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In an interview with Hideo Kojima a while back in OPSM2, there was much discussion on MGS3, but more interestingly, he was toying with the idea of games involving real time death.
Not if your game character gets shot some guy comes round your house and shoots you, but a game where you buy a game, and start playing, but when your character dies, that's it. You cannot play the game anymore because you died.
It makes sense. However realistic games get, however good the graphics get, and even in a few years when we are playing games at TV quality, when you die, you get another life and carry on from the last door you walked through. That's hardly realistic, is it?
But consoles cannot do it. You could (in a fashion) do it on a PC, wher if you die, a file gets hidden somewhere on your PC's harddrive which says you're dead, and then when you load the game, the game finds this file and locks you out of the game. This would almost work, but give it a week, and there will be a post in this very forum letting the world know where this file is hidden. Still won't work on a console though, due to the lack of HDD. No console has the ability to destory a disc (the X-Box has, but I don't think they meant it to...) and you're hardly going to snap a disc into pieces if the game asks you to are you? So it looks like it can't be done.....
....At home that is. Every next-gen console now has (or will have soon) internet access. What if you buy the game, say, an Ultimate Fighter game for home use, and play it as much as you like, training, specialising and personalising a character, then you could pay x amount to take your developed character online. Online you would leave the realms of playing against the machine, and play other fighters from around the world in a one on one fight to the death. If you die, that's it. You're dead. Your internet connection would wipe the character from your memory card (this is possible), and you would go back to playing at home, training another guy to play again (after paying x amount again).
Note the monetry references. Of course, for any game to work online, someones going to have to pay for it, and in the games writers eyes, it might as well be you. How would you feel if you bought a game for say, £40, trained a character for 3 months, paid another £20 to fight in the tournament only to get slaughtered in the first round? Not that happy, I'd imagine. I'd also hazard a guess that you would'nt pay another £20 the next time either.
It's definately an interesting concept, dying in-game, and one I would be very interested to see how Mr Kojima goes about it (if he ever does). I don't know if I'd go for it myself, as I don't personally see myself a good enough gamer to take on the cream of the earth head to head, but I'd be definately interested in it. Perhaps even the Daily Mail would like it, as it potentially and subliminally rub in the concept of death to the gamers who turn obsessive? Who knows.
Thanks for reading,
Slave
Not if your game character gets shot some guy comes round your house and shoots you, but a game where you buy a game, and start playing, but when your character dies, that's it. You cannot play the game anymore because you died.
It makes sense. However realistic games get, however good the graphics get, and even in a few years when we are playing games at TV quality, when you die, you get another life and carry on from the last door you walked through. That's hardly realistic, is it?
But consoles cannot do it. You could (in a fashion) do it on a PC, wher if you die, a file gets hidden somewhere on your PC's harddrive which says you're dead, and then when you load the game, the game finds this file and locks you out of the game. This would almost work, but give it a week, and there will be a post in this very forum letting the world know where this file is hidden. Still won't work on a console though, due to the lack of HDD. No console has the ability to destory a disc (the X-Box has, but I don't think they meant it to...) and you're hardly going to snap a disc into pieces if the game asks you to are you? So it looks like it can't be done.....
....At home that is. Every next-gen console now has (or will have soon) internet access. What if you buy the game, say, an Ultimate Fighter game for home use, and play it as much as you like, training, specialising and personalising a character, then you could pay x amount to take your developed character online. Online you would leave the realms of playing against the machine, and play other fighters from around the world in a one on one fight to the death. If you die, that's it. You're dead. Your internet connection would wipe the character from your memory card (this is possible), and you would go back to playing at home, training another guy to play again (after paying x amount again).
Note the monetry references. Of course, for any game to work online, someones going to have to pay for it, and in the games writers eyes, it might as well be you. How would you feel if you bought a game for say, £40, trained a character for 3 months, paid another £20 to fight in the tournament only to get slaughtered in the first round? Not that happy, I'd imagine. I'd also hazard a guess that you would'nt pay another £20 the next time either.
It's definately an interesting concept, dying in-game, and one I would be very interested to see how Mr Kojima goes about it (if he ever does). I don't know if I'd go for it myself, as I don't personally see myself a good enough gamer to take on the cream of the earth head to head, but I'd be definately interested in it. Perhaps even the Daily Mail would like it, as it potentially and subliminally rub in the concept of death to the gamers who turn obsessive? Who knows.
Thanks for reading,
Slave
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I remember playing Valhalla on the Speccy...
Whenever you died you ended up in Hell, which, despite being no major hassle, did mean that you had to deal with the inconvience of getting back to were you wanted to be...
Whenever you died you ended up in Hell, which, despite being no major hassle, did mean that you had to deal with the inconvience of getting back to were you wanted to be...
Great topic, well deserved GAD.
Games really do need more tension. It's often a case of "oh I died press start quickly until screen comes back"
Dying hasn't got the affect it used to have. FM had the idea of not stopping you from playing the game when you died, but just reseting it, so you had to start again from the beginning...
I've been toying around with another idea though. I really, really hate lives. Any game with them never puts it evenly spread anyway, and you either end up dying time and time again, or you end up with millions of lives. Check Donkey Kong on the Gameboy for an example of too many lives, and Earthworm Jim 1 for just enough.
Still, it annoys me. It's "press start to continue" that annoys me... press start to resurrect your body? That's a bit easy, isn't it?
So I've got this idea that when you die you go... somewhere. Then you've got to get out to live again. Yeah.
Sort of a "ESCAPE FROM HEAVEN!!" situation, perhaps. And when you wake up you're in a coffin deep underground. Or perhaps not.
Games really do need more tension. It's often a case of "oh I died press start quickly until screen comes back"
Dying hasn't got the affect it used to have. FM had the idea of not stopping you from playing the game when you died, but just reseting it, so you had to start again from the beginning...
