[HN Gopher] Notes on rarely-seen game mechanics
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Notes on rarely-seen game mechanics
Author : luu
Score : 116 points
Date : 2023-05-14 21:09 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.plover.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.plover.com)
| corysama wrote:
| Kojima made a GBA game about a vampire hunter who was stronger in
| the daylight. The cartridge featured a light sensor that could
| detect if you were playing it out in the sun.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boktai:_The_Sun_Is_in_Your_Han...
| snowram wrote:
| Pointless rambling but I am tired of Kojima being titled as the
| sole creator every time he is involved in a game. This cult of
| personality is silly.
| pjc50 wrote:
| "Auteur theory": somewhat valid, but definitely hides a lot
| of real creative input by a lot of people.
| atoav wrote:
| A game, much like a film, is usually a collective effort.
| Most people don't even have the eyes to see the individual
| parts that flow into such a work.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| Game creators are also annoyed by it. ;) https://pbs.twimg.co
| m/media/EFGyOnLWsAA0GF3?format=jpg&name=...
| Minor49er wrote:
| How ironic
|
| If anyone else is a fan of the original Deus Ex, one of the
| writers for it, Sheldon Pacotti, has been writing science
| fiction for years:
|
| http://sheldonpacotti.com/
| tpoacher wrote:
| I read Demiurge right after I played the original Deus Ex
| for that reason. It was a masterpiece.
|
| Haven't had the chance to read anything by Chris Todd yet
| (the writer/curator of all the snippets you come across
| within the game, as opposed to the plot itself), but I
| remember enjoying his in-game style a lot too at the
| time.
| LelouBil wrote:
| Great quote
| AlexandrB wrote:
| It's not ideal, but it's better than crediting the game
| entirely to the publisher. Talking about studios can be
| useful, but then you have to include a year or something
| since the make up a studio can change radically over time.
| There are definitely people in the industry that have an
| outsized influence or a particular style/flavor to their
| output.
| waboremo wrote:
| I would argue that it isn't better than crediting the game
| to the studio. People can look into the game's credits to
| see who actually worked on it. However when everyone keeps
| going "Bob made this game", nobody bothers looking into who
| else. They just become a deity of creation.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| This is a questionable mechanic - I'd even say a useless
| gimmick that adds nothing substantial to the gameplay.
|
| Dean Hall, the creator of the viral survival sandbox mod DayZ,
| was obsessed with realism-based immersion, and also tried
| something similar in his game in 2012. One of the updates tied
| the in-game time to the real time at the location of the server
| you were connected to. It also made the moonless and/or cloudy
| nights _impenetrably_ dark, even GPU gamma correction wasn 't
| able to help you see anything. Considering that the majority of
| players played the game in the evening, that the game was set
| in the fictional Balkan country (they only had an hour or so of
| twilight at best), and that the night vision device was a top-
| tier item hard to obtain in a survival sandbox, the majority of
| players just played on servers in distant timezones, preferring
| huge latencies to playing in the dark.
|
| The update was reverted shortly after that, as it was obvious
| that it degraded the gameplay quality immensely.
| ttymck wrote:
| You've made quite the generalization based on one example of
| a real time MMO. I still acknowledge the artistry behind it
| in the case of DayZ, and it's even more interesting within
| the context of Kojima's career.
| BizarroLand wrote:
| If the game was designed for it, I could see the advantage
| of having a synchronous day/night cycle in game for a few
| reasons.
|
| For instance, an RPG where your time of day combined with
| in game locations could change what enemies spawn, or
| characters that get sleepy and less capable after so long,
| but it should also be able to cause unique time events to
| happen, and not just spooky Halloween season or Xmas
| spectacular, either.
| autoexec wrote:
| Sure you'd be stronger, but for those playing without a
| backlight you'd also be nearly blind. The GBA SP would spare
| you from struggling to make out anything on the GBA screen
| under direct sunlight, but the cartage also went in at the
| bottom facing you and the floor, not at the top facing the
| outside world which might have made the sensor less effective.
| everdrive wrote:
| The original wide GBA, as well as the first run of the SP had
| a reflective screen, and would look wonderful in direct
| sunlight. It's only the second gen of the SP which had a
| backlight (rather than a front light) and could not perform
| in the sun.
| xyzzy_plugh wrote:
| Indeed, the original solution for the GBA was a peripheral
| lamp to illuminate the screen just like natural light: The
| Worm Light
|
| It's almost as if the peripheral port was made for it.
| autoexec wrote:
| > The original wide GBA, as well as the first run of the SP
| had a reflective screen, and would look wonderful in direct
| sunlight.
