Obscured View

I really enjoy Geometry Wars, although my Robotron skills (i.e. dual stick shooter) are much diminished these days from what they used to be. We had some fierce competitions at EALA when it was in Brentwood on the Ultracade machine there. Whomever was competing from the EA side would make all kinds of creative entries for the high score like “Westwood SUX” and such. Ah yes, fun. =P

I find it a bit hard to believe that the creator of Geometry Wars had never played Robotron, as he mentioned when asked in an early interview after Retro Evolved hit LIVE. Oh come on, really? I could understand if you’d not played Crazy Climber, Rock n’ Rope, Cloak & Dagger, or a host of other semi-niche arcade games… but not playing or having seen someone playing Robotron is like not having played Pac Man or Space Invaders. Sure, I’m dating myself, but having historical knowledge of classic games is what allows you to make better ones nowadays instead of making similar games over and over again — even though they can certainly be fun.

Let’s dive into that for a bit.

So Geometry Wars was one of the best games LIVE had to offer on release… well OK it was the best. It’s fun, fast, competitive, and aside from stages vs. a free-flowing structure, almost identical to Robotron in gameplay mechanics. You move and shoot, and different things with different types of mannerisms attempt to kill you.

I think it would be safe to say that GW caused the industry to collectively say “ooh! Retro can be profitable!” and start cranking out straight ports of retro games, “re-imagined” games that are suspiciously similar to retro games, and a host of quick smaller games, many of which rip off larger games from the DS or PSP that didn’t make their way fast enough to the service. It’s become a “reto renaissance” in some ways, but this renaissance made developers think one thing, while publishers see something completely different.

Monetarily, I know some people did well off of retro download games, but did it advance the console downloadable game industry, or set it back? We went from fairly advanced PC and Console titles to… Rally-X and Frogger 2 : This time it’s personal! And not only did we get titles like this, we got great games that no one had a clue how to handle in this day and age. No on-line multiplayer? In CYBERBALL?! One of the best competitive pre-Street Fighter arcade games ever? Are you daft?! No, more likely the person that made that decision wasn’t old enough to have played the game in an arcade in the first place.

Or, better yet, perhaps it was the “play it safe and then we’ll see” plan from the publisher. In this scenario, an on the cheap version is released in the “original” form to test the waters and see how sales do. If it sells well enough, they can justify a larger budget to “do it right”. Of course, the original game is so dated that it doesn’t sell and they don’t make the game they should have made… which of course is the one they should have made in the first place.

Sorry, I’m ranting at whomever’s decision that was, because it was a dumb one. The problem here is that there’s a minimum standard now for having a quality on-line game. You can’t go under that any longer, yet some people still try.

I have to agree with the N+ developers that LIVE is suffering from a glut of not-great titles, burying the gems in a sea of mediocrity. Again, I’m dating myself here, but something very similar happened back in the 70s with Atari and the 2600. They had zero quality control on their titles, and allowed anyone to put any kind of “game” onto the system that they wanted. I put game in quotes because there’s no way that many of the titles even qualified as real games. Sure, Atari made some money, but eventually there was so much crap out in stores that no one could tell which games were worth buying and which were not, so everyone stopped buying them all together. I’m seeing a similar trend with LIVE, and it’s bothersome, because it’s a great service with some really good titles on it, but the majority of them are not worthy of being on the service in the first place.

So here’s some helpful hints for people that are thinking of “re-imagining” classic games onto these services:

1. If the game was able to be played by more than one person in the arcade, it damn well better be playable over the internet as well as on the couch in the new version.
2. If the game can add cooperative play in some fashion even if it didn’t have it before, add it.
3. Play the original game for more than 15 minutes. If it’s multiplayer, play it with other people in the same room because arcades had a social element that you can’t recapture easily with today’s on-line unless you understand what was exciting about the game in the first place. MAME doesn’t get you there unless you’ve got a cabinet for it. Try an Ultracade instead.
4. #3 will help you to get to this one as well, which is simply to understand what makes the game unique. Let’s take BattleZone for example. This entire game is about shooting enemies and not being shot. Aiming and timing was critical, especially in higher stages. Using cover was also critical. So when you go to “re-imagine” it, making your tank’s shot fly in a spiral with pixie dust particles flying from it in a rainbow of colors (or was that flavors?) which render it impossible to gauge if you were on target or not is a bad idea. You broke the game’s core mechanic, bravo! I can no longer sneak shots past obstacles because my shot will move into them on its own. Yay another broken windshield for me! You have any idea how much those cost on a tank?!
5. Don’t take the “port and then improve” route. Most download developers aren’t charging an arm and a leg for their services. For publishers out there, throw them a bone and let them do the game right the first time. I realize that the returns publishers are expecting for download games are decreasing… but perhaps that’s because you’ve been doing these on the cheap for too long? Hmm….
6. If there’s someone at your company saying that just porting the game alone is enough, and you don’t need any new features like multiplayer internet or cooperative play, nod in understanding and then fire them.
7. For the platform providers, kill the bad ideas. Just because you have a relationship with a publisher >cough< Sierra >cough< don’t allow them to just shovel games onto your system. For every gem they put out, 4 other mediocre ones clog the system up and make all of us less likely to download any games you offer.
8. Just because one type of game sold well, doesn’t mean 20 more of that same type of game will. How many tile matching games do we need? At least Puzzle Quest added to the formula rather than just re-hashed it. Bunnies, Hexes, Mystical orbs — yeah OK they’re all colored and they go away when I put them in a pattern. Can we move on now?
9. And a corollary to #8 — just because a bad game of one type failed, doesn’t mean that another one of quality will not. Consumers aren’t stupid — they know quality vs. non-quality in a matter of minutes. Killing a game idea based on genre alone is a bad idea.

So I’ve likely passed the TLDR barrier a while ago, so I’ll just end this here. Maybe I’ll add to this and update it at a later time.

One consolation is that some developers are getting it right when taking an old game to download service. Bravo for that gents, you’ve already got my MS points. If I could pre-order a downloadable game, I would on that one.

Wait, scratch that. The last thing I want is for online to turn into Gamestop. =P