Hooray For You
I finished Mario & Luigi 3: Bowser’s Inside Story a few weeks ago and I wrote this while thinking about what I like about these games. Each game in the series ends with a final dungeon that feels tedious and less inventive than any of the previous environments, although I’d say that the most recent game comes closer to feeling like that throughout the entire thing than either of the first two games did.
Anyway, when I’m fighting in an RPG battle in the Mario & Luigi series, I have to defend myself from every attack by timing a counterattack button press. There is a visual cue, sometimes obvious and sometimes subtle, that tells you which of your two party members will be attacked and which attack the enemy will be using, and then you have a short interval to figure out which button you need to press and whether you’ll be tapping it quickly, holding it for a short time, or waiting for the enemy to slowly close in before tapping. If you manage to get every button press correctly in Mario & Luigi, you can avoid almost all physical damage to your party members’ (relatively low) hit point count.
Not only is this nice, but the engine in the series is responsive and very clearly put together. You never feel like you fail because of a miscommunication or an unfair expectation on the part of the software— if you miss, it’s because you got the timing wrong. If you succeed, though, it is also because of your skill, and you are rewarded with a much simpler game (you can focus the choices you make about which of your characters’ statistics get boosted almost entirely on offensive tactics) and really nice visual and audible cues. A small burst of sound confirms your success and you are often rewarded with a slightly more exaggerated animation showing your attacker’s pain or shock at not landing a hit on you.
My favorite games are games that do this right— present you frequently with small challenges that can end in two ways: a failure– one that you feel you deserved, not one that you feel is the fault of the software– or a success. Successes are met with small rewards in the form of positive feedback. This positive feedback becomes extremely rewarding over time and I sometimes find myself focusing more on these small victories than I do on the overall game.
It is only in this realization that I have been able to explain my love for Crazy Taxi. The arcade franchise has mostly faded away, its only entry in the last five years being a PSP port of the first two games, but like many of Sega’s games from the first half of this decade, it’s a great game with some rough edges but an original concept and a fun, lighthearted execution. The best part of Crazy Taxi to me, and the reason I bring it up now, is that as you drive you earn extra money from your passenger for doing daring (maybe even… crazy?) things but not actually crashing into anything else. For driving in the wrong lanes, you can earn more money over time. For flying over cars or squeezing between two lanes of traffic or whatever other awesome things you stop and ask yourself “I wonder if I can…” (at least, within the context of a sandbox-style driving game built on arcade hardware from 2000). Obviously in the case of Crazy Taxi these rewards are in the form of actual in-game points, but as an arcade game the points aren’t much of a long-term reward and so just the thrill of getting the points at all is part of the good feeling you get from succeeding at a small feat.
I think Nintendo is one of the companies that still does a great job of this. I wish more studios would follow suit. My guess is that this is the kind of thing that often gets relegated to a “polish” phase that would come at the end of development, but then gets pushed aside when development doesn’t run as scheduled. Whether or not Nintendo gets it because a) they actually keep development on schedule, b) they don’t release a game until it’s received that polish, or c) they work in the details from the very beginning, I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was some combination of all three.
—Casey
