I can't find a game today whose goal is to kill all enemies you see like games used to have. You are given 3 life to finish them all. If it's an action game, there must be at least a story part telling you what to do. When halfway there, another story emerge. Or there must be a least a part where you have to sneak in, thus you have less combat. You can no longer enter and kill everybody brutally and mercilessly all the time, Contra-style. Bosses appear after a few stages, where back then every stage has a boss. Right now each stage is transitioned with a story. Before, there is no transition at all, you are in a desert and the next stage is in north pole and you had no clue what's going on but you kept playing anyway. Do you think games have been getting better? I mean, games were originally born with traditional hack-n-slash, that's when people start to love games. but we tried to remove it. [edited by - alnite on March 4, 2004 10:25:17 PM]

Serious Sam is a great game where all you do in strafe and constantly shoot hundreds of enemies. Games like Serious Sam show that hack-n-slash can still be great today.

Have you ever played Serious Sam? Although it has a little bit of story (kill monster, yada, save world, yada), it''s just an excuse to have another reason to blast away (as if "they are trying to kill you" wasn''t enough). At points you have to destroy some 200 monster before continueing.

I think mindless hack''n''slash games are now mostly web-based.

I think that the old level-boss-level-boss-level-boss-level-big boss schema is still recovering from its horrible abuse during the eighties and early nineties. Absolutely every game involved that formula, and most of them let you kill things by jumping on their heads. You''ll notice that even in games where jumping on someone''s head SHOULD kill them, designers shy away from that particular feature.

Seriously, if you jump off a roof in an FPS and land on somebody''s noggin, they should be seriously hurt, but generally they aren''t. That''s because people will think immediately of what you all thought of: Super Mario Brothers. Same thing with boss enemies. It''s absurd to think that every mile or so there will be a twelve-foot ninja, a giant sasquatch, or a biomechanical octopus waiting next to a big unstable series of pressurized cannisters that explode into its face when you shoot them through the tiny gap in his armor.

Not that it doesn''t happen. Shinobi used the formula, Metal Gear Solid 2 used the formula, and God knows Final Fantasy X stuck to it. I''m sure there are scores of other examples out there. The presence of sneaking levels is more of a feature than a shortcoming, most times. Any kind of gameplay becomes monotonous with time. Constant hacking gets a little old in games like Mark of Kri, or Shinobi, or any other such game. Opportunities to sneak up and neutralize an enemy without getting shot at are welcome, as far as I''m concerned. In fact, I often thought while playing older "hacking hames" that it would be nice to be able to just stick a knife in that moblin''s eye, instead of having him zero in on my face as soon as the door opens.

I think games HAVE been getting better, and I think that the old formulas are always going to be fond memories. If anyone tried to make a Contra game that was anything except a faithful 2D recreation of the Contra experience, they would be guilty of horrible crimes. 3D Contra without some kind of stealth, or vehicles, or FPS play, and featuring a huge silly boss after each level would be dismal.

I thought Serious Sam was really fun, but it lacked variety. Somehow the same enemies popped up thoughout the whole game. If they added more intelligent enemies and some with diverse behavior it would be a great (fun) game.

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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage
I think that the old level-boss-level-boss-level-boss-level-big boss schema is still recovering from its horrible abuse during the eighties and early nineties.


Not that it doesn''t happen. Shinobi used the formula, Metal Gear Solid 2 used the formula

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1. I think that it would be good to have more ''old-school'' games that mess around with the formula and provide original twists. Ie. instead of having a boss at the end of the level, have ONE LEVEL WHERE a boss that chases you through the whole level and needs to be slowed down occasionaly, but can only be killed when you get to a certain part (or several parts of the level).
Or a mini-''boss'' that is just a collection of creatures (even the weakest of the enemies!) working together as one.


But I love the tension you get in a good stealth game.

@Ketchaval: Reminds me of Metroid Fusion where there were some good scripted chases where your character was the prey.

joeG

dunno. on the consoles there are quite some ''oldschool'' games..

and even newstyle games take the old features with them, trying to build up on them.

take zelda. it evolved much during each release, and still, the castle->boss - explore - castle->boss - explore remains.

definitely, if mixed up well, the old fun features can still be good

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Yes, I have played Serious Sam, silly me I forget that one .

The thing is, I don''t really know if you can call it an improvement or simply just another design. The first design we came up with might be hack-n-slash. But right now, maybe it''s just the current trend that everybody likes stealth. And I am thinking, maybe sometime in the future, people will get bored with stealth because 90% games released have stealth feature in it. Now when this happens, will game developers invent a new design, or will going back to the traditional hack-n-slash be enough?

What I am saying is human would get bored if something is presented over and over again, that''s why we ditch hack-n-slash right now because we had been playing that kind of games gazillion times. But if that feature is taken away from us for a long time, we might want it back again. And honestly, I do miss a new game where your job is to kill and nothing else.

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The reason that hack and slash games existed in the first place is because the hardware was too poor to allow developers to make anything more complex without extreme difficulty. The industry will probably never return to that idea (besides a few exceptions like Serious Sam) because it really gets boring fast (especially with good graphics). With the low detail/cartoonish graphics it can be fun for some time, but with better graphics, you get a sort of curve. As graphics/physics/etc. get more realistic in a game, the player expects everything else to follow, thus a hundred photorealistic monsters with real weight coming at you seems rediculous and becomes an incredible drag. I have found that effect with Serious Sam personally.

By the way, Serious Sam is a good game and is generally fun (I find the half-assed stories to be more fun than the actual gameplay at times, but it''s still pretty good) but I only play it to relieve stress or something because it is incredibly shallow and offers almost no immersiveness.

That brings me to another point: immersiveness. The more the player thinks he/she is in the game, the more fun they will have. How can a game have immersiveness if the concept is so shallow and lacking interactivity as simple hack-and-slash.