The “Feature Suite” and the Death of Arcade Gaming

Apparently, if you make football games, according to my 733t insider knowledge, there are three main areas you compete in – the first is licensing; FIFA is the leader here, so FIFA games have all the right looking advertising hoardings, all the correct player names, the same music off the telly. This is important because a lot of football gamers like to play the game to recreate the experience of watching football on television rather than actually playing the game, physically themselves. The second area is gameplay, and I’m led to believe that Pro Evo is the leader here; as shown by the comparative sales of the two titles, this is less important to the average casual gamer, but gets you votes with the hardcore gamer and the hardcore/football fan crossover audience. The third area, and apparently the one where you can slot your new football game (if you’re content with third place I guess) is its “feature suite” – this is essentially the whole meta-game package, all the modes, league structures, kit editors and assorted other gimmickry. So basically your game may play like ass, and your user gets to see goals scored by Davis Veckham or whatever, but they can make a model look a bit like them, name it after them, and have it play for England.

Now, the football game market is quite different to the way most other game genres are made and marketed (hence the dominance of chav gaming kings EA in the genre), but other games can gain heavily from focusing on their feature suite as well. As my example, I give you Tekken 5. Tekken 5, like its predecessors has always had an odd position in the fighting game pantheon; generally disliked by the hardcore for its lack of game balance, somewhat bland character design and button-bash heavy fighting system, the Tekken series has nevertheless remained the most popular and profitable fighting game license in the post PlayStation world. As an answer to this quandary, I direct you back to the traditional reason cited for the fall of arcade (it this sense we mean competitive, skill based) gaming since the advent of the PS1 – that in the arcade, where once the coolest, bleeding edge games resided, we had to pay 20 pence (or 10 yen, or a quarter) to play – therefore, getting good at the game got you more playtime for your money; also, arcades being social places, having the high score on Galaga carried a not inconsiderable amount of Geek cultural cache. These days of course, most arcade machines are just powerful PCs in a bigger box, and home versions of arcade machines are often arcade perfect and released simultaneously alongside their coin munching counterparts; no-one has any reason to leave there bedroom to play the coolest games. They also get the game after one down-payment and want to see as much of it as their concentration span allows with little effort, the knock on effect being the predominance of “experience based” games that one simply plays through to see the whole story and get the cathartic reward of smacking down the last boss – everyone you know has finished the game, so whether you did it quicker or more skilfully ceases to matter so much. This leaves the olde-skool arcade game in an uncomfortable position – no-one will play or like it if it isn’t easy enough to complete after a few hours play, after a few hours play, no-one is going to get deep enough into the game to want to play competitively, and as such the game is criticised for its simplicity or lack of depth, generally because Johnny PlayStation has slapped it on Easy and completed it first go.

So, what do you do about that? Tekken 5 sorts this problem out admirably by presenting not only a solid fighting game, but also an incredibly extensive feature suite. So we not only get a fighting game, we get a level based, almost RPG style career mode, a story mode, all the usual tag, time attack, and survival modes, a score of unlockable characters, custom costume variations for every character bought piece by piece with gold earned in the career mode, arcade perfect versions of Tekken 1, 2, 3 and Starblade, and a vestigial but actual-size action game based on the Tekken engine. If I so desire, I can still put the difficulty on easy and play through the game with all the characters, though this is a far longer process if you include all the bonus characters, but if I want to change how my character looks, I need to put some time into career mode, if I want to see the whole game I need to explore every expansive nook and cranny of the disc.

It’s in the feature suite then that Tekken 5 outshines the superhuman twitch tactics of Virtual Fighter Evolution and the appealing atmosphere and intuitive controls of stable mate Soul Calibre II – essentially by being an arcade fighter designed primarily to be played, learnt and explored at home rather than in the smoky ambience of the local arcade. Cracking the feature suite problem never really helped the third string football title I mentioned earlier – because despite appearances (and Winning Eleven) to the contrary, the core/casual audience wants an experience based football game, not a skill based one; it certainly doesn’t want an encyclopaedic options menu next to a game that plays and looks like a 10 year old budget title. That’s not to say that a good feature suite can’t push a game from competent to classic; Tekken 5 is a good example of making the stick as appealing as the carrot, and shows how, in a move suspiciously parallel to the all consuming Grand Theft Auto phenomenon, we might re-capture a lost generation of arcade gaming by opening these games as far wide as they can take, and giving the user a whole play room full of arcade toys patterned after one winning central concept. Gamers may, to quote the Simpsons “Come for the Freak, Stay for the Food”.

Brief Musings on GTA: San Andreas

Last night I played some GTA: San Andreas; god damn that's a sad and lonely game. A bit less so than Vice City, since at least the guys giving you missions are your friends (in a fit of White Boy, I can't think of how to spell "home-ees". Homeez? Homyz? Homes? Homez?), but it doesn't feel much better when you're slitting throats to steel a book of rap lyrics for a guy you don't even like. Contrary to popular belief, I actually think Rockstar's Quantity over Quality approach to designing the GTA iterations has kind of crossed the line and backfired a little; there are so many different things to do in San Andreas, the majority of them feel under-developed, tacked on, and mostly, tokenism. I mean, stealth – who honestly thought that stealth missions would improve GTA? But everyone else is doing it, and it's easy, so fuck it, chuck it in. Instant boring-ass missions. The stat improval is pretty much the same; basically, to power your character up, you have to play about five minutes of button bashing sub-games per play session – dull. Incorporating things like the stealth missions has also kind of sucked the life out of some of the games' vitality – in Vice City you didn't really mind playing certain missions over and over again, since different random stuff tended to happen each time – now, and awful lot of the missions happen in buildings or in secluded locations instanced away from the main city, eliminating this random element – it makes for more elaborate set pieces, but loses a bit of the games very fragile heart – a loss I'm not sure GTA can take much of, at least for this gamer.