Author:
Jaime Wolf
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Date:
9/7/2019 1:25:17 PM
Subject:
RE: Sometimes, when I've just gotten out of bed
The only point where I find checkpointing excusable anymore is with a precision platformer like Super Meat Boy, The End is Nigh and Celeste, where the challenge of a room would be ruined by being able to slowly creep your way to the end of the screen via quick saves. Any other genre, I do not like when they disallow manual saving *unless* the checkpointing system is incredibly aggressive such as Dark Souls or any modern rogue-lite with a one to two hour total run length such as FTL.
I very much agree on repositioning player characters during a cutscene, it's one of the bigger cardinal sins of cutscene design that many developers often ignore as setting up a proper, good looking shot can be difficult when the position of the characters involved is not predefined, and is instead variable depending on where the player was standing when the cutscene was triggered. Doing a cutscene shot carelessly without repositioning characters can lead to such hilarious situations as seen in Deadly Premonition, a game where if the conditions are just right, the cutscene camera shot of two characters conversing will be completely blocked by a random table lamp, desk or a third NPC that just happens to be standing in front of the camera.
Doom 3 used a lot of fancy camera pans and techniques that are common in film and tv: Wide angle to narrow view panning shots, lead-ins and hand-offs, and that fancy transition they would always do at the end of a cutscene where the camera would smoothly move from a wide shot back into the player character's head. All of this would end up being mostly meaningless however, as one of the complaints commonly levied against Doom 3 was that it had too many cutscenes.
Borderlands' second wind is typically called a comeback mechanic in other games, though they are typically reserved for competitive two+ player games. The first use of this I remember in an FPS was in Prey, where if you lost all of your HP, you were thrown into the spirit world and you could come back if you managed to kill enough targets with your bow in the allotted time.
Probably the most infamous example of the comeback mechanic is in Mario Kart, where whoever is in last place always gets more powerful items compared to whoever is in first place. Timesplitters 2 also had a very funny implementation of it with the monkey assistant mode, where every once in a while, a heavily armed monkey would show up and side with whoever was in last place to take out whoever was in first place. The furthest back I can think of that a game had a comeback mechanic was every single pinball machine made after 1990, where if you were so bad as to sink the ball without getting any score, the game would just let you have a second go without depleting any of your tries.
