Introduction

Figure 1 - King Of Fighters '99 teaches an
important lesson about family planning.

So you downloaded MAME and purchased licenses to every ROM for it. Now you have three thousand games, give or take a thousand. Infinite fun, right? Not exactly, but you do have access to a resource for learning some valuable lessons about game design.

Try playing through a set of games. For instance, all the ones in a given genre (brawler, fighter, puzzle, etc.) or all the games released in a given decade. This may take some time since there's an average of a hundred games in each genre. Go on - give it a try. We'll wait.

As you play, you may notice some patterns developing. For instance, many listed games are direct clones of others. Trimming these out may reduce the number of games to 2500 or so. Learning to spot direct clones will save you a lot of time and pain.

There are also variations of the same game - different ROM dumps, re-releases in different geographic regions, etc.

There are 47 (really - we counted!) different "Street Fighter 2" games , but by the time you weed out variants and direct clones, you get down to maybe five that have any discernable difference, and really only three that are worth playing.

Even once you've trimmed things down to this point, there are STILL a lot of games available under MAME. Still a good time, right?

Most arcade games are awful. In some cases this is because you're playing it without the input devices it came with. In others it's because the emulation isn't correct. The novelty of things moving on screen has worn off these days. And when you emulate, you have infinite money, so getting the most out of your quarter isn't a factor.

You already know most of the good arcade games. But there are some pearls of knowledge to be gleaned from the mountains of decades-old fetid oysters available in MAME.

If You Enter a Genre, Know The Norms

A brawler based on a comic book license. Could be good. Could be bad. Actually, it was both!

Spider-Man: The Videogame (Sega 1991) was a thoroughly mediocre brawler with platformer elements. There's not much here. You can't dash, you'll find a lack of weapons, and there's nothing to break that's full of VCRs, gems, or meat. It does have a pretty cool voice chip in it. There's a "trade health for super move" ability, but not much else.

Figure 2 - Remember that time when Spiderman beat up Shy Guys?

Oh, and you can put in more money at any time for more health. That's just the kiss of death to game play. Sorry, Gauntlet fans.

Hardware and graphics wise, Spidey is a solid game. Good art (because they licensed it from real artists), and great hardware - 416x226 display and 16k colors running on a 24MHz of combined CPU power. The sprites scale, move smoothly, and the world looks good.

The Punisher (Capcom 1993) is a much better game built on slightly worse hardware. It runs at 384x224 with 4096 colors, on only 20MHz of combined CPU power.

Figure 3 - In The Punisher, Kingpin is large enough you could hollow him out and use him as home. Awesome.

Capcom knows brawlers, and it really shows in Punisher. There's lots of stuff to smash, varied enemies and weapons you can pick up and use. There's meat hidden in almost everything, ready for you to eat to regain health. They make good use of The Punisher license to enable new gameplay - if enemies have guns, you can pull your own gun and blow them away. The second player can play as Nick Fury, super spy. The art is more clearly defined in The Punisher (see identical scenes above). On the left everyone is just chilling - maybe they're in a jazz club. On the right it's pretty clear that there's whuppin' about to go down.

The first room in Punisher is better than the first three levels of Spiderman combined. It's a bar room with a pool table and bags of money everywhere - which you can take with you. Inside the room are:

• Three chairs.
• A barrel, which contains a pizza you can get health from.
• Plants.
• An arcade machine with $1000 in cash inside it.

All of these things you can either pick up and beat people with, or just smash open with your fists.

What's the upshot from all this? What makes this more than just a case of bad design vs. good design?

Well, they didn't HAVE to design anything. All they had to do to make a pretty good game was copy what came before and change what they needed to make their game unique. It's not plagiarism to copy good design. No one gets sued for making round wheels.

Final Fight is the quintessential brawler, and Capcom released it in 1989. Final Fight defined the brawler. The concept of a brawler is you're a dude out to kick some ass, from left to right. In Final Fight, you could pick stuff up, break it on people, use it as a weapon, smash it open to get the delicious prizes inside. You could grab people, hurl them around, and there were different moves you could do to break up the monotony of punching.

So if you're going to release another game in that genre, you'd better have a good reason not to match the features that made the last one good. In Spiderman, it seems like they were just lazy - in the case of Final Fight, those features make the difference between an OK game and a great one. Spiderman is just OK.

But the Punisher pays attention to the lessons of Final Fight, and it shows.

Let's apply this to the modern gaming world. Consider Doom - the game that defined the FPS genre. Fast action, over-the-top violence, and solid game play. Frequently claustrophobic and very dark. Wildly enjoyable.

Serious Sam evolves the FPS genre by switching from maze-like levels to a linear progression of arenas and upping the enemy count by an order of magnitude. The developers stay true to their game's FPS roots by keeping the game play focused on mowing down hordes of bizarre enemies. It's clear that the developers understand the genre and are consciously choosing what to adopt and what to reject in making their game. And the game is still fun to play today.

Doom 3, however, is in the same boat as Spider-Man. When they designed Doom 3, it's as if they looked at Doom and said "hey, let's make a game like that." But the result is only similar in appearance. It misses the key game play elements - you spend basically zero time in clean confrontation with enemies; instead you get whacked in the back of the head by enemies you don't have a chance to see, and spend the rest of your time skulking around in pitch black corridors. Perhaps Doom 3 is a good example of another genre - but it's unclear what that would be, and its namesake (and perspective) condemns it to be a FPS .

If you're going to make a genre game, know the norms. Realize there's a precedent set by past games, and pick and choose what you're going to match, and where you're going to innovate. Where developers fail is when they enter a genre, but they don't build on what came before.

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