This thread is to discuss not only the main Sean Malstrom, or his blog, but also his ideas and notions. I've noticed and increasing number of users here echoing his statements (if they don't look at his writings) or agreeing with him (if they do look at it).

Now first of all, this is the third thread about him, but the first two got horribly glitched from trying to post all his articles (espcially the reply notifications). So we aren't going to try to post everything of his here. At most we'll link to relevant articles and quote some passages.

Second of all, this thread isn't really about him alone, but also the points he discusses. Me, I'm going to try to put some of his points in my own words, and why I realize the guy was writing about a problem I'd been seeing with gaming wel before I discovered his writings.

The "Show Off" games versus the "Have Fun" games (or as Malstrom puts it: "Buy this because we kick ass" versus "Buy this because we want you to kick ass"): This is the real divide between games. Not the "casual" or "hardcore" bs invented to dismiss games developers didn't like. Not the "2D vs 3D" game (since he mentions FPS and racing games thrive in 3D). Not the arcade vs PC values (which he mentions, but also brings up hit games for both kinds). The true divide in gaming is the gamers wanting to have fun, and the developers wanting to show off.

To me, this angle explains so many things in gaming. For one thing, it reveals what the so-called casual gamers and so-called hardcore truly are. This can be thought of as a pyramid (but a three-dimensional one, since genres and preferences will vary hugely).

1. The largest group is on the bottom, who prefer "Have Fun" games almost exclusively, and have little tolerance for any showing off that comes at the expense of having fun. They hate long and/or frequent cut scenes, and games that have little freedom in how you play (I'll get to that shortly). Any time you see a game sell 15 million copies or more, this group was involved in making it that hit.

2. The smallest group is those that prefer "Show Off" games, and don't get the appeal of "Have Fun" games. These people include many (but not all) developers, some people in the gaming press, and gamers that have been dubbed "hardcore" because they agree with the developers. They think cut scenes are more important than gameplay, that quirky gameplay is superior to tried-and-true gameplay, and that graphics are to always advance until we make the holodeck a reality (although this attitude doesn't always manifest the same way). With this group, you are luck if you get a game that sells nearly 2 million copies, and that's if you get a big opening. These games don't have legs.

3. The middle group are people like me, the Wiiviewer, and many users around here, who are willing to take some showing off in a game as long as having fun is not compromised. Our tastes range from the mainstream games like Mario Kart and Call of Duty to even relatively niche games like Disgaea and Ace Attorney. We can't make a game mainstream on our own, but can still make a game sell just over 10 million with enough appeal.

But we won't take just anything. While we like the Metroid games (which never had mainstream sales), we were turned off by Other M, and made our displeasure known not only by outcry but also by our not buying the game. This brings me to the next major point.

Some are echoing Malstrom's statements because the middle tier is feeling the same developer drift that the mainstream tier felt in the mid 90s:  While the mainstream was turned off from the N64, and sort of went with the Playstation, the middle tier still stuck around somewhat with the N64 and Gamecube, and largely embraced the Playstation 1 and 2.

But when Nintendo got back on the mainstream this generation, we also got back on it, because a lot of the games still appealed to us. We made Twilight Princess a hit, helped establish the RPG audience on the DS, bought even more copies of Resident Evil 4, and also bought lots of the appealing games on the 360 and PS3.

But there were warning signs at the start. The early PSP and DS games were proof that you couldn't just translate any home game onto these systems (showing that the handheld ghetto was bunk). Now the 3DS seems to be repeating that mistake again.

But the general picture of this gen is loaded with warning signs. On the Wii and DS side, we have the third party neglect, and on the PS3 and 360 side, we have the increasing hemogeny of games, and too many games that are sold at full price with no replay value. Not to mention several major games have showing off increased at the expense of having fun.

So instead of being given lots of games this gen that appeal to the middle tier, we're given either games that are too weird to have appeal or are shoddy imitations of hit games (whether a weak party game on the DS and Wii or a weak FPS on the 360 and PS3), with the rare genuine hit.

Furthermore, when we've seen what developers are saying about the 3DS, and the upcoming Nintendo system and Sony handheld, it's almost nothing about appealing to the costumers that made the systems hits (aside from stupidly insisting we want more "surprise"). Instead it's stuff showing the developers don't love customers, they love specs.

