I like the difficulty system Silent Storm used, where in addition to picking a difficulty level, much more granular settings were available as % sliders for individual numbers, like enemy damage, enemy accuracy, etc. When you had tweaked everything to your satisfaction, you had a difficulty (brag) rating where 1.0 was Normal.

I’d like to do something like this with Cylopean where certain aspects of the Sanity system can be made easier for the less hardcore player. In “The Way It Was Meant to Be Played*” (normal) mode, Sanity points have to be carefully managed. There are no blue potions, period. I know this is going to turn people off.

*If you can think of a less clunky way to say that, I’d be obliged

MGS changes what information you get about the world and how.

Bad games?

Well, I figure Gameplay and Presentation are the two major categories to judge a game by. We really don’t need to discuss presentation, since audio, visuals, and storyline are things that obviously affect the quality of a game. I like to think of presentation as a value that multiplies the overall enjoyment found in the gameplay of a game.

Meaning, if you ain’t got gameplay, you ain’t got nothin’. Gameplay can be bad for a number of reasons as stated above, but I’ll try and break it down a bit differently. When playing a game, I have fun when I accomplish something and when I experience new things. Gaining levels in RPGs are fun because they combine the accomplishment of reaching a milestone with the experience of using new abilities. When completing a task in a game is too easy, the sense of accomplishment is less and the game is not as fun. When something is too challenging the player gets “stuck” and no longer has fresh experiences. This sounds simple but at the end of the day the quality of gameplay can be chalked up as Value of Accomplishment + Rate of Experiences. Thus bringing the entire equation to this:

Presentation(Au+Vi+St) * Gameplay(VoA+RoE) = Quality of Game

Try testing out this equation with various games. I find it pretty accurate. Things such as repetitive level design or tedious grinding would reduce RoE, while giving players real choices can increase VoA(without affecting difficulty!) When designing a game, try to find creative ways to positively impact the Gameplay end of the above equation.

One series I like that would be considered a “guilty pleasure” is Dynasty Warriors. I get to kill 1000s, while gaining levels and using some of my fav quasi-historic characters to boot! Ahhh, now that’s what I call nirvana!

Heh, I’d left off revisits of old arcade games, because they were frequently damned good games. (As is Civ1-3. Haven’t played 4) They had so little to work with, so many different games, and such fierce competition, that there is little room for bad games coming out of the 70s to the late 1980s arcades. I mean there were oodles of bad games, but the ones that still surface into your consciousness? A lot of them are either primal play types (Invaders, Asteroids, Missile Defense, Tank Wars (okay, that one needed polishing to be playable, but I played a great Tankwars clone in high school)), and Pac Man or excellent polished renditions of their play systems (Raiden, 1942, Contra, Super Off Road, Centipede, Galaga, etc.)

What makes a game bad? When it isn’t fun to play. This can be because of a bunch of things, not all of which are the same for everyone, of course.

Install issues, clunky interfaces, regular crashes, display incompatibility, and a lack of quick, convenient help for basic issues are all things that have caused me to abandon a game relatively quickly. The game itself might have been pretty good, but I didn’t find that out, because IMHO it wasn’t worth my time to overcome basic problems at the start. People are like that. Make the initial bar just a bit higher and a significant number of players will just go back to whatever they were playing before.

Frustration is another player-killer. The section requiring Olympic-level reflexes for twenty-six separate gates, with no option to save part-way through, is a pain in the arse. I’m not a Ninja Warrior entrant, for goodness’ sake. If a player has to try the same part over and over, difficulty levels may be needed, or some other help-out. Players who don’t have highly developed thirteen-year-old quick-twitch muscles and a willingness to train on the game eleven hours a day will drop out. Other things can cause frustration, too. Like having to grind endlessly or to search vast and ultimately repetitive maps with few or no hints to find a crucial item. Or discovering that an innocuous choice made hours of playing time (and since saved over) has made impossible completing the game, or some critical part thereof. And, of course, having to tolerate the misbehaviour in multiplayer games of random decerebrates whose idea of fun is to spend time messing with naive newbies, or just stacking them up like cordwood.

As for my guilty pleasures: Syndicate, Warlords II, the Day of Defeat mod for Half-Life, early iterations of Civilization, some Flash revisits of old arcade favourites (like 1942 and Raiden). Well, these were excellent games in their time. So much so that there is something about them that keeps me coming back to them, setting aside recent releases in favour of established if antique quality.

Now personally, sometimes one category is enough to get me to not play at all, and sometimes a strong showing in one of the first three will let me ignore the rest of them.

For example, many of the infocom text adventures I would rank high on fun, interesting, and functionality, but very low on internal consistency. (For example, in Enchanter the final encounter is solved through trial and error, and there are failure points where you are given no indication that you have made the game unwinnable until hours of play later. This is a repeating theme throughout the company’s products.) (I’d say that the best infocom games are good games with poor design elements)

Lunar 2 is interesting, fairly consistent, and it works, but the fun is lacking. I slugged through most of that game to acquire the little video rewards along the way that told the main story. (I did not finish the special ending stuff. I lost my memory card and the game wasn’t interesting enough for me to play twice. (Bad game, good story)

Temple of Elemental Evil is mostly fun, the story is reasonably interesting, and on my play through I saw no glaring inconsistencies, though it didn’t work all that well as software. (good game bad software)

Oni Reasonably fun, repetitive and frustrating in areas, issues with poor control, game worked the same through as much of it as I played before my computer decided that it didn’t want to run the game anymore. meh.

Tomb Raider 1 and 2. The first one was fun, interesting, consistent, and functional (though the controls weren’t awesome, they were adequate.) The second one? It had places that would kill you without warning. Sure, in TR1 I died because things surprised me, but never in such a manner that after the fact I felt that I couldn’t have seen it coming if I was paying attention to the right things. In the second game, there are traps that only announce their presence after it is too late to avoid them. Though from what I’ve heard, it is the third game where they fall deep into bad game territory.

Part 2:
If you are talking about them coming out today?
The SSI Silver and Gold box games.
Dungeons of the Necromancer’s Domain (I only play that when I find the graph pad I’m using to map it.)
Possibly Nethack.

Hum a lot of the other games I was going to list really are I think objectively good games even if they aren’t very pretty.

A good example of what you’re talking about is something we ran into on RC3. There’s a gadget called the “refractor” which you use to redirect lasers (a’la the legend of zelda) into targets.

We had a target that was on a little spider which would move around. But that wasn’t complicated ENOUGH for us. No, the spider would ALSO follow your laser around like a kitty cat following a laser pointer. So we doubled up the purpose of the laser and used it in a way that completely contradicted anything we taught the player about how the laser worked.

After a TON of focus testing, we simplified it vastly — but the spider still remains in the game as a testament to our struggle.

Well done, well done.

As far as your post, I think you’ve hit on a classic schism between Eastern and Western game design, there. Personally I’m with you. I’d rather see something that felt “fair” — since “unbeatable” rarely feels good.