Official Off-Topic Thread

[.TakaM]

The thing is...
Thinking back to super metroid, the game was 100% open to different styles of play, skip the varia suit, but there is still enough health from enemies in Norfair to sustain you, same if you want to play through without collecting energy tanks.
Bosses also almost always had a way to get health out of them, shoot their projectiles etc, they were just a bit risky to collect.
and like yoshi's island, I think all the bosses had an eggplant somewhere that were hard to collect eggs from, you'd usually be in the bosses attack range, but you had to be there to collect enough eggs and defeat them.

I'm thinking if you try to play through Twinsen with only 3 life bars, it's gonna get ridiculously hard, too little room for error and we will have to keep players like that in mind if we decide to have full control over how much health they can replenish in each level...

[Doppleganger]

Why not have all the bushes drop clovers at a particular rate. So instead of one out of ten bushes you pass containing a clover, you have a 1:10 chance of getting a clover from any bush you pass. You could even go so far as designing some bushes to drop clovers at a higher rate. 1:4 maybe. A slightly different look might be the discerning factor between the bushes.

[Dusty]

Zelda uses a predefined, as well as random drop rate for bushes. Some bushes will always drop a heart(like in LttP, the set of bushes just east of Link's house), rupee or what not, and all others have random drops. This is a pretty effective method because it gives a random chance, as well as a chance for you define when to drop health.

[.TakaM]

Why not have all the bushes drop clovers at a particular rate. So instead of one out of ten bushes you pass containing a clover, you have a 1:10 chance of getting a clover from any bush you pass. You could even go so far as designing some bushes to drop clovers at a higher rate. 1:4 maybe. A slightly different look might be the discerning factor between the bushes.

hmmm.. I rather like your chances getting better as your health gets worse... that's a pretty good balance.
 ?

[ptoing]

lol rank

I dunno, I am not a fan of adaptive difficulty. If the player is cack he is cack and needs to improve. I see no need for games to have stuff that makes it easier or harder on the player depending on how good/bad he plays. Best is to make a well balanced game with a good difficulty curve imo.

[bengo]

The problem I've found in alot of nintendo games is they're pretty easy or just pretty average in terms of difficulty. One of the reasons why I tend not to play Nintendo games is because of that, I mainly play arcade games, where it's if you're shot once you die, i.e. Metal Slug, Dodonpachi, or other games where you get a challenge out of the opponent(s), i.e. Street Fighter 3, Marvel vs Capcom, Change Air Blade, Call of Duty, Gears of War.
It's understandable why Nintendo makes their games like that though, because then it's not too difficult for your average game but not too easy for your game addict. To me though, it's all about the challenge, all about how many shots you can dodge until you finally get hit, all about if you're able to execute that combo correctly, all about if you can take out that tank before it destroys your base.
So my question is, while classics like Metroid and The Legend of Zelda are fun, do you think they'd be funner if they actually presented some challenge(While there is some challenge in them, it's usually not challenging enough where the average gamer would tend to die alot, or even once, perhaps)?

[ptoing]

The original NES Zelda, Metroid and SMB are not exactly supereasy. Also, most arcade games have rank. Mostly shmups. As in the better you play the harder it gets over time.
Money making facility. I think I only died like 2 times because I was being stupid in Windwaker and I still had MASSIVE amounts of fun with that game. Just exploring the world and stuff like that was awesome enough for me and the fights, esp the bosses are really good fun. There is more than just challenge that is important to a good game.

[.TakaM]

I find that when I'm playing an easy game I still have just as much fun if I were playing a hard game.
like super mario 64, I hardly ever die in it, infact the first time I saw the gameover screen on DS I was surprised and realized I hadn't seen it before.
mainly because I'll be constantly diving and sweep kicking, sorta like reading the track ahead of you in a rally game, long jumping onto enemies, trying to bounce from one to the other, never changing the camera angle etc, and in windwaker I actually try to always only use the spin slash, as in doing a full circle with the joystick, then pressing B, it kinda breaks the parry opportunity down into three parts, you can hit them twice then jump back. more fun than playing normally

I dunno, maybe I am weird but you can always make the conscious decision to make any game hard, and thats where I have the most fun

[Zero]

The thing about easier games like Super Mario 64 is that most of the time you can challenge yourself by unlocking everything. In this particular game, you have to find 150 stars before you can unlock every mini-game, which took me quite a long time, and was very challenging. So if you wanted to, you could take the easy way out and not find all the stars, or you have the option to challenge yourself.

[Dusty]

Oh ya, there's also games like Metroid, that changes the drop depending on what you need. If you needed missles, there was a chance you'd get missles over life, but if you needed life, there was a chance monsters would drop life.
Either way, I agree with the people who say don't try to make the difficulty change for the player. Keep it at one thing, and if it's too hard(as long as it's not discouragingly hard), they'll keep trying until they beat it. Just don't piss them off.