You know, those really small things that may not even be that well executed, and (oftentimes) mostly non-representative of the game in general, or otherwise not used very often. A mechanic OR a section is acceptable.
For me it’s court scenes or other loophole/legal manipulations, this is exceptionally odd because I hate crime dramas, but for some reason I love playing them. In Neverwinter Nights 2 even though that whole Ember scene always ends the same I love that area and seeing how well I can do (there was a similar one in one of the NWN adventures with torches and swords that I can’t recall), as well as the whole “weaseling out of a Baatzu contract” part in the dream in MOTB. I’d probably like Phoenix Wright, but I’ve never bothered to play it so I don’t know about that. The only exception that I’ve played is Chrono Trigger, simply because it’s completely uninteractive.
I like hidden object/adventure games- the sort where you have to find the knife and the lamp and the partridge in a pear tree (or pieces of each) and then you use them later on.
Lots of those games have scenes where you have to somehow build a bridge between your current location and the next one, which you can see across the way. And often there are objects that you are obviously going to need eventually on the other side. For most games, you can click anything you see on your screen regardless of where it is.
But I like it when you try to click something on the other side of the ravine/broken bridge/broken stairs and the game is all “sorry, you can’t reach that yet!”. It just makes sense.
I also like it when that stuff follows the laws of gravity. Like you find the hammer sitting on the ground or on a ledge, not floating wherever it blends in best.
When a game can honestly make me laugh out loud. Not just a snicker, but a full blown, hearty belly-laughter. I’m currently playing through the second season of Sam & Max, and this has now happened more times than I can count (time-traveling, spacefaring mariachis, wtf?). I liked the game before, but because of this, I love it, not to mention that the puzzles are actually pretty challenging too, at times.
Graphics are a huge deal for me. I’m an illustrator, so I guess that’s my excuse, but my enjoyment of a game gets a +50% bonus if the game’s visuals mesh with whatever I happen to be into at the time. I can enjoy a game with meh graphics, and I often find games very pretty but very boring, but all my top picks are pretty great visually. Even Nethack I enjoy largely because I like the clean look of certain fonts at certain sizes. I can’t play on black-and-white servers, it’s just too bleeaagh. My tastes are a bit odd, though - I’m currently playing through Flower, Sun and Rain, an offensively ugly game and, God knows why, I like it.
I like the little “real world” touches that give a game world some “depth” and backstory- for example, in Fallout 3, the various TV & Radios found in the game are “Radiation King” brand, and the advertising posters are all retro-50s and believable- it just helps create the illusion that you’re in an actual world (or what’s left of it) and not an electronic warehouse full of boxes.
I like it when canned dialogue has a variable script.
(ie; when you have to replay part of a game and the incidental dialogue is slightly different each time.)
Sort of like the voice actors do several improvised (or multi-scripted) “takes” for each mission and you get different bits each time. This takes a little of the frustration out of doing the same part over.
I also like it when the script goes contrary to convention - as in a popular contemporary combat FPS where you learn that the bad guy has a nuke nearby, and instead of going all Rambo and saving the day, you end up getting spectacularly cinematically nuked.
I like games where I can carry things, drop things, and come back to find them still there. Being able to do this with clothes, spare guns and vehicles in Saints Row 2 is one of the things I most appreciate compared to the old GTA games, where there were few opportunities to prevent a favoured car being despawned.
Achievements. They are so pointless and no-one cares what ones you have… but I try and get them all anyway (at least the non-frustrating ones).
Similarly, unlockables. The previously mentioned saints row 2 is EXCELLENT in this regard as every side mission/distraction unlocked SOMETHING for you when you finished it. Even a normally unfun side mission becomes entertaining when you know you will get something for it, even if that something is a stupid car you will never use because you have 400 better ones in your garage.
Dialog choices, even if they make literally no difference at all to anything in the game. It’s just better somehow when I get to pick what my avatar says.
3D. No, not the graphics… I mean when objects in the game have a real X, Y, and Z component of position. And not just “flying” or “nonflying” in the vertical axis; I mean different heights. I don’t care if the graphics are all low-resolution sprites, if things can move over and under other things. Like, in Myth II, if your archers are shooting at an advancing army, and they move forward after you loose, then your arrows might end up hitting the second rank, if the first rank has moved out from under the arrows. And if you’re indoors with a low ceiling, your archers’ range is reduced, because if they arc their shots too much they hit the ceiling.
