Disco Elysium makes quite a big statement on law enforcement, and you play an amnesiac cop who does all sorts of weird shit (because you’re the character in a point and click game) and people tolerate it because you’re a cop. That by itself supports the message about law enforcement.
It’s a good way of getting the message across. I used to be a lot more pro cop than I am now. Disco elysium I do not credit with changing that, but i definitely noticed what it was doing when I played the start of the game, and I did play the game some point before souring on the police for good.
I ramble. I just really like the writing of that, and it’s testament to the value videogames/interactive fiction has for storytelling - because experiencing that for yourself, as the cop, is way more elegant than reading it in a book.
Not sure how obscure this one is, but in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, there’s typically a bunch of creative ways to do things, and you’re punished for being consistent (you do mostly headshots? They get helmets!). There’s a boss fight with an ancient sniper known as The End, and Kojima wanted it to take a week to complete. He was told no, of course, but it’s still a massive exercise in patience.
Alternately, you can just quit the game, pop the cartridge out for a week, and when you start it up on day 8, The End has died of natural causes.
Similar to the boss fight in MGS with Psycho Mantis. You had to switch your controller to the second player port for that boss fight, so he couldn’t “read your mind,” and perfectly block all your inputs from the first player port.
There may have also been some save cartridge shenanigans, as it was a PS1 title
Changing the controller port was one of my favourite game moments ever. Such a clever idea.
I think The End is obscure enough for people who haven’t played it. Fun fact: this is one of the very few uses of the RTC setting on the PS2 affecting gameplay.
I exhausted all the ones I know in the PCSX2 2.4 blog post:
The PlayStation 2 uses a real-time clock (RTC) to keep track of the date and time in the real world. Games often use the RTC in order to seed pseudorandom number generation (RNG) because of its high variability. Additionally, save files show a timestamp in the BIOS, and these timestamps are sometimes shown in-game too. However, some games use the RTC in a more interactive way. Ratchet & Clank 2 and Ratchet & Clank 3, for example, let you teleport to the post-game Insomniac Museum area from 03:00–04:00, bypassing completion checks. The Simpsons: Hit & Run, The Simpsons: Road Rage, SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom, and Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights have holiday-exclusive Easter eggs. Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 displays the date and time on a camera recording when you get busted. And Metal Gear Solid 3… if you know, you know.
Kingdom Hearts has a similar mechanic, but it uses your in-game time’s hours mod 12 to give you a reward at the clock tower.
Assuming ludonarrative harmony is the opposite of
Ludonarrative dissonance is the perceived conflict between a video game’s narrative told through the non-interactive elements and the narrative told through the gameplay. Ludonarrative (derived from Latin ludus, meaning ‘game’, and narrative) refers to the intersection of a video game’s ludic elements (gameplay) and narrative elements.
Correct!
I think Hardspace Shipbreaker does a really good job of this. You work as an exploited blue collar worker, and the gameplay really makes you feel like a blue collar worker. Especially at the end, the plot and gameplay synergizes in a really creative way.
At the end
You form a union and go on a strike. The strike involves intentionally breaking everything. That essentially means doing the opposite to what you’ve developed your muscle memory for for the entire game. It’s a really cool twist on the normal gameplay that, up until this point, was becoming somewhat stale.
It also highlights the overall theme of the game, which is to explore why it’s so easy for people to fall in line with the status quo and why it’s so important to stay vigilant to company overreach
In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky, there’s a cutscene where you’re about to be executed by a group of Sableye using the move Fury Swipes.
In the main series games, this would make no sense. Fury Swipes has piddly power, and Sableye have middling physical attack.
In the Mystery Dungeon games, multi-hit moves like Fury Swipes are unbelievably busted, physical attack is far less dependent on the base stats of the Pokémon using the move, and a bunch of Sableye would definitely kill someone using it over and over again.
(Maybe not niche) in The Lion's Song, you
get attached to three or four main, playable characters and their overcoming of adversity to pursue their dreams. Very slow burn, because it’s over the course of several individual episodes. You will also get attached to the side characters, and see characters pass from one story into the next seamlessly.
But this is just the game emotionally fattening you up for slaughter.
Many characters die in world war 1 at the end of the game. As per a non-interactive credit roll. You’ll feel helpless, and mourning the promising lives gone to waste.
At that point, you’ve lived just a fragment of the suffering that the average survivor of ww1 felt.
Sanity effects in Eternal Darkness. The magic antagonist making your character more easily insane.
