Video Games - Speed of Play and user-enjoyment?

The Game Room
1

This is something I’ve long wondered about.* I recall when the orginal Street Fighter II was released and really enjoying it, however as time went on it seemed to go for a more hectic style of play which I’ve never liked in any genre (Turbo edition! Hyper edition! Super-Turbo-Hyper-Edition!).

This seems to be common with more sedate scrolling-shooters like the original Gradius being replaced by similar games (apparently called ‘bullet-hell’) shooters with as many enemies and ordance packed on screen as they can get, so it all comes down to reflexes only.

Many first-person shooters went the same way, compare Goldeneye on the N64 with Quake and its sequels where speed of play seems to be all important.

Personally I’ve never enjoyed this aspect of gaming and I wonder where it comes from. Any opinions? :slight_smile:

*I’m currently suffering quite badly from the cold so apologies if this post doesn’t make much sense, hopefully people will know what I mean.

2

Except Championship Edition actually reduced the damage any individual attack did, so the matches lasted longer. It also better balanced the attacks and any penalties for using them.

(E.g. In the original Street Fighter 2, Blanka would take double damage if hit while using his Beat roll.)

3

Is this really a trend, though? I remember a hyper-sped-up Ms. Pacman that was really popular in the early eighties, whereas a relatively recent trend in games is the stealth game, rewarding slow play and planning over frenetic button-pushing. I don’t have particularly great reflexes, so while an occasional game of something wacky like Team Fortress is all right, I tend toward the more deliberately paced games.

4

This is why I like Fallout 3 and New Vegas so much. VATS lets you turn combat with multiple opponents into something deliberate rather than flailing and button mashing.

5

I dispute your premise.

Re: shmups, the core gameplay hasn’t really changed. The majority, and certainly the bulk of the best regarded ones, are still pattern/precision games. There aren’t many popular shmups that I would categorize as reaction or twitch games.

The bullet hell style generally makes a shmup -more- forgiving, in that they let you see the pattern on-screen before it gets to you, in contrast with the older shooters were you were mostly going by pure memory. They add more ways for shots to threaten you, by pressuring you with a combination of timing and positioning, instead of simply being really large or really fast.

Re: FPS, Goldeneye vs Quake is not even remotely an apples-to-apples comparison. Quake was intended to be a fast-paced game even by the standards of the already-mature PC FPS genre. Goldeneye was introducing shooters to a console audience with a console controller. Of course they’re going to play radically different. A modern comparison would be something like Halo vs Counterstrike. If you really want to get deliberate, there’s the entire tactical shooter genre; Insurgency or Red Orchestra focus on completely different things from even a slower-paced shooter like TF2.

Re: fighting games, SF2’s turbo wasn’t just adding speed for speed’s sake, it was re-pacing the game in general. Movement and animations were sped up, sure, but attack lethality was toned down; there was more give-and-take instead of literal “touch of death” combos. Since then, the genre has spiraled out into both fast and slow, reactive vs proactive, you name it. SF4 is a slow game by the standards of the genre, and it’s been extremely successful. Heck, there are even “tactical” fighting games; you can’t exactly call Dive Kick a button masher.

6

That was a big complaint about Quake 2, actually – everything else was a huge improvement over Quake, but it moved a lot slower.

Any FPS slower than Quake 2 feels like molasses to me, that’s one of the reasons I am not a big fan of Halo.

7

I hate fighting games. I was really good at Fatal Fury (which actually plays like a boss-only action game), decent at the other Fatal Fury games, Art of Fighting 2, and World Heroes, kinda passable at the other World Heroes games, the Samurai Shodown games and The King of Fighters '94 and '95, and EVERYTHING ELSE absolutely ate me alive. Yes, even Street Fighter 2, a game where I could do every single attack flawlessly (and do not get me started on Tekken). Fast, slow, frenetic, languid, whatever, these games are flat-out brutal. The thing is, unless you want to be forever mired in mash-'n-pray territory (which a great many players are, believe me), you have to put in months of dedicated, relentless practice to get even somewhat competent. So many attacks, defenses, combos, ranges, delays, setups, and positions; add something like supers or tech hits or parries and the learning curve just blows up. So it really doesn’t matter to me whether it’s a Mortal Kombat machinegun crushign defeat or a BlazBlue piece-by-piece crushing defeat; either way, not a lot of fun.

