News You Can Bruise for 2004 August 25

In case you came late to the party, a mecha is a Godzilla-sized robot (such as, well, Mechagodzilla) operated by a person who is usually riding in the robot. The point of a mecha game is to do a game on a large scale, where you can crunch through entire cities wreaking havoc. People who like mecha games also seem to like drawing lots of pictures of mechas (mecha? mechae?), which is not my cup of tea, but that is not relevant to this discussion.

In your standard Roguelike game, you push buttons to control a simulated person. When you play a mecha game, you are pushing buttons to control a simulation of a person pushing buttons to control a second machine. Sometimes people have wacky ideas about what it would look like to have a video game about playing a video game. Well, here you have it. It looks like a mecha game, and it is annoying.

It doesn't have to be this way. Mechas are, by conceit of the genre, vaguely humanoid. The best interface is therefore the one you've spent your whole life using: your own body. Forgo the buttons and use motion capture and force-feedback to tie your mecha's movement to your own, as in Fiasco. Indeed, some mechas are refered to as "suits", implying this very mechanic. In game terms, this would be implemented by letting you use the same commands to move your mecha in battle mode as you use to move yourself in non-battle mode.

If you absolutely need to simulate additional clunkiness (eg. so you can have a notion of "current facing direction", as Gearhead does), do it by reducing the directional key controls to the Clunky Three: rotate left, rotate right, and thrust (move forward). This time-honored trio shows up in innumerable games all the way back to Spacewar, and nothing does a better job of connoting "the thing on the screen does not represent you, only a machine you control". I don't play a lot of mecha games, but this was used in the only one I ever liked--a DOS play-by-modem maze chase that Andy and I used to play.

Gearhead, in the worst mecha game tradition, forgoes both these mecha-motion strategies in favor of a menu system. When you're just walking around with your feet, you can use the arrow keys to move. But when it comes time to stand and fight mecha-style, you can't directly move your mecha at all. Instead of letting you use the arrow keys for left, right, and thrust, there is a menu system which has options for left, right, and thrust. You use the arrow keys to select your option from a menu, and hit enter to rotate or move. It's Microsoft Mecha 98. Just don't do this! There's no reason to! Factor out the aggravation for a better game.

Someone who likes mecha games might say that this is part of the the game; the human is subsumed into the machine and must operate it in clunkiness. I would say that misses the point. You are already interacting with a machine in a clunky way. It's just that it's a real machine, not a simulated one. Treat the player sitting at the computer as though they were the character sitting in the mecha, and you've got big mimesis wihout sacrificing usability. You can bet the character in the game is not selecting "Rotate left" from a menu; it's not that bad to drive a mecha. Take advantage of the clunkiness of the standard Roguelike controls and kill two robo-birds with one mecha-stone.

I've picked on Gearhead enough. As I said, I pick on it not because it's a bad game but because it's a really, really good game made virtually unplayable by a bad UI decision. It's a game where talking to the world-weary shopkeeper is quick and fun, but where even small battles play at a crawl. Admittedly I have a preference for the world-weary shopkeeper type interaction, but that doesn't mean I want the battles to be slow and hard to play.

As previously mentioned, this is a lot better than KBounce. It has penguins--the bouncy balls are penguins and you're trying to cut up their ice floes so they can be transported to zoos or some lame excuse like that. I like the penguins, but I don't like the linear way it gets harder, adding one penguin each time.

This game is a clone of "Pirates!", one of Sid Meier's pre-Civilization games. There was a real chance here for the clone to improve on the original, but it just plays like early Sid Meier, the kind of game that would be fun if it were the late 80s and similar, better games didn't exist yet.