David Perry Challenge #003 - Metroid

Metroid is a fully open and explorable 2D platformer released for the Nintendo Entertainment System/Famicom back in the mid-eighties. It has since gone on to be one of Nintendo's premiere action/adventure properties, with award winning games such as Super Metroid on the Super Nintendo, and the Metroid Prime series on Gamecube and Wii. Furthermore, the series protagonist Samus Aran become a shining example of a strong, female protagonist in games (pathetic attempt at deeper narrative in Metroid: Other M on the Wii aside). It also takes half the credit for establishing the “Metroidvania” genre, a type of platformer with open worlds as opposed to linear corridors, along with Castlevania. Despite this, Metroid is not a game that is as fresh today as it was twenty-seven years ago. Though amazing for the time and beloved by those who remember playing it upon release, game design as a philosophy moved so far beyond Metroid in such a short time that what may have been acceptable shortcomings or even respected rules back in 1985 stand out as serious flaws today.

Though the environment tiles are highly detailed, the backgrounds are just flat black due to the NES's shortcomings and the already unstable framerate.

To understand just what is flawed about Metroid and why it is flawed, we need to look at a game with similar problems: Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. The first issue is that of control or lack thereof. Under normal circumstances, there is nothing wrong with Samus Aran's run, jump, or shoot. The controls are loose and maybe a little slow but nothing that can't be learned in time. It is the interruption of these controls that cannot be excused. Each time an enemy hits Samus, she is knocked back several tiles and player control is briefly revoked. Due to this, the player will often find themselves hitting other enemies or falling into deadly pits. The high number of enemies at any moment, which slows the game's framerate down considerably, also does not help this issue. Due to the extremely limited range of your shots, and the fact that most enemies take at least four hits to kill, getting hit by enemies and thus knocked back is almost inevitable. By 1987, in Castlevania II, players were already complaining about knockback from hits and so, as a general rule of game design, knockback in extreme forms was discouraged. One need not look further than the original Mega Man for proof that knockback did not have to be as extreme as the forms seen in Metroid or Castlevania and that it could still be an effective deterrence from running into enemies.

Swear to God, this just came up coincidentally when I searched for "Metroid Screenshot."

The pits are another matter entirely, as they hinder the player's ability to jump. In most games, you fall into a pit and you die. In Metroid, if you fall into a pit you are tortured, quickly losing health over time until you either die or escape. With enemies dive-bombing you the whole time, pits become frantic moments of frustration with the player unable to jump or shoot effectively, at least until you've found bombs which allow you to hit enemies in the air and bounce on the explosions.

Finding these things is almost like cheating.

My biggest issue with the game, though, is the lack of feedback. Items you find are complete mysteries until you discover their use for yourself as there are no tooltips or demonstrations. Missile doors don't open unless you shoot them with five missiles, and yet there is no sense that your shots are having any effect on them at first. There is no map of the world and so it is incredibly easy to get lost or have the sense that you are on a wild goose chase for items that may or may not exist, the purposes of which are uncertain. Hidden passageways containing important items, like under a normally torturous lava pit, also do nothing but confuse the player without proper visual feedback to the change in rules.

In Metroid, finding something rewards you with a tune. You are never shown what your reward is until you figure it out for yourself.

Several of these problems were eliminated in future iterations of the Metroid series. In Metroid II on Gameboy, Samus's shots traveled the full distance across the screen, making enemies easier to hit. Super Metroid was much faster; had greatly reduced knockback; unlike the original Metroid on NES, enemies did not take four or five hits to kill but just one or two, keeping the pace of the game fast and tight; and save states, as opposed to Metroid's 24 character password system, were a very welcome change. It is good then that Nintendo learned what they needed to for future iterations, and learned it quickly. Metroid is a prime example of how fickle game design is as a philosophy, and how in just a few short years a game can go from being a masterpiece to a goulash of mechanical missteps.

David Perry Challenge #001 - Mirror's Edge

Today I bring you the first of the 100 game challenge, Mirror's Edge from Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment and published by EA in 2009. Video footage comes first and my 1-page writeup follows. This will be the format I follow every week.

Week 1: Mirror's Edge (DICE/EA, 2009)

Mirror's Edge is a first-person free runner designed with the intent to create a high stakes experience in an adrenaline-pumping setting. The use of high-contrast colorization - which itself contrasts many of the releases of the current generation's use of brown, dull materials – creates easily navigable pathways with the use of red-shaded objects to guide the player's eye. Combined with the design choice to have bullets unable to hit you when you are going over a certain speed, Mirror's Edge is tediously calculated simulation of a game. It's smoke and mirrors, a highly glossy prototype, but nothing more.

This is not to say that it's a bad prototype. Quite the contrary, Mirror's Edge successfully posits the thesis that a game which takes place from a First-Person view can be used for more than just shooting guns. The parkour mechanics go beyond the basics of running and jumping to include two different kinds of shimmies, wall-runs, 180 degree kick spins, zip-lining, and vertical climbing. The visuals are incredibly striking, with the outdoor having a strong emphasis on blues and indoors favoring greens. In order to finish the RGB trifecta, Reds are used sparingly in order to guide the player toward what they need to grab onto or run at next. It's a simple technique that eliminates some confusion in an otherwise highly detailed and sometimes confusing world.

However, the game is not without its faults. While the parkour mechanics are solid for the most part, a lot of it feels like a pixel-hunt. It is easy to gloss over your goal half the time or miss a jump because your “Death Dot” cursor happened to be off from where you were supposed to have it. While a “Death Dot” in many games can be a blessing of precision-based shooting, here it only serves to hamper the experience. The purpose of free running is just that - to be free in your running – and yet more than once I found myself unable to get through a section the way I wanted to. Even though it looked like a wall would be ideal for wall-running, or the gap between platforms easily jumped over, the section was specifically designed for you to shimmy across the ledge on the side. It is moments like this that force the realization that the player is being led; that any sense of agency they have in the game world is an illusion, and the whole game has been laid out to be played in a specific manner. Do it any other way and you will not only die but will have to replay the current section countless times before you are allowed to continue.

While Mirror's Edge makes itself out to be an open world, it only leads the player down a linear path. It's possible that this “illusion of freedom” motif mirrors, as it were, the game's totalitarian narrative. Any freedom one is led to believe they have is actually a carefully constructed ride, with ups and downs, glimpses of choice, and much like the game's high contrast aesthetics, shimmers of greatness. The game's challenge come from finding the path through levels laid out by the designers, not by creating your own as the game would have you hope would happen. The skill comes in the form of precisely timing and aiming your jumps (a slow-motion mechanic is included to assist in this endeavor and disarming enemies, though it almost seems as if it too was at one point included in the ride and was changed to a button-press at the last minute). While you can take enemies guns and shoot them, the game in no way encourages this behavior. Gunplay is a sloppy, slow, throwaway mechanic. Being that this is from the studio that brought us Battlefield, we know damn well that they are capable of forging solid first-person shooter mechanics. The gunplay is all part of the simulation. The player is given the illusion they can use guns, but that use comes at the cost of usability. In the end, it is a better choice to just throw the guns away. Even the bullets flying at you are all part of the ride and are themselves an illusory threat. There are a few tense moments to be found here, but once you realize just how shallow the rabbit hole actually is, the tension wears off quick.

There are some good ideas in Mirror's Edge, but they are all at odds with each other. The mechanics are shoehorned into an expressionistic use of narrative-as-gameplay, yet the gameplay itself can do nothing to alleviate the feeling that the roller-coaster is too well constructed. We are still safe.