Among the comments to my post about scrolling shooters, John writes:

Maybe with the alternate path system your talking about, you could change the path and rhythm of the game [...] Thats got the old rub of making loads of content that people wont see though.

This reminded me of something I read recently that made me very angry. Kotaku’s Amanda Glasser recently had a go on the upcoming Wii port of Dead Rising, and noted the following:

“[We] wanted people to experience all the content,” says Capcom’s Chris Kramer – the man running the hands-on at Nintendo’s Fall Media Summit. Chris meant this in regards to the untimed missions. By taking the pressure off, you actually have time to go through and do all of the missions instead of having to choose which ones to fail and go back for a replay later.

It’s enough to make one vomit with rage. I love Dead Rising, but I can’t imagine it being nearly as much fun without the constant time pressures building up in the background. I consider it an essential part of the game. We once had a conversation in class about how to define its gameplay… personally, I think it’s best described as a ‘time-limited herding challenge’. Obviously there’s boss fights and photography and stuff as well, but I always feel the main task is to go out into the mall and bring back survivors. Maybe I’m just nice like that? Anyway, the sensation of slowing being crushed between the ever-decreasing time limits and the growing wall of zombies is what gives the game its characteristic challenge - shepherding a group of survivors from A to B would be really easy if you didn’t have a plot event scheduled at C in two minutes time.

During my first game, I remember I once had to abandon a group of six survivors at the wrong side of Paradise Plaza because I just couldn’t wait for their stupid NPC pathfinding to catch up with me. (That’s another thing I can’t understand people complaining about - as far as I’m concerned, the wonky AI just reinforces the fact that Frank is the only capable person in the game - but I digress.) Leaving half a dozen people to become zombie chow really affected me emotionally, because it was my decision. And it’s a decision that Wii players will apparently never face. Nor will they enjoy the euphoria of overcoming these challenges when they make a highly successful run - during my last game, I rescued almost all survivors and killed all but one of the bosses, and it made me feel like a king.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently working on a game. I’ve just about finished all the major mechanical functions, but I still need to produce a mountain of art assets. I’m planning on having five stages, but I also want to have different versions of each stage - like day/night, calm/stormy, etc - or hidden, alternative routes. Depending on how much of the art can be re-used between versions, this means I’ll probably need twice as many background tilesets as I would normally. This feels like a lot of work, but I definitely think the outcome would justify it.

Making decisions is what interactivity is all about, but there’s no point making decisions unless they have meaningful effects on the play experience - this is all stuff I touch on in my dissertation. I think creating more content than most people will see is great. Look at OutRun, for example. In a single run you’re only ever going to see five out of the fifteen stages, but having such profound control over your route - and conversely, control over which stages to ignore - is what makes it such a liberating experience.

The arguments against making more content than necessary are obvious and understandable, but if you’re going to create something totally linear where all players will experience everything, then you should really consider getting out of games and buying yourself a video camera. Having said that, I think the real reason Capcom are butchering Dead Rising is because the Wii’s inability to render a crowd of zombies takes away the challenge of herding survivors against a time limit anyway. That, and… perhaps they feel the Wii ‘audience’ want a more ‘casual’ experience? If you ask me, these are both good reasons to not bother releasing Dead Rising on the Wii at all.

And so we come to the truth of the matter - Wii Dead Rising is not Dead Rising at all. It’s a re-imagined spin-off for players - and consoles - that can’t cope with the original. There’s nothing particularly wrong with that, but it sounds pretty boring to me.