain wasn't "imperialism bad" but "Belgian imperialism bad, unlike the civilizing British imperialism". As Hochschild puts it:

Conrad was a man of his time and place in other ways as well. He was partly a prisoner of what Mark Twain, in a different context, called "the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages." Heart of Darkness has come in for some justified pummeling in recent years because of its portrayal of black characters, who say no more than a few words. In fact, they don't speak at all: they grunt; they chant; they produce a "drone of weird incantations" and "a wild and passionate uproar"; they spout "strings of amazing words that resembled no sounds of human language ... like the responses of some satanic litany." 3

Chinua Achebe, probably the most celebrated African novelist of all time, is a lot more emphatic of his dislike for Conrad, who was as he puts it a "bloody racist" with a book that only carries the message:

Keep away from Africa, or else! Mr. Kurtz [. . .] should have heeded that warning and the prowling horror in his heart would have kept its place, chained to its lair. But he foolishly exposed himself to the wild irresistible allure of the jungle and lo! The darkness found him out. 4

This is a baggage that the Heart of Darkness adaptations apparently can't avoid. If you were to believe "Apocalypse Now" and the endless parade of Vietnam War movies that followed it, even the most terrible Yankee war criminal was a multifaceted and complex character with a tortured soul, while every single armed Vietnamese was a drone in a soulless machine. The Vietnamese civilian is at best a noble savage and at worst a hooker saying "me so horny". The Vietnamese soldier is a target in an eastern horde. The great tragedy of a war that killed millions of Vietnamese is that killing millions of Vietnamese made the US soldiers feel bad.

This is so sad, Alexa play "All Along The Watchtower"

Part 2: "Spec Ops as a glorification of the military" or "Uncle Sam's character flaw is that he cares too much"

Well look at that; Spec Ops also starts with Jimi Hendrix:

The premise behind Spec Ops is a convoluted mess, it involves some crazy sandstorm and Dubai, a developed nation, falling into an avoidable chaos for seemly no reason. This allows the writing team to come with a very specific setting that wash the hands of the US military industry complex from their vilest sins.

The worse thing that the US army did as a whole was to tell Konrad to abandon the city (AKA, not intervene at all), meanwhile the worst thing Konrad did was to go to the city in what was at first unambiguously a humanitarian effort. This humanitarian effort somehow descended into a full on war zone for no real reason. The Haiti earthquake and the Indian Ocean tsunami both proved that military personal destined to humanitarian relief could be abusive, but neither of those cases ever descended into an actual war or anything even close to that.

Spec Ops wants to have a war in the Middle East, but it also wants to have a US military that act entirely out of altruistic intentions or doesn't act at all. This is completely contradictory with the entire history of the USA interventions on the Middle East.

This, intentionally or not it doesn't matter, leads to the portrait of Middle Easter people as barbarians, somehow they descended into an actual war where Haiti and Thailand didn't.

Spec Ops refuses to even consider the idea that an US military intervention may be inherently motivated by unethical reasons. When things go south and our protagonist needs to go and hunt down Konrad is because war is hell or whatever and Konrad's hand has being forced into martial law due the circumstances. An altruistic man has turned into a monster because the faceless and evil elite of Dubai abandoned its noble savages behind; Konrad who was simply carrying his white man's burden has fallen prey to inherent lawless violence of the Middle East.

Keep away from the Middle East or else, Mr. Konrad! But he foolishly exposed himself to the wild irresistible allure of the desert and the darkness found him out. The real tragedy of the Dubai apocalypse is that some guys from Minnesota got their souls corrupted by it, and our protagonist had to see it, and that made him sad.

Notes

1 Some dudes at Wikipedia.

2 A speech of Dubya at Dallas, 2016.

3 Adam Hochschild, "King Leopold's Ghost", 1998.

4 Chinua Achebe, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's «Heart of Darkness»", 1975.

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