Good Controls Are Always Worthwhile

June 1987. The arcade industry had recovered from a slump early in the decade. Atari was one of the top game companies. Out Run, Sky Shark, and Roadblasters are taking in quarters like mad. Rampage, Gauntlet, and Super Mario have all been out in the market for a few years.

Also released this year in Japan was Wonder Momo (Namco 1987). You're a Japanese magical girl. You fight things on stage and transform. Standard fare. Unfortunately, the controls bar you from enjoying the game. It's just unresponsive. This is especially bad since Mario has been out on the market for years. At this point in history, the problem of running around and jumping has been solved by mankind.

Figure 7 - Good ideas, bad execution.

Dragon Buster (Namco 1985), which predated Zelda 2 by a solid year, had the potential to be a true classic. It had tons of innovative features, like magic spells, one of the first life bars, branching levels, an overworld map, and even different moves like double jumping, downthrusts, and more. But its movement model suffers from poor transitions between walking and jumping, weird speed-related glitches, and no air control - which is especially bad because you frequently get juggled by enemies. The game is actually pretty good, but you have to overlook the fact that moving is pure pain. Although it's been ported a few times (most recently to the PSP), it never enjoyed the fame it deserved.

How do you make a game with compelling controls? The best approach is to make the most out of as little as possible. The Punisher, like many brawlers, has only a directional input and two buttons, yet there are upwards of a dozen moves you can execute. Almost every combination of input results in something different happening. And all this is pretty intuitive.

Contrast this with any arcade fighting game, which will have on average six buttons, and in which to do anything you have to combine one to three button presses with a series of directional moves. To actually be any good, you have to memorize lists of coded moves - which aren't displayed in the game and have to be learned from peers or magazines. And on top of this, really you only want to ever do like five different moves - fewer moves than there are buttons!

If you're going to add depth to a game, do it by making full use of a small number of inputs rather than adding more. Games like Dragon Buster and Wonder Momo had good concepts, but failed to execute on the basics, which cost them in the marketplace. Games like Final Fight, Punisher, and Outfoxies succeed because they respond well to basic input and make good use of the different combinations of those inputs.

Conclusion

MAME is an incredible opportunity for any budding game designer to really study their craft. Just the experience of playing through a bunch of games to find a fun one can be highly educational (as this article demonstrates).

What rewards are there for those who can stomach playing through hundreds of stinkers (and the odd pornographic Mah-Jongg game) to find the few bits of wheat amongst the chaff? They will gain an encyclopedic knowledge of the arcade industry, the ability to answer their own questions about game design with hard facts, and insights into the longevity of novelty.

Figure 8 - The credits from Zombie Raid. Why is this guy called Meat Bacon Apple?