|
| None of mine ever did. The best lighting seemed to be
| sitting with a lamp behind you but with actual sun overhead
| everything was too dark to make out.
| rzzzt wrote:
| Nicely balanced mechanic.
| janderson3 wrote:
| Oh my. I had a GBA that me and my dad modded to be backlit.
| Boktai was so good on that system. I didn't think about how
| lucky I was that I could play the game pretty easily.
| riffraff wrote:
| Ah there's a fairly common perception game played at fairs in my
| home region: guess the height of the hanging ham.
|
| A ham (technical, a prosciutto) is hanged on a rope and people
| have to guess how far it is from the ground.
|
| The winner takes it home, of course.
| dannyeei wrote:
| My partners family plays a version of Canasta where you start
| dealing by picking up all the cards you think you'll need to deal
| and if you picked it perfectly you get another 100 points.
|
| It's a great addition to the game and makes it a positive to be
| the dealer.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I think the "shake box" mechanic has been used twice by Nintendo,
| once on the DS with sound, and once on the switch with haptic
| vibration.
|
| https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-DS/Make-10-A-journ...
|
| Make 10: The Nut Tapper subgame.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm8v_WJ3Xek
|
| 1-2-Switch: Ball Count
| Beldin wrote:
| Surely one of the Wario Ware games does this at least for one
| minigame? I mean, they're chockfull of weird game mechanics.
| jayd16 wrote:
| Short-term memory seems super common. Simon is an example similar
| to the one given, and of course there's the popular matching
| flipped cards mechanic you see in a lot of games.
| bombcar wrote:
| The Mario Party series often implemented "strange game modes"
| where you had to do things like blow on the controller microphone
| just enough, etc.
|
| They're fun for very short party games; but with many you could
| see how they'd be horribly annoying over an entire feature-length
| game.
| mysterydip wrote:
| One of my favorite sites to browse when I'm looking for
| inspiration is this site of 300 game mechanics:
| http://www.squidi.net/three/ . Even if I don't copy something
| verbatim, reading through them starts my brain juices flowing,
| and I'll remix them with some of my own ideas or combine a couple
| together to get me unstuck on a problem I'm having with one of my
| designs.
| YokoZar wrote:
| Is there a similar list of more generic or common mechanics?
| I've always been curious if a list that contained things like
| "tiles-based", "roguelike", "rhythm game" would yield
| interesting results if combined randomly.
| immibis wrote:
| Chess-but-you-can-make-your-opponent-undo-a-move-by-chopping-off-
| your-finger sounds like something out of an Iain M. Banks novel.
| TomK32 wrote:
| Have you seen The Banshees of Inisherin? Was in cinemas earlier
| this year.
| bitwize wrote:
| John Wick made the High Table take a move back by cutting off a
| finger.
| cainxinth wrote:
| Ha, I just finished "The Player of Games," and I agree.
| cwillu wrote:
| "I must request that we engage in a wager of the body."
| AndrewOMartin wrote:
| Chess-but-you-can-make-your-opponent-undo-a-move-once-per-game
| might actually be viable, but I can't begin to analyse the
| implications on strategy.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| What about N times per (2N-1) game matches? so e.g. 4 times
| in a best-of-seven match?
| somat wrote:
| The mechanics interest me more.
|
| Do you just decide to make two moves?
|
| That is you make a move, opponent makes a move, you undo your
| opponent move. Now whose turn is it? is it your turn? where
| you have effectively moved twice, your opponents turn? but we
| can't can just let them make the same move, that goes against
| the spirit of the thing. So perhaps their turn but they can
| make any move except for the one you undid.
| spadros wrote:
| I read it more as you undo their last move and your last
| move. Then you can replay and hopefully not fall into the
| same trap.
| geminger wrote:
| Cf. Roald Dahl's "Man from the South"
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_from_the_South
| whateveracct wrote:
| Sounds like a Kaiji arc
| mjd wrote:
| Was there a game something like that in "Consider Phlebas"? I
| thought about mentioning it in the article but decided it
| wasn't worth the time it would take.
| Loughla wrote:
| There were body bets in Player of Games. In consider Phlebas
| they had the game Damage where players bet/lost lives either
| extra people you 'owned' or your own life depending on the
| size of the game.
| drb493 wrote:
| Seaman for dreamcast utilized a microphone in which you would
| talk to your fish (that also would develop to grow a human head).
| It relied on voice commands. You could praise it, scold it, order
| it to clean its tank. In response it would insult you or ask you
| trivia facts.