The ability to look at your weapons and items in a viewing screen, and zoom in on them, rotate them around, etc, being able to really get a good look at every little detail of them. Metal Gear Solid 3 is the best example of this; not only can you zoom in and rotate in 3D every single weapon and item in your possession, there is also a guy you can call on your radio who will tell you everything about the item or weapon if you have it equipped; in some cases the discussion will be ridiculously elaborate and go into great detail about the item’s history, development, even listing all the countries that use it and stuff like that. He will also give you information about the equipment being used by the enemies in any given area of the game.
A game where I understand where I am. I don’t care if you do it with a good minimap or some other mechanic (Halo was always good with the arrow thing) but I can’t stand being lost. Fallout 3, I’m talking to you.
Well, that and how it’s introduced without being introduced. For those who haven’t played it, STALKER is a post-apocalyptic FPS with a hint of RPG, set in the Chernobyl Zone of Reclamation. The only people living there are scroungers, scavengers, looters and people who rob them. And the Russian army who shoots everyone else on sight. Oh, and scary ass mutants
Anyway, fairly often during the course of the game you get information regarding weapon and ammo caches hidden throughout the Zone, grenades stowed away for a rainy day, a few bottles of vodka, a box of rounds and the like. So in the beginning of the game, when you’re naked with a pistol and a single clip, those caches are absolutely invaluable - that’s where you get just enough bang to scrape by. Bushwack a guy with a few more rounds on him. Which in turn allows you to explore, find more guns & ammo & meds, do missions etc…
Till eventually you’re overloaded with stuff, spare guns, not-weightless ammo, med packs, food, armor - and you can’t bring yourself to just dump it because the guns, armor and food you *are *using decay, quite fast at that. So when you find another copy of a rare and great gun, you want to stash it somewhere safe, to pick it up when the one you have breaks down.
And so you start to adopt the same kind of squirrel behavior the rest of the Zone does. Stash it everywhere convenient, places you know you’ll be around again sometime, places that are out of the way of real danger (since you don’t know how tooled up you’ll be when you need to visit them) but not alltogether hard to reach. Just like those NPC drop points. And you keep a handy scrap of paper with the list of where everything is. Just like the NPCs.
When I realized this, and how it fit with the game world, it blew my mind.
Night before last I was raiding in Warcraft, and, as is my wont, whilst other guildies were chatting and getting ready for the next boss, I wandered a bit in the cleared areas and looked at the ceilings. Some of them are really beautiful, and I remarked on it. One of my guild-mates responded that she felt they were pretty spiffy, too, and while she had been in the instance -many- times, she’d never looked upwards before.
I told her that I like details, and that I figured some poor artist never gets parts of his or her work looked at, so I tend to check out things people probably never view.
Also, it’s sort-of fun when the searching reveals oddness. I remember finding the apple tree with the oddly-slain corpse on a floating island in Nagrand. Apparently for quite some time it remained one of the big mysteries (still unsolved) in the game as to what it was supposed to be. Also loved finding the day-care center in the nagrand / zangarmarsh mountains. First existance, apparently, of the ‘baby’ models.
So I guess part of what I’m saying is that I like finding the touches in the middle of nowhere that say that the artists got to have a little fun.
I personally have made a few 3d assets for a couple mods and an unreleased indy game… One was a giant asteroid with tunnels all through it, and I put a tiny little concealed cave deep in some recess inside the asteroid, which led down a very narrow twisty tunnel, and eventually opened up inside of a large cavern carved with intricate designs, the center of which floated… a monolith(since its a law that every space game must have a monolith stuck in somewhere). Took months for someone to find it, but I was happy when they did.
One of my space ships(a big sucker) has a tiny little guy in a spacesuit sitting on a wooden plank that is suspended by two ropes at either end(gantry?) like you see on old sailing ships, a rag in his hand and a bucket at his side.
In another one(i like making spaceships!), i noticed the hangar bay floor was roughly the size of a basketball court, so I put regulation hoops up at either end for the ‘crew’ to play with during their downtime.
Putting those little touches in is one of the great joys of this kind of hobby.
For games, one of the things I love the most is a good UI, something WoW(for all its faults) does spectacularly. Playing old games is now for me almost impossible just due to how clunky UIs were back then. Sadly, the horrible UI seems to be making a comeback due to all the console ports.
Oh, and death to bloom(and all but the most subtle HDRL), and what I like to refer to as the ‘vaseline effect’ from overuse of specularity/reflection shaders and normal maps.
Everyone else is posting video game stuff, but mine is for table-top (card, board, etc.) games.
A timing system for when multiple players want to do something at the same time. So many games neglect to clearly define what happens, so it’s usually an indication that the game has been playtested well and the corner cases of strategy found by competitive players. This is important because it won’t result in a game being effectively won by decree when we get to a case the rules-writers hadn’t bothered to specify, and we have to decide what to do with the game in progress.
