Hi. Yesterday, as a break from testing Eamon deluxe, I fired up my Snes and had a less than successful go at Super Mario brothers two, ---- and just to be clear I don't mean the lost levels.
As people may know, in that game you can choose to play mario, Luiji, Princess or toad. It's a fairly simple game, no weapons, no major hp just exploration and a litle tactical chucking of vedgitables that you find growing all over the place (yes, it is weerd), yet the four characters are distinctly different. Toad for instance runs fast, but can't jump particularly high, yet of course being low to the ground he can very quickly pick up objects and run with them (very useful on bosses). Luiji is the highest jumper and is pretty fast, but he's very slow with objects and also he floats around quite a lot making it very tricky to get him to jump precisely. princess isn't great at object grabbing, and her speed is average, but she has one awsome ability, the ability to hover in mid air and thus get over some of the mopre dangerous areas. Mario of course is Mr. average (and interestingly enough, probably imho the worst in the game for that reason). the reason I mention this is that mario 2 takes several characteristics, jump hight, jump distance, running speed and object grabbing speed, and alters their properties so as to create some rather different ways of playing the game. For instance yesterday I was trying to run through bits with mario that I usually do with princess, and found I had to be far more precise with my jumps. In audio games though, it seems that either the characters are customizeable every way from sunday as in entombed, or there are no characters at all. while I imagine two reasons for this are A, the difficulty of storing and activating two sets of movement, damage, or whatever properties in the game, and B, the extra sound files needed for a second character, I am stil a litle surprised nobody has included it yet, sinse even when dealing with very few properties it can make a major difference to the game. Say for instance in superliam, you could play as either Liam or Dr. Quark. Quark being an old man is slower at running, jumping and shooting than liam, but because he is using the latest experimental version of his super suit his gun is much more powerful (though it fires more slowly), and because his armour is stronger he has more health. this would create quite a different game, even with only the reaction based gameplay, for instance you'd need to be more prcise at jumping cycle bot, and try to get in your heavy hits now and again where they would count. The more properties a game has, and the more the gameplay is based on judgement rather than reaction speed, the more can be played with with different characters, but even in a comparatively simple game like Superliam it could make a nice difference to gameplay, and indeed give replayability through trying to finish the game on the other character. Beware the grue! Dark. --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
