The Elements of a Good Game: Characters – Part 1

I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about what makes various games popular, what makes various games good, and how these two things interact and are related. I have come to the conclusion that I don’t care about what makes a game popular, but I am interested in quality works of creativity. I hate to try to fence quality into neat little categories, but I do tend to think about it in four very broad terms. When it comes right down to it, I think games can be held up and viewed as a competent work only when they satisfy all four of these basic elements. Characters, Story, Gameplay, and Art Design can each prop a game up, but only with them together can a good game be made. You won’t ever see me giving a game scores based on any of these elements, but I like to look at each one and say how the game did, pointing out what was good and what could be improved.

Today, I just want to talk about one of these: Characters. Characters are one of the first things we will care about when put into a game, and often the success of the whole experience will live or die based on the likability of the main cast, and ESPECIALLY the player character or characters. When we’re given control of a character in order to experience a story, it is important that we can relate to them. That doesn’t mean that they have to look or sound like us, or even have much in common with us. What it means is that we need to understand their motivations, their beliefs and goals, and how they respond to situations. Their actions need to make sense to us most of the time, and we should be able to see why they do what they do.

Recent History – Counter-Strike

I chose Counter-Strike for today’s post for several reasons, but the most important one is that it is simple. It is not a very complex game, and I posit that finding a more bare-bones online FPS is nigh impossible. I also chose it because I have a lot of experience with it, and because I think it makes a nice contrast to TF2 as a whole. Comparing it to TF2 is like comparing an apple to a masterfully prepared turkey: both are good, but one is significantly more complicated. I didn’t choose Halo, or Battlefield, or Call of Duty, or any of those others for this reason, because while they may be less complex than TF2, they are still more complex than Counter Strike.

Counter-Strike has been around for over a decade, and even though ostensibly I am talking about Counter-Strike source, almost every aspect of CS gameplay is constant throughout every iteration, the graphics are really the biggest changes.

A Look Back – Team Fortress Classic

Team Fortress Classic is the direct predecessor to TF2, released in 1999. It was, in fact, made by the same people, and in many ways does inform the setting and gameplay of TF2. However, and I do not say this lightly about a game, TFC was terrible. I don’t mean that it was terrible in a way that relates to the actual game’s intent, though, or any facts about the thought process that went in to making the game. No, it was a competent team-based game, one of the first FPS games to have different classes, and had graphics that were on-par with the time, if that matters to you. TFC was terrible because of what it did to competitive gaming, and it will continue to be a terrible memory for all of history, until humanity purges all traces of it from its collective knowledge. TFC represents an aspect of online play that I despise.

I’ve gotten ahead of myself, though. Let’s start over. Forget that stuff for now.

This week – Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2 is a teamwork-focused first-person shooter that came out in 2007 as part of The Orange Box, and is technically a sequel to Team Fortress, a pre-2000 mod of Quake. Team Fortress 2 was heavily reviewed (along with the rest of the contents of the Box) when it came out, but here, 4.5 years later, the game is still fun, but somewhat different. I want to talk about what TF2 has done with multiplayer shooters, consistently-updated games, and Steam in general. Also, as of last year, TF2 is free for download, so go ahead and try it to see what you think, I highly recommend it.

I may have tipped my hand just now, but I’ll go ahead and say it: I love Team Fortress 2. Every once in a while I need to get online and shoot people, but TF2 is so much more than that, it has style AND substance, and that’s why I’m talking about it.

Recent History – Overlord 2

Overlord 2 was released in 2009, a mere 2 years after the first Overlord, and it is the most recent (and likely last, due to poor sales) game in the series. This one takes place in much more varied environments than the last, and the player gets to explore snowy glaciers, steamy jungles, open plains, and even a thick swamp. You are once again playing the part of the Overlord, but not the same Overlord as the last game. Instead, you’re his son, and your lands are sort of at war with a huge Romanesque Empire.

I have mixed feelings about Overlord 2, but as always I will try to give a fair recollection of things that are interesting and new, and things that are the same, and what’s good or bad. The main problem, though, is that the writing for the game is not nearly as strong as the first one, and in fact feels kind of forced. Don’t get me wrong, the overall plot is actually probably better in some parts, and it has a twist that I definitely didn’t see coming, but there’s something missing. I’m not sure what happened, but while the game is still silly and mostly enjoyable, there’s not as much absurd high-fantasy humor as the original, and it all ends of feeling a bit too serious for a game with literal hippy rainbow elves.

