Reviews The game mechanics that should have changed the world, but didn't

Neo Scavenger's inventory looks right out of the original UFO (X-Com), at least in terms of the UI and item shape/tessellation (I don't think and equipment in UFO could expand the inventory space though).

The mechanic I'd like to see crop up again is the movement system from the PSX era Ghost in the Shell. Walk and slide (run) both across the ground, and up onto walls and ceilings, with jumping going perpendicular the the surface you're on before arcing down.

 

The best feature from Gears of war that you rarely (if ever) see on other games is individual difficulty settings for Co-op: I can be dropped by two bullets and enemies will soak up half a clip from my guy, and my partner is a bullet sponge spewing death in a blink. It is incredibly satisfying for my non-gaming other half to carry me through a particularly difficult section of a game.

 

Too much work.
Changing the size of health bars is trivial, but if you want to create real difficulty adjustment you are wasting thousands of hours to account for the handful of weirdos like me who have brain defects that cause struggling with things other than combat.

 

To be fair, the last Tomb Raider game did allow you to set the level of the puzzels and the toughness of the enemy. Granted it still wansn't enough on the puzzle difficulty, but they did at least allow you to alter it. I really enjoyed being able to do this.
My first run through was max puzzles and middle enemy, then the 2nd time I did max enemy and middle puzzles. By being able to change them meant I played the game through more than once. I'll probably do a 3rd run at some point when I have forgotten how to immediately solve the puzzles.

As for the article, I can see why the Xenomorph template hasn't been used more often. Whilst the AI was great I found the game mind numbingly dull. I haven't played any of the other games mentioned, so am unable to quote on them - they just aren't my kind of games anyway.

 

Mages in World of Warcraft, have had blink since 2004...

 

Invade-a-load - usually better than the game it was supplied with - and so addictive!.

 

I would never expect anyone to reuse the portal mechanic because they will be immediately judged against Portal. Either they will be accused of blatant copying or at best it might be 'not quite as good'. Not worth the risk. Same with a lot of these examples where the notable mechanic is actually the USP of a successful game.

 

Loads of game have blinks, or fast dashes which are essentially a blink in operation - pretty well any game that has hero's with special powers, one of them will have something that's essentially a blink. e.g. In Overwatch tracer gets 3 blinks in a row and a rewind.

Disagree about the reload thing - reload is always one of the dullest and most frustrating parts of a shooter. Making me have to spend even more time focusing on it doesn't help. Still makes me think of TF2 which I loved but hated the fact half the classes felt like they spent more time reloading then anything else.

 

Seems odd to highlight Guerrilla specifically when it comes to destruction/deform-able environments - I have very fond memories of "rocket launcher mining" on multiplayer on my mates PS2, and using that awesome X-Ray scope railgun. It was WAAAAY ahead of it's time with that stuff, whereas by time Guerrilla came out, other games like Crysis, Mercenaries 2 and Just Cause had already used it as a big gameplay element.

 

Ooh, here's one that often flies under the radar: Timesplitters1, 2 & 3's Mapmaker. Custom map creation (level structure, items, entities, triggers, etc) entirely built into a game engine and completely accessible without any external toolchains (no "we have custom maps, just download our SDK and import your Blender models and rigs and modify them to match our naming conventions etc etc..."). Closest thing I can think of is the Halo series' Forge mode, but that is only entities within an existing map (IIRC, for Halo 3 at least) and came nearly a decade later.

 

YES.

We used to do epic "last stand" maps on the Virus mode - 1 big room with all the weapon/ammo spawns that has multiple entrances from long tunnels where all the spawn points are. Make it safely to the room right at the beginning of the match, then hold out as long as possible.

 

I don't actually know the game you are referring to on this, but you can go back even further than this to find this type of gun in use in a game. I was a huge fan of Perfect Dark on the N64 which was released early in 2000. In this game they had the Farsight which was a railgun with xray that allowed you to shoot through walls if you so wished.