Comments on: Games that are fun even when you’re not good at them

By: Aler

Aler — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 13:11:11 +0000

I suck at online shooters, but Team Fortress 2 is extremely forgiving of poor players. The community is shockingly friendly for a game like this, and I’ve found players are more likely to help you than condemn you for bad playing. A mechanic that helps is regular team shuffling – it’s hard to harbour a grudge on an enemy team member when you’ll be fighting side by side in a couple minutes.

The game is also built around self improvement. When you die, you aren’t compared against other players, but against your past records. “You killed more enemies than your previous best as a pyro” or “You came close to tying your record for kill assists”. This puts the emphasis on the fact that you are gradually getting better, even if you aren’t as good as your teammates.

By: Mbp

Mbp — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 06:57:59 +0000

Online shooters. I completely suck at all of them and yet I love the adrenaline rush of pitting my skills against human opponents. Unfortunately the humiliation of having my noobness constantly exposed is painful. I wish the games had some kind of grading system to match up players of similar skill (or lack of it).

By: Dblade

Dblade — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 23:46:18 +0000

A game that I’m not good at but like is Robotron, but for none of the reasons you list-like Ikaruga, the core gameplay is compelling enough to keep playing despite not being able to make it past level 20 or so.

Emergent gameplay is meh. People talk about it a lot, but they don’t really like failure having consequences. Even if its benign ones, it winds up taking control out of the players hands. In MMO’s specifically our player is a result of our choices, and even if we lose, that always remains constant. If our player instead is impacted more by our failures or outside choices, we lose control and usually get pissed or quit.

By: Hirvox

Hirvox — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 05:30:11 +0000

Granted, a lot of the points are awarded from conquest, but war is not the only form of conquest: There’s diplomacy/spying and cultural/religious dominance as well. My favourite strategy is utopia-building with citizens that breed like rabbits and fill every possible nook and cranny. As a result, aside from taking the enemy capital city every war is a purely defensive one.

By: evizaer

evizaer — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 19:52:01 +0000

The impenetrable, impregnable Dwarf Fortress is all about losing in the most fun way possible. There isn't much in the way of objectives that the game provides. You get a team of dwarfs and an area of procedurally generated land along with limited supplies--from then on it's up to you. If you can get past the roguelike horrific interface, you can have a hell of a lot of fun watching the ridiculous ways your dwarves will find (and YOU will find) for killing off unwanted kittens, building giant statues of dwarven gods, and created lava kill chambers and monster arenas. None of these mechanics are set in stone within the game, they're accomplished by harnessing the tools available and letting behavior emerge.

By: spinks

spinks — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 16:11:42 +0000

Well, there’s at least three different developer set win conditions in the game. Victory by war, victory by economics, and escape to alpha centauri. But whatever difficulty level you are playing at, victory at war seems to get more points (at least that’s what I have observed).

By: Hirvox

Hirvox — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 11:02:22 +0000

The Civ example is a bit beside the point, because the scoring system is tied to the difficulty level: Unless you can beat the blatantly cheating computer at the hardest difficulty level, you aren’t getting a 100% score. And even playing a technocrat is a developer-designed goal, because you ain’t getting to Alpha Centauri if you don’t climb the tech tree and improve your industry faster than the opponents.

Personally, I love Ikaruga and Canabalt. Even though I die often, the atmosphere more than makes up for it. There’s also Spelunky, which has a very harsh death mechanic, but pretty much all deaths are avoidable and one always has to balance accomplishing tasks (like collecting wealth, saving the damsel or getting a secret item) with survival: Can I waste an item here, do I have time to get one more treasure?

By: Uzi

Uzi — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:53:01 +0000

Yes. In a word. There are lots of games I really really suck at that I love. They are all single player.

This is because I’m a competetive SOB who hates ‘loosing’ which is why I dont play online shooters or other PvP much. I dont mind loosing the odd arena match in WoW but its a small segment of the game. Getting owned in Counter Strike or whatever the kids are playing these days offers little attraction

But ‘King or Dragon Pass’ I love (Sim/Story telling) but am rubbish at. Uplink. Civ, GalCiv and the various Sim and Tycoon titles that involve building or story telling. I’m sometimes good and frequently not at them. I dont care. Untill I see how good my friends are….