The original Gradius is fairly sedate (I know because I was able to reach the end without cheats). If you think any other Gradius game qualfiies, you need your head examined. The crystal area in stage 3 of Gradius 2 will have you climbing the walls (if you live that long), and Gradius 3 is essentially the Everything Out To Kill You trope. Let’s not forget Salamander (a.k.a. Life Force), which has the distinction of the vast majority of players Game Over-ing in the first level (not even Operation Wolf was that harsh). If you ask me, not much has changed since. The Strikers 1945 games had plenty of attrition despite not filling the screen with bullets, Aero Fighters was much the same, and pretty much every Capcom shooter after 1942 has been fast and lethal. Frankly, I haven’t seen danmaku make much inroads in America: Giga Wing was an experiment that didn’t catch on (and it has a reflect barrier! How lame is that? :slight_smile: ), Progear barely got the time of day, and despite a big push Deathsmiles is best known as “that XBox 360 girl game that’s not Dead or Alive Xtreme 2”.

Closest thing to an FPS I’ve played lately is L.A. Noire. It’s kinda average speedwise.

I dunno. I guess you just have to find something that suits your tastes. Assassin’s Creed could qualify, as it’s more preperation- and execution-based. There are spots where you have to hustle, but it’s more “race against time” than “react to the bullet in three milliseconds or die”.

8

Mars Matrix & many Raizing games consistently top polls to this day, DDP and its kin were big on the 360, you’ve probably heard of Touhou despite them being untranslated basement hobbies, and Ikaruga’s big enough in the west that it’s recently gotten an official PC Steam release (an unheard-of thing). To the extent that that shmups exist at all in the west, they tend to fit the category; Luftrausers & Jamestown come to mind, although the latter is kinda borderline.

9

Judging anything about trends in video games by looking at either fighting games or shmups is kinda like judging trends in automobiles by looking only at muscle cars. They’re SUPER CRAZY NICHE products that cater mostly to enthusiasts.

That said, I agree with the disagreement on shmups - bullet hell games are NOT actually ‘faster’ than most older games, but, in many cases, actually SLOWER, just more “busy” (more things going on at once.).

Fighting games…welp, Street Fighter 4 is markedly slower in many respects than earlier versions of the game, but the latest iteration of BlazBlue is markedly faster overall than previous versions, so I don’t think there’s a trend here either.

FPS games, once again, have slowed down significantly - CoD is a much more sedate game than Quake. :stuck_out_tongue:

So considering that ALL of your examples are SERIOUSLY OLD, I’m not at all convinced there is a trend here. If anything, in recent years it’s the opposite, because games are struggling to gain wider accessibility, and so things like extreme twitch reflexes are being de-emphasized. This might’ve been a trend in the 90s though. :stuck_out_tongue:

FWIW, how ‘fast’ I like a game to be is tied very tightly to how the game works, and it’s a super hard thing to measure even across games in the same “genre”. For example, fighting games - Street Fighter 4 is a very ‘fast’ game if you look at the speed of attacks - some come out in 3 frames, and even things like overheads that you might be expected to try to react to come out in 17 frames or so. Compare that to Blazblue where the fastest attacks are 5-6 frames and most overheads are in the 24ish area. But at the same time, SF4 is a very slow game, because each character walks pretty slowly, has very limited dash options, and jumps are kinda floaty, whereas in Blazblue most of the cast can run, fly through the air with impressive speed, etc. So while attacks in Street Fighter are fast, movement is slow, and Blazblue is the reverse.

So yeah. Stuff?

10

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