Videogames stand at the forefront of a crisis.
Beyond this generation games cannot move into the 4th dimension*, that of course being Time and Space. Now before we get too far ahead of ourselves, its fair to say games have not yet conquered the 3rd dimension, and some would say that they have not explored all they can in 2D. But moving through the dimensions over the years has been a symbol of game developers moving forward, and it has usually been shown through the growth of the platform genre: 2D platformers had you moving left, right, up, and down on a single plane, then 3D platformers added depth with the...well you all understand what that brought to the genre. The platform genre is the best one to explain these dimensional upgrades, if you take Racing games for example: racing games have always been to a certain degree 3D because a 2D racing game wouldn't make sense (I'd be interested if someone could prove me wrong here). You could never see enough of what was coming up next, and in most racing games you can't Jump - an incredibly vital part of the mechanics of 2D games.
These leaps forward are best viewed in key Mario games. The breakdown is: Super Mario Bros. showed everyone how 2D platformers were supposed to work; Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island then showed us all everything that was possible with 2D platformers**, and then Super Mario 64 did the whole birth of the genre thing again with 3D games***. But in order to go more deeply into how games have moved through the dimensions we have to look at what Videogames have done to the concept of dimensions, how that concept has been so skewed by developers, journalists, or marketers to suit whatever point they are getting across. We have to look at the addition of a little thing called ".5".
Making things up
Ever since maybe Yoshi's Island, videogame industry publishers, developers, and commentators have been labeling certain types of 2D platformers as 2.5D. This is a fabrication, in the real world something cannot exist between two dimensions, dimensions are absolute. But for this line of thinking to work all you've got to do is forget that the 4 main dimensions can be labelled or assigned to actual things (lines, squares, cubes etc) and instead think of games as being on a multiple point scale. As I've said before Doom can't really be described as a true 3-D game but if you put it on the games industry's scale it would probably be about 2.75D.
Let's explore this notion further in 3D
Take a moment to compare Super Mario 64 with Crash Bandicoot: Mario 64 is the benchmark and is a true 3D game on the industry's scale, Crash on the other hand looks and plays somewhat like a 3D platformer but because of a conscious decision against freedom by its developers you always run largely in one direction (sometimes misguidedly towards the screen) through it's very narrow environments or even what you could call 2D sections. So Crash Bandicoot is probably about a 2.9D on the scale. It seems odd when a critic might complain about Super Mario 64's use of Invisible Walls on the edge of some areas but then gladly play and rave about Crash Bandicoot which sometimes feels like 3D platformer's equivalent of prison. Both games were very well received and are still revered today, you could argue that Crash Bandicoot is the better game of the two because instead of having a reliance on breaking-new-ground and experimentation it concentrates on the conventions that made platforming games fun in the first place****, although you probably won't win because it's like saying Sonic The Hedgehog is a better game than Super Mario Bros. because it's faster. Alternatively, you could argue that Crash Team Racing is a better game that Mario Kart 64 and Diddy Kong Racing combined, and in that argument you should always win.Beyond the 3rd dimension there has been little experimentation: Microsoft's Blinx played around with it first in 2002 with Blinx: The Time Sweeper then further explored the 4th dimension with 2004's sequel Blinx 2: Masters of Time and Space. Underneath all the new play mechanics however the two games still played like Mario 64 clones***** so on the scale they'd maybe sit at about 3.25D. I haven't yet played it, but from what I've seen Super Mario Galaxy does something a little more than 64, Sunshine, and just about every other 3D platformer before it. So on the industry's scale it could be a 3.5D game. And maybe that's just as far as the industry can (or should) go?
- Danny* I suppose it would be possible to make a Tesseract in a 3-D platformer, but I can't imagine it would be very fun to traverse.
** Despite the release of New Super Mario Bros, Yoshi's Island is probably the greatest 2-D platformer of all time. Closely followed by Klonoa 2: Lunatea's Veil.
*** It was sure a lot more fun than the isometric funfest Sonic 3D: Flickies Island.
**** It's probably more than a coincidence that Super Mario Galaxy has 2D play sections...and a Spin Attack.
***** In the same way that most Sega Megadrive/Genesis games played like Super Mario World clones.
3 comments:
I do declare, this will make you crazy thinking this way!
