My recent review of Tomb Raider has made me think of two more things to blog about. One you'll get now. The other you're going to have to wait for like a good little boy or girl. If you do turn out to be a nice patient one, who knows, mayble I'll give you a cookie. Or a pretzel. Or a Boeing 757.
Two games I've played recently utilize a gameplay mechanic that I'd like to call SuperHeroSack mode. I'm not sure how many other games are doing this but I do know that I want developers to stop implementing this crud into their video games. It doesn't make sense and it substantially takes away from the intergrity of the game they're designing.
Tomb Raider's Superherosack mode involves pressing the R2 (or L2...I forgot which one) button. This changes the entire perspective into some dark blurry mess, where targets, goals and objectives become some blurry highlighted mess to stand out.
THERE HE IS!
I know what the main idea behind this is. To immerse the gamer, to help the gamer, to add some strange new feature that will make ignorant chumps get goosebumps. To me, the idea of knowing (better yet, NOT knowing) what to do and where to go is something that is a key component to any great game design. It's so key that if you mess it up, essentially making it way, way too difficult or the more common path, making it way, way to easy can turn the final product into 3 month old sushi that's been sitting in the sun.
The reason I call it Superherosack mode is because having a mode like this makes Lara more of a superhero. She has skills that shouldn't exist in her gameworld. Look, I don't nitpick over what's unrealistic and realisitic. Mainly because I don't care. But I do nitpick over what is not consitant or relevant to the particular world we're givin.
In Tomb Raider we're left with a dark world. A world that should make more sense to navigate around naturally, without the aid of Superherosack mode. Of course we don't need to use this mode, and could just run around figuring out stuff on our own. But there's a sense that this world was created with the knowledge that superballsack mode would be available at all times to the gamer. And certianly not implemented after the game was finished.
Superherosack mode is also in The Last of Us. Joel can use his Spidysenses to listen ever so closely to the things around him, like he was some dog listening for a distant storm or an owl listening for some tiny mouse to fart too loudly.
Color Inside the Lines Jimmy! Jesus Christ!
The funny thing about Superherosack mode, no matter the game, is that these are things we should be able to do anyways. Like in The Last of Us, why do we need this? Can't the gamer just listen for where the enemies are? This seems a bit more natural and far less work. Sure, having the outlines of our enemies exact locations is nice and makes things a bit easier, though I can't help but feel it doesn't make any sense. The world is dynamic, we can't just go "into the zone" like spiderman. Are ears hear everything as much as we only want to hear the dirty, squeeling sounds of our partner during shimmyshimmybangbang.