A Look Back – Pikmin

 

Pikmin is a cute, short, adventure/strategy game that was a launch title for the Gamecube back in 2001. Whenever I try to describe this week’s topic (Overlord) to someone, I invariably call it “evil Lord of the Rings Pikmin”, which is true for many gameplay mechanics and general ideas, but not fair to either game. On Monday, I said a lot of really nice things about the writing and dialogue in Overlord, but Pikmin really doesn’t have any spoken words. The story is told in an entirely different way, and Olimar is the only character in Pikmin that is relatable and and goal-oriented. This is not to say that Pikmin NEEDS more writing, though, because I thought the game had remarkable story-telling.

Pikmin is about Captain Olimar, who accidentally crashes his ship on a strange planet that very similar to Earth, only Olimar is very small in comparison to say, all the plants, bugs, boxes, puddles of water, cans, and whatever else you might find on any given small patch of land on Earth. The planet’s wildlife is all bigger than Olimar, and almost all of it is overwhelmingly hostile. He would be doomed and unable to find the (strangely intact) pieces of his ship that were scattered by the crash if not for his discovery of the small, friendly, plant-like inhabitants of the planet, the titular Pikmin. The Pikmin unanimously follow Olimar’s every command unquestioningly, and through strength in numbers they help him traverse and explore this strange place, and gather the pieces of his ship back together.

This week – Overlord

Overlord is a neat little 3rd-person action/adventure/roleplaying/minion management/whatever else game that came out in 2007. The basic premise is that you are the Overlord, a Sauron-wannabe who can summon 4 different flavors of goblin minions, all of which are good for different jobs for battles and puzzle-solving. You set out from your dark fortress to go ravage a version of Middle-Earth that I would describe as broken. It’s a lot like Lord of the Rings would be if the humans were all stupid, the hobbits were all greedy jerks, the dwarves were militaristic and money-grubbing (so nothing’s changed) and the elves are so high-minded and pacifistic that they’ve all been killed off. Basically, everyone except the major antagonists and you are useless, which is usually played for comedy, and I think it works pretty well, as long as you don’t mind that it’s pretty cynical and dark.

You are the main villain of the story, but that doesn’t mean that the “heroes” you fight are actually good, in fact, every main enemy leader represents one of the 7 Deadly sins (a gluttonous hobbit, a slothful elf, an extremely wrathful and warlike human and his perpetually envious and thieving girlfriend, a lustful and hedonistic ex-paladin, an exceptionally greedy dwarf with a tank made of gold, and a wizard who is too proud to entertain the notion that he might have become a villain without noticing it). You can choose to kill or help anyone you meet, and make choices to do things that are either evil or less evil, so you might be the most heroic character, depending on how you play it, even if you do walk around causing destruction and sporting a helmet covered in spikes of obsidian, sending your minions into certain death with every command.

This week’s topic – Mario Kart 7!

First of all, I hear you saying “Hey Matthew, if this blog is about fun and originality, then why did you pick a game containing the most universally recognized and over-used video game character of all time?”. The reason is this: I’ll look for new and unique elements in any enjoyable game, and while they may be easier to find in offbeat indie games, it doesn’t mean that mainstream games lack creativity. This week we’re looking at MK7, and the franchise as a whole, and I’ll show you what gaming has gained (and lost) from this series.

MK7 came out at the end of last year, and I received it for Christmas from my brother. It is the first and only 3DS game I own, but my opinions on the 3DS’s pool of titles are not the point here. What I want to talk about is the inclusion of the 3DS’s effect on this Mario Kart game in particular. Now, I’m going to assume that everyone reading this has at some point played a Mario Kart game, or at least knows enough about them to understand that they are racing games that are focused on messing with the other racers and having fun on quirky tracks with familiar characters. Every game in this series follows the basic formula of drive around, shoot items at each other, and then hopefully eke out a victory through skill or luck.

Inaugural Post! A personal favorite – Bastion!

Bastion is a game that evoked some emotional responses from me, a feat that very few games have pulled off in my lifetime. I felt loneliness, sadness, joy, anxiety, despair, anger, mirth, and hope, all while playing this quirky little indie game. Bastion came out in the summer of 2011, so it is fairly recent. It received a lot of praise and awards, and actually deserved the vast majority of them.

Bastion has you play as The Kid, a boy or man of indeterminate age, although the game leads me to believe that he is between 19 and 25. You explore a jumbled up and mostly ruined world that is now in pieces and floating in the sky following an anomalous Calamity, and you journey to find survivors while trying to protect the Bastion, which is the last remaining safe place for humanity. However, for a ruined world, you may find that it is exceptionally colorful. All of the art in this game is hand-painted, and that stuck out to me as unique and cool, a very nice touch. It isn’t fair, though, to deride bigger budget games for not doing this, though, because Bastion is a much smaller game in scale than most of the mainstream games of the past few years, and also uses an isometric point of view and fixed camera angles. It is important to note that this little bit of beauty and originality wouldn’t work for most games. This is something I will be saying a few more times in this review.