Game Magic

Let’s rock!

Do you remember amazing Little Big Adventure (Relentless) ?

My primary concern now is making an analysis video of this gem of the past. And the most complicated part of it is to folmulate what can modern developers exactly learn from it to usein their own projects.

 It seems like 99% of all the people, who played this game series in the 90s, came to an agreement, that was incredibly good and came ahead of it’s time, but it’s really tough to pick some specific game mechanics out of it to use them today.

Most of the difficult situations of the game were so because of a pretty nasty controls, which made aiming and jumping a pretty complicated tasks. LBA’s movement system can be totally called an anachronism, and can’t compete with modern ones.

I thought I’d say the same about the state-switching system (you know, this normal/athletic/angry/descrete animated window) because the advantages these states give (abilities to talk, run, jump, fight and sneak) can be easily distributed over a keyboard (or a gamepad) and be available in one ultimate normal state (like Ctrl for sneat, Shift for run, Space to jump, etc.). But I’ve missed one thing.

These states drastically change the behaviour of the Magic Ball, the main wearpon and puzzle solving instrument of LBA series; and it would be pretty strange and unintuitive to make one ultimate state with 4 knobs to switch between 4 different Magic Ball behaviours. But that’s not all.

LBA 2 took this concept further - when you change behaviour not only your’s Magic Ball trajectory changes, but the trajectory of other Magic Balls on the screen (Temple of Bu level). And that sounds interesting: a system of player’s status switching, that changes both player’s and surrounding objects’ behaviour. 

The analysis is going, I’m sure there’ll be much more things to say about the LBA’s game mechanics, that can be of current interest. If you’re intrigued - don’t miss it here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCk6ebZC3j08AkE2vH9sBxlQ

Making use of gaming experience in real life (feat. Dark Souls).

For several year I’ve been thinkin on how can gaming experience be used in daily life. 

For now I suppose, that mostly the games can’t help you succeding in other tasks, but a few titles are pretty close to that point. One of them is Dark Souls, and I think that it can teach us a thing of two. 

First of all you comprehend a concept that everything good takes big effords and patience. Also you constatly try to calculate risks: in many game situations you’ll decide will you play risky, but with more interest (but that tactic pretty often can be dissapointing), or in a more stable, but more boring manner. The thing, that’s at stake is your lifetime. So in your daily life - you can try risky things like startups, a job in new field, some weird relationships and so on, but in the end they can be a waste of time. On the other hand life without severe risk is more stable, but can feel more boring. 

Secondly, every time you face something new at the game, you learn to ask yourself a question “What am I looking at?”. Through the game you get help from a lot of weird creatures, but some more normally looking ones can betray you, causing additional difficulties. Also when you meet a monster you never know how dangerous it is or will it respawn after killing, but still you try to guess. I think that this mindset can help you to take people and different events of your life with a lower bias and constatly ask yourself “What am I looking at?”.

And one more thing I’ve constantly asked myself during the game is “What state I’m in?”. In modern world of internet and Hadron Colliders we live like omniscient beings. But there’s still so much to discover! And no one can surely tell you what to do with your life for you to be happy. When you’re playing Dark Souls for the first time (especially without online manuals) you feel a really strong frustration. You literally have to fight for knowledge about this odd hostile world and constantly look for different patterns. Some world’s laws, like how exactly held humanity affects the gameplay, will most likely stay obscure to the player. I think this virtual scientific work can make you more attentive to your real life and it’s patterns.

I’m making a detailed video on these, where I’ll look closely at each of these points and some more.

What do you think about using gaming experience in real life? Do you have a story of your own? Tell me, I’m really into that topic.

So, here I am. 

Today I’d like to look into reasons, that kept us playing old console games in the 90s. These games had no save options, so we replayed them over and over from the very beginning to go past another nasty situation or boss. 

What made us do that? I think the answer lies in some pixel art features. I analysed modern arcade-style gem Maldita Castilla and came up with the video games’ Eye Candy concept. 

It is an object with few thought-out details, rife colors, pleasing shadows and a noticeable feel of volume + distinctive behaviour and well made animations.