Happy Monday, folks, and welcome to the Weekly Video Games Thread!
Last week, Nintendo released an update to Mario Kart World that brings back my favorite form of Battle Mode, Bob-Omb Blast. It’s something I’ve wanted for the game for a while, and true to form, it’s very fun. Everyone having an extra balloon keeps you from repeatedly getting knocked out, and the normally lovely aesthetic changes World brought to the table work very well.
However, the most interesting thing about it is that it, and I’m guessing this is deliberate, fully ruins the strategy I’d been using for eight years in Mario Kart 8 Deluxe. In that game, I’d act like a carpet bomber. I would grab tons of bombs, wait to see a few players driving together, and run through, dropping them all behind me in a rush. It was fun! It’s also… not really an ideal method of playing in multiplayer, at least from a creative perspective. It’s both super defensive and disengaged, it feels cool but limits one-on-one interaction, and the only real defense against it is to wait for the yutz to run out of bombs. I had fun playing this way in Deluxe, and I’ll probably continue to use this strategy whenever I play it next, but this is very much a “dominant strategy,” the kind of unstoppable method of gaming that makes high level play both fun and extremely boring. It’s Melee players only bothering with Fox, Falco, and Sheik. It’s the most overpowered gun in any given Call of Duty.
World, appropriately, does just enough to fix this through two things: the levels and the Bob-Oms themselves. In all versions of Bob-Omb Blast, the bombs you throw in front of you explode when they land, while the bombs you drop behind stand until either a few seconds or when someone drives into them. In Deluxe, the bombs’ range is really big, so you don’t really need a ton of skill, planning, or knowledge for them to be useful. In World (and this might be true across the board, but I’m cool and don’t bother looking behind me in Mario Kart), the range is very small. It’s not too small for this to be useful ever, and you can definitely plan for it, but I very quickly realized that my strategy wasn’t applicable, especially not on much larger courses than the ones in Deluxe. I’ve had to play far more actively, running other racers down and not waiting for them to come to me. And while that rush I loved isn’t there, I think the experience is more interesting as a result. To put simply, I’m trying a lot harder now, and it’s made the experience more engaging.
Oddly enough, I’m already seeing another example of this in Batman: Arkham City, which I’ve started replaying. The Predator Mode in that game is a bit more challenging than the one in Arkham Asylum, due to levels, enemies, and overall conditions that don’t allow you to just string up half a dozen goons from gargoyles. See, balancing is a wildly complex topic in game design for both single and multiplayer games. So for today’s prompt, I’d like you to tell me of a time when a game fixed a dominant strategy in a way that added to the experience. I’m more interested in the positives examples today. Maybe that’s because Arkham City also has a couple of bad examples, too.
Anyway, what did you play this weekend?