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It's become an assumption lately that more is always better. Games are becoming increasingly complex and game controllers have more buttons now than ever, allowing players to do more things at once. That works, because for most of us, multitasking is an amazing thing and makes the gaming experience that much more engaging.
Playing Bionic Commando: ReArmed for Xbox 360 with this "more is better" concept engraved on my brain. I played the original when I was a kid. I'm talking so young, addition and subtraction were still giving me trouble. Heck, looking back, I don't even think I got halfway through the first level of the original game; I mostly watched my brother play it. Anyway, I could still recall some of the basics of the game but overall, I wasn't sure I could tell how faithful the new Xbox Live version would be.
So I started jumping around and trying to grab onto things when I realized why years ago I sucked at Bionic Commando to begin with. The game limits your movement to such a degree that you feel more disabled than someone stuck in a wheel chair. At least someone in a wheelchair can aim a gun more directions than straight ahead, right? The game has no crouching or jumping, no aiming up above you—none of that stuff. You can only move left or right, shoot straight ahead, and launch the grapple arm in five different directions. These archaic controls haven't at all been updated in the new version. An outrage! Yet I continued to play.
Somehow, despite my options being so severely limited, I was still having fun because the levels in Bionic Commando are designed with these limitations in mind. What at first seem like simple tasks require a bit of planning in order to bypass them and go on to the next challenge. Foes become more difficult to defeat with limited movement and attack capabilities. These limitations technically make the game unfair to the player, putting him at a disadvantage.
But isn't the point of playing games to face a challenge? Isn't the greatest challenge having a disadvantage and overcoming it to become victorious? It turns out this archaic design not only remains valid, but stands out more compared to modern games. See, back in the 80's Bionic Commando's limitations were forced upon it due to current-day controllers and technology. Games back then often had to make up for their limitations through clever game design. For example, Mega Man featured weapons with a variety of different attack patterns. In adventure games such as Myst, you could only go where the developer allowed you to and use items when deemed appropriate. However, this allowed for highly detailed environments to explore while developing very in-depth and thought-provoking puzzles that other genres could not replicate.
The concept of limitation has not been abandoned in present-day games, but it's no longer a necessity. Likewise, players aren't always welcome to it. Halo for example, allows players to carry no more than two weapons and Doom 3 doesn't allow the player to use the flashlight with another weapon thus forcing them to lower their defenses in order to see. In an interesting paradox, players value the limitations found in Halo for their strategic value while the restrictions in Doom 3 are for some reason, decried as poor design choices.
At the end of the day, it all becomes a balancing act between design and technology. With far fewer tech limits to deal with now, it's all the more tempting for designers to remove restrictions rather than add them. But sometimes "less is more" as the saying goes, and the best choice is to take something away from players, limit what they can do and build new challenges around that limitation.
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