"One to be born from a dragon..." -- Let's Play Final Fantasy II

But I loved Portal.

I think Phoenix has got you there.

Fine: In-game tutorials are never okay except when they lie to you.

Those would be "Well-designed games."

Seriously speaking: Two of my 20 back burner projects are retro-8-bit games. I am going to include an image of a controller, labeling the 4 directional and 2 face buttons with the equivalent keyboard keys, and that is IT. I am placing faith in the players that they are going to be able to work out what each button does, how to play the game, in the case of the retro RPG, where they can save it, without me explaining one single thing.

And those games would only be possible with only certain genres: really simple RPGs, platformers, strategy games, maybe puzzle games, and probably a few other genres.

Everything else (like, say, fighting games)? Not happening.

You can learn a strategy game through trial and error but not a fighting game? Forgive me but I'm not entirely convinced.

You might need outside assistance to learn a character's special ultra-mega-samba death combo, but generally you rely on a guide or FAQ for that and not an in-game "show you the ropes" tutorial.

Most strategy games usually come down to "Highlight this spot and press confirm. Select option from menu and press confirm. Watch action happen", just with varying amounts of menus and the occasional addition of timing.

Meanwhile, fighting games. Say you're playing... let's say Melty Blood. Can you figure out how to punch and kick? Yeah, that's pretty simple. Can you figure out their special moves? Takes a lot of button mashing (or just a check of the command list), but yeah, you can figure that out. Blowback Edges, Sidesteps and Throwing? A little trial and error and you've got that down.

Can you figure out how to use the shield attacks? Can you figure out how to use launchers to start the aerial combos the CPU abuses? Can you figure out how to switch between characters? Can you figure out how to quick stand?

All of those are extremely basic things (with knowing how to launch being possibly the most important piece of information in the game) not specific to any one character, and all of them are never explained to you. You either have to check a guide or check a guide. Meanwhile, the CPU uses all of those things and you're stuck going WTF.

Yeah, Melty Blood really needs a tutorial.

It doesnt matter what it is. A tutorial, or my personal least favorite thing in all of video games, the cutscene. If you can't skip it, it should NOT be in the game. Before anyone asks, yes, even the first time you should be able to skip it, because you might lose your save, kill your system, or in some other way be forced to start from scratch. There is nothing more frustrating for me than sitting down to play a video game, and an hour later FINALLY being able to do something other than mash x (FFX-2). I am not trying to watch a movie damn it, I am trying to play a video game!

Close enough, Brick?

So you're going to do the sealed cave even though this is the only version you can skip it, right?

As our LPer you need to defeat it that we vicariously triumph over childhood memories!

Alright then, I think we should get on with photoshopping the crap out of Cagnazzo.

That doesn't sound like a well-designed game to me, but I'll have to take your word for it since I've never heard of it.

I think tutorials in some form are a good idea for more complex games. However, when FFXII had a tutorial on how to walk forward, that was ridiculous.

See... this seems like it falls under that umbrella of bad design. Fighting games are kind of a weird case, but, let's look at Super Mario Bros. just as an example.

The basic controls are pretty simple. D-pad's for walking (and ducking), B's for running (and fireballs), A's for jumping. That's all there is to it, and you can pick it up with a basic level of experimentation it's not asking a lot that people can do on their own.

Knowing that isn't all there is to the game though. Or even Mario's basic moveset. You're going to work out at some point that jumping on a goomba kills it, when you try it on a koopa, oh hey, doesn't work the same way... then spinies just kill you! Beetles can't be killed even with fire! %$@#! Hammers! These are further basic gameplay elements you pick up as you go, ideally coming in slowly over time. There's also a lot of basic fundamental techniques, needed to complete the game, like how your jump height actually benefits from a running start. That's pretty darn complex, but there's a point in the game that forces you to work it out by presenting a situation where if you don't know about it, progress appears to be impossible, forcing you to experiment more.

When you have a well-designed fighting game (which I'm not entirely convinced I've ever seen), you can accomplish a lot of this same stuff. It helps to have some basic sensibility involved in the control scheme (high medium low block for your face buttons, various combinations extrapolating from there?), have early level AI opponents favor strategies with obvious counters, forcing people to pick up on them, later ones countering you if you rely on the same strategies... interestingly enough, human opponents will just naturally do this. If you have to perform some arcane button combination to do something really fundamental though, that's bad design, whether you document it or not.

On it!

So Cecil was just walking around outside Baron Castle when suddenly



OH MY GOD A SHINY.

W-what?

Seriously?

That TAS run...
A- Exploits some weird bugs to wall jump (and some other weirdness), and
B- Warps past a run-mandatory jump which wouldn't be possible even without those bugs.

Point B in particularly is decidedly not the same thing as not having pits which require a running start.

SNES/WSC/DoS/Advance/Anniversary sprite slideshow Kainazzo? is clearly the best Kainazzo.

...Wow that PSP sprite is gigantic. O.O

Looks like somebody wasn't paying attention to how much attention they were paying to Mario 3!

Golbez taught them to be evil Fiends
Rubicante leads, Scarmiglione does zombies
Barbariccia is cool but nude
Cagnazzo is a party dude

http://www.gamespite.net/talkingtime...ad.php?p=11662

goddamn, i'd play this game so hard.

Good god, I can't help comparing that to Super RMN Bros. Every little atom of the original Super Mario Bros. 3 is absolutely to infinity and beyond opposite to everything that romhacks stand for.
The discovery of the first leaf powerup in the game remains to this day one of the most mind-blowing experiences in all my videogaming.

What does that mean?

You're not grouping the words together correctly. Let me give you a hint.



Actually, I'm still not sure what it means.