Firstly, old doctor Hoodoo has already pointed this out in the abstract, but allow me to concretely say to you, LED Storm, motherfucker!
Now, secondly, I hope this doesn't embarrass you (I liked this column a lot, by the way, and want many more), but I remember when we were a couple of wee lads and it was all about how many "megs" a game was. Streetfighter 2 is the first 16-meg SNES game ever! It's amazing what Link to the Past does with 8 megs! And you looked at a game and said, "I don't think they should be calling that a 4-meg game. It's easily 8-meg".
Which was, of course, backwards thinking, because the amount of megs was non-negotiable, it was what was in them that counted. And I think you're kind of doing the same thing here. As you say yourself, you can't have fractions of dimensional interaction: Doom is visually 3d but ludologically 2d, whereas Crash Bandicoot is 3d, because most stages allow some degree of depth with their side-to-side (or some degree of side-to-side with their depth).
Too far down this road and we'll start looking at movies and saying, "it's not black and white per se: more black, white, bits of red and a couple of reels where there are ochre tones". No: either it's b/w and everything in the picture is either b or w, or it's a colour movie, regardless of how much of the colour spectrum it uses. (That's a real nice coat). Or calling books "a novel with five-eighths fact".
I've often remarked to you that I think the shift to 3d is like the shift to talkies (or colour): neither were as overnight-epochal as some would have you believe, but both were a shift that, once pretty much complete, would never swing back. Had we done everything there was to do in b/w, thus necessitating scientific advances in colour photography? Of course we fucking hadn't. Does the fact that movies are, at this second, a little stale, mean that a second colour spectrum should be explored, or the wavelength of soundtracks expanded? It does not, contrary to what Gaspar Noe may like to tell you.
And so with games, which just need to calm the fuck down, stop trying to fix everything with progress, and concentrate on using the tools available to them. But that won't happen, because the nerds like to quantify things in numbers, because something can't have artistic cachet unless it's an anime about a robot who fucks children. Gah.
Hang the fuck on.
This is motherfucking stupid. ALL games have a time dimension to them. Am I missing something basic that Steven Hawking could explain to me, or is not Moon Patrol three-dimensional (height, width, passage of time) and everything forward of (arbitrarily) Quake four-dimensional (height, depth, width, and an unalterable course down the time axis)?
By which logic Sands of Time (without making a dillyo out of it) and Blinx (without having a game in it) are more correctly adventures in the fifth or sixth dimensions, those of causality and time-folding.
But fuck that shit, because the fourth dimension is the axis along which three-dee beings travel, and the fifth is the dimension in which that axis can be folded back over itself, so y'know what? Motherfucking Terranigma is fifth-dimensional because when you die in a dungeon, you reappear at its entrance with all your accumulated experience. So if most games are the fourth-dimensional equivalent of Operation Wolf, RPGs and games that utilise this convention are Time Crisis or Sin and Punishment.
I'm starting to sound like the fucking Weekend Web, but I'm right.
I think to some degree you're right, but I don't think that putting a time limit in Super Mario Bros then turns it into a 3D game. You're falling into the trap of assigning the various dimensions their actual labels and relating that back to games. The crux of this column was the idea that the games industry has played around with the concept of dimensions so much to the point where it's almost lost all meaning.
Besides, looking with a view through reality again: for the most part games are always represented on a flat 2D screen. They can only go so far as replicating the third dimension or conveying the feeling of travelling around an object in that dimension for the player. I can accept that some games have the player travelling great distances (space), or doing activities in a given timeframe, but I can't accept that this replication of the 4th dimension has the same impact on the player. Some players are known to get motion-sickness when playing 3D platformers but not when they play 2D games. This is because they can feel the difference. Now I'm not saying that these same get dizzy just walking around in our real life 3D world, but you can't deny there is a fundamental difference between playing something like Pole Position and then playing Gran Turismo.
Theoritically the Industry-invented-dimensional-scale could be infinite as games get more and more advanced, but I think it's a mistake to start calling games 4D or above. Aside from Virtual Reality I don't believe a gamer ever feels a representation of the 4th dimension, a gamer is always just right there, in his/her chair. I'll admit that we've got a little closer to bridging the 3rd and 4th with the addition of motion-control in games, which is why I'd call Super Mario Galaxy (which I finally get to play a week from now) and Metroid Prime 3 3.5D.
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