Oldskool's thought for today

[oldskool]

I don't know if this will become a recurring daily/weekly/monthly thing, or if it's just going to randomly come up from time to time.

But I just recently discovered a new thing in games. Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes has it, as well as Pokemon LeafGreen and FireRed.

What is it?

It's "Previously...".

This thing actually recaps the last few things you did, as well as the previous storyline in the case of Twin Snakes.

Why is this important?

This one feature could make the shelf life of a game virtually infinite. Presently, if you put a game down midway through and tried to pick up where you left off, you would either start over or put it back down, because you forgot where you were, forgot what you were supposed to be trying to do and forgot why you were supposed to care about any of it.

With this feature, you can pick up a game weeks later and be reminded of what you're doing, what you just did and what your main goal is.

Discuss this feature. Any other games it's in that I don't know about? Like it? Think it's pointless?

[King Ellis]

Daily thoughts? Deja vu....

I think it's a cool thing caus I love nostalgic type stuff. Imagine picking up the game after not playing it for a year or two and it told you what you did last? Just smacks of coolness.

That said your points seem kind of odd. At present without this feature we just start again or stop playing? Certainly isn't what I do, not since they invented saves/passcodes and the like.

[Corizzle]

All I did was reada FAQ on GameFAQ's until I got to the part where I am and see what the next goal is.... I didn't restart.

Although I do like this feature in games since I now won't have to read spoilers for the game to remember where I was.

[oldskool]

And therein lies the problem. Flipping through a spoiler-laden FAQ to see where you are is no match for having the game tell you where you are, what you did and what you are to do next. (This might just be personal opinion, though, because I've had a few games spoiled for me because I set them down and flipped a bit too far into the FAQ I was using to find out what I was supposed to be doing.)

Take, for example, my personal favorite game of all time, FF III. In that game, once you got past a certain point in the first world, and another point in the second world, you pretty much had free reign on where to go and what to do next. It would be nice if you could have this feature in the game, because since you can go anywhere, it's very difficult to establish exactly where you are in the game's storyline as well as why you're at your present location. Are you there because it's where you need to be to advance the storyline, or did I decide to take a side trip out here to see/buy something?

I guess what I meant to say was that in RPGs when you set them down, you start over or put them down again because it's very difficult to re-pick up a plot line, depending on how long ago you stopped playing. I put down FFVII, and I know I'll have to restart when I pick it up again, because I have no idea where I am or what I'm supposed to be doing.

A "Previously in FF VII..." feature would make the game a hundred times easier to put down (since you know you won't have to feel your way through the FAQs to figure out where you are and what you're doing) as well as a thousand times easier to pick up (I know I'm at least 10 hours into the game, and the fact that I'm going to have to give that up simply because I don't know what I'm doing is going to suck.)

In my esteemed opinion, this feature belongs in, at the very minimum, every RPG out there from now on. It's a great feature, and as far as I can tell it increases the shelf life of a game to almost infinite proportions.

Edited March 27, 2005 by oldskool

[Guest Grapehead]

It's an interesting feature, I thought it was very cool when I first heard about it for Pokemon(man I love those games)... now that another game has taken it in, I can only hope this could become something easy to add into a game. If it became a standard, I'd be very happy, but I'd rather have very few games with it, or every game, I would just go crazy if half of them used this feature.

[Herr Matzat]

you think on daily basis ? i don´t belive you