Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Other than these few discrete choices, the rest of the overmap
means
nothing
.
This makes the task of finding those discrete locations, and
walking to them, nothing but a chore. Grinding in particular is an espe-
cially annoying chore, since it's nothing but a random amount of time
between random encounters. Instead, you should just have a button that
takes you right into a fight, as on my menu. (Of course, this does seem a
little stupid. But that's only because random encounters are kind of stu-
pid to begin with, and this is simply shining a light on that stupidity and
making it easier to see.)
Sports Games
Examples:
John Madden Football
,
Ice Hockey
(the NES game),
Mario
Tennis
,
Mutant League Football
In a way, the genre of sports games is like a brother to the board-game
genre of war games, in that most of them are simulations. Digital sports
games usually fall into one of two categories: games that are more origi-
nal or abstract that are loosely based on a sport, and games that strive
to
simulate
a sport. Most frequently, games aren't trying to simulate the
sport itself, but instead the televised version of it. For instance, prob-
ably the most famous sports-game series in the United States is the
John
Madden
series of football games (now just called
Madden
). Since their
humble beginnings in 1991, these games have done everything they can
to look like TV football (the early Sega Genesis games even digitized
audio clips of John Madden speaking, although the audio quality was
extremely low). The games have come a long way in terms of technology,
and it's fair to say that they look a lot like real TV football.
By now some readers will be able to predict my next question: so
what? Why is it so important that football video games look like TV
video games? Well, if we're judging them as games, it doesn't matter. So
are there really enough people who want to recreate the magic of watch-
ing a football game on TV for this simulation-style game to become this
popular? War games represent a niche in the board-game world, because
despite the fact that many historical battles are
fascinating and interest-
ing things (unlike watching something on TV), there's a very limited au-
dience for simulation. So why does the Madden series have such popu-
larity? I think there are many reasons, including the fact that TV football
is one of the most popular American pastimes. But I also attribute it to
game shame—people simply don't respect games as an acceptable way to
spend their time, and so the more a game looks like something else (even
TV), the more acceptable it is.
