Re: What types of games do you want to play?
@Aaron, crytically the problem and the major difference between Streets of rage, golden axe, final fight, alien vs predator, and even more modern games like dragon age as compared to audiogames like superliam or the zompocalypse demo is one of perspective.
Audio 2d games have mostly worked on effectively a one dimentional plane, ie you hear it on the right and move up to it. Even the jumps through the air have been effectivelygiving your character the property to move along that one dimentional plane whilst not effected by ground based dangers such as pits for a short time while the bup arrow is pressed.
A true 2D game like street fighter or mario would as we've said before make far more of the second dimention, indeed in games like guilty gear or night stalkers, character's movement through the air can be a deeply complex thing.
What made the walk along beatemups difficult, is that they were, as one person described, 2.5 dimentional. I'll try and explain.
If you imagine your keyboard as the playing area of a game like final fight, and your character always facing either right or left, with enemies appearing on the right or left. If you begin on the letter a you could attack right to an enemy on the letter s, or you could move upwards to the letter q, and attack enemies on the letter r, or downwards to the letter z and attack enemies on the x key. You could not directly turn either up or down, you are always facing left or right and can only attack left or right. when you hit jump, you would move up into the air above the a key and could say attack an enemy on the s key with a jump kick, but you couldn't attack an enemy on the q key above you.
Now however is where things get complicated, and where the tactics come in.
suppose for example you are on the a key and see an enemy coming up the upper row above you, and one just above you on the q key. Well what you might do is hit diagonal up and jump, and
jump from the a key to the w key, then use a special attack that hits on both sides to take out both the enemy on the q key, and the incoming enemy on the e key. Now however your at the top and enemies are coming up from the bottom row, from the x and c keys, so you need to move down and get to one side to hit them.
This is what made the walk along beatemups so challenging. both you and enemies always had to maneuver into a position where you could attack effectively, using jumps which would sometimes put you temporarilly out of danger. R bear in streets of rage 2 for example is a tough boss because though he has a very short reach, he runs in small diagonals around you, plus has the ability to jump from somewhere above or below you right onto you in a diagonal pattern when he uses his body splash move.
I'm not saying this would be impossible to do in audio. It's possible you could use pitch changes for the steps of enemies coming in above or below, though wh ether audio representation would be fine enough for you to be able to track as many enemies as some of those old beatemups had on screen at once, especially when your talking about enemies with different ranges of attacks or charge moves I don't know, however bare in mind when your saying "The audio beatemups are lacking" your raising a far more complex problem than just "where are the combos"
Indeed I actually wonder if for an audio brawler, we'd be better with something in full first person view so that you can more easily distinguish all the sounds and positions of enemies around you, their distances and likely range of attacks as compared to your own, something like a more complex form of a blind legend though with mouse movement aiming and controls like those in swamp as opposed to the swipe method.
_______________________________________________ Audiogames-reflector mailing list Audiogames-reflector@sabahattin-gucukoglu.com https://sabahattin-gucukoglu.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/audiogames-reflector
