Action Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 400

and the Infernal Machine . The earlier, 2D isometric Indiana Jones games were pure
adventure games.

Chapter 19, “Adventure Games,” discusses action-adventures in more detail.

Music, Dance, and Rhythm Games
Dance Dance Revolution , PaRappa the Rapper , and similar games belong to a compara-
tively new subgenre of action games, those that challenge the player's sense of
rhythm. They typically show an avatar on screen who dances in response to the
player's button presses. In single-player mode, the player's avatar must dance better
than a computer-controlled character; in multiplayer mode, two avatars compete
head to head. The screen shows which dance step the player should perform next,
while the game awards points for pressing the correct button on the controller or
pad on a dance mat, and for being on the beat.

Music games are more recent arrivals. The huge success of Guitar Hero and Rock
Band demonstrates that a lot of players want to enjoy the fantasy of being a musi-
cian—even though they don't actually make music in these games. Much of the
fun in these games comes from using their specialized, guitar-shaped controllers.

NOTE Players could
instantly understand
what they were sup-
posed to do in Frogger ,
which accounts for a
lot of its success. It
also appealed to both
male and female play-
ers at a time when that
was rare. These are
qualities to strive for.

Other Action Games
A great many action games don't fit neatly into any of the preceding subgenres, and
the variety among them is enormous. They are difficult to categorize except in neg-
ative terms: They don't involve shooting, hand-to-hand fighting, or abstract puzzle
solving. They do, however, frequently use representational puzzle solving. Most of
these action games demand skills such as maneuvering and path planning.

Frogger , shown in Figure 13.5 , is a good example of an action game that belongs to
no obvious subgenre. The player maneuvers the world's only nonswimming frog
family across a busy road and a logging river infested with crocodiles. A highly suc-
cessful arcade game launched in 1981, the Frogger series eventually became one of
the most successful of all time. Hasbro's 1997 remake, Frogger 3D (also shown in
Figure 13.5) sold millions of copies, remaining on the software bestsellers charts for
many months after release. The developers kept the gameplay virtually unchanged
and just updated the presentation, increasing the variety of the levels available to
the player. Frogger 2: Swampy's Revenge , a sequel to Frogger 3D , introduced a more
structured game while still remaining faithful to the gameplay of the original.

Other notable action games that don't fit into defined subgenres include Pong ,
Marble Madness , Pac-Man , Q*bert , Lemmings , and Katamari Damacy . Both Marble
Madness (1986) and Katamari Damacy (2004) use an excellent but seldom-seen chal-
lenge, controlling a rolling object that exhibits inertia. Lemmings , a brilliant game
about trying to prevent a group of dim-witted creatures from killing themselves by