Two Rail - Shooters - Game Invaders: The Theory and Understanding of Computer Games - page 45

Rez and Star Fox are both rail - shooters so they are going to be pretty similar,
right? Let' s fi nd out.

ACTIVITY PROFILING AND GENRE THEORY

First of all let's consider the activity profi le for Star Fox Assault. As you can see
from Figure 5.1, by far the most important activity is mission-based, followed
closely by confronting and use of weapons. Classic activities for shooters with a
back-story, which Star Fox defi nitely has as we will see, by looking at the medium
scoring activities, in descending order: fl ying, targeting, attacking; again, all typical
of shooters in general and rail - shooters in particular. Following on from this we
have a large group of low scoring activities, for instance: defending, exploring,
maneuvering, powering up, rescuing, stunts, and warfare. Rescuing is interesting
because you have the other pilots on your wing whom you can help out. All in all
there are 16 activities scoring 2 or more. This is quite a complex profi le for a shooter
and it gets a relatively high twitch factor of 1.3 which is what you'd expect of a
game in this genre.
Star Fox is a shooter in which you have powerful enemy forces to battle it out
with all the time in a series of missions. There is a good deal of actual fl ying; you
have to position your star fi ghter in order to be able to make use of weapons accu-
rately. This all comes out in the high scoring activities. The large number of low
scoring activities, such things as accumulating rewards, stunts, trading, and so on,
point to a deceptively complex game playing experience.

Figure 5.1 Activity profi les for Star Fox Assault and Rez. (See color insert.)