How We Got Here - Game Design Theory - page 88

often in the form of brawlers. Games like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ,
Golden Axe , and The Simpsons Arcade Game were all extremely popu-
lar and extremely terrible games. Nonetheless, the cooperative nature of
these games together with their popular themes was enough to keep us
pumping in the quarters. I know I spent at least a hundred dollars of my
parents' money as a kid playing TMNT .
The one great thing to come out of arcades, however, was the fight-
ing-game community. This has lasted into the post-arcade era, and
blossomed into a larger professional gaming world. Having a group of
gamers who are so dedicated to playing games that they make it their
profession is a very, very healthy thing for the world of games. If your
game is exploitable, unbalanced, or otherwise broken, these people will
find out. Better still, if your game is deep and interesting, these people
will also find out.
Handheld Devices
Due to their hardware limitations, handheld devices have always been a
sort of safe haven for games that focus on gameplay. Often these devices
had hardware that was one to three generations behind the current gen-
eration of consoles, and because of that, the games often would focus
more on having great gameplay, with less concern for fulfilling graphics
expectations.
Sadly, very few of them actually ended up doing this, and so to this
day we only have a handful of must-play portable games. One of the
most successful handhelds of all time, the Nintendo Game Boy, was es-
sentially a Tetris machine. I've played hundreds of the system's games,
and I can't think of more than two or three other games that I would
really recommend.
Nintendo's next major foray was the Game Boy Advance (GBA),
which in large part was an Advance Wars machine. This was one of the
most successful and most interesting games on the platform, particularly
interesting because it showed that in the year 2001, a 2D pixel-art, turn-
based war game could be successful with the right presentation.
Something must also be said about the Nintendo DS and DSi. While
there are thousands of game titles for this system, I again have to say that
Advance Wars: Days of Ruin (the second Advance Wars game for that
system) is probably the reigning king. This game was notable in that it
had online matchmaking and even had voice chat! Of course, computer
games had already had voice chat for years, but this was probably the
first example I had ever seen of a popular console game that featured
it. Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is the closest to a PC game that I've ever
seen on a console.