The Ant Nest

I don’t get on with console controllers and first person shooters.

I’m not sure precisely when it changed, but these days, it feels like I’m firmly in a minority of games players. The times I’ve dabbled in console FPS games have proved consistently frustrating, knowing that I would be enjoying the game if only I could hit a barn door. The only threat to farm buildings I could ever muster was PC bound.

I concluded that I was simply missing a certain dual-stick coordination competence, built up through years of practice. In the same way, I have many years of experience making keyboard and mouse sing together. If I wanted to play shooters on a console, then I’d have to spend many months hating them, building that core competence, before I could start to get the same experience that I could get on my PC.

But a couple of weeks ago, I sat down to play Call of Duty: World at War cooperatively with some work colleagues - on 360. The strangest thing happened. I just picked up the controller, played the game and enjoyed it. I didn’t spend my time swinging my gun around, wildly missing targets. I chose an enemy to shoot, I pointed my gun at them, and I killed them. More than that, I was merrily beating my team mate, racking up points and multipliers.

It was quite a revelation. What threw it into starker contrast was playing the Killzone 2 demo a day later. It dumped me straight back into the drab, dull world I’d just escaped from - back to a tedious, laborious process of choosing a target to aim for and then wrestling the crosshair from side to side until I could finally settle it on the target five seconds later.

I’m not going to dive into an analysis of the details of what Call of Duty is doing that Killzone 2 isn’t (though I look forward to sitting down and figuring that out in detail). Equally, I’m not about to plow into a critique of Killzone 2 (that seems to be the fastest way of summoning the very worst of the internet).

Rather, what immediately stuck out to me was how supremely important this detail was, and how insignificant it made everything else. In one game I was having fun, in the other I wasn’t. And beyond that, what stuck out was how little this aspect seems to feature as everyone rushes to splash out top marks.

Everyone who makes action games right now seems to be rushing around trying to figure out why Call of Duty games are selling five or ten million copies, while everyone else is topping out at two or four. It’s got to have recharging health, it’s got to be about hiding in cover, it’s got to have perks in its multiplayer. It’s got to be bigger and badder, got to have the best graphics, more explosions, more visceral - exponentially more expensive.

Yet it seems like a really big, unspoken part of the answer, that missing five million sales, is right here: When someone says to a friend “Hey, come play Killzone 2 with me tonight”, that friend leaves thinking “What my friend was doing looked fun, so I’d better come round and watch him play again sometime”. When someone says to a friend “Hey, come play Call of Duty with me tonight”, that friend ends the night thinking “That was great. I want to play that again already, so I’ll buy it tomorrow”.

I’m way behind on hip platforming games. Braid and LittleBigPlanet will make it to my thumbs soon enough, but these days, I’m still trying to get through the backlog of big hitters from 2007. Today: Super Mario Galaxy.

What really brought the game to my attention was this talk from the game’s director, Yoshiaki Koizumi. Specifically:

“The concept was to play with Mario running around on spherical objects … Why spherical worlds… What distinctive features attracted us to spherical worlds? Was it just because they were novel?”

[Koizumi] explained that no matter how large you make the playing field, if you walk long enough you will run into a wall, and that will make you turn around, which makes the camera turn around and runs the risk of making the player lost.

With a sphere, Mario can run all he wants without falling or hitting a wall… a useful concept for getting players totally absorbed in the moment. Koizumi added that the best thing about spherical worlds is the “unity of surface,” and the “connectedness.”

Neither will the player get lost easily, or need to adjust the camera – by using spheres, Koizumi said, they had created a game field that never ended.

This became the overall theme of development – “we should tune the game so people can play without ever having to think about the camera,” Koizumi said. “Frankly, it took a very long struggle, but we finally found the direction we needed.”

It’s long struck me that separate camera controls should count as an unnecessary complexity in third person games. On occasion, I’ve put a 3D game in the hands of a non-gamer friend and watched how they struggle to coordinate movement and controlling their view point. The consistent result was an inability to navigate the space, followed very quickly by frustration and then within a few minutes they would give up. However, since I’ve never seen a game remove camera controls without reviewers throwing up their arms in protest, it seemed that removing camera controls was a desirable theory that might never be satisfactorily borne out in practice.

It was fascinating to read of Nintendo’s solution - to alter radically the structure of the world around the needs of the camera. How successfully does Super Mario Galaxy realise these ideas?

Continue reading ‘Notes on Super Mario Galaxy‘