Many good video games have a feature that I call "novelty progression". As the player advances through the game, they are continuously introduced to new experiences that are outside of the core game experience. One form of novelty progression is "feature progression" in which the novelties will change the core game experience.

As an example of a game with novelty and feature progression, consider Starcraft's single-player campaigns. You begin the campaign with a small number of units available to you and new units with new abilities are unlocked as as you progress through the game. You continuously encounter new environments and new enemies, and you are given an unfolding story with new characters and new twists. Furthermore, every stage has something different from the core game in terms of gameplay. There are scripted events, a timer, hero units with spoken dialogue, allied units to rescue. Several missions only give you a small tactical squad and no base with which to produce additional units. None of these changes to the gameplay are overdone to the point of being considered a normal part of the game. Once you beat all of the missions and become used to one of the races, you start over with a second and then a third race whose strategies are different.

What makes novelty progression work? First, there must be a solid game core that is fun to play without the novelties. The novelties must be new and not something previously seen with a different skin. Also, with so many games having been produced, novelties must not be the same thing that the player has seen before in many different games unless it is done well in a new way. A desert level or an ice level might have been awesome in its own right in the 1980s, but today you will have to add something special.

What makes feature progression work? The new features must be useful, so that you can use them in more than one place. They must be more than keycards. Also, new features must not break the game unless they are added near the end.

The Metroidvania category of games are based on feature progression. Get the item that makes you jump higher and you can reach the next cave. Get the item that lets you swing around and you can reach the next cave. Get the item that lets you blow up barriers and you can reach the next cave. As already mentioned, feature progression works best when you can use these features in normal gameplay.

The Legend of Zelda is worth mentioning in terms of feature progression. Of the many items you get, you can use many of them in normal gameplay but generally half of them are not very useful outside of the one place where you need them. However, very few of the items are totally useless in normal gameplay. In the original LoZ, the fire, arrow, and bomb were usable in normal gameplay but had enough drawbacks to not be worth using. The programmers got around this drawback by providing enough places to use these limited-use items to make them seem more useful to the player.

There have been some experimental Flash games that are based on feature progression (or progressive feature removal). One that comes to mind is Tower of Heaven.

RPGs are based on novelty progression with their storylines, environments, NPCs, and enemies. They also have some feature progression in that as the game progresses you get new abilities with new effects that may change your decisions in battle. This feature progression has tended not to work well even in big-name games because the new features either are game breakers or are degraded to the point of uselessness to prevent them from becoming game breakers. Game developers also have a tendency to introduce all of the classes, elements, and status effects early in the game or by the midpoint rather than progressively introducing them a bit at a time throughout the game. This may be justified by certain features of RPGs being subtle enough, with calculations based on many factors, that the player might not notice some of these features unless an early tutorial introduces them.

What happens when a game has a good core but does not have novelty progression? You get the RPG trope "You must collect ten blue ratsasses" where you keep getting assigned the same task with a trivial difference. You get the Arkandian game series in which there's a very nice RPG engine but every event is the same and you've played out the game in fifteen minutes, after which you're only raising numbers for the next ten hours until you reach the end of the scripted content. You get bored, and that is the ultimate condemnation of a video game.

We used to have the "Sci-Fi channel." And it was good. Now we have SyFy. And it's crap. Somebody ought to do something about that. ( Read more... )

So in our postmodern horror entertainment we have vampires who don't act a thing like vampires and zombies that don't act a thing like zombies. Going along with the trend, I give you:

The Postmodern Werewolf

His body is covered in skin. He has a crew cut and is balding slightly which almost hides the fact that he is a werewolf, but his werewolf nature gives him a bit of chin stubble in the evenings.

And he wears a dog collar. Because he's a werewolf.

He is a vegetarian, having sworn off red meat for his health. However, the hunter's nature is still in him, so he runs a fishing boat off Cape Cod and he checks ebay for bargain deals.

When the moon is full, he says "hey that's neat" and goes inside to watch Sailor Moon anime.

You will never catch him drinking a pina colada at Trader Vic's. He goes for Starbucks. No, wait; Wolf Coffee. Because he's a werewolf, you see.

