5 Video Game Concepts That Are Always Awesome

I may be a cynic and complain a lot about video games, even the ones I love. But I do still have soft spots that get me giddy. And I love to give tips to developers as if they actually read this thing. So here's some free advice, guys. Just always do these things, and your games will have some strong (albeit incredibly minor) details in them.

5. Canceling Abilities/Moves

Tight controls make a game great for everyone. The more skilled players can feel their wings spread, and less skilled players feel more in control. But giving players a way to cancel a long animation and speedily throw out damage to either continue a combo or derail the enemy's chance to deal damage is a surefire way to make the player feel like he's the smartest man alive.

Funny enough, I think most of the time these things exist as bugs. And you can bet your ass that us gamers will abuse the shit out of them. Not because we have to cheat, but because it's just so damn slick!

4. Customizing Buttons/UI

One thing I can't fault the Call of Duty franchise on is the controls. Clicking the left stick to run? Brilliant! So it's understandable that many games would simply copy them. After all, a player who doesn't like how your game controls is a player who isn't going to buy it (I couldn't get further than 5 minutes into Killzone 3 because of this). But some games just work too differently from the mainstream stuff to fully mirror others, so the developers have to be inventive and find controls that will naturally click in players' hands.

You know what players don't find confusing? Their own control schemes! And any player who desires to do so usually knows how to figure out how to do it AND knows exactly what they want their buttons to be. Case solved!

3. Taunt Button

If a game has a taunt button, then I'm gonna press it. Like, I'm gonna press it more often than not pressing it. Any one who's played a game with me knows that. "Die! Time to die! Die!"

I don't need to explain this. You know I'm right!

2. Walk Like a Person, Not a Tank!

The 90's are over and now 3D graphics are the standard in video games. We no longer have to suffer through that awkward transition phase and can freely enjoy not having clunky, weird, not-sure-what-we're-doing type design, right?

But take just about any current Rockstar game as an example. They seem to be caught up in animating momentum and natural movement in their characters or something. That would be fine in something like a Kinect game where our slow, fat bodies are translated on-screen. But our hands are so damn fast, guys. And when the character isn't as fast as those hands, that ironically feels unnatural. So go when I push go, dammit!

1. Explain things!

Here's a screen from a game from 2012 (Darksiders 2). And it's an American developer that makes it (Vigil)! The biggest offenders of this concept usually come from Japanese games; either from translation errors or just giving an ambiguous one word description of something important to core gameplay. Conversely, I'm also playing Warriors Orochi 3 (which is Japanese, of course) and they go out of their way to let us players know what each stat does.

So what exactly does "Arcane" do, Darksiders 2? That wasn't worth explaining SOMEWHERE? This problem is something that's been around, but maybe the new thinking is simply that players will Google search the answers. Well, here's my answer to Vigil: cut that shit out!

When I'm getting deep into some RPG itemization (the usual cause of things needing lengthy descriptions that dev's try to explain in a single word) I promise you I am not offended by a tooltip that fills the whole screen. Just so long as I'm allowed to understand your damn game, I am happy!