A Few Comments on Resident Evil 4

February 15th, 2013

Last year, my brother played Resident Evil 4 for the first time. After he finished the game, we discussed it over IM. Here are some of the key points from our conversation:

Moving and Shooting

Not being able to move and shoot does several things to the gameplay:

it forces the player to find a spot and bunker down, creating a stop ‘n pop style of shooting.
it makes Leon vulnerable, forcing the player to consider the surrounding environment and locations of the enemies and formulate a plan of attack.
it creates a tug of war over the ground between Leon and the enemies (spatial dynamic). The player wants Leon to keep his distance, while the enemies attempt to close in on him. This push-pull relationship contributes to the inhale-exhale flow of the shoot-outs.
it removes the clutter of moving while shooting (as moving throws off aiming).

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Spatial Dynamic and Fly-Kicking

The closer the enemies are to Leon, the easier they are to shoot, but the more likely they are to attack him (spatial dynamic and risk/reward).
Leon can gain ground by stunning and then fly-kicking enemies, but they need to be close to him/he needs to run over to them to execute the attack (risk/reward).
The cool down after the fly-kick, where the player has no control over Leon, balances the mechanic and extends the risk/reward.

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Tension

The game builds tension by either:

limiting the size of the play area and thereby the distance between Leon and the enemies
adding more enemies to overwhelm the player
increasing the Ganado’s armour (interplay)
increasing the number of directions enemies can approach from (adaption skills, multitasking)

These methods squeeze more skill out of the player.

Camera and Viewpoint

The camera is brought in close so that it’s both claustrophobic and functional. This is a neat throwback to the fixed camera angles of the original games.
The laser sight helps to distinguish depth.

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Interplay

Most shooters have weak interplay: you just shoot an enemy and they die, and if they don’t die, you shoot them a few more times to make sure. In Resident Evil 4, the player can shoot to stun, which then opens up opportunities to execute special attacks.
The enemies also have interplay with one another. For example, if a Ganado is knocked into a group of other Ganados, it’ll push the whole group backwards.
The organic interactions between enemies feeds back into the interplay between Leon and the enemies, creating deeper and more emergent interactions.
Because each body part causes the enemy to react differently when shot, the body maps the potential interplay and strategic options. The designers can then tweak the availability of certain strings of interactions by covering up certain parts of the body (armour plates, for instance).

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Game Speed

The game speed is slowed right down so as to give the player enough time to deal with the hordes of Gonados. The large number of enemies make the relative time faster. So although the player has more time, they need to do more in that time.

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Quick Time Events

QTEs are only used in contextual situations or when regular interactions aren’t possible (ie. cutscenes). In this way, they add more interactivity to the game. Many games now tend to use QTEs to subtract interactivity.

If you liked Resident Evil 4, then you should totally check out Vanquish. It’s a different type of shooter, but you can certainly feel the lineage between the two games. I’ll be writing about that game soon enough.

A Few Comments on Cut the Rope

February 12th, 2013

I’ve squeezed quite a bit of gaming out of my iPod over the past 2 years. Cut the Rope is one of my favourite titles. I don’t follow the mobile scene much, so if you have any good iOS game recommendations, please let me know in the comments.

Cut the Rope follows a simple, repeated structure that’s easy to understand. The game elements obey form fits function, and there’s a nice visual contrast between them and the background. These qualities make this simple puzzler a great game to play, as well as watch being played.
None of the levels require the camera to scroll both vertically and horizontally. Everything is either kept within a single screen or spread out in one direction. By keeping the camera only moving along a single axis at most, it’s easy for the player to follow the action.
The physics add a playfulness to the gameplay. This is the game’s core appeal.
Cut the Rope is an action-puzzle game, so even when the levels focus on problem solving (knowledge), execution skills (dexterity, reflex, timing) are still needed to carry out the solution (which is different from a standard puzzle game, like Picross or Crosswords). Most levels tend to focus on execution skills. This aspect, along with the physics and cute-n’-clean presentation, are what make this game so accessible.
Each box is based on a certain game element, which is first introduced on its own and then combined with existing elements to create layered challenges. The game is logically organised around its gameplay.
Stars are a form of scalable difficulty.
Often, the way to obtain all three stars is different from the way to obtain the first two, which is usually rather obvious. The first two stars thereby facilitate the creation of a red herring in the player’s mind, which takes more knowledge and adaption skills to overcome. Level 2 – 21 is an example of this phenomena:

At first, the player is likely to cut the top-right rope, as not only is doing so the quickest way to reach the time-active star, but the rope itself appears to be the longest, drawing the player’s eye. After the player does this, they can’t reach the star on the right. When they come to repeat this level for a perfect run, they must think around the original solution to come up with another plan.

For more discussion on Cut the Rope, please check out this thread on the Critical Gaming Facebook page.

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Tags: cut the rope

A Few Comments on Star Ocean: Second Evolution

February 10th, 2013

I played this game for 10 hours before giving up. I’m sure it gets better, but who has the time to wade through so much filler? Here are my thoughts:

A significant portion of Second Evolution‘s gameplay involves reading through protracted talking sequences. The occasionally-voiced anime archetypes blather excessively about nothing and are far too polite for their own good. There’s just no punch to the writing and no conflict to keep the story moving forwards.
Battles take place in a circular arena where the player can move around enemies to dodge their attacks and target their weak points. The 2D sprites and digital controls weaken the spatial dynamic by making it harder to align and judge the relative position of the two parties.
The battles run in real-time. The player has several party members, but can only control one at a time while the others follow their pre-set AI behaviours. At any time, the player can switch between party members so as to manually attack, use items, or cast spells. This allows them to micromanage the battles. Since there’s minimal interplay between the different party members (for example, stacking attacks) and party members and enemies, this mechanic is only useful for tending to the AI-controlled characters when they’re low on HP or MP.
The enemies don’t coordinate their attacks or use their numbers to close in on the player and make use of the spatial dynamic.
Because the battles lack dynamics and interplay, there’s very little to keep the player engaged. I won most fights by just pressing the attack button a few times and watching the action unfold automatically.
Similar to the PSone Final Fantasy games, the overworld is rendered in 3D, while the towns and dungeons are pre-rendered images of 3D environments. The awkward angles of the 2D stills, coupled with the sprite avatar and digital controls, sometimes make it tricky to navigate these areas.
The 2D landscapes are littered with treasure chests that reward exploration. Over time, the player amounts a small bounty of seemingly useless trinkets. A money-for-skills system allows the player to forge these items into something useful. The whole process is bogged down in needless abstraction that’s best remedied with a visit to GameFAQs.

If anyone’s interested in this series, there’s a fan-translation of the original SNES game (which was later remade for the PSP in the same vein as Second Evolution).

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Tags: star ocean, star ocean second evolution

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