Power-ups and Bickering

Capitalism!

Besides being the title of this blog, this is what we consider to be one of the core tenants of great cooperative gameplay. Arguing about who gets power-ups and life refills is something that we spent most of our childhood doing. Unfortunately, we haven't seen much of this yet. Joust was far too difficult, and too much attention was spent not killing each other to worry about getting points. Battle City and Ice Climbers had little interaction: the level driven structures of the games, combined with the lack of resources to compete for, made for very little discourse between us outside of commenting on the game. Exed Exes was too inane: our boredom mixed with the relative difficulty resulted very little attention being paid to jockeying for power-ups.

We hit our stride, for the first five games, with Mario Bros. Our previous familiarity with the game, combined with the mechanics, creates plenty of moments of joyful point stealing. Due to the fact that you get points for making the "kill" by running over a defeated enemy, and no points for actually defeating enemies, it is very easy to kill steal from your partner. When this is tied into the fact that points, which are rewarded for defeating enemies, grant extra lives, it means that jumping on your partners head to slow them down becomes personally useful. This extends to the bonus levels, where you are rewarded points based on the number of coins individually collected.

What works so well here, that doesn't occur in other games that we've played so far, is that we are able to get in each others way, make actions that interrupt one another, without completely ruining everything. Joust would have had some fun competition to get points in a hurry, if touching another player didn't equal instant death. Ice Climbers and Battle City lacked any kind of real competition against other players, making for struggle between the players and the game instead of each other. While this is cooperative gameplay by definition, it doesn't create the friendly struggle that is so endearing. Exed Exes, while having all the right elements, including power-ups, just fails to capture the attention at any meaningful level.

Bosses

Well, "H" may not be terrifying, but it's a start.

I have come to see bosses as an integral part of most genres, especially in the arcade format. They act as an end-piece to a level or stage or world, and a final challenge before progressing. I think that some of the lack of bosses that we have seen so far is directly related to a concept of these games as games. What I mean is that something like Joust or Mario Bros. is designed to be a diversion, like solitaire. There are a set of rules that mandate an increasing difficulty level after every round. The goal of the game is to do well and polish your skills and occasionally benefit from lucky breaks when a game employs a RNG.

Because I grew up alongside the rise of the NES, I expect most games to have some kind of goal. I am used to bosses and endings of one kind or another, even if it is a "second quest" like in Zelda or replaying the game with harder enemies, like in Super Mario Bros.

We had especially come to expect this from arcade games, due to the quarter crunching nature of the games we grew up with. Beat 'em up and shoot 'em up games are often designed with nightmarish segments that are designed to kill all but the most experienced player, making it difficult, if not impossible, to reach the end of the game on a single credit. These often come in the form of bosses with deadly attacks, and the like. So far, the only bosses we have encountered were in Exed Exes, and these bosses felt more like prototypes than the screen filling death traps we will in encounter in later games.

Continues

Today is a good day to die.

We think of the phrase "Insert Coin to Continue," or something like that, as an essential part of arcade culture. It is a screen that comes up constantly, especially in the quarter-draining beat 'em ups and shoot 'em ups that are more prominent in later years. When we originally discussed this, before playing any games, we talked about a 5.00 limit, split between us. We set this as a high, but not totally unrealistic amount to be able to spend in an arcade session from our youth. While we would rarely, if ever, spend all of our money on a single game, it is still a useful round number for the purpose of this blog. All of this being said, as soon as we started with the project, we were bluntly reminded that games did not always have continues.

I developed a love of pinball during college that has given me some appreciation for this style of game, with the entire focus being on your high score for a single round. Even so, many modern pinball games are able to be toggled into a mode that support continues, albeit at a higher price. There may be delineated high score tables, to differentiate between a "pure" game and one bolstered with additional money, but still, there is some form of a continue.

Why does this matter? For games like Battle City and Ice Climbers, which are designed around self-contained levels, continues wouldn't do much, and would even trivialize them to a large extent. While we were able to get through enough of Mario Bros. to see the entirety of enemies and obstacles, we were unable to accomplish the same in Joust, due to the sheer difficulty of the game. After doing some supplemental reading on Exed Exes, we learned that, while were able to continue in the game, doing so dashed any chances we may have had of actually "beating" it by achieving 5,000,000 points.

Hard Work Makes the Time Go By

In light of the previous post, I'm going to spend the this time writing about gameplay mechanics. During the play through of the first five games, we talked extensively on what we saw as trends developing between games. Due to the somewhat arbitrary nature of the games we are playing, you can read this blog as a side-story to the end of the golden age of the arcade and rise of the modern era. I have written up our observations on the various mechanics, and those should be published throughout the week.