Lately I’ve been pretty bad about playing multiple games all at once rather than concentrating on one game and trying to finish it. This is definitely not what I usually do because when I find a game that I like, I tend to focus on it til I beat it or get bored of it, one of the two. So it seemed to me that when I was finding myself making progress in 5 or 6 games all at once that I started to worry. What if I had become complacent with games? What if I found many of the games that I was playing to be boring or repetitive? Had I become one of those old jaded gamers who hates everything by default? Was I losing my optimistic attitude? OH GOD – EBOLA AIDS?!
Sorry – got a little carried away there – or I wanted to cheaply plug Hyperbole and a Half and lament the lack of updates lately. Your choice.
Anyway, I soon discovered after thinking about it that I wasn’t really getting bored of games – I was simply intrigued and interested in the way that they introduce you to them. I thought back to this, and the source of this crazy altitis that I have gotten with gaming led back to Borderlands. Borderlands has a great way of introducing you to the game – you choose a character, but instead of being put into a tutorial that clearly marks what and how you’re supposed to do things, you are instead put into a town where a little cute robot named Claptrap walks you through the motions of doing things. It feels natural without seeming like it’s throwing you into the deep end of the pool yet it isn’t so contrived as to be obvious and therefore, stiff. When I started playing games recently, like Alan Wake, Fable III, and my 3rd playthrough of Metal Gear Solid, I loved playing the intros, because on-screen instructions aside, they tried to put you into a world that should matter to you as well as teach you how to play. Once you get past that, you finally get into the game proper, where gameplay and mechanics take over and the player is expected to keep up with them in increasing difficulty and challenge.
I guess I just wanted to see how different games tried to show you how to play without it seeming like you were sitting in a classroom being told how to. Of course, the failure rate of dying or otherwise losing the game at the intro is supposed to be extremely low, so I guess maybe part of it is the ease as well. I used to be one of those dudes who really loved a game the harder it was, which forced you to learn mechanics either from a perusal of the instruction book or, as was the case many a time, through constant and utter failure (you can cue the original Ninja Gaiden here, and how its unforgiving nature caused many a controller to be dropped to the ground in disgust). These days, however, probably because I literally don’t have time to fail for hours at a time, I want to make sure that I get eased into a game that will give me the appropriate level of challenge, and a good introduction with a comfortably “easy as hell” setting does that just fine.
So yes, bring on Claptrap and more intros so full of charm they even make “behind the scenes” vids about them:
