Anyone who has played any of the first six or seven Megaman games is familiar with the formula of eight worlds, eight bosses, and eight special powers which could be used in a rock-paper-scissors fashion to beat the next boss with relative ease; all leading up to the final encounter with Dr. Wily. I think the reason why this experience worked so well was because of the lack of a save function on the NES.
Starting fresh every time the game was turned on allowed the player to tackle the game in any way they wished. The ability to access eight of the game's nine levels from the beginning meant that most of the content was available to the player right out of the box. This helped avoid the problem of large amounts of quality content being locked away from the player (e.g. some of the late game Battletoads levels are seriously awesome, but almost nobody got to see them).
Restarting each time also provided the additional experience of trying out different special attacks on different bosses with each attempt. Sometimes the logic behind what specials beat which bosses was less than intuitive (MM6: Tomahawk Man beats Yamato Man?), but having the player begin each journey fresh allowed this kind of design to work because if you guessed wrong, you could simply try a different combination next time. This gave the player a sense of mastery over the game when they started to learn from past experiences and could crush more and more bosses with each run.
Any thoughts on current gen gaming limitations? I think the recent movement towards motion controls seems to have a lot of glaring problems that might be able to be worked into games in interesting ways. Any thoughts?
Starting fresh every time the game was turned on allowed the player to tackle the game in any way they wished. The ability to access eight of the game's nine levels from the beginning meant that most of the content was available to the player right out of the box. This helped avoid the problem of large amounts of quality content being locked away from the player (e.g. some of the late game Battletoads levels are seriously awesome, but almost nobody got to see them).
Restarting each time also provided the additional experience of trying out different special attacks on different bosses with each attempt. Sometimes the logic behind what specials beat which bosses was less than intuitive (MM6: Tomahawk Man beats Yamato Man?), but having the player begin each journey fresh allowed this kind of design to work because if you guessed wrong, you could simply try a different combination next time. This gave the player a sense of mastery over the game when they started to learn from past experiences and could crush more and more bosses with each run.
Any thoughts on current gen gaming limitations? I think the recent movement towards motion controls seems to have a lot of glaring problems that might be able to be worked into games in interesting ways. Any thoughts?