This may be a day late and a few bucks short, but less than 48 hours before I finally have Metroid Prime 3: Corruption in my hands… I finally beat Metroid Prime 2: Echoes! I do have to say I was a bit disappointed by the end bosses, though. When I made it to the end of Metroid Prime, I had a tough time beating the aptly named “Metroid Prime”. In Echoes, I got spanked by the first iteration of the Emperor Ing. Deep breath, try to figure out his pattern: I still lost a ton of health, but I did beat him. On to stage 2, where despite major undertakings of damage I managed to recoup over half of my health. Stage 3 did a number on me again, but I still survived and got my free pass on to fight Dark Samus after my Energy tanks were magically recharged. She defeated me again on my first try, but the second time against her was, for lack of a better description, a joke. And that’s it? This was the final encounter? Kind of a let-down.

I still can’t wait for Corruption though, for two reasons. One, while I was never big into Metroid growing up it is one of those titles that I have learned to love now that I’m older, and new iterations both on the home consoles and on the handhelds make me giddy. Two, it will be the first Wii game in quite some time that I am going to spend money on, and in fact is one of the reasons (as a 1st/2nd party title) that I bought the system in the first place. I can’t live without my Nintendo franchises!

I need to vent about a small pet peeve of mine. The matter being how many game developers don’t seem quite able to intelligently solve the issue of how to design games that use the gap between the upper and lower screens on the DS.

You really have two options as the developer; ignore the gap, allowing objects to “seamlessly” transfer from one screen to the other, or allow things to temporarily “disappear” between the screens as they make their way from one to the other. Really the issue presented isn’t one that is the developers’ fault. Nintendo made a system that came with a fairly necessary breakup between their two screens due to the hinge mechanism on the system. But one would think, or even hope, that developers could look at their own game being developed and understand how they should treat the gap.

Let’s look at a very basic example. In Elite Beat Agents, there are periodically graphic montages that take up the height of both screens. If you pay attention, the game actually does cut out the portion of the image in between the screens – the illusion is that the player doesn’t notice anything is missing, while if they had tried to just cut the image into two halves things would almost certainly look “strange” near the gap, whether or not the player consciously picked up on why it looked odd.

It admittedly gets trickier when you get into gameplay that has these moving parts. A puzzle game is fairly simple – with very few exceptions, the designer should have objects move directly from one screen to another. But in an action game, one should really examine how the gameplay will be affected based on how you handle the gap. In Dragon Quest: Rocket Slime, boss battles that spanned both screens typically let objects disappear in the gap. And while the potential negative effect of this approach is that the player may get confused or feel like the game is “cheap” in hiding something that suddenly appears, what really happens is the player’s brain accounts for most objects transferring between screens and knows that if something went into the gap at Point A, moving at a certain rate of speed, it should exit the gap and appear at Point B on the other screen. It isn’t even a conscious thought most times, the brain simply treats the gap like a solid bar hiding what is behind it.

Then you have games like Bubble Bobble Revolution. This game allows you to take your dinosaur character between the two screens and allows the bad guys to do the same… but the game noticeably does NOT recognize the gap and rather the designers chose to let objects transfer directly from one screen to the other. The problem here is twofold. For one, the brain does not know how to handle such a transfer since it does not automatically expect something at the bottom of the top screen to seamlessly “jump” to the top of the bottom screen. The “bar” that was blocking content in another game no longer exists. Secondly, the gap between the screens is just enough that things moving between screens while in motion can often appear to even jump horizontally as they make the transition, even if the transition makes perfect sense in a pixel-perfect world. What the developer has now done is create a confusing, uncomfortable game experience for the player when perhaps more consideration should have been paid to how the gap was going to affect the gameplay.

I’m not saying that you should always “lose” content to the gap. Far from it. But please, game designers, THINK when making your game. Which method works best for what you are trying to achieve? And if neither solution seems to be a clear winner… should your game really be switching between the screens in the first place? Perhaps re-thinking the game idea entirely could save your title.

If this blog didn’t have a date/timestamp on it, I wouldn’t have believed you if you told me that it had been nearly a month since my last post. A month? I knew that I hadn’t posted in a little bit, but. . . a month?

Needless to say, I’ve been pretty busy lately. Keeping up (or trying to) with organizing the disc golf tourney I’m running next month, my office just moved locations and has been keeping me busy with work besides, doing the family thing and starting to work more on the yard now that the warmer weather is upon us. It’s just been crazy.

I’ll try and break things up into more bite-sized pieces, but I did have to post about this – I now remember why I stopped playing Mario Kart:DS online. Looking through my catalog of games, I saw MKDS and said to myself “huh, maybe I’ll go on WFC and see if I can still find anyone online.” It’s a testament to the title’s popularity how easy it was for me to find a game in “Worldwide” mode; I don’t think I waited more than 2 minutes total to get 3 opponents in the queue, which is darn speedy in my opinion for a DS game that’s been out for a year and a half. Unfortunately, in my three opponents I found three of the five archetypes that you will find when trying to play MKDS online (the first three were my opponents: I suppose you could put me in the fourth category, since even in my hey-day of playing MKDS I still wouldn’t have put myself in the fifth category).

1. The “Win/Loss Glitch” player – This guy you see who joins the race and you say to yourself “wow, 762 wins and only 23 losses! This guy must be awesome!” No, unfortunately he’s just a guy who plays a lot and knows how to exploit a bug found in the game where he can remove his losses simply by disconnecting before the first race even starts. He fills a slot so your game will start the setup process, but you almost never see him on the track.
2. The Loser – This is the player who has a record of 0-5, obviously hasn’t played much so you can’t really look down on their record if they took the game online and they obviously have owned it less than 24 hours. Unfortunately this is also the player who always drops after they lose the first-of-three races. The Loser is also likely either 8 years old, or at least is as mature as an 8-year-old.
3. The Sore Loser – This guy is much different than The Loser. Probably sporting a W/L rating around 66%, he can beat a lot of the competition out there but he still can’t hang with the big boys. Most skilled players can beat this guy without using items or snaking, perhaps just using a well-placed sparks boost here and there. This is the guy who will go into the third race with you and drop out halfway through when he throws a tantrum after realizing that no, there really is no way he’s even going to take a single race from you, no matter how much you try to let him “keep up with you”.
4. The Big Boys – These are the players who are able to get 3-star rankings in the game (not just on some tracks or GP’s, but have achieved the bona-fide “you have gotten 3 stars on everything” status), race time trials in order to work on their lines, and can snake in their sleep – they also don’t think snaking is “cheating”. You’ll rarely see a Big Boy quit a race, although sometimes maturity issues may make a Big Boy act like a Sore Loser.
5. The MKDS Lifers – Most games have them, especially racing games… the fans of the title who devote their entire lives to being good at the game. The Big Boys can get a flap of 18 seconds on that track? The MKDS Lifer can get a flap of 12.6. You remember the asian kids who took over your college’s computer labs from 9pm until 9am so they could play Starcraft? They’re probably either still playing Starcraft, or have become MKDS Lifers. If you get into a race with them, you already lost.