Lester
Welsh
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by Lester Welsh |
| You know, I've been thinking. And I tend to do that a lot. And when I do, nine times out of ten, it's about video gaming, and eight times out of those nine, what I'm thinking tends to make just the slightest amount of sense. So allow me to divulge the inspired question. What happened to the use of points and the high score system in video games? Once upon a time, points used to wield serious power, and honestly, arcade competition on a single videogame used to be so fierce, to get one's name on the high score screen was a cherished honor. Once upon a time, players would send Polaroids of their home videogame high score screens to what used to be "Nintendo Fun Club News" so they could see how their high scores ranked among the nation's finest (today, does anyone really read Nintendo Power?). I think I know what happened. There were once games like Galaga, fine shooting games, before videogame magazines damned them as "mindless." If you've never played Galaga in your entire life, I'm not saying that you should not consider yourself a serious gamer, and I'm definitely not saying that you should go out into the woods and waste yourself with a semi-automatic. You're just missing a major part of videogame history. Galaga was a one player shooter where the player was lucky if he hit most of the many, many enemies while trying not to get himself killed. One hit from the cunning enemy craft wrecked the player's ship, unless an add-on ship was acquired. The player couldn't possibly kill every enemy fighter on the first try, but every fighter he nailed meant a certain amount of points. The point spread progression increased with the speed, color, flight path and durability of the enemy. Galaga was genuinely a great game because of simple play mechanics and a steadily rising difficulty level, in addition to many other factors. Galaga on the Game Boy is great. Arcade games were primarily one player games where the enemy count high. Life expectancy was low and attacking more enemies meant that the player acquired actual (not virtual) mental skills. The high score system, therefor, became all-important. The competition was so brutal on the one-player arcade platform that this was the only way to separate the "die hard" gamers from the casual ones, and on a good day, the best from the rest. That may be all she wrote, folks. These days, arcade games are no longer one-player, they're multi-player, and the fighter genre has taken a front and center seat in arcade videogaming. While the real, human competition used to take place on the scoreboard, the competition is now immediate; your human competitor plays right beside you. The need for direct human competition and the public display of personal achievement is instantly satisfied. The game is now about who can stay fighting on the machine the longest. Games are no longer about how many rocks one can blow away while just managing to say alive like in Asteroids, it's about beating the end boss. Does the high score system and story-type adventure gameplay get along well simultaneously on the home consoles? Not quite. Take a game like Nintendo's Super Mario World. The gamer doesn't notice the scoreboard, because in the game, it is of little consequence; the player is on a quest. The goal is to finish the game. To make matters more complex, not even Luigi can challenge his score because they aren't playing against each other like in Mario Bros., they're helping each other win the game! Why even have a score counter in Super Mario World if it doesn't even matter? In Star Fox, we should all know by now that although the player is on a quest, it is little more than a long shooting game. This is why I like the idea of listing the percentage of the enemies the player has successfully attacked, out of the enemy count in the whole game. This gives the player the nagging feeling that although he has won the game, he has not completed it. Besides, when each level is completed, if the player hits a certain percent of enemies, he gets a free life. For another instance, there is no point system in Donkey Kong Country, yet the save feature goes by percentage. That nagging feeling of "winning without completion" is the absolute crux of the game. Attaining a saved "score" of 120% (yes, it's achievable) becomes more desirable than just winning the game. The essence of my argument is that a high score is something that one strives to achieve, not haplessly stumbles upon. Although a point tally or high score system makes perfect sense in an action game, it is pointless in an adventure game. The point tally in Kirby's Dream Land is of absolutely no consequence. Earthworm Jim 2 is a great adventure game, better off without a scoring system. On a home system, unless the high scores have a save feature, it is totally pointless for a game to have a point tally, except if it is of consequence in the game itself. So what happened to the church of the high score? The games "evolve," that's all. Plot replaces score. Competition against fighters replaces competition on the high score screen. "How soon one can finish the game" replaces "how well one can finish the game." All one has to do to deplete all of the enemy's energy in Street Fighter vs. X-Men, but in Galaga, one is lucky if one can take out half of the little buggers that are on the screen. The church of the high score is seemingly no more, but is it truthfully so? In a home videogame, players want to beat the game, and when they beat the game, they complain of how simple it is. In a point-ranking game like Galaga or Asteroids or even Space Invaders, the sugar rush of the high score fever is direct. Will the high score fever ever return to arcades? Maybe, if applied in the right manner. So the games "evolved," and so has the high score system, and games like DKC and Star Fox confirm it. I think that it's about time other games adapted to the example, or better yet, come up with a better method. It's quite apparent that the high score system of the past can't work for today's games, and the games of today and beyond cannot adapt to the systems of yesteryear. So, it's only customary that a new high score system be christianized. Why? The high score system is designed to enhance gameplay, not detract from it. So in essence, games don't necessarily need a high score system, but couldn't do nearly as well as if it were implemented carefully.
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