If a female comic book character can be replaced by Hawkeye without the pose looking silly or stupid, then it is probably not sexist. Via KYM.

See also the Bechdel Test.

• Stealth Hunter 2 is a Metal Gear Solid knockoff with late 1990s-style rendered graphics, good animations, and decently designed levels. For freeware, it's a very good example of the genre.
• Poacher is a Metroid-like platformer about a stereotypical Yorkshireman getting involved in a war between good and evil spirits trapped underground. Each area of the map presents new challenges, and gaining new abilities will modify the basic gameplay and open up new areas of the map. The game does a very good job of driving you in one direction while giving you the illusion of freedom. Be warned that it's a 90MB download.

Epic Battle Fantasy parodied Final Fantasy style battle systems by having well-animated characters react in funny ways to getting hit, and by having crazy skills such as "Power Metal" where the music from the blaring speakers damages your enemies while healing your metalhead party. It was also a good example of a FF-style battle system; as a game, it worked. Epic Battle Fantasy 2 was more of the same with new enemies and animations.

Epic Battle Fantasy 3 wraps an adventure game around the battle system. Players now get leveling up, a skill system, lots of NPCs giving you quests, a few minigames, one puzzle, and an awesome soundtrack by Halcyonic Falcon X. The adventure is straightforward -- follow the single path -- which can be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it. I appreciate the reduced playing time from never wondering where to go. What really counts is all of the little things that went into the game: the odd NPCs that are on nearly every screen of the map, the banter between your party members during battles, the large number of skills and items, and the large number of animations. Binding it all together is the solid core of the battle system, presented with high-quality artwork and music. The result is one of the best flash games ever made. It has about a 12 hour playing time.

The Birdinator, by EmitterCritter

This is an "upgrade your stats to launch the animal" type game like Hedgehog Launch mixed with a horizontal shooter, and it's the action component that makes it. You play as a fat bird flying south for the winter with a frickin' laser beam on your head, and you have to fly around and shoot your way through other birds, airplanes, and jetpack-equipped hunters. Certain parts are NSFW.

Blind, by Peter Maslencenko and Omar Shehata

You play a blind person in a dark room trying to find a way to the exit. You can only see what is immediately around you through echolocation, and only by the fact that the waves stop moving when they hit something. It makes for an interesting game.

Busker Panic, by HardCircle

This is a simple game where you dodge objects as long as you can to rack up the highest score.

Closure, by Tyler Glaiel

This is a dark-room find-the-exit platformer in which your quest is not-so-secretly to let yourself die because you're in a coma and you're only imagining everything. Don't let that stop you from playing it. This game has a novel mechanic in which you will fall through any unlit walls.

Coma, by wittyhobos

This game is an adventure in a beautifully drawn world in which your quest is not-so-secretly to let yourself die because you're in a coma and you're only imagining everything. Don't let that stop you from playing it. The game world is fun to explore.

Darkness 2 - Cliff of Eternity, by Luiz Fernando

You control a ball with a paint gun in a black room in another dark room find-the-exit platformer. You can shoot paint pellets to reveal walls and hazards so that you can figure out how to reach the exit. (This has no relation to the excellent Darkness horror series by lutc.)

Go To Hell, by Meta Sauce

Dig down through randomly placed dangers while keeping track of your health, strength, and air, and be sure to bring enough money to pay for Hell's door fee. There is a nice flowing water effect. The same author also made the insanely addicting Hex Empire.

The League of Evil Scientists, by Woblyware

This is a platformer that starts out easy and then gets harder than NES-hard by the end. Fortunately, the levels are small and you have infinite restarts. You are this buffed cyborg dude with wall-jump and double-jump and you have to dodge a bunch of predictable enemies in order to find and punch out a harmless scientist in each level.

Mardek 3, by Pseudolonewolf

I already recommended this earlier based on the quality of Mardek 1 and 2, and I only recently got around to playing it. It meets my already high expectations and exceeds them at times. There are a few rough points such as finding the right person to talk to so that an area you have been told to go to will appear on your map, and certain boss fights are of an unexpectedly high difficulty, but on the whole it is very very good.

Waterfalls by MoonMana

Direct falling particles into the containers to fill them up, or just sit back and watch the pretty.