What I Played This Week (12/13/2020)

I finished Yakuza Kiwami 2 immediately after writing last week’s blog post, it turns out I was on the final chapter of the game. Since then I’ve spent most of my gaming time playing Spider-man: Miles Morales, the add-on turned Sequel to Insomniac Games’ Marvel’s Spider-man.

Playing this game brought back a memory of a 2018 video from Game Maker’s Toolkit where Mark Brown argues that the web-swinging fails to fulfil the promise of making you “feel like Spider-man” and like a lot of the response to the video I mostly disagree.

I find some of the games Mark chooses as examples of both what to do, and what not to do, very interesting. I’m going to talk briefly about both Super Mario Odyssey and the Batman Arkham series. Mark uses Odyssey as an example of a game that rewards complete mastery of it’s movements systems. It also gives players lots of optional challenges to put those skills to the test. But that’s the thing, they’re completely optional. Mark uses the combat in the Batman Arkham games as an example of a system that is all style over substance, he goes so far as to call it “patronizing”. Both of these game systems, and both of the Insomniac’s Spider-man games’ swinging, have a very low bar to entry. You can almost certainly beat Mario Odyssey without using any of the advanced moves that mark shows off in the video. The batman games could probably get pretty far into the game, just by hitting the punch and parry buttons at mostly the right time. But both of those games have optional ways for more dedicated players to push their abilities. Mario Odyssey hides optional piles of coins at the edges of it’s levels, and doesn’t require advanced movement skills to get to the final fight with Bowser. All of the Arkham games have optional combat challenges that not only ask the players to defeat a large group of enemies, but do it without breaking your combo.

Mark mentions this, but both Spider-man games have similar optional traversal challenges that require using all of the tricks in Spidey’s traversal arsenal, I think it’s fair to want more of these sorts of challenges in the game, he does call out like 3 different boss fights as also integrating traversal and combat. Outside of core story missions, I think the thing that makes Spider-man swinging work is that most of the challenge is completely optional. For a player looking for an easy carefree time swinging around as Spider-man, there’s nothing stopping you from swinging around Manhattan. The game will not stop you to say “no, you didn’t Spider-man right. Go back and try again” because frankly that’s not fun.The challenge in swinging around as Spider-man isn’t imposed by the game, I try to swing fast/efficiently because I think it’s fun, and the game supports that fun. Mark points out that using Point Zip + Point Launch is actually faster for simple traversing and I think that actually disproves his point. Point Zip + Point Launch is more difficult to do well than just swinging through the city. Integrating zips and launches is how Spider-man makes it’s traversal more difficult. Weaving swings and zips seamlessly is how the traversal system gets difficult. The Perfect Point Launch move adds a little reward to perfectly timing a point launch, it not only gives you a big boost of speed, but it rewards you with a big sound and visual effect. The Perfect Point Launch  is the game saying “Damn Spider-man, you nailed that. Good job”. Challenge in games don’t always need to reward challenge points, stars, or gold medals. 

I also totally understand the desire to have more friction in systems like this, I might be the only person to actually like driving in Grand Theft Auto 4 for exactly this reason. Like real driving you had to practice to get good at it. GTA 4 was the first game I got with my Xbox 360, meaning it was the only game I had for a while and spent a lot of time getting good at driving in it. It felt great to confidently weave my car between cars in incoming traffic.

Star Wars Squadrons: I also played some Star Wars Squadrons this week because the B-wing (and TIE Defender) update was released. As much as I wish I liked flying my favorite dumb-looking Star Wars ship, it just too slow. I’ve realized that the way I like to play Squadrons is in an interceptor flying too fast to be hit, I have no idea what to do in a bomber. I try to hit the big ships but then I get shot. It’s possible that this a side-effect of me mostly playing solo, maybe coordinating with a team to better time bombing runs is how to get the most out of a bomber.