This is a major reason the 3DS isn't catching on (not meeting sales expectations, system returns, weak software sales). Some of us actually are refusing to buy this stuff, as it's clearly not made for us, but for showing off first and foremost. That isn't fun, and isn't for us.

But enough negativity here. He also discusses what is essential to making some truly good games, as in the games that are awesome even years later, not the games that just get good reviews.

"What can the player do?": This is a question Malstrom has posed to many developers, and they all seem to have not taken that into account when making their games. "Show Off" games don't really let the players do much. Those games only want the player to take in the game, and be amazed. That is the road to making the game a flash in the pan. Games that last always take into account what the player can do.

Developers, and artists of any medium, are always about more freedom for themselves (for games specifically, it's often in terms of specs and their "vision"), but what that really does is take out the bad idea filters. The limitations of the Star Wars original trilogy versus the freedom of the prequel trilogy is a famous example of this happening. It's not the Lucas was a hack. It was that he wasn't driven to make his stories truly great anymore, and was allowed to play around. Or take Spielberg's later work compared to his earlier work. Back to gaming, who should have the most freedom is the player, not the developer.

Freedom is not "a hundred different tasks", but "a hundred different ways to do the same task": This is not a phrase he's written (as far as I can recall), but he's written about how true classic games will let people play games in so many different ways (one exception is rhythm games, but even they let you choose what song to play for the most part).

Take Pong. A shallow look at the game would assume that all the player can do is move the paddle up and down. Those skilled in the game (and anyone skilled in any form of tennis) knew that's a one way ticket to loosing all your quarters (I bet you whippersnappers wouldn't even get that reference). It's one task, but there are many ways to do it, especially when you can be precise in placing the paddle so that the ball hits it a certain way, espcially if you are playing offensively or defensively.

Or take Street Fighter II. Which character do you want to play? Which moves do you want to use in a particular situation? Do you prefer no special moves, or almost all special moves? Do you want to be precise in how you move or react, or just do whatever move you feel like? Now some competative players will insist on playing a certain way, but the point is most gamers don't have to.

And FPS, especially multiplayer. One of the reasons Modern Warfare caught on is that the additions to the multiplayer allowed even more freedom for the players. But single player in FPS has been stagnating largely because freedom is given less consideration (not all FPS, but anytime you hear complaints of the single player, this was likely involved).

Replay Value shoud be considered a vital aspect of any game: Imagine anyone who buys a game will replay it at least twice. Then design gets looked at in a different way, since anything that requires a wow factor will fall flat on any replay.

This is something I've seen as early as the game Iillusion of Gaia, which I DO LIKE, make no mistake (it's presentation is stellar, even today), but the more I replayed it, the more I dreaded the cut scenes. I wanted to hack at monsters with my flute (Jethro Tull goes psycho), not waste time with text boxes that moved like molasses.

This also brings up the "quirky" gameplay I brought up before. Of the Resident Evil games that I played, RE0 is the only one I haven't replayed, and have no intention of doing so. The reason is the removal of the item chest. It made the dual gameplay more frustrating than it needed to be. The puzzles meant you not only had to know the right item, but make sure the right character had the right item. And if neither was carrying it, you had to find that item wherever you dropped it. And then there was ferrying items and weapons from one area to the other. Oh god, was that tedious. If replay value had been taken into account, then the chest would have been left in, in addition to the dual gameplay being tweaked to flow more smoothly.

Don't force the replay valuse. People should want to replay a game, not have to replay a game: I won't expound on this too much. It's just to warn that adding cheap additions to the game, like DLC, is not adding replay value. Again, it has to be taken into account with the main game itself.

The problem with 3D Mario is the structure, not the perspective: As I mentioned, more ways to do one task more appealing than several different tasks. Mario is a great example of that. Simply put, too many stars in these games require you to get them in specific ways. In the "Get to the Goal" Mario style, you just had to reach the end of the level, but how you got there was where the variety and the fun came in. "Star Finder" Mario (which is his term, the other is mine) is increasingly about doing what the developers force you to do.

