The Ludologist

Understatement: The game ranking for Bomberman Zero is 33%.

The reviewers more or less agree that Bomberman Zero removes all the good parts from the series:

• Top-down view.
• The characters
• Dying instantly when being hit
• Multiplayer on one console/screen.

While adding new unwelcome features:

• New “futuristic” characters.
• First person view (most of the time).
• Health bar.
• 99-level single player with no continue option.

Compare this to, say, New Super Mario Bros (89%), which has managed to take an existing series and genuinely update it (it is absolutely great).

My take is that it is about how you deal with technology and game style changes:

• Bomberman Zero seems to follow the ca. 1999 laundry list of “new cool things”: First person view, vague futurism with murky textures, online multiplayer and follow that slavishly. (Single player without continue is more 1986 than 2006 though, retro in the bad way.)
• New Super Mario Bros sticks with the 2D format (retro in the good way), but mostly builds on advances in character animation tools and game physics: The game feels modern due to the great animations and the exquisite physics – it is all about a sense of bodily presence in the game. Modernized, but not by way of a laundry list, and without destroying the game’s core.

There you have it: This is how to make a modern version of an old game. Ok, so it is not that simple. New Super Mario Bros is probably easier to modernize because a slightly open game of exploration and travel is quite contemporary, whereas single-screen 2d action games are hardly made anymore.

Still, I could imagine a 2D top-down Bomberman modernized like New Super Mario Bros: Better animations, better physics. I would play that.

At Businessweek, an interview with Peter Molyneux, Jonathan Smith and Simon Byron on game designs they dislike:

• Peter Molyneux picks cutscenes (that old chestnut).
• Simon Byron says stealth.
• More interesting, Jonathan Smith points to games that are too balanced(!).

Jonathan Smith’s basic argument is that if the game is never too easy or too hard, as a player you feel “you might not be there at all”. This is a bit controversial in relation to current research (such as Robin Hunicke‘s) of auto-adjusting difficulty, where the game is supposed to match itself to the player.
Jonathan Smith’s point ties in with Noah Falstein’s article in Steve Rabin’s Introduction To Game Development, where he describes the ideal game difficulty as one that shifts between being hard and easy. As I recall, the basic argument is that as a player I should first try something very hard, and then a bit later get the experience that a challenge has become easy because of my newly acquired skills:

That sounds like an argument against perfect balance and against automatic difficulty adjustment, doesn’t it? But perhaps the better conclusion is not to avoid balancing and difficulty adjustment, but to balance and diffulty-adjust as to aim for something like the ebb and flow in the model above.

Good balancing is paramount, but balancing should not aim for a straight line.

Via Gonzalo, I must link to this clip of a chimpanzee playing Ms. Pac-Man:

As far as I have read recently, some mammals such as humans, pigs, and chimpanzees will perform mental challenges just for the fun of it, but lemurs will only do it for food.
I think this means that frivolousness is a sure sign of intelligence. Good to know in the summer heat.

IGDA has just released their brand new updated 2006 Casual Games White Paper. The white paper is an absolutely excellent resource for developers and even researchers interested in casual games. Get it. It’s free.