I've been toying around with another idea though. I really, really hate lives. Any game with them never puts it evenly spread anyway, and you either end up dying time and time again, or you end up with millions of lives. Check Donkey Kong on the Gameboy for an example of too many lives, and Earthworm Jim 1 for just enough.
Still, it annoys me. It's "press start to continue" that annoys me... press start to resurrect your body? That's a bit easy, isn't it?
So I've got this idea that when you die you go... somewhere. Then you've got to get out to live again. Yeah.
Sort of a "ESCAPE FROM HEAVEN!!" situation, perhaps. And when you wake up you're in a coffin deep underground. Or perhaps not.
The last time I think I felt real emotion playing a game was with Final Fantasy 7. I stayed up quite late trying to get this special item by beating loads of enemies in a row on a special game thingy, and got to the last one and just couldn't beat it. Now I could either give up and go to bed, or keep going, and the more I tried, the more I got determined to win.
I ended up staying awake til 4 in the morning until I finally beat it, because I was scared that I'd have to go through the whole thing again. That's what games need more of.
I ended up staying awake til 4 in the morning until I finally beat it, because I was scared that I'd have to go through the whole thing again. That's what games need more of.
The real Game Over?
I've got Game Over on the ZX Spectrum!
A bit of an adult title (from the loadup screen anyway). It looks like the kind of game that Castlevania could be based on...
I've got Game Over on the ZX Spectrum!
A bit of an adult title (from the loadup screen anyway). It looks like the kind of game that Castlevania could be based on...
Actually they had something similar in Ultima Online last time I played it (over 2 years ago). Whenever your character was killed, you became a ghost in the underworld version of the ultima kingdom and you had to go and find a healer before you would be turned back to your formal self. Even then any equipment you had been carrying would be lost.
One way to acheive this proper 'real death' thing would be like this:
When you died a special mode became available, you must then complete this very boring mode to get your character revived again. This would make the player reluctant to die as he/she wouldn't (well, probably) want to play through the boring mode again.
I don't really think that having to buy a new game each time you died would work (surprisingly) unless you were quite well off and had money to burn.
When you died a special mode became available, you must then complete this very boring mode to get your character revived again. This would make the player reluctant to die as he/she wouldn't (well, probably) want to play through the boring mode again.
I don't really think that having to buy a new game each time you died would work (surprisingly) unless you were quite well off and had money to burn.
Remember playing the elite 4 on Pokémon Stadium?
You could save after a fight but only if you quitted.
Then, if you reloaded that save file, you'd have to save it again for it to save.
In other words, you could only continue exactly where you left off, not get to a save point and return to it whenever something went wrong.
This meant that you could save your game if you had to stop playing, but you couldn't use it to cheat so if you lost, you still had to fight the entire elit four again.
I think that's a good idea.
It allows you to save when you stop playing, but only sends you back the next time you switch it on.
A bit like those Stone Owls in Majora's Mask.
You can save when you genuinely need to quit but not use it as a way of cheating the difficulty level.
That would makes games like Conker and MGS much more challenging, interesting, exciting, and it'll bring back the "old school" getting extra lives.
Nice post by the way Slaveunit.
You could save after a fight but only if you quitted.
Then, if you reloaded that save file, you'd have to save it again for it to save.
In other words, you could only continue exactly where you left off, not get to a save point and return to it whenever something went wrong.
This meant that you could save your game if you had to stop playing, but you couldn't use it to cheat so if you lost, you still had to fight the entire elit four again.
I think that's a good idea.
It allows you to save when you stop playing, but only sends you back the next time you switch it on.
A bit like those Stone Owls in Majora's Mask.
You can save when you genuinely need to quit but not use it as a way of cheating the difficulty level.
That would makes games like Conker and MGS much more challenging, interesting, exciting, and it'll bring back the "old school" getting extra lives.
Nice post by the way Slaveunit.
I'd be dead against this.
*chuckles*
"Dead against this" :-)
I don't think that it would have mass-market appeal, unfortunately, as people want a game they can play time and again, rather than just once.
Maybe if the game was designed so that it was really difficult to die, like you had to be a bit of a moron, or something.
In an FPS, you get shot, it doesn't kill you, but if you don't get medical help, it will do. Medical help is readily available, for some strange reason, and bad guys are poor shots, so never shoot you in the head, or anything.
*chuckles*
"Dead against this" :-)
I don't think that it would have mass-market appeal, unfortunately, as people want a game they can play time and again, rather than just once.
Maybe if the game was designed so that it was really difficult to die, like you had to be a bit of a moron, or something.
In an FPS, you get shot, it doesn't kill you, but if you don't get medical help, it will do. Medical help is readily available, for some strange reason, and bad guys are poor shots, so never shoot you in the head, or anything.
Didn't they do excatly that with the floppy disk (5-1/4 inch) version of 'Little Computer Person' for the C64 in the eighties...
If you didnt feed and look after your little computer person properly he bacame ill and then died, after which, if you ever tired to boot the little Tamagochi pre-curser, it came up with a picture of your little dead guy and a message stating that he was no more.
For it to do this, when your little computer person died it changed some of the files on the floppy, so the only way you could replay was to buy another copy of the game... the blighters!
(Written by the same guy who did the original C64 Ghostbusters title from what I remember... David C???)
If you didnt feed and look after your little computer person properly he bacame ill and then died, after which, if you ever tired to boot the little Tamagochi pre-curser, it came up with a picture of your little dead guy and a message stating that he was no more.
For it to do this, when your little computer person died it changed some of the files on the floppy, so the only way you could replay was to buy another copy of the game... the blighters!
(Written by the same guy who did the original C64 Ghostbusters title from what I remember... David C???)
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