And Malstrom even brought up Yoshi's Island to make it clear this can ruin even the 2D Mario games. But to me, the best example of why these games don't appeal to the mainstream is the clock level in Super Mario 64. You have to stop the clock in most of the stars, which means you have to wait until the time is right (and you can't even just put the controller down for a minuts, since Mario's sleep animation would kick in, and takes a second to get back up. Then you have to climb up the level to get to where the star is, and it has to be along a certain path, as that's the only way up.

That isn't completely universal to every star task in these games, but common enough to turn off the mainstream from these games. Make a Star game where you can get every star in at least a dozen ways each, and try to have a new level for each star (so we don't get forced replay on the levels), and you'll see how sales turn out better.

This is also why Malstrom says the retro areas in Sunshine are not really in the classic style, as they still require you to go along one path to get to the Shine. Heck, this can also explain a lot of the problems in the recent Sonic games, which allowed plenty of freedom in the Genesis days (note how many paths levels would have), but starting with Adventure, the levels got more and more linear (we could see the signs early in Sonic 3D Blast though).

I like his discussions about 'old school Nintendo' vs 'new school Nintendo', and that when 'new school' takes over Nintendo, they fall, when they get back to 'old school', they rise (as seen with DS and Wii).

Now he sees 'new school Nintendo' written all over the 3DS...which is worrying since their handheld market has always been very strong, and now it might be the first time this market has been tarnished, like the home console market during the SNES-N64 transition.

And this is what i don't grasp entirely. "Star Finder" Mario was more about freedom initially, and retained that to a degree in Sunshine and Galaxy 1. It was Galaxy 2 that really went with the "Hamster in a maze" route, and that was in deliberate effort to approach 2D Mario, which isn't as free-form as we're emphasizing.

The Galaxy 2 route is correct, but what they need to do is seamlessly integrate between stages: you keep powerups "permanently" as you move between levels, allowing you to play differently, but the linearity of Galaxy 2 was not at fault in that case.

The alternative to restoring freedom to 3D Mario is to go back to the Mario 64 standard, where you're just put in a sandbox and can pursue some stars out of order

I stated that it started with 64, and why.

Ahh, but Tick-Tock Clock would be my example of freedom in that game. To this day i remember how i got the second star in that world by accident, not by running the gauntlet of swinging pedulums, but by making a strategic long jump from a higher platform. You didn't have to stop the clock for any of them, really, it just made it different every time, and indeed two stars (numbers 4 and 5 i believe) required you to have it running. Some of the tricks you could pull in 64 were unintentional sequence breaking (like the easy way to get 100 coins on tall tall mountain: go through the inside secret slide, then ignore the star at the end and start back up the mountain), but it's there nonetheless

Well I did not it wasn't complete, but tell me how many starts allow multiple paths without glitches (as in the freedom was accidental, not by design)?

Tiny Huge Island was entirely designed around the multipath concept. Some worlds didn't work that way, but many of them did. The second star of Lethal Lava Land gave you two choices, one of which was more platform intensive, and you could use powerups to do the stage differently (the very essence of variation in 2D Mario, which is otherwise linear as a tarmac but for your ability to access different paths with powerups). In some cases you could use the cannons to traverse space if you were brave

Some stages and stars were highly restrictive (especially the stars that did what became standard in Sunshine: that if you wanted Star 2 you had to select Star 2 at the level start, or it wouldn't even be possible), but many were wide open. Hell, i never do Shifting Sand Land the "correct" way unless i'm going for 8 red coins

So any freedom in these games should be more universal, as in try to avoid any stages that require a set path.

Set paths are the core implement of 2D Marios, however. What i think would work in that case is, as i mentioned before, having power-ups that you hold over between stages. An understated problem is that power-ups have been on a temporary basis and used (especially in Galaxy) to merely get you past certain obstacles. Really, Sunshine was superior in that regard with the alternate FLUDD nozzles, as while certain nozzles were required to do certain things, you could also use them to approach the game differently and apply them the way you wanted to apply them

Yeah. Also Malstrom did mention that power ups are just optional ways to enhance the games in old school Mario games. I also realize that some of the less fun levels in Super Mario World were those that required a power up to get to the goal (even if just the secondary one).