|
| The game also used the dreamcast clock to age the fish even when
| the game was not running. It had an anti-cheat mechanism where it
| would detect if you altered the clock and would punish the
| cheater accordingly.
| michaelbuckbee wrote:
| It's likely outside the radar of anyone on HN without kids but
| Roblox is a wild ecosystem of game mechanic mashups that I've not
| seen anywhere else.
| lostphilosopher wrote:
| The Metal Gear Solid boss fight with Psycho Mantis is my favorite
| example of rarely-seen game mechanics (in this case in a video
| game).
|
| (Spoiler alert on a game from 1998.)
| https://www.thegamer.com/metal-gear-solid-psycho-mantis-boss...
| Physkal wrote:
| Very interesting, Was there any dialog clues that hinted to
| that specific solution?
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| IIRC, if you take long enough to figure it out, you can call
| your "support team" in-game and they'll give you hints about
| trying the second controller port.
|
| (Also I love that this and the comment chain immediately
| above it are both Kojima games. Can't wait to see what kind
| of mechanics he throws at us in DS2.)
| fendy3002 wrote:
| Yes, if you die once you'll get a call telling about it. If
| you die the third time, you'll be able to break two statues,
| nullify his mind reading.
|
| Or, from youtube said, you can defeat him without both, since
| he'll evade seven attacks and will be hit by the eight.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Star Tropics (A great, if quite linear, action-RPG for the NES)
| required you to dunk the actual game manual in water to solve a
| puzzle.
| no_wizard wrote:
| Which in the 2019 re-release they neglected to handle[0]
| leading to people being very confused. I bet they just
| figured everyone would google it
|
| [0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190625150528/http://www.ni
| nten...
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I've played it so often that I have it memorized (it helps
| that it's a fairly famous model of jet airplane too)
| evandale wrote:
| MGS has so many cool mechanics.
|
| I was in university when Snake Eater came out and I got to play
| it when I went home during the Christmas break. I got to The
| End fight and had to go back. When I came back during March
| break I didn't have to win the fight because he died.
|
| https://metalgear.fandom.com/wiki/The_End#Avoiding_the_fight
| doublerabbit wrote:
| And that of needing the games cd case for Meryl's codec if you
| wish to proceed further in the game, iirc.
|
| Otacon: "there should be a codec number on the back of the game
| box"
|
| I do enjoy when they include pseudo-reality in to character.
| ender341341 wrote:
| I hated that one, cause it wasn't game box but disk case, and
| in game I'd just picked up a disk and spent forever trying to
| figure out how to look at the case before looking up the
| answer.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| You know the PlayStation Classic mini-console that came out a
| few years back? They incorporated that puzzle into the
| console's packaging: the back of the PSClassic's box includes
| thumbnails for the 20 or so games that come installed, and
| MGS's thumbnail is just a picture of Meryl's codec convo
| screen. It cracked me up when I first saw it.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| 4th wall breaking stuff is cool. A few other big games that
| break the fourth wall in boss fights: Arkham Asylum
| (Scarecrow), Undertale (Flowey), Pony Island (Asmodeus.exe).
| Nier does something similar.
| [deleted]
| btilly wrote:
| Another pain tolerance game is https://www.amazon.com/Jumpin-
| Banana-PP1048-Shocking-Tanks/d.... If you set your controller to
| give you a bigger shock when hit, your shots do more damage and
| it is easier to win.
| glitchc wrote:
| > Have-to-drop-out is often a bad game mechanic
|
| Tell that to Fortnite and other battle-royale games.
|
| > And there's that game where two players take turns hitting each
| other in the face until one gives up or is too battered to
| continue -- I don't know what it's called.
|
| Hilarious!
| lifefeed wrote:
| Talking about pain tolerance using "Episode 13 of Survivor:
| Borneo" is (accidentally?) a great example, because underneath
| the game of pain was an incredible tactical decision by Richard
| which ultimately won him the game.
|
| (The short version is there were three players left: Richard,
| Rudy, and Kelly. Rudy was popular, Kelly was a hard competitor,
| and Richard was sly. If Rudy made the final two, he would win
| against either of them. Richard and Rudy had long standing deal
| to help each other, and if Richard broke that then Rudy would
| vote against him from the final jury, and Richard had burned
| enough bridges that he needed every vote he could get. By Richard
| deciding to step down, he made the bet that Kelly would win the
| challenge and the immunity, and would vote off Rudy, because she
| would know she couldn't win against him. So Richard made the
| final two, against Kelly, without burning his friendship with
| Rudy. And he won.)
