There are many things that make games good as I said in my previous post. But one of the more intangible things is innovation. The thing that made Magnificent Gizmos & Gadgets on the iPhone so cool was that there were dozens of ways to go about solving each puzzle. Another was that it just gave you the tools and let you make your own fun sort of.
I’m not saying there’s never been a contraption building game before or that there’s never been a build-your-own-solution type game. But they gave you a fairly limited set of tools and then set out 44 different challenges that you had to figure out how to solve.
The innovation comes in the presentation and the control scheme. touch to place an item, touch to connect it. drag, drop until you have the perfect configuration for the task. In a word, brilliant. That game was so simple to pick up that I literally told non-gamers “Here, check this out…” and off they went toddling down the path of sudden game addiction.
There have been very few games that have had that instant addiction lately. Peggle comes to mind as does Geometry Wars and Larva Mortus. None of them were truly groundbreaking, but they all had some special thing that made their ultra-simple controls and fascinating visuals instant hits. Many of you probably haven’t heard of Larva Mortus which was a retro top-down shooter, but I played that game for months on end because of the great fun.
The thing about innovation is that it must always be balanced against or perhaps tempered by comfort. You can’t go so far out of the gamer’s traditional comfort zone that they have to struggle to learn the game or the controls. A game that I’m really looking forward to that will have a load of innovation but some of the easiest controls I’ve seen is AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! from Dejobaan Games. I sat down and played the alpha (on my Acer Aspire One Netbook no less!) and was instantly hooked. It’s got a cool new sort of game style and some quick pick up and play game controls.
This is definitely something that I think makes games good. We don’t need a million WWII FPS games, we don’t need a million tower defense clones. We need two million unique cool games that are fun to play and show us gameplay that we’ve never seen or that we haven’t quite seen like that before. That’s what we need and that’s what I look forward to.