Wow, I seem to be the only one to come across this thread who feels that wacky off-the-wall stuff is not "Fun."

I agree that gameplay is king. How in the heck do jump pads and stuff popping out of walls for no reason translate into quality gameplay?? They don''t! Wackiness and surrealism don''t have any more bearing on whether a game is FUN or not than Realism and Logic do. You folks are confusing two completely seperate elements of games.

Realize, I''m not saying that Wacky games CAN''T be fun, I''m just saying that how "wacky" or surreal a game is, is completely irrelevant to how fun it is.


Brian Lacy
Smoking Monkey Studios

Comments? Questions? Curious?
brian@smoking-monkey.org

"I create. Therefore I am."

I think what people are talking about is not strangeness for its own sake, just avoiding realism when there is an alternative that is more fun.

Myself, I like to see whacky stuff once in a while just because I get to see reality every day(lucky me).

Its not that wackyness is what makes a game fun.. Its just usually when developers TRY to make their games realistic and believable, they have to cut back on alot of the realism and half ass it. All aspects of reality can''t be modelled completely in a game environment (at least not yet) so the programmers end up having to sacrifice some of the reality for aspects of it that are more important to the game (like shooting only zombies in resident evil and not being able to blast shot guns through doors) The "wacky" methods, so to speak, are not allways generally wacky but are easier to model since you''re the one creating them.
The GBA i believe is bringing creativity back to programming. That lil bugger is going to take 2D games to a new level. Its the first 32bit platform that encourages 2D programming. We''ll see some amazing things done on that in the future.

"The human mind is limited only by the bounds which we impose upon ourselves." -iNfuSeD

This sort of relates to the Super Mario Brothers thread, simply because I''ll use that game as a example.

Mario uses the "jump on enemy" to kill them tactic...as well as jump up from below to knock enemys off of blocks above you...now admitingly this is a seemingly simple tactic pretty unrealistic and all...but it is a pure gameplay tactic...simply by jumping onto an enemy you are putting yourself at risk if you happen to miss...land just a little to the left/right of the enemy and they gotcha...the other enemy killing tactic of jumping into blocks, doesn''t put you imeadiantly at risk...but given the variety of blocks (some you can knock on...others won''t move...and still others break appart if the player happens to be large mario) it isn''t heavily relied upon (notice the game teaches you to keep hitting the blocks through the use of the "?" block types...giveing you a minor and sometimes major reward for doing so...this keeps the tactic freash in your mind)...so basicly mario can take out enemies either of the two different ways (not counting fire balls yet).

Now lets say that the game used a more "conventional" enemy design...enemy A needs to be jumped on once...enemy B needs to be jumped on twice...so on and so fourth...the game would get dull pretty quickly...instead Mario had a small number of enemys, but offered a lot of variety in how you could interact with them....the Kuppas were a good base enemy...moveing left and right as they came across blocked pathways...they were predictable and not really too dangerious, but they provided good practice...then come the turtles...jump on them (or hit them from below) and you ended up with a upturned shell (if left alone the turtle would crawl back out eventualy)...bump into the side of the shell and it became a "weapon"...but not a free one as it could still cause damage to the player...then of course there were the spiked back enemys, which couldn''t be jumped on...think about these three enemies types for a second...one is a "pushover"...another serves a multi-purpose role...and the third cannot be hurt in the normal fashion...when the player encounters each enemy individualy they must use a different stratigy to beat them...and when encountered in different numbers the player has to change stratigy yet again depending on the situation...

The game isn''t "wierd" because of this...all of the enemies could have been designed in more realistic terms...but instead they were designed to give a clear presentation of what is expected of the player...you don''t jump on the spiked creatures...because they clearly have spikes....The game only looks weird or surreal when thinking outside the gameplay mechanics...but thinking within the gameplay it all makes sense...the turtles are graphicly represented by turtles because of how that particular enemy functions within the game.