| [deleted]
| adamredwoods wrote:
| This article was a response to:
| https://blog.plover.com/notes/alien-poker.html
|
| >> Will we ever hear about why the aliens might already know how
| to play Go?
|
| Which I found a bit more interesting (as an avid board game
| player).
|
| >> "There is a mathematics game," said the alien.... "The game
| involves a screee--" Some word that the autopilot couldn't
| translate. The alien raised a three-clawed hand, holding a lens-
| shaped object. The alien's mutually opposed fingers turned it so
| that Louis could see the different markings on each side. "This
| is a screee. You and I will throw it upward six times each. I
| will choose one of the symbols, you will choose the other. If my
| symbol falls looking upward more often than yours, the artifact
| is mine. The risks are even."
|
| >> "Agreed," said Louis. He was a bit disappointed in the
| simplicity of the game.
| titoasty wrote:
| I made one with a weird game mechanics:
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1778910/Let_It_Slide/
|
| You have to drag to move. Sounds painful, and it is. That's
| really weird and you have to re-learn how to move your character,
| which can be frustrating and show how used we are to standard
| movements. After a few minutes you get used to it and it becomes
| fun.
|
| I made it when I researched how to "physically" play differently.
| LanceH wrote:
| It's not quite pain tolerance, but puts the competitor in duress
| and wastes their time:
|
| In the winter sport of biathlon (skiing and shooting), if a
| target is missed, there are penalty laps around a small loop
| before they can continue. It's partly a time penalty, but also
| just uses up more of their reserve.
|
| Then there is the steeplechase which is basically running around
| the track with the misery of running in wet shoes.
|
| Or maybe all of running, really. I was in a running club years
| ago. Professional coach, and athletes from high schoolers to
| hobbyists to the world record holder in the 5k. We were at
| breakfast and one of the hobbyists asked when it stopped hurting
| so much. The pros laughed and said, "It never stops hurting. It's
| about making them hurt more."
|
| Now that I think of it, my kids have seen great success in
| wrestling from the same approach of just being more willing to be
| miserable than their opponents. It's not simply a matter of being
| more fit, either. People just give up due to pain at different
| points.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| Definitely had friends play the "See who can hold your hand in a
| candle flame the longest"
|
| Also, drywall bingo: there's a wall of drywall that is about to
| be demolished. Pick a spot near the middle of the wall and
| headbutt it. If you hit a stud, you lose.
| akuchling wrote:
| Another perception game is Dive
| (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/304324/dive), which has a
| stack of translucent plastic sheets. Some of these sheets have
| silhouettes of sea creatures on them (fish, sharks, even a whale)
| and you need to estimate how many sheets down that shark is.
| haizhung wrote:
| A game involving pain tolerance is called ,,pain station" and
| e.g. playable in the computer games Museum in Berlin.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PainStation
|
| Each time your opponent scores a hit in pong against you, you get
| an electric shock. The person first letting to of the metal
| handle delivering the shocks loses.
| latchkey wrote:
| Such a great scene:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI9_cLu5-JY
| Karellen wrote:
| > Dave continues, discussing a P.K. Dick story in which the
| characters take turns holding their fingers in a cigarette
| lighter. In the story, they're not burned, because Dick, but
| you could imagine playing this as a brutal game in our non-Dick
| universe. In fact I thought I might have heard of people
| playing exactly this game, but I'm not sure.
|
| Reminds me of Lawrence of Arabia:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvQViPBAvPk
|
| > Ow. It damn well hurts!
|
| > Certainly it hurts.
|
| > Well what's the trick then?
|
| > The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Given the amount of influence the book _Seven Pillars of
| Wisdom_ pretty clearly had on _Dune_ , I wouldn't be a bit
| surprised if that's a case of the film _Lawrence of Arabia_
| (1962) influencing _Dune_ (1965)--that little exchange could
| plausibly be the seed of inspiration that became the Gom
| Jabbar scene.
| throwbadubadu wrote:
| Also heat and get your hand whipped.. and the hand whipping is
| actually the most painful and leaves a permanent mark for few
| days (so you can keep mocking your visiting friends/colleagues
| for the rest of their trip :D).
|
| See it in action here: https://youtu.be/JEfCGsXIeRY
| Beldin wrote:
| Eternal Darkness for the gamecube had a sanity meter. A bit
| reduced sanity and you'd literally start seeing things. Even
| lower and things got weirder... including faking a gamecube
| reset, faking lowering the volume on your tv (with faked on-
| screen volume bar), etc. The list of examples [1] is beautiful.
|
| [1] https://eternaldarkness.fandom.com/wiki/Sanity_Effects
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