mediaplay: welcome to my school
potatofarmgirl: Black Beauty
inoshi: hiroshimishima: caramelzappa: This is amazing. This is why we can’t have nice things, anymore! See, I was going to make a comment on this yesterday, but it ended up being really long-winded and I scrapped it all, but now that I see it again, I have to say something. In all cases, the pictures are from the first half-hour of the game. Assuming a complete and working knowledge of the game at this point is a little silly. As it is, the above picture shows a point where a player might end up if he or she went to the right after the elevator. He (Pauly U), like others on display, can’t figure out how to open red doors, but he may find out they can hit blocks, so he ends up going down. He does not have the “Morphing Ball” (the in-game name for the Morph Ball) yet and cannot pass, but makes the assumption that this is where he’s supposed to go so he then assumes that he is stuck. Assumptions are powerful things in video games and assuming wrong can lead to confusion or frustration. The red doors are a good example. A new player might try to shoot them normally and find that they don’t open. They might try missiles, but they may not want to use more than one at a time because they only have 5. (Not a single person in the pictures has more than 5 missiles, I assume, because they don’t know how to open red doors. I can safely assume this because there are another 5 missiles behind the door in Sir_Dave_85’s picture.) So they try one. It doesn’t work. They maybe try one or two more and it still doesn’t work. The astute may notice that the door flashes each time, but even after 4 missiles, it’s still not open. So then, is it so hard to see why someone might not have figured it out just yet?  Back to the Morph Ball. When you get it, the name appears on screen and that’s it. No instruction on how to use it or what it does. Same with the explanation on how to open red doors. Sure, it’s in the manual and all VC and 3DS Nintendo titles have manuals built in—you knew that, right?—but who’s to say any of these players read the manual? Games have come a long way since their roots and controllers and games are much more complex. That said, memory limits aren’t that big of an issue anymore. Games can include comprehensive tutorials and guides within the game to get players acclimated to what they’ll need to be doing throughout the game. Super Metroid does not have that.  Though there is a point to be made here: Even if it Super Metroid did have the ability to include a tutorial, it does not want to teach players that way. Instead, it prefers to lock you into situation until you figure out what to do. As explained by Hugo Bille in “The Invisible Hand of Super Metroid”: As it turns out, this is only the first of many rooms where you have the key to progress, but you might not know it yet. Whenever this happens, Super Metroid does the only right thing. It locks you in. Because the only thing that is more frustrating than not knowing what to do, is to turn back and give up when you were inches from the truth. That won’t happen here, nor anywhere in the game. You will stay in this room until you learn to run. It’s a harsh school, and students of modern game design may feel that the game should have just printed it out - Hold B to run. This is just not how Super Metroid rolls. It will never let go of the illusion that you are on your own. It will hold you by the hand, but it will never admit it. Do you remember getting stuck in this room? Do you remember not knowing how to run? I sure as hell do and it’s because of this design. By creating what seems like an insurmountable wall, the whole experience becomes more memorable and the hope is that the player is more likely to internalize that solution. This is the exact same thing as the Bomb situation. Once the player realizes that bombs are used for getting around, they’ll have a better understanding of that facet of the game and be more likely to remember it from here on out. Using that kind of approach in teaching a player how to play your game is risky these days. Yes, there is a market for it. Just ask anyone who plays and loves Dark Souls. (Hello~!) But games are able to reach more people by being easy to learn and easy to pick up and play. The audience is growing larger by the day. There are people who are playing Super Metroid for the first time. There are people playing video games for the first time, whether they be 3 years-old or 30. We shouldn’t deride these people. Instead, I’m jealous because they’re looking at this amazing game through fresh, innocent eyes. They get to learn the hard way that there’s a run button. They get to learn how to wall-jump and shinespark. They get to beat the game for the first time and maybe find out that Samus is a woman. They also get to play through it a second time with all that knowledge and see how all that gained knowledge completely changes and breaks the game. You are experienced. You are jaded. Instead of making fun of these people, we should be happy they’re giving this game a chance. (That ended up being long-winded anyway and started unraveling at the end, but I think you get the point.)
austin23ryan: thedancerwithtattoos: ryanishka: I see they are practicing levitation however the girl in the back right is having trouble No Don’t let Dr Fields see this oh it’s just me
awakenthehope: Really? #walmart #music I….
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