video game mechanics thought

[egypturnash]

While walking to the grocery store, I discovered that my jacket pocket still had the ticket stub from 'Matrix 2'.


One of the problems with that movie was that the big action sequences were not that different from what you can star in, in video games. Especially the ones that're coming out in the coming year. The sequence that was spread about as an example of the oh-so-fantabulous effects in the movie, the "Burly Brawl" sequence, is a perfect example of this - fighting your way through hordes of enemies is something that's starting to return to modern video games.

Except there's one major difference. In games, when someone slugs you, you go 'ouch' and are out of the action for a moment; then another enemy punches you, you take more damage, and continue to be incapacitated, and get frustrated as baddies pound your health bar into nothing. Neo, on the other hand, intercepts and blocks clone punches without even thinking. So: here's how to make it work in a game. Auto-block. Perfect auto-block. J. Random Thug punches you, and you stop him, without having to do anything. No buttons, no controller moves, no nothing. Put the controller down and your character still blocks. This is, of course, boring. So, make it you can only block for so long. You get tired. Put up a little block-power meter that's knocked down with every auto-block; when it runs out, you start taking hits. It regenerates fast, but a pile of enemies can hurt you faster. It also regenerates while you're doing showoffy attacks. Some show-off attacks would have a twirling and sweeping component, to push the teeming hordes of baddies back; this could give you a moment free of attacks to do a brief charge-up for a really absurd one. Auto-blocking would of course interrupt such things.

This wouldn't be the Unique Selling Point of a game, I think, but it'd be an interesting game mechanic. It wouldn't surprise me if someone's already thought of and implemented it.

Comments

[ilthuain.livejournal.com]

There is an auto block in Samurai Shodown 4. It's an option, and if you take it, you only get 4 or 5 blocks in a round (I think). Also a number of fighting games have a block-meter, the most interesting in Guilty Gear XX, where the more you block, the higher the damage will be when the enemy eventually hits.

Geekdom rocks!

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Those are both 2D one-on-one fighting games, right? That's a genre I mostly avoid; it's never appealed to me very much. I'm thinking more in the run-around-in-3D realm. More specifically, the thought was 'how could you make that Neo-vs-Smiths scene entertaining instead of frustrating'.

An auto-block mechanism could alter free-roaming action games the way 'bullet storm' has for vertically-scrolling shootemups - give the player the chance to look lots more daring and impressive than they really are, by filling the screen with lots more danger that can be easily ignored. Or even turned into extra power, as in the second example you cite, or in a number of recent shootemups where you can absorb certain bullets (never all of them!) to charge up a mass destruction weapon. (Ikaruga, Mars Matrix, and a couple others I don't have or can't think of offhand are bulletstorm shooters that do this.)

[windsagio.livejournal.com]

For the record, Some of the SF's have auto blocking too... and if you remember, Tekken has a neutral~block system.

And yes~ We know way too much about games.

[minakawa.livejournal.com]

In Jedi Knight II, once the player has obtained his lightsaber and has it drawn, he automatically blocks incoming blaster fire with it.

[trikotomy.livejournal.com]

Yes. I think you can only deflect a certain number of attacks within a certain radius in front of you, though. So if you're fighting a big gang of enemies it becomes important to fight back.

I think the biggest issue with having that many enemies onscreen would be how to maintain decent framerates.