Game Mechanics

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Yo yo yo, just thought I’d do a quick post (okay, well, not as quick as that Sonic one, but also far less depressing!).

Getting back into the swing of working on FPA again, I’ve begun thinking about game mechanics, and analyzing games that I’m playing even more so than usual.

So I’d like to know, what’s your favorite game mechanics? This post got quite a bit longer than I thought it would, so click below for my answer, and some musings on saving in games and game difficulty…

I’ve been playing Resident Evil 5 co-op split screen with Fairly (we just finished it last weekend), and Henry Hatsworth on the DS. Haven’t beaten it yet, but it’s definitely a great game. It definitely gets pretty hard near the end, which I really appreciate, but I always wonder how difficult I should actually make FPA games. I try to make the main game pretty easily beatable, while hoping that the side levels and challenges provide decent difficulty, but then players still decide that they just simply MUST get that headache badge on Kongregate.com, and thus are entitled to complain about how difficult I made World 2 in their comments :/

Anyways, I’m definitely digging some of the mechanics in Henry Hatsworth, like the balance of the puzzle on the bottom and the item system for the platformer on top, and beating up enemies after their dead is always fun (though I read a review on I believe IGN.com that thought Hatsworth was the only platformer out there that allowed you to continue to bet up on baddies after they’re dead, I was quite insulted! haha), and tossing bombs, then matching a few lines in the puzzle to power up those bombs is a pretty sweet mechanic.

So back to the question, my all-timer has got to be the suit system in Mario Bros. 3, which I’d also consider my favorite game ever, as I’ve probably written on this site more than a few times. I used to go back and play World 5 over again to rack on on Tanooki suits (this was the Super Mario All-Stars version, where you could actually save your game and go back to play the different worlds over), and try to go back to other levels and beat them without losing the suit. Did the same thing with the Hammer Bros. suit.

Which leads me to an interesting observation… I bought Mario 3 for GBA a little while ago, and when you beat every level in that game, everything opens up so you can just play levels over and over again. In the SNES version, it would save your open levels if you just quit the game, but if you select a different world, all of the levels would be locked again. You would have to beat those first few levels of World 5 to get to that Tanooki suit. In the GBA one, you could just go to that mushroom house over and over again, without really earning it. Once I did that, I didn’t really want to go back and play the game over again, though I did eventually start a new save file, heh.

What do you think? Does unlocking everything, like all levels, or infinite ammo in something like Resi4 or 5 ruin the replay value, rather than enhance it? Or am I just crazy since I play for the challenge, not just to spam the super attacks of the game? I think back to all the old GameBoy games that I have that I’ve played over and over again, going all the way back to the beginning of the game if I got a game over, and to this day still feeling like they have near infinite replay value, since it took me years to beat any of them when I was younger.

Maybe I am just crazy, and gamers nowadays just want to get to the end of a game and be done with it, heh.