So what are some games that you people think got a game mechanic (or gaming concept) down perfectly? I'm not talking about games that WERE perfect in everything they did; that's something else. I'm asking about games that may have been imperfect in a lot of ways, and possibly had some very major flaws, but which had one thing about them that was done so well that you hold them as the standard for that particular video game mechanic.
My example: Shinobi (and it's lesser-known sequel Nightshade) is in my mind the perfect and pinnacle example of how to make a game ridiculously hard while still making it fun and rewarding to play, and it does it absolutely beautifully. Now, to be fair: Shinobi is by far and large NOT the hardest game out there, even when set on it's highest difficulty. However, it is hard to say that Shinobi was my any means an "easy" game, so for my purposes it should work well enough. Also, there were certainly a number of flaws with Shinobi (many of which, but not all, were fixed in Nightshade): the controls were more complicated than just about any game I've seen in a long time, the hit detection was sometimes a little off, the cinema scenes (while passable) were hardly anything to get excited about, and the story was generally rather lackluster. However, what made Shinobi so incredibly fun and addictive was that the better you played, the more badass and ninja-like your character began to look while going through those levels. Badies tended to come in groups, and they had this very fun and interesting mechanic set up where the first time you slew an enemy in one of the groups it would "freeze" in place and gray out. You then had a small amount of time to kill the next one, and if you killed all the badies in a group before running out of time, you got this really cool cut scene where your ninja character sheathed his sword dramatically and all the enemies fell down in pieces at the same time. Even better than that, with each enemy you killed before your "combo" ran out, your sword would double in power, meaning that if you took down a bunch of weaker enemies quickly enough (hardly an easy feat since many of the later enemies were armored and could only be hurt from certain angles), you could theoretically destroy incredibly large and dangerous enemies in one solid swipe. In fact, some of the more difficult bosses could be absolutely annihilated this way (example: I only hit the final boss twice during the whole fight and while it took me about 20 minutes to get it all to work properly, him dying actually only took 4 seconds). There was nothing so rewarding in that game as running into a group of badies, Shadow Dashing around all of them with pinpoint precision while slaughtering them one by one, and then dodging around behind the german tank and not only destroying it with one attack, but then getting to watch it cinematically explode and all the other badies fall down in pieces while your character ever-so-calmly sheaths his sword and walks away. Those moments were so rewarding in fact that many times even after I completed a level I found myself going back through it again just to try and get the level "ninja perfect" from start to finish. This was one of the few games where I found myself so caught up in it that I started trying to act more ninja-like even when I wasn't slaughtering groups of enemies like a badass ninja god with a soul-eating katana. I found myself compelled to stand perfectly still with my hand on my sword and do nothing while the enemies closed in around me, only to burst into action and in a massive flash of sheer badassery, kill them all before they had a chance to blink. I have had my friends tell me that when I'm playing really well they can easily sit there and WATCH me play that game and be entertained for hours on end. So yeah, getting back to the main point: I hold Shinobi and it's sequel as the perfect example of the "challenging" game, and how do it right: if you're going to make it hard as hell, then reward the player by making sure that he looks like an absolute badass whenever he succeeds.
So, to get back to the original point: what games do you people hold up on a pedestal as a shining example of how to get a game mechanic "perfect"?
My example: Shinobi (and it's lesser-known sequel Nightshade) is in my mind the perfect and pinnacle example of how to make a game ridiculously hard while still making it fun and rewarding to play, and it does it absolutely beautifully. Now, to be fair: Shinobi is by far and large NOT the hardest game out there, even when set on it's highest difficulty. However, it is hard to say that Shinobi was my any means an "easy" game, so for my purposes it should work well enough. Also, there were certainly a number of flaws with Shinobi (many of which, but not all, were fixed in Nightshade): the controls were more complicated than just about any game I've seen in a long time, the hit detection was sometimes a little off, the cinema scenes (while passable) were hardly anything to get excited about, and the story was generally rather lackluster. However, what made Shinobi so incredibly fun and addictive was that the better you played, the more badass and ninja-like your character began to look while going through those levels. Badies tended to come in groups, and they had this very fun and interesting mechanic set up where the first time you slew an enemy in one of the groups it would "freeze" in place and gray out. You then had a small amount of time to kill the next one, and if you killed all the badies in a group before running out of time, you got this really cool cut scene where your ninja character sheathed his sword dramatically and all the enemies fell down in pieces at the same time. Even better than that, with each enemy you killed before your "combo" ran out, your sword would double in power, meaning that if you took down a bunch of weaker enemies quickly enough (hardly an easy feat since many of the later enemies were armored and could only be hurt from certain angles), you could theoretically destroy incredibly large and dangerous enemies in one solid swipe. In fact, some of the more difficult bosses could be absolutely annihilated this way (example: I only hit the final boss twice during the whole fight and while it took me about 20 minutes to get it all to work properly, him dying actually only took 4 seconds). There was nothing so rewarding in that game as running into a group of badies, Shadow Dashing around all of them with pinpoint precision while slaughtering them one by one, and then dodging around behind the german tank and not only destroying it with one attack, but then getting to watch it cinematically explode and all the other badies fall down in pieces while your character ever-so-calmly sheaths his sword and walks away. Those moments were so rewarding in fact that many times even after I completed a level I found myself going back through it again just to try and get the level "ninja perfect" from start to finish. This was one of the few games where I found myself so caught up in it that I started trying to act more ninja-like even when I wasn't slaughtering groups of enemies like a badass ninja god with a soul-eating katana. I found myself compelled to stand perfectly still with my hand on my sword and do nothing while the enemies closed in around me, only to burst into action and in a massive flash of sheer badassery, kill them all before they had a chance to blink. I have had my friends tell me that when I'm playing really well they can easily sit there and WATCH me play that game and be entertained for hours on end. So yeah, getting back to the main point: I hold Shinobi and it's sequel as the perfect example of the "challenging" game, and how do it right: if you're going to make it hard as hell, then reward the player by making sure that he looks like an absolute badass whenever he succeeds.
So, to get back to the original point: what games do you people hold up on a pedestal as a shining example of how to get a game mechanic "perfect"?
- i would say that i would show it as a good example of how to do the whole platforming idea whilst looking cool. The game itself and the combat(whilst repetitive) worked together with the camera to make everything you did look like you were in a matrix film.
