Posts Tagged: Arkham Asylum

Experience / Game Design — 2 Comments
7
May 10

Who killed the high score? Part 2: RIPG

It seems as though point-scoring systems, once an indispensable part of videogames, have slowly been dying out. High score tables are far from extinct, but among the immersive single-player games that are considered the flagships of the medium – commercial colossi such as Half-Life, Uncharted, Fallout, Metroid Prime, Super Mario Galaxy and Grand Theft Auto, and critical high water marks such as Braid, Portal, World of Goo and BioShock – few use scoring in any significant way.

Why has the high score fallen out of favour? And are we overlooking an element of games that has not outlived its usefulness?

In Part 1 of Who killed the high score? I wrote about Halo 3‘s campaign scoring system, and how it greatly improved my experience of replaying that game. That got me thinking about another well-realised scoring system, in a game at the very opposite end of the developer budget scale: Spelunky. Continue reading →

Game Design / Industry — 7 Comments
2
Dec 09

The year of thirds

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If 2007 was the year of first person, then 2009 was the year of third person. A simple, and accurate equation, but it is more complex than all that.

With the exception of retro-fuelled nostalgia, the games industry can rarely be accused of looking backwards. From time to time we certainly hold up anointed examples of videogame craft and skill above others, and we regularly pine for a return to our first experiences with Mario, Zelda, and other aged icons.

But it is unusual to see analysis of trends or innovation outside of the gaming canon; even more unusual to look at a year’s worth of games once we’ve wiped our hands of them with obligatory Game of the Year awards. These awards are often contentious and fiercely debated at the time, but rarely do we concern ourselves with the trends of a particular year after we’ve handed out our pats-on-the-back and shown the world just how thoroughly up with it we’ve been in the last 365 days. We rarely even return to the games of years past: unless they’re in the canon, we probably won’t revisit them.

I’d therefore like to return to just two years ago: the year 2007. This, as it was easy to see at the time, was the year of first person. Continue reading →

Experience / Game Design — 12 Comments
16
Oct 09

Arkham Asylum, and the space of traumatic memory

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Batman: Arkham Asylum holds many surprises. But most surprising of all is its thematisation of trauma.

(Beware considerable Arkham Asylum spoilers.)

Batman: Arkham Asylum was not a game I was looking forward to. Rarely is there much to be said for licensed tie-ins, and so far, the Dark Knight has lead a rather forgettable life through digital media.

Yet Arkham Asylum is more than a good use of a license. In fact, it’s more than a treasured Good Game, all in capital letters, with the twin stars of solid mechanics and decent storyline pinned on its chest.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is that rare beast: the game that has